Death, oh baby ...

... you know that dying is fine, but maybe,

I wouldn’t like death if death were good,

Not even if death were good.

Things that are making me think about death:

1) One of my favorite professors, Feliz Eda Burhan, died last week; she was an amazing woman — a brilliant scholar and teacher. She was demanding and always v. critical of my writing (and I loved her for it). “This is good,” she would write on my essays, “but I know you can do better.”

A classmate of mine wrote to me to inform me of her death; she said that Professor Burhan had “passed away.” That’s what everybody said about her, actually: she passed away. I’ve always found this an incredibly strange phrase; I preferred the way another of my friends put it: that Professor Burhan had come to inhabit one of her own phrases, the “absence of presence and the presence of absence.” She is not here, but she has not passed away. In her absence is presence.

2) Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Mahler was obsessed with death his entire career, but he was particularly afraid of the curse of the ninth — to which, in fact, he ultimately succumbed. As he was writing the Ninth, his four-and-a-half-year-old daughter suddenly died of scarlet fever; he himself was diagnosed with a fatal heart condition; WWI was rapidly approaching. So the symphony became his farewell to life — his own, and that of his entire world’s. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold — I was thinking of this line as I listened, especially during the third movement when the cracks in the structure are revealed and everything indeed begins to crumble. The second and third movements are intense and twisted, carnivalesque, ridiculous and sinister at the same time; the first and fourth are movements of the body: the symphony begins with an irregular pulse, a hesitant arrhythmia, and the final movement ends in much the same way; it is the heart-beat slowing down.

Herbert von Karajan said that this symphony is “music coming from another world, it is coming from eternity.”

I highly recommend both the program notes by Dr. Richard E. Rodda from the performance I attended (the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the incomparable Marin Alsop), and the essay “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony” by Lewis Thomas. It’s rather apocalyptic, but so is the symphony.

3) These recently-declassified photos from Hiroshima, 1945:

This one reminds me of the human body, a spine or a rib cage.

in honor of the last day of national poetry month...

All You Who Sleep Tonight

All you who sleep tonight

Far from the ones you love,

No hand to left or right

And emptiness above —

Know that you aren’t alone

The whole world shares your tears,

Some for two nights or one,

And some for all their years.

— Vikram Seth

Three kinds of love

The first is love mixed with architecture: yellow hot-water-bottle windows, a tear in every one, and the red tower from Vienna Westbahnhof.

(Hundertwasser, Yellow Houses — it hurts to wait with love,

if love is somewhere else — jealousy, 1966)

The second is tiny, that shies at the hooting of cars, that adores the bells of horse-trams.

должно быть, маленький,

смирный любеночек.

Она шарахается автомобильных гудков.

Любит звоночки коночек

(Mayakovsky, A Cloud in Trousers, 1915)

The third is contained in twelve billion words, beginning in ----, ----.

The first kind of love speaks German; the second, Russian; the third, English.

‘The most lamentable comedy and cruel death’

First, the cruel death, i.e. my new favorite depressing poem:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

— Stevie Smith (1957)

And the most lamentable comedy: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by my new hero, Laurence Sterne. My cheek muscles are sore from having grinned and/or laughed out loud through 150 pages (which isn’t v. far in, but Tristram himself hasn’t even been born yet, or rather, hasn’t gotten around to telling the story of his birth, though he has covered his conception, the death of poor Yorick, the wounding of Uncle Toby, hobby-horses, and whether it is possible to baptize a child before it has been born).

For in this long digression which I was accidentally led into, as in all my digressions (one only excepted) there is a master-stroke of digressive skill, the merit of which has all along, I fear, been overlooked by my reader [...]

The connection: these works are ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them,’ which is what Marianne Moore says poetry should be.

Things we like V: undeniable trends [aka the year in review]

1. An analysis of my reading habits in 2010:

Books that I read, cover to cover: approximately 30.

Books that I spent a good deal of time reading, but either started and didn’t finish, or read only lengthy excerpts of: approximately 25.

2. Norwegian men of the year (to qualify one must be named Edvard): Munch and Grieg.

3. Apichatpong Weerasethakul (one of my new favorite people) and his film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and, praise the Queen!, was showing in London, where I finally saw it and became entirely enamored. There is a v. nice summary of Uncle Boonmee here, though I also highly recommend putting the original Thai title into Google translate:

4. The difference between the real and the surreal, more specifically: my increasing inability to distinguish them. There is reality TV, for one thing, which shouldn’t be real but is, and then obviously wax people who are not made of wax, and women laughing alone with salad.

5. Hedonism, which often takes the form of a search for the perfect chocolate muffin (found, at long last, on Charing Cross Road). As we were snacking on the street, my friend whom I was with declared, “This is the best muffin in the entire world. I like that I can be v. hedonistic around you.”

6. Commemorating instances of cosmic unfairness and/or explaining medieval literature by writing limericks.

7. Ai Weiwei, his ethics, and his beautiful beautiful sunflower seeds.

8. Quantum entanglement, which sounds, like most things, better in German: Quantenverschränkung.

Things we like III

1) This beautiful and inspiring TED talk by Zainab Salbi on Women, wartime and the dream of peace. Salbi grew up in war-torn Iraq and is the founder of Women for Women International, which works to help women in post-war zones rebuild their lives and communities. She’s a passionate and eloquent speaker, and she quotes Rumi, so of course I love her.

2) Fereshteh Najafi, who is like an Iranian Paul Klee. I particularly like her series Tara, The Princess, and Searching for Free Human. The image below (her most Klee-esque) is from Tara.

3) Wikipedia! For two reasons: 1) for having audio samples of Finnish, an absolutely wonderful language that unfortunately I don’t speak at all; 2) for having long been my source for accidental poetry and unexpected syntax, most recently in the message from writer Kartika: “I started writing Wikipedia to take away the sad feeling I had whenever I searched for a general and important article that didn’t exist yet in my language.”

4) The fact that Jim Carrey and I are entirely agreed on what constitutes a dream come true.

Until I forget to remember

Getting up late in the morning and having a cup of coffee
dark and strong would not be a lazy distraction.

It is just my least struggle to endure the time
without you, the indelible you, until my heart forgets to
remember you from my past, my old habits.

Let us possess one world: each has one, and is one.


This was written on the cover of a notebook I did not buy, but only photographed, another example of the haunting and inevitably sad dialect of Asian English that seems so ubiquitous and marketable. The photo I took turned out, appropriately, furtive and blurry. I’d taken a lot of photos that day — we went to the Nougat Museum, a peculiar and haphazard little place that sold candies called “milk cake plateaux” and “heart crisp fresh milk volumes” — and on the way there I was thinking about Louis Malle.

Two summers ago I started watching Malle’s film L’Inde fantôme, a six-hour documentary first released in 1969. The problem with Louis Malle in India was that he was incapable of living in the present. Every beach reminded him of an earlier beach; every street in Calcutta was an echo of Paris. Time had ceased to exist for him, and so when he looked through the eye of his camera there was no boundary between what was happening and what had already happened. The camera was the crux of his alienation: he was a westerner with a camera, and so a westerner twice over. When India gave him too much — too many colors, too much noise, too many eyes and voices — he became mute, and deaf, and blind, and set up his camera as a facsimile of a human being, to watch and hear and speak in his absence.

I am very jealous of Louis Malle, because he trusted his camera so much. I have a little video recorder now, a fantastic device that looks like an iPod and has enough memory to hold at least six hours of Taïwan fantôme (if I ever make it). But still I use it suspiciously, blushingly, and it’s even worse with still cameras. Quite simply, I feel it is impossible for me to both live in and photograph Taiwan. What can I photograph here? National Geographic moments; east/west confrontations that would be cliché if they weren’t so everyday; things that are foreign to me.

What can I not photograph? Everydayness and memory; the coexistence and nonchalance of grandeur and kitsch, plastic and puddles and pineapples; the overwhelming sensation of being here, and its counterpart of not being here. I cannot photograph the fact that I am simultaneously here and in Paris, and in Germany, in America, in my books, on the moon. The camera removes me from my always-already uncertain process of integration, suspends my current negotiations with Asia, and makes me again a Westerner twice over.