La France et les poetes japonais modernes

Il y aura une soirée de débat (?) sur l'oeuvre de Nakahara Chuya et autres poètes modernes du Japon. Ryoko Sekiguchi, notre amie poétesse qui écrit en français ( et qui habite à Paris), va participer. C'est dommage que c'est un mardi... il faut trouver un "way out" pour y aller!

http://www.institut.jp/agenda/evenement-fr.php?evt_id=540

La Pleurante

Sometimes a fragment of a work makes a good enough reading for the day; here is what Sylvie Germain writes in La Pleurante des rues de Prague:

Ce sont ces larmes d'inconsolés qui bruissent dans le grand corps immatériel de la pleurante des rues de Pragues, et ces inconsolés sont aussi bien des vivants que des morts.
Cette pleurante boite sans fin entre deux mondes, celui du visible et celui de l'invisible, celui du présent et celui de passé, celui de la chair et du souffle et celui de la poussière et du silence. Elle louvoie d'un monde à l'autre, --passeuse clandestine de larmes mêlées, celles des disparus et celles des vivants. (39)

Gayatri Spivak in Japan

Gayatri Spivak is coming to Japan in July and her official schedule is now published:

http://www.i-house.or.jp/en/ProgramActivities/ushiba/index.htm

See you at one of the occasions!

If not here, where on earth is sacred?

My new essay is now published in Kazeno tabibito, no. 26. For the first time I revealed my personal two most sacred places...

「ここがもし聖地でなければどこが」
「風の旅人」２６号、２００７年６月、pp.19-22.

Homo scribens (according to Malcolm Cowley)

Here is what Cowley says a propos of Caldwell:

Such is the image of HOMO SCRIBENS, the writing man, that Caldwell presents to the world, and to himself as an ideal. It is a radically simplified picture that omits the problems encountered by others who follow the trade. Caldwell's idealized writer has no problems except material ones; no doubts of himself, no hesitations, no fears of losing contact with his subliminal wealth. He is impelled to write by a physical need that makes him forget the need for sleep; turning back the clock, he goes on working without being disturbed by hunger or sexual desire. His only aim is to set down, in the simplest words, a true unplotted record of people without yesterdays. Past literature does not exist for him, and he is scarcely aware of having rivals in the present. As with Adam in the garden, every statement he makes is new. His only mentor is WEBSTER'S COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY; his only acknowledged judge and critic is the inner ear.

(And I Worked at the Writer's Trade)

Kind of cool, ain't it?

Steven Yao's talk

My friend Steve Yao (Hamilton College) gave his talk on Asian American literature at Yoshiaki Koshikawa's Meiji seminar today. This is the first time for Steve to come to Japan. With Kyoko Omori, Shuzo Saito, and Keita Hatooka, it was a very enjoyable afternoon of serious "causerie litteraire."

Then when we were done for the class, we had an announcement. Meiji University would be closed for a week to prevent the spread of measles! How very strange, indeed. Most of the major universities in Tokyo are now hit by this desease. Biological terrorism of a sutble kind? I don't know.

La folie de Francoise Dolto

I am baffled to read a passage by Françoise Dolto. She must be one of the most mystique of thinkers. "It's so important to remember what is said at the time of birth," she says. Here is her admirable and enigmatic statement:

Nous sommes parole densifiée, une parole absente, pas dite, qui est au-delà des sentiments qui font s'étreindre deux êtres. (...) Un être humain IN UTERO est "parlé" par ses parents, il entend la voix -- ce que nous savons maintenant et qu'on ne savait pas. Je vais même jusqu'à dire qu'un enfant--je vais dire une bêtise pour beaucoup d'accoucheurs--, un enfant qui est un peu trop pressé de naître, on dirait que c'est un enfant qui veut aller du côté où ça parle, plus vite que les autres. En tout cas, ces enfants qui naissent prématurément ont besoin de beaucoup de paroles au moment de leur naissance pour leur expliquer ce que c'est tout d'un coup d'être venu un peu trop tôt et d'avoir besoin de soins qui vont les séparer de leur parents.

(Parler juste aux enfants, 14)

Do you understand this? Do you REALLY understand this? And do you REALLY agree?

Les freres corses

Frankly, I wouldn't have picked up a Dumas twenty years ago. But when I casually began reading Les freres corses (1844) I was instantly engrossed. What fluidity of narration, what excitement! The signs of a masterpiece are all over. Of course the story is silly, if you want to look at it that way. But it touches upon our secret desire for a well-wrought narrative in which one thing leads to another, with occasional breezy moments. A very nice, exciting story. What's behind it all is the twin brothers' telepathy.

Eh bien, il a fallu un coup de scalpel pour nous séparer; ce qui fait que, tout éloignés que nous sommes maintenant, nous avons toujours un même corps, de sorte que l'impression, soit physique, soit morale, que l'un de nous deux éprouve a son contre-coup sur l'autre. Eh bien, ces jours-ci, sans motif aucun, j'ai été triste, morose, sombre. J'ai ressenti des serrements de cœur cruels: il est évident que mon frère éprouve quelque profond chagrin. (42)

Full of silly exoticism, it is true, when it comes to depict the island Corsica, but it's so attractive, too. Dumas, the great. I'll probably read all of his masterpieces that I have overlooked in my youth in the years to come.

A Travel into World Culture (Africa)

My friend Kazue Nakamura organized a series of 6 lectures for the Liberty Academy, Meiji University. 6 speakers over the period of 10 weeks will talk about Africa, its images, and the diaspora of its people. Today Shinichiro Suzuki, the reggae-man professor, talked about the Caribbean and its musical culture. It was very interesting. Co(s)mic blackness... a nice phrase to be remembered! Afterwards we had tea together at the Hilltop Hotel.

I'll be the speaker in four weeks... what shall I talk about?

On Being Corse (Alexandre Dumas)

Here is a nice dialogue in Dumas' splendid novella "Les Frères Corse":

--Et quel âge a madame Savilia? demandai-je.
--Quarante ans, à peu près.
--Ah! fis-je répondant toujours à mes propres pensées, alors à merveille; et des enfants, sans doute?
--Deux fils, deux fiers jeunes gens.
--Les verrai-je?
--Vous en verrez un, celui qui demeure avec elle.
--Et l'autre?
--L'autre habite Paris.
--Et quel âge ont-ils?
--Vingt et un ans.
--Tous deux?
--Oui, ce sont des jumeux.
--Et à quelle profession se destinent-ils?
--Celui qui est à Paris sera avocat.
--Et l'autre?
--L'autre sera Corse. (18)

Blue Plum

On the 4th of May we went for BBQing at Ome with the Hayashis. Ome is the most rural area within the boundary of Tokyo and it takes about 1 hour and a half from where we live. We went out to the riverside (the same River Tama), the water was chilly and clean, we grilled chicken and beef, drank and took it easy. Exactly a year ago we were there and we were so happy to be back this time. And this year with my puppy Amiable. She was rather apprehensive about getting her feet wet, but was excited to see other dogs woofing around. Many thanks to my friend Takumi Hayashi who invited us.

Ome writes 青梅 and means "blue plum." Then I googled to find out that there's The Blue Plum festival somewhere in Tennessee!

A stunning connection between two utterly unrelated places.

De l'infini interne (Le Clezio)

Voici un passage de L'inconnu sur la terre, un livre que j'ai toujours voulu apprendre par coeur, pour mieux voir le monde:

Mais dans la beauté réelle il y a surtout ceci: l'infini interne. Parfois, je regarde des yeux, comme cela, deux yeux dans le visage d'un enfant de cinq ans. Ils ne sont pas comme des yeux d'animal, et ils ne sont pas non plus comme des yeux d'homme. Ce sont deux yeux profonds, clairs, qui fixent directement votre regard, qui traversent tout droit l'air transparent de leur lumière que rien ne peut troubler. Ces yeux n'expriment rien, du moins rien de ce que les paroles des adultes laissent comprendre. Ils ne veulent pas juger, ni séduire, ni subjuguer. Ils veulent seulement voir ce qu'il y a, et par les pupilles ouvertes, recevoir en retour le rayonnement de la lumière. Alors dans ces yeux, sans qu'on puisse comprendre pourquoi, on aperçoit soudain la profondeur qui est sous toutes les apparences. C'est un vertige inconnu qui s'empare de vous, tandis que le regard clair de ces yeux d'enfants s'appuie sur vos propres yeux. Une porte en vous s'entreouvre, et l'espace vaste et le temps très grand commencent à sortir, à glisser comme un souffle, comme une eau froide qui va et vient. (63)

Ce qui est tout à fait fascinant dans ce passage et la dernière phrase dans laquelle sont juxtaposés: le temps, le souffle-air, et l'eau.

Stephen and Augustine (Kenneth Burke)

Here is a passage from The Rhetoric of Religion (1961):

The divine scheming had gone still further. Recall, in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, how love of language figures in Stephen's apostasy from Catholicism to aestheticism. Though having lost his belief in the Bible as doctrine, Stephen still savours the words for their style. This is nearly the reverse of Augustine's course. At first Augustine listened to Ambrose purely through professional admiration for him as a speaker, being interested in the manner rather than the matter of his sermons. Yet imperceptively, unknowingly (sensim et nesciens) he was being drawn closer to belief; and about three years before his conversion, while still methodically doubting, largely under Ambrose's influence he decied to become a catechumen in the Catholic Church. (80)

On Pound's Cantos (Antony Easthope)

Although there is of course no question of a return to the feudal ballad, modern poetry and especially that of the "Cantos" is more like the ballad than it is like anything from the intervening discourse of the bourgeois epoch. At stake in modernism, once again, is the definition of subject position. All the tactics, including those given manifesto treatment as "the tradition" and the ""ideogram," can be understood as working towards a single end---to foreground signifier over signified, to acknowledge that the reader is positioned as subject of enunciation producing the enounced of the poem. (Poetry as Discourse, 134)

On Hardy's Wessex

This is the kind of land I'd like to visit, along with Giono's Manosque and Faulkner's Mississippi:

It is a landscape of chalk and limestone downland, of low moors and acid heaths, of alluvial valleys, of the New Forest of the Norman Kings and the old cleared forests on heavy clay soils like the Vale of Blackmoor where in Hardy's view "superstitions linger longest."

(Desmond Hawkins, Hardy: Novelist and Poet, 208)

Probably the closest I've ever been to to this landscape is that of the southern Washington state. Yes, including Nirvana's Aberdeen and its environs.

It is / it is NOT in Stevens

Whatever it may be, IT exists or not, and the synthesis is only brought about by an aesthetical judgment. In other words, by creation, forming, in-forming. Webb in the same book says this on Stevens:

If the early Stevens is reminiscent of Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God and his effort to revive in an atheistic framework a pagan sense of the sacred, the later Stevens is more reminiscent of the dialectical tension between cataphatic and apophatic theology. Being and nothingness are two of the most prominent motifs in the later poems, and in Stevens' use they are actually two aspects of one reality. Being is in all things, yet never contained in them; and although it is evanescent in them, it is only in them that it can be apprehended. Consequently to approach it in poetry, one must use both positive analogies and their negations. (82)

Construction and deconstruction working at the same time, in the same stroke; thus is the destiny of poetry. (Ain't it?)

Transcendent / immanent (Eugene Webb)

Here is what Eugene Webb has to say on the sacred:

[T]he sacred, however it is formulated conceptually, is always apprehended experientially as simultaneously transcendent and immanent, and its transcendent and immanent aspects may serve as poles between which the experience moves. When one pole is more prominent than the other, this will affect the character of the experience. When the transcendent pole dominates, the experience will be characterized relatively more strongly by the sense of terror and of sinfulness; when the immanent pole becomes more prominent the sense of terror and sinfulness will give way to other feelings, perhaps a sense of salvation and forgiveness, perhaps a sense of rebirth and of participation in sacred being. (The Dark Dove, 7)

This rings true.

On Gurus and Their Pitfalls

Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar writes:

I have mentioned above the dangers of the guru role lie in the disciples' massive parental projections which the guru must process internally. Although the guru shares this danger with the analyst, or more generally, with any healer, the intensity of these projections, their duration, and the sheer number of devotees involved are vastly greater than in the case of his secular counterparts. These idealizing projections are subversive of the guru's self-representation, constitute an insiduous assault which a few gurus---again like some therapists---are not able to successfully resist. A regression to an omnipotent grandiosity is one consequence, while in the sexual sphere a retreat into sexual perversion has been reported often enough to constitute a specific danger of the guru role. (The Analyst and the Mystic, 53-54)

So it's a general mechanism that the gurus themselves fall victims to their own power of initial attraction.

Emerson and Philosophy (according to Cavell)

I [Cavell] think of no one else in the history of thought about whom just this gesture of denial is characteristic, all but universal, as if someone perversely keeps insisting---perhaps it is a voice in the head---that despite all appearances it must be Emerson himself whose insistence on some such question it is so urgent to deny. Yet we know that Emerson was himself convinced early that his "reasoning faculty" was weak, that he could never "hope to write Butler's ANALOGY or an Essay of Hume"...And nothing I find could be more significant of his prose than its despair of and hope for philosophy. (This New Yet Unapproachable America, 78)