Monday 4 March 2024

Life

Life = a Restitution for Wasted Time
Catherine Eisner

Photo credit: Stasis and Motion by Rachel Tanugi Ribas

 
or. . .
 
Reality is that which everything is an instance of.
 
Eli Siegel

One cannot emulate, of course, the sheer undeniability of this Aesthetic Realist poet’s elegant relativist axiom,
but one can die trying. 

Afterthought: The mood of these thoughts is also echoed in poet Vernon Scannell’s resonant phrase ‘The wounded music of what might have been.’ (See page 2, Too Late Again from Ambit 184, Spring 2006.)
 

Thursday 29 February 2024

“More Out-takes from Ol’ Ameriky” (The Uncollected Songbook Part One.) I know this girl is lyin’

I know this girl is lyin’ man
we know each other well
I know this girl is lyin’ man
she’s lyin’ in her throat

that’s right! 
Lord you so right!
that’s right!
that’s right Lord!

men don’t trust the women man
WOMEN don’t trust the women 
man

NO ONE trusts a woman man
’cos women never tell the truth

NEVER man?
no never!
that’s right!
that’s right!
they NEVER tell the truth! 

praise the Lord!
amen

and women man

 
(Composed on Sunday 26 April 2009 after listening to the outpourings of Pastor Jones’s
healing and deliverance ministry over the airwaves of world band radio, which warn
of Satan’s traps. ‘This is how we Holy roll,’ says Pastor Jones, the broadcaster,
followed by popular Heavens Best Gospel Rap Music program.) 
 
See also, There’s a Train Acomin’

Sunday 25 February 2024

The Utility of Art as a Social Function according to Heinrich Böll

Or should that be The Utility of Art at a Social Function?


I think I’ve written all I want to say on the topic of the Non-Utility of Art,
see Schoolboy’s Mock-Heroic Epic:
 
‘That art is non-utile is a self-conscious truism voiced oftenest by post-Marxian cynics. 

‘As Oscar Wilde, a socialist manqué, makes clear: All art is quite useless. 

‘This banality is no more absurdly pointed up than in the verses of a lofty poet who compares himself with his father digging the family cabbage patch – a spade wielded with evident utility – yet who claims a special dispensation for his own artist’s pen . . . “I’ll dig with it.” (Pause for involuntary cringe.)

‘Anthony Blunt – tarnished knight of the realm, professed communist, and Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures – was unequivocal when a young man in expressing his utopian sympathy for the cultural worthiness of Social Realism: “The culture of the revolution will be evolved by the proletariat to produce its own culture . . . If an art is not contributing to the common good, it is bad art.” ’

Yet, I now must acknowledge I’m a positive infant in my understanding of this sociocultural conundrum since reacquainting myself recently with the works of that West German champion of dissident literature, Heinrich Böll (1917-1985), staunch enemy of  Consumerist Materialism and scourge of its correlative, News Media Corruption . . .  
 
. . . specifically, the closing passages of Böll’s excoriating polemical novel, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or, How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead
 
A Specimen of Instant Art.
Well, if we are to be honest we have regretfully to report that at this moment Blorna did punch Straubleder in the jaw. Without further ado, so that it may be forgotten without further ado: blood flowed, from Straubleder's nose; according to private estimates, some four to seven drops but, what was worse: although Straubleder backed away he did say: “I forgive you, I forgive you everything — considering your emotional state.” And so it was that this remark apparently maddened Blorna, provoking something described by witnesses as a “scuffle,” and, as is usually the case when the Straubleders and Blornas of this world show themselves in public, a News photographer  . . . was present, and we can hardly be shocked at the News (its nature being now known) for publishing the photograph of this scuffle under the heading: “Conservative politician assaulted by Leftist attorney.” . . .   
 
At the exhibition there was furthermore a confrontation between Maud Straubleder and Trude Blorna . . .  in which Trude B. hinted at Straubleder's numerous advances to her . . . 
 
End of a Long Friendship.
. . . At this point the squabbling ladies were parted by Frederick Le Boche [artist] , who with great presence of mind had seized upon the chance to catch Straubleder’s blood on a piece of blotting paper and had converted it into what he called “a specimen of instant art.” This he entitled “End of a Long Friendship,” signed, and gave not to Straubleder but to Blorna, saying: “Here's something you can peddle to help you out of a hole.” From this occurrence plus the preceding acts of violence it should be possible to deduce that Art still has a social function. 

Friday 23 February 2024

Moon. Mirror. Moon.

                She woke, was told: ‘Admit a path remote

                from grief and trace the moon’s bright shaft which cleaves

                the curtain’s arrow-slit to find your throat.

                This moonlight is a snake that undeceives.’

 
                Heart-gripped, she wept, led from her bed to draw

                apart the folds; beheld the moon, half-hewn,

                yet burdened, too, in growth; salvation saw

                in her dark mirror, a phantom waning moon;

 
                a moon reshapen in the looking glass,

                whereas the gibbous moon’s a maiden’s shame

                that waxes to its gravid burdensomeness.

                Moonlight beckons: ‘Now pinch the candle flame.’

 
                The steep banks of the millrace told their tale.

                She plunges into floodtide, gasps for breath.

                The mill stood like a church till its great wheel

                grants at last that immemorial death.

 
                In her deserted room the mirror shows

                decrescent moon in fullness grows,

                avowal of a circumstantial lie.

                Affinities the glass does not deny.

                                                                                                                   Catherine Eisner


Photo credit: Alexandra Georgieva

Sunday 7 January 2024

An Émigré Childhood. Opus 42. Southern England 1942.

          There was a time when skies made shadows of
          those great wings that cursed our house a midday dark,               where echoes hid a mute Heil Ludendorff!
          and La Vie Parisienne by Offenbach.
          Always the notes of Chopin’s Waltz impend. 
          Father playing, but never to the end. 
 

The dancer stumbles.

A minute later I lifted the lid to the keyboard and adjusted my piano stool.

            I have since read that seers believe that to dream of playing a piano is a favourable omen and means the discovery of something of great value in a surprising place; so I resolved to realise my dream of the night before.

            I experienced a feeling of equipoise I had not known since I last rode Dinah ... a balanced seat, hands-free, independent of the reins.

            In my opinion it is actually more difficult to run into bar 210 of Valse in A-flat Opus 42 where the waltz ‘stumbles’ than emerge from it – one runs the risk of sounding as if one has simply walked into a wall, rather than suspending the breath for a moment – hence, this artifice of ineptitude is not easy to achieve and, even though Chopin intended to simulate a clumsy dancer’s imbalance before her lost rhythm is regained, the player’s assumed clumsiness must be diligently practiced over and over again.

            So, creating this suspension requires exceptional finesse in timing and shades of dynamics and balance, which, to my way of thinking, is the more difficult task.

            In my father’s case, alas, the task was performed never with consummate success, as though the passage was a nagging regret and he had to return again and again to pick a sore.  (Father would tune his piano himself by feeding a reference note into an oscilloscope an army pal of his had once used for reading radar; he’d then retune the fifths until they were slightly flat. Those dancing waveforms on a monitor screen, as I told the doctors, I always associate with Chopin’s waltzes.)

            For my own part, my effortless arpeggiation on the evening I returned from Boy’s funeral, and my faultless span at bar 255 – which had once made such demands on the extensive stretch of my Father’s left hand – meant I rode the home-straight cooly through the flurry of that passionate coda, and reached the winning post at last, luckily without a fall ... until pent up grief all at once welled up and burst my heart.

Extract from Dispossession       

Part 11 of Sister Morphine (Salt 2008)       

 

 

For particularly recherché (even prophetic) examples of la poésie concrète likewise revealng my father’s ‘deep continent’ brand of polymathy, see The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K. and . . .
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/04/circo-perfuso-fato-sanguinis.html
 
The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K are exhibited at the Arts Council Poetry Collection website administered by the Poetry Library at Royal Festival Hall in London’s Southbank Centre . . .

The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K 
(1902-1939)

A Memoir of a Numeromaniacal Futurist




    

 

Sunday 31 December 2023

Her Left Shoe . . . E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Terrible Projectile of Semiotics

 New Year’s Eve 2023
 
‘Darkness had no effect upon my fancy . . .’ wrote Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, no doubt recalling the month in which she first drafted her Promethean fable whose ‘Abhorred monster!’ she had created in June 1816, the Year Without a Summer; or as her literary confrère, Lord Byron, described it in the bleak conclusion to his vatic, epoch-defining blank verse: ‘Darkness . . . was the Universe.’ 
 
The Birthplace of Frankenstein’s Monster? A short carriage drive from the heart of Geneva, Switzerland.
 
 
In 1816, following the thunderous volcantic eruption of Mount Tabora in the East Indies, the Northern Hemisphere was consumed by a sulphurous fog so dense that sunspots were visible to the naked eye. It was a time of famine, doubt and fear. ‘All was black. The brows of men by the despairing light wore an unearthly aspect . . .’
 
That darkness, too, had been shared by the Prussian fabulist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, himself a writer of transgressive grotesqueries, of fantastical humanoid automatons ‘endued with animation’, a sinister unhealthy preoccupation in the view of those stuffy contemporaries of his who branded him an ‘Outsider’ of a ‘lurid hue’, resistant to the intellectual gravitas expected of popular writers as proselytisers for a Greater Germany.
 
(Incidentally, the unfortunate Victor Frankenstein, a Genevese, would have been heartened and spared his traumatic guilt from his nights in Bavarian charnel-houses had he known that some 200 years later – this December 2023 – the ‘Greater Europe’ of the European Union agreed the proposed Regulation for the harvesting of Substances of Human Origin intended for human application.)

‘Wound Fever’ and Forbidden Light . . .
and a Beast named Blasphemy.
So . . . significantly, in 1816, Mary Shelley and Ernst Hoffmann, each a communicant with the spirit of the new Age of Galvanism, were neighbouring Romantics dwelling in Continental Europe and divided only by a distance no greater than London to John O’ Groats. Hence, over Berlin’s literary salons where the polymathic Hoffmann was feted, and over the shores of Lake Geneva at the Villa Diodati where the Shelley/Byron coterie wrote, too, in Gothic script, there swirled morbid broodings on the outer reaches of metaphysics, adrift in the poisoned upper air, as if strangely convoluted sunless plants had grown twisted and found sustenance searching for forbidden light.

Beneath this overcast gloom, then, which presided in 1816, it is perhaps no coincidence that Hoffmann’s own nightmarish fable of uncanny anthropomorphisation, written in the same year, finds an echo in the despair of Mary’s monster: ‘The fever of my blood did not allow me to be visited by peaceful dreams.’
 
For in Hoffmann’ Nutcracker (Berlin 1816) we find another profoundly troubled Mary – the child Marie – who like the author of Frankenstein is also prey to an ‘acute mental vision’ of a monster . . . in this case, the seven-headed Mouse King, more terrifying than the beast named Blasphemy (cf. Revelation 13.1 ‘And I saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads.’)

Freudians, of course, no doubt have discovered a bonanaza of interpretations in Hoffmann’s Nussknacker und Mäusekönig, a box of delights that includes – surely voyeuristically? – the unfettered fevered imaginings of atavistic threat and the blood of young girls. Certainly, at whatever dark level of Hoffmann’s forty-year-old consciousness, there is some fixation that’s impenetrably troubling.

Atavistic threat and the blood of young girls? Well, of all the enigmatic dramas enacted in Hoffmann’s disconcerting Kinderfabel, one plot twist still retains its power to surprise us in the tale’s transformation from the printed page of 1816 to Tchaikovsky’s celebrated ballet-féerie of 1892, even now performed in centres of culture throughout the world. (Our traditional Christmas ballet season in London is incomplete without it).

Consider Act 1 of the ballet, which closes with the Battle to defeat the Mouse King when Marie (Clara in the ballet) famously defends her Nutcracker from attack and – mirroring the action of the book . . . she reacts without thought.  For the febrile girl of the Nussknacker could not ‘contain herself anymore . . . so grabbed her left shoe, without being clearly aware of what she was doing, and threw it at the King.’ (The original narrative in French, is faithfully rendered: ‘Et, en même temps, d’un mouvement instinctif, sans se rendre compte de ce qu’elle faisait, Marie détacha son soulier de son pied, et, de toutes ses forces, elle le jeta au milieu de la mêlée, et cela si adroitement, que le terrible projectile atteignit le roi des souris . . .’)
 
I cast out my shoe.
A shoe as missile? It is a symbol of submission as long-established as the Old Testament, see Psalm 60:8, Over Edom will I cast out my shoe.’ See also Joshua 10:24: ‘Come near, put your feet upon the necks of these kings.’ In both instances, the phrase conveys a meaning of The Downtrodden, a people brought to subjection by a shoe.
 
However, in Hoffmann’s fable, the young heroine’s defeat of the Mouse King’s is shortlived, even, one might suspect, she is moralistically punished for her daring. For, in the melee she crashes backwards into a glass cabinet of toys and . . . ‘At that moment . . . Marie felt an even sharper pain in her left arm than before and sank to the ground, unconscious.’ 

When she awakes, she is told, ‘Nutcracker was lying on your bleeding arm and not far from you was your left shoe.’ A little later, a surgeon arrives and ‘He felt Mary’s pulse and she heard that there was talk of a wound fever.’  

Surely it is not too fanciful for us to perceive Mary’s shattered display case and its scattered dolls and resultant blood as emblematic of shattered childish illusions?
 
I believe these authorial contrivances, from the culminating scene of Act 1, to be profoundly symbolic . . . for surely the young girl’s ‘Wundfieber’ (wound fever) is a sickly metaphor for her menarche?
 
In this belief I  would not be alone in evoking the pale consumptive heroines of the early 19th Century, a literary device that may be found even earlier in Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, perhaps continental Europe’s most celebrated novel of the decadent aestheticisation of tuberculer maidenhood spiritualised by disease. (NB: the setting of Julie is Geneva)
 
This fascination with blood is observable too in a 19th Century fashion cultivated by calculating women who positively sought to look tubercular – the ‘flattering malady’– whereby a courtesan would not only entice her male devotees by seeming to suffer from a phthisic cough but would dissimulate the blood in her sputum by pricking her gums with a pin.
 
(In this connection, it should be remarked that Hoffmann’s Nutcracker found its first translator in Alexandre Dumas père, the version in French that Tchaikovsky set to music for his ballet.  The son of Dumas,  Alexandre Dumas fils, of course, wrote that classic tale of love and consumption, La Dame aux Camélias, and, in this case, the clunking menstrual metaphor may be seen in the red camellias signposted by literature’s consumptive heroine nonpareil.)

Downtrodden . . . a footnote . . .
the perseveration of a ‘terrible projectile’ . . .
The following instances from myth and remembered times warn us that the shoe is a projectile to be genuinely feared . . . the ultimate defiant put-down, pancultural in meaning, when actions speak louder than words, and one’s antagonists must learn they are worthy only of subjection in the dirt under one’s heel
 
The basest insult that can never be unsaid.

 Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi hurled his shoes at 
United States president George W Bush on 1December 2008
in protest against Occupation. Shoes  are considered
exceptionally unclean in the Arab World.
 
Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union, allegedly banged his shoe on his delegate-desk
in protest at a speech by Philippine delegate Lorenzo Sumulong
at UN General Assembly in New York City on 12 October 1960.

Norse god Vídar, son of Odin, famed for killing the wolf Fenrir
by crushing the monster’s lower jaw with his great shoe and
grabbing its upper jaw in one hand to tear its mouth apart.

 
See also Fragment: Hoffmann’s Pictogram 1821    
 
See also Maimed Hero: Frankenstein Exhumed . . . Tragic Monster in Nelson’s Own Image?  https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/06/ 



Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
 
 

Friday 15 December 2023

Suddenly I Heard Someone Say

  The interceding voice is known to you
  from literature; a stranger’s voice who speaks
  offstage: He passed with his friendly word through
    red-brick pillars into the darkness. Texts,
  familiar as the classics, tell of
  a life’s unforeseeable salvation:
  Someone shouts. A hand grabs me by the collar 
   and I am flung from the police cordon.
    A casual comment to the universe,
  addresses no one in particular.
  Jaunty, the voice is baroquely perverse.
  I run, compelled by an animal fear.
.
  Sometimes we are so confounded that we
  do not know our own voice or whence this plea
    comes, but hear only the stranger’s decree:
  ‘You know there cannot be a voice for me.’
                                                                                                                                                                      Catherine Eisner
.

  Text composed from key lines from : 
  A Passage to India. E M Forster.
  The Pianist: One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945. Władysław Szpilman.
  Of this Time, of that Place. Lionel Trilling.
  The Pilgrim’s Progress. John Bunyan.



Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)