borderlines of the imagination

I spent most of last night getting into Thomas Pynchon's "Mason and Dixon," figuring if I wanted to enjoy a tome right now I'd pick one with less current cultural prickliness than the latest Harry Potter. Once again I found myself overwhelmed, unable to stop turning pages, cast into a full world in the same way as when reading Pynchon's latest, "Against the Day." What strikes me the most about his writing is that Pynchon is an intelligent man. He has done extraordinary amounts of research in regards to the subject matter he's presenting, and in regards to just about everything else, and he knows how to weave it all into a compelling story which doesn't read like someone's narrated science manual. Furthermore he's also enough of a writer to not only understand his subjects, but to ignore all the truth of his knoweldge and make up his own sidereal histories to established persons and times, as if there were infinite number of histories, worlds to be historicized, waiting directly below this one, a Borgesian nest of worlds within worlds, each with its own sure dialects and idiosynchronicities, that can't quite be distinguished from but are certainly other than the world we live in. And there's a plot.

I had to put down Fernando Pessoa's "Book of Disquietude" because, despite how fascination his idea of assuming mulitple heteronyms to write under is, this is essentially a plotless notebook of moments of feeling rather glum and out of sorts with humanity, claiming to have fascinating dreams but not even telling us what they are, perhaps better titled a book of bemoaning. He is not even a Rilke with a prescience of vision and beauty beneath his Everyday which leaves one wondering just what the journalist really sees. Despite what I feel is a necessity to divulge the depths of the human mind and experience, one wants to at least wonder if something will change, some slightest event actually happen to break the author from their ennui into a sense of real life. Sartre looked at a tree and felt a profound nausea in that he was one with it, a spiritual enough experience in what is presented as an otherwise humdrum life, and because of that decides to look up an ex-lover. Not a terribly profound plot, but moving, because at the very least it goes somewhere. Even Pavic's recent "Dictionary of the Khazars," told in sprawling asymptotic encyclopedic entries that span space and time and religion and myth without ever quite being straightforward, has the ability to suggest that something happens to the characters, even if that happening is in the reader's own process of trying to assemble the disparate trains of thought. At least, entertaining, as it pushes the imagination, and the very act of reading.

Having felt creatively dry for days now, Pynchon's tome was like a refreshing drink, I was suddenly filled between his pages with ideas, scenes, a sense of something happening in the dark of my own internal narratives. He has created a world, which like all good worlds begs that it is quite possible to create others. The genius behind Tolkien's Middlearth is that it is self-contained, fleshed out, populated and mythologized to the utmost. Every line Tolkien wrote added to the fullness of his simulacraic reality, all the short stories and rejected fragments, so that we might have his grand trilogy, which is in itself not specifically a story but another chapter in the history of its world. The beauty, and curse, of dreams is that they are always set in their own realities, everyone's quite different, and more complicating it is a world with no set boundaries, that changes night by night so that a certain bridge you walked under five years ago no longer exists, and a strange tower now stands in its place which in itself never seems to quite stand still enough to tell how many floors it has, or who lives there, or if it is really there at all. Vague suggestions of denizens, deities, deep mythologies of the psyche, ever alluded to but never clearly explicated, forests and swamps and deserts that may indeed be nothing other than the dreamer's own body and somnolent processes.

Harry Potter may have his wizards' schools and loves and nemeses, but these elements can only belong, when all is written, to the world, to an externality of events driven more by economic fetishizing and the populaces that support it, than they can belong to himself. In the end Harry Potter's world can no longer sustain itself as a world, as it is not spun out of his own imagination with him as only a minor miracle worker in it, and he succumbs to the dustbins of all worn out marketing gimmicks. Arguably so does any element of history or the imagination, once the Author is done with them and moves on. Mason and Dixon, Bilbo Baggins, Bernando Soares, Harry Potter, the race of the Khazars, Borges himself, all these have passed on, returned to some post-formative, subterranean cavern underneath the ice shelves of cultural consciousness to be recycled back into the collective dreaming, to return next time with different faces, altered agendas, stripped of any original historicity and design, the only articulable world the one in which they somehow exist together, devoid of memories and the stories which birthed and bound them, lost names in the fabric of being nothing but someone else's character and never their own to invent, as we sometimes, barely, have the glimmering of possibility towards.

uncertain joys of the mind

"I too was happy, because I exist. I left the house with a great goal, which was, finally, to get to the office on time. But on this day the very compulsion of life participated in that other good compulsion which makes the sun shine in the hours stipulated by the almanac, according to the longitude and latitude of the places on the earth. I felt happy for not being able to feel unhappy. I walked down the street in a leisurely fashion, full of certainty, because, after all, the office was a known factor, the people in it known factors, all certainties. It shouldn't be surprising that I felt free, without knowing what I might be free of. In baskets set on the sidewalk along the Rua da Prata, the bananas for sale under the sun were of a grand yellow.

It takes very little to make me happy: that the rain had stopped, that the sun is shining brightly in this happy South, bananas that are more yellow for having black spots on them, the people selling them because they talk, the sidewalks of the Rua da Prata, the Tagus in the background, blue streaked with green turning to gold, this entire domestic corner of the Universal system.

The day will come when I will not see this any more, when the bananas on the side of the street will outlive me, the wisecracking women who sell them, and the day's newspapers, which the little man has spread out from one side of the corner to the other. I know very well that they will be different bananas, that the women will be different, and the newspapers will have, for anyone who bends over to look, a date different from today's. But they, because they do not live, last, even if they are different, while I, because I am alive, pass away even if I am the same.

I could make this moment more solemn by buying bananas, since it seems to me that all of the day's sun is projected into them as if it were a spotlight without a lamp. But I'm ashamed of rituals, symbols, of buying things on the street. The women might not wrap them properly or sell them as they should be sold because I don't know how to buy them as they should be bought. They might find my voice bizarre when I ask the price. It's better to write than to dare to live, even if living is nothing more than buying bananas in the sunlight, as long as the sun lasts and there are bananas for sale.

Later on perhaps... Yes, later on... Another man, perhaps... I don't know..."

from Fernando Pessoa's "The Book of Disquiet"