Doug Bruns

Archive for the ‘Literature’ Category

, , , , ,

“…to measure their experience…”

In Creativity, Life, Literature, The Examined Life, The infinity of ideas, Writers on May 16, 2012 at 8:00 am

I’m traveling. This is a repost.

___________________________

I read recently an interview in The Paris Review with Norman Mailer. In it he referred to his audience “which has no tradition by which to measure their experience but the intensity and clarity of their inner lives.” I was struck by this phrase: the intensity and clarity of an inner life. What does that mean, really? Does it mean a life of the mind, in the classic sense, a trained, disciplined and well-educated mind? How else does one develop an inner life, but by a mind of disciplined introspection? Mystics have an inner life and so on. I must obviously have little clarity if I can’t even discern what a true inner life is. As a species we are unique in our ability to be introspective, or so we think. (Imagine the guilt if someday we should learn that the whale and elephant and a few other great beasts had self-consciousness, a life of the mind, an inner life!)

I think a life that is intense and has clarity would be directed and purposeful, perhaps that of a successful entrepreneur, an artist or architect. Great travelers and adventurers, Sir Richard Burton, Magellan, Scott would qualify too. But the exterior, the husk of life does not necessarily bespeak the inner life. Mailer was thinking of the reader of his work who would, by inner experience, weigh and gauge his writing. My inner life lacks clarity. It lacks intensity too, as I leap from this to that without mastery. I’m interested in many things, but intensity I have none. Passion yes. Obsession, even, I have. But I frankly feel intense about little, if anything. Family, virtues, good over evil are things I have intensity for. That is a start. Clarity? If Mailer was referring to a pool filled with gin-clear water, my clarity is a pebble-strewn eddy barely visible through collected surface foam.

It was posited in The Breakdown of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind that the inner life developed late in the evolution of man, somewhere if I recall in the 15th or 16th century. It is a wild thought, but interesting, in that one might speculate that not all of us have developed the same degree of intensity and clarity of an inner life, that some maybe have missed the gene altogether.

, , , ,

Friday Moleskine notes

In Life, Literature, Truth, Writing on May 11, 2012 at 6:00 am

I will be on the road, or more properly, in the mountains, for another two weeks, but pulled this Friday collection of notes and quotes together before leaving. Thanks for reading.

______________________

Freud wrote that anatomy is destiny.

* * *

“Memory, unaided by even a photograph, lays a claim on us that is so much more exacting for being so perishable.” From the New York Times Book Review (10.6.2003)

* * *

Nathanael West, writing on Americans, from The Day of the Locust (1939):

They were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old, and had been made so by boredom and disappointment. All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theres…. Where else would they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?… They get tired of oranges…. They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all…. [Newspapers and movies] fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars…. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates…. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved of nothing.

* * *

Life is the opportunity for art. Be a master wherever you are. Expose the truth wherever you go.

, , , , , , , , ,

Bookends

In Books, Creativity, Literature, Memoir, Writers, Writing on May 2, 2012 at 8:00 am

This is a repost. I’m out of the country. As this piece is “published,” I will have touched down in Kathmandu, day one of twenty-two days away from home. That’s a long time.

____________________________

November 14, 1851, one-hundred fifty-nine years ago today Moby Dick was published. The Reader’s Almanac, “The official blog of The Library of America“,tells the story of Melville inviting Nathaniel Hawthorn, his reclusive neighbor to a celebratory dinner party as Moby Dick is came off the press. The article quotes a letter from a local Lenox resident:

Not very long ago the author of The Scarlet Letter and the author of Typee having, in some unaccountable way, gotten a mutual desire to see one another, as if neither had a home to which he could invite the other, made arrangements in a very formal manner to dine together at a hotel in this village . . .

If you love reading about the writing life, you will find short article of interest: “The happiest day in Herman Melville’s life.”

_____

The grand lady of American Letters, Joan Didion, has a new book coming out next year, a memoir about aging called Blue Nights. Didion, who almost single-handedly created the genre of literary non-fiction (a bit of an overstatement but close (enough) to true) has been a favorite of mine for many years.

_____

“What Bloggers Owe Montaigne” is a wonderful essay at The Paris Review by Montaigne biographer Sarah Bakewell.

Bloggers might be surprised to hear that they are keeping alive a tradition created more than four centuries ago. Montaigne, in turn, might not have expected to be remembered so long, least of all in the English language—yet he always believed that such understanding between remote eras and cultures was possible. “Each man bears the entire form of the human condition,” he said.

As you might know, from reading my posts here, Montaigne is the writer-thinker-friend I have turned to repeatedly for as long as it matters. As this article demonstrates, Montaigne continues to influence–to this day–as he did centuries ago. There is the hue of immortality to that.

And interestingly, to speak of current and lasting influence, there is this extended essay over at The Nervous Breakdown on all things Montaigne, thanks to Jason Chambers, Johathan Evison, Dennis Haritou and Jason Rice. Their piece is called: When We Fell in Love: Sarah Bakewell.

_____

A bit of Maine. My review of Maine writer, Susan Hand Shetterly‘s book, Settled in the Wild, is now up at Mostly Fiction dot com. As the dusk jack reads: “Like Annie Dillard and Mary Oliver, Susan Hand Shetterly takes a magnifying glass to the wilderness that remains, spending the time few of us take to really look.” I am, admittedly a fan of all things Maine (well, most all things…), but objectively, this is a wonderful little book.

_____

Read On!

, , , ,

My “coffee-thing”

In Books, Creativity, Literature, Memoir, Thinkers, Writers, Writing on April 16, 2012 at 6:34 am

I wrote an essay a year or so ago for the The Nervous Breakdown. Yesterday I received an email from a woman who read the piece and felt compelled to write. The reader had, several years previously, suffered brain trauma in a car accident and was now worried it was catching up to her. She wrote, “I managed to cope fairly well, considering, untill some years ago: I started to think I was going barking mad, dementia/alzheimer a family condition, thinking it was my turn now. Having been reassured I’m just sufffering normal 60ýears memory-loss, I can happily reassured go on living… Thanks to…Doug Bruns for writing about this “coffee-thing”. (My piece was called, Like Burnt Coffee.) I found some comfort in her experience and wanted to pass along (most of) the essay.

_________________________

“…the books from which entire literatures have flowed, like Homer, Rabelais, are encyclopedias of their time,” wrote Flaubert to Colet. “They knew everything,” he said.

Flaubert was writing in 1854 and grappling with a momentous, essentially silent, event in human history: books had surpassed the human brain for universal capacity. The encyclopedic individual to which Flaubert referred–Homer, Rabelais and their ilk–had been eclipsed by the summation of knowledge as contained in the book. The course of flowing knowledge had reversed–no longer would it flow from individual to book. Rather, the book, the compilation and accumulation of knowledge, would forever inform the individual. (In modern life, the flow has again transitioned: book to computer–and most recently, computer to internet.)

It is related that Gottfried Leibniz was the last man to know everything that could be known; that after he died in 1716, the knowledge the world contained was greater than what one individual was capable of knowing. There is no fact to support either of these notions, Leibniz’s omniscience or the quantity of knowledge in the world at his time. Regardless, it is a concept that gives me pause.

I want to know everything. Realistically, not everything, just more. I read Guy Davenport, Isaiah Berlin, Christopher Hitchens, Susan Sontag, Robert Nozick; I read them–and so many others–and am reminded immediately and precisely how stupid and thick I am. Obtuse… I might as well be illiterate…There is nothing I retain. I forget everything…I go to dinner parties and afterward am told that I had previously entertained those same polite people with that same tired story. I submit an essay only to discover that I’d published it a year previously, a month previously. I look at my library and wonder, who read all these books? I am, I fear, seriously and irredeemably lacking. There will no make-up class. This is not Groundhog Day, the movie.

Unlike Leibniz, I know nothing. If I am the sum of the collected existences which preceded me–what Octavio Paz called, “the living tissue of the current situation”–then I am but a fragment, a single cell even, of a human self. The whole is a futility. It rests in my mouth like the bitter taste of burned coffee.

, , ,

The state of my (reading) mind.

In Books, Creativity, Death, Literature, The Examined Life on March 7, 2012 at 6:00 am

I just left my local bookstore, Longfellow’s, empty-handed. That is significant and speaks to the current state of my mind. I finished reading a book last night and didn’t have one in waiting. That is unusual. It appears that I’m at a reading paralysis, brought on by irrational fears of mortality. Allow me to explain.

But first, the book I finished last night was the latest by Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending. It is a beautiful little book. I sat down and read it straight, stopping only to refresh my bourbon, also straight. (It was a marathon reading. I needed my electrolytes!) It is a novel of ideas, filtered through a simple but clever story. The first-person narration steadily works up to a crescendo, albeit muted. I liked it very much, but am puzzled that it won the Man Booker Prize. Geoff Dyer wondered too, saying as much in a review in the Times a few months ago. Even without Dyer’s echo, I could not but wonder at the scope of the work, or lack thereof. A prize like the Booker or the Pulitzer calls for a bigger canvas in my scheme of things.

Back to my mental state.

Reading is so important to me that I’ve become trapped by it. The problem specifically is absurd and in telling you I am revealing more than my nature usually permits. Perhaps breaking down the fourth wall, as they say in theater, is just the thing.

Do you ever worry, that should you die tomorrow, the last book might not be the right “last” book? Wouldn’t you want it to be something big and profound to send you off? Like Moby Dick, perhaps? That would be a good one. (Not an option, I just re-read that last summer.) Or Ulysses? Or Proust? (I simply don’t have the discipline to wade through those again–at least not while in such a fragile mental state.) Getting my drift? I told you it was absurd. The “next book” used to hold such promise; now it seems a dark test.

At fifty-six I am starting to plan for the end. Morbid? I think not. Just being prudent. What haven’t I read? What do I need to read? And I’m not just thinking titles. I’m thinking genres. Science, literature, philosophy, history and so on. The bigger question–and this is the important thing–the bigger question is: as a person who has gained most of his knowledge through books, what do I want to know next?

I’m curious by nature and I’ve spent a lot of time attempting to keep curiosity alive. Curiosity is an expectant little beast that needs attending to. Ignore it and it will die. Give it too much attention and you will die. It’s a balance. Moderation, said the Greeks and the Buddha. Where is my moderated curiosity leading me? And to that question, distressingly, I don’t have a solid feel-good answer.

_______________________________

As a side note, Philip Roth famously stated last summer that he no longer reads fiction. That created quite a stir in the lit community. Now, this morning, in a piece at The Daily Beast, Cormac McCarthy is quoted as saying, “I haven’t read a novel in years.” I don’t know what, if anything, to make of this situation.

, , , ,

Leaning in to wisdom.

In Creativity, Literature, Music, Nature, Philosophy, Photography, The infinity of ideas, Thinkers, Wisdom, Writing on February 25, 2012 at 11:12 am

I’m writing an interview with the photographer Thatcher Cook . He just published his first book, Black Apple.  We’re wrapping it up and in a couple of weeks the interview will be published at Obscura Press.  I’ll let you know when it goes up. Thatcher is a thoughtful and reflective individual. Those interested in the creative life will, I think, appreciate the interview.

I mention this because one of the questions I asked him–Who are your influences?–got me thinking. An artistic or intellectual influence is a profound thing. There is that quote by Newton, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” An influence is a connection to a tradition, like the old-world apprenticeship but perhaps without the hands-on mentoring. I think about the artistic and intellectual influences in my life this way. It seems a fashion of constructing meaning in an otherwise (potentially) vacuous arena. The writing life, the wanderings of the documentary photographer, the hours of studio work the artist puts in, or the musician alone in her room practicing. These are painfully lonely pursuits. If for nothing else, reaching back affords a sense of community.

If you’ve been following these dispatches you know there are a handful writers and thinkers who have left their mark on me, inspired me, who have taught and guided me–and continue to do so.  I think it is good to reflect deeply toward those who have traveled the path before us. I say “reflect deeply toward” and not “reflect deeply upon” for a purpose. It’s only a turn of phrase, but when I think about, say, Henry David Thoreau, or E.B. White, I picture myself leaning into them, listening to them. It is an image that links us, like Plato leaning into the circle as he listens to Socrates at the Agora. This is my teacher. What is he saying? Last summer I spent some time in the north woods of Maine. I was on the trail of Thoreau. I camped at Lilly Bay, a spot he mentions in The Maine Woods. He was my guide and inspiration and it seemed his voice clearer while in his footsteps, as I leaned in.

And there are others. There is Montaigne and Nietzsche for their thoughts, Schubert and Beethoven for their guts, Wallace Stevens for the art of the word and Audubon (and Thoreau) for a life of meaning in nature. E.B. White teaches me the art of the essay (so much to learn) and, more contemporarily, Jim Harrison shows me what a life lived large should look like. My point is, it is important to draw upon wisdom and example deeply if you wish to experience and perhaps build upon what has come before you.

I am getting preachy, and I don’t care for that. I must climb down off this box of soap. To cite one of my mentor influences: But what do I know? (Montaigne)