Number 45
Godliness and Beauty
An Introduction:
Possibly the dear reader will think I’ve gone a bit nuts with my first essay. I don’t think I have at least. I’ve left many recommendations below to keep the dear reader busy. (I also realized that it would be fun to chart literary progress through the recommendations I’ve given out over the weeks. Would be interesting to see which books led to which books). Have a fine week.
On Godliness and Beauty:
Recently I have come to the realization that there exists very little beauty in the world these days. Not just in objects or art either. No. I mostly mean people actually. The most beautiful people are, to me at least, those who live for something other than beauty. This is why people are attracted to artists and writers and actors (actors are also more prone to being naturally beautiful but many others are as well. What gives an actors his or her aura, and differentiates him or her from the rest of the beautiful people, is the fact that the actor’s existence is based not upon beauty, but instead upon film). These people live to serve a higher power. This is also why the most beautiful people are religious people. And I don’t mean the High Holidays WASPs like me. No. I mean the true believers. True believers have changed the course of history, have inspired millions. Billions. And this is not achieved simply through such individuals’s words due to the fact that at its core everything comes back to sex. What moves mountains is the beauty of the true believers. The dear reader must remember here that I am not discussing physical beauty because there are millions of physically beautiful people in the world. The beauty of those who exist for a higher power is that aforementioned aura. It is the blinding wave of sexual desire surrounding characters like Japón’s Ascen or Dostoevsky’s Alyosha Karamazov. The question of God’s existence is not even relevant here. It does not matter if He is real or not (He is). What matters instead is simply that these people have a fervent devotion to something greater than themselves. And if the belief is in God (we here discuss my WASP God but any will do) the belief is in the most beautiful thing imaginable, something which in turn imbues the true believers with an unparalleled beauty. But now nobody believes in anything. And now not many people are truly beautiful. I obviously do not have any proof to back up this essay, but I will leave the dear reader with a passage from Octavio Paz’s “Vuelta”:
ideas ate the gods
the gods
became ideas
great bladders full of bile
the bladders burst
the idols exploded
putrefaction of the gods
the sanctuary was a dungheap
the dungheap a nursery
armed ideas sprouted
ideolized ideodeities
sharpened syllogisms
deified cannibals
ideas as idiotic as deities
rabid dogs
dogs in love with their own vomitThere are a few ways to think of this passage, but I consider it to be in line with my argument. Do I care to explain? No, not really. Email me with your thoughts, dear reader.
On Octavio Paz:
There’s something special about Octavio Paz. Despite the fact that his poems are being read and not watched there is something rather passive about the way in which they are consumed. It is much like he writes in “As One Listens to the Rain”: “listen to me as one listens to the rain, / not attentive, not distracted,…listen to me as one listens to the rain, / without listening, hear what I say.” When the dear reader reads Paz he or she does not read Paz. He or she feels Paz, knows Paz even.
Paz’s poetry is as if he is having a three-way argument between himself, the subject of the poem, and the words that he grasps for but cannot grasp. Often he is open about this, interrupting many poems such as “The River” with interludes like the following:
In mid-poem a great helplessness overtakes me, everything abandons me,
there is no one beside me, not even those eyes that gaze from behind me at what I write,
no one behind or in front of me, the pen mutinies, there is neither beginning nor end nor even a wall to leap,
the poem is a deserted esplanade, what’s said is not said, the unsaid is unsayable
What allows the reader to understand anything through all of these never written lines is his or her own emotional intuition. Here the dear reader can turn to yet another quotation for explanation (this one from “Blanco”):
The spirit is an invention of the body The body is an invention of the world The world is an invention of the spirit No Yes the unreality of the seen transparency is all that remains
Paz’s words are unreal. They must be seen through in order to ascertain the truth. It is very often that the reader will find him or herself overcome with emotion that doesn’t seem to correlate to the words on the page. This is when the reader realizes that reading Paz is not about reading Paz. Once again, to read Paz truly is to feel Paz truly.
Some Recommendations:
The Poems of Octavio Paz:
See above.
Stalker:
Tarkovsky at his best.
Japón:
One of those films that you can’t seem to shake out of your head.
Too Late to Die Young:
A somewhat tragic movie about young people. Beautifully shot.
Antipoems: New and Selected:
A rather fine portrait of a rather funny poet. By portrait I mean book of selected poems of course.
La Piscine:
I forgot to recommend this the other week. Captures that aspirational idea of le sud in the 60s magnificently well. Mixed with a bit of tragedy for the sake of interest. For another excellent depiction of such a life see La Collectionneuse.
Waiting For Godot:
Much like Japón and all other Beckett (all other Beckett that I’ve read at least) one gets through Waiting For Godot without issue but then cannot seem to stop thinking of it in the following weeks. I know that this is true because I didn’t recommend it when I read it a few weeks ago but have not been able to cease my ruminations since.
Some Songs:
“The Fairest Of The Seasons” - Nico - Chelsea Girl
“Little Sister” - Nico - Chelsea Girl
“I’ll Keep It With Mine” - Nico - Chelsea Girl
“Sozinho (Live)” - Caetano Veloso - Prenda Minha
“Mis-Shapes” - Pulp - Different Class
“Common People” - Pulp - Different Class
“I Love You, Suzanne” - Lou Reed - New Sensations
“New Sensations” - Lou Reed - New Sensations
“Senses” - New Order - Movement
“That’s How I Got To Memphis” - Tom T. Hall - Tom T. Hall - Storyteller, Poet, Philosopher
Some Photos:
Like the Paz, your observations.