dunja

this is one of those books that put you in a special state of mind, and keep you in it for a long time. Solaris – The Other and The Alien, which – as such – bounces human mind back to itself literally.

“We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. [...] we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Humans. We don’t need other worlds. We need a mirror.”

Solaris comes as a mirror of humanity in two ways: on the one hand, reflecting human inability to understand The Alien, to grasp its life-form. If (in Wittgensteinian terms) language is a form of life, and if communication comes according to rules humans can hardly interpret, then this lack of communication shows the lack of understanding the life form of the other. The only language, the only life form present is the one humans see, the one humans always already see as. And the only kind of understanding emerging from it is the one which tells us something about ourselves and our understanding and our own mind. One the other hand, Solaris reproduces beings kept deep in our psyche, hidden in the deepest parts of our mind. In so far, it reflects human psyche in its entirety. Reflection of Solaris’ reflection is a reflection of ourselves. And the Kantian project comes here in the form: to understand Solaris and its life-form is to understand the condition of possibility of this understanding, that is, to understand ourselves, while the object of thought, the Ocean-in-itself, remains beyond our reach.

“[...] humanity now had to acknowledge the neighborhood, which even though being a billion miles of emptiness away, divided from us by  a whole space of light years, still stands on the paths of its expansion, the neighborhood harder to grasp than the whole rest of the Universe.” (my translation)

Solaristics – a scientific discipline devoted to the research of Solaris has come to substantial problems. For (just as Laudan says), in order for a research question to become a recognized scientific problem, the possibility of its solution has to be granted: it has to be a solvable problem. The golden age of Solaristics was over once the possility of answering the crucial questions regarding Solaris started fading away. Mainly the possibility of the Contact. And when an empirical problem looses its status, it becomes a philosophical problem. Solaristics has accordingly become a degenerating research tradition, which bounces science back to epistemology, back to Kant. Something like a punch into the face of naive analytic philosophy?

How a concordance is a book that breaks down all the words of an author and lists them alphabetically, according to how many times they appear, where they appear. Shakespeare, for example, says natural x number of times. Milton says God x times and Satan x times. Imagine having your own concordance: all your words indexed. You could find out how many times you said love. Or yes. Or your name. And what it would be like to discover the concordance of whom you love left by your door one day in August. And what it would be like to hide it under your bed, afraid. And how long it took to look up your own name.

Ray Hsu (Concordance, in “Anthropy”)

***

(T.S.Eliot)

***

The sky above the port in the colour of television tuned to a dead channel is all that remains

Your body spilt over my body

Brings reality to seeing

Read the book. It’s hard to write about it in one note, so this is just an intro, or something like the first impressions… The favorite game of leaving footprints in the snow made by accidental figures – that’s all that remains… for some reason i need to bring these Octavio Paz’s lines:

...the unreality of the seen

transparency is all that remains

Your footsteps in the next room...

…

Was L. B. only a faker, a lost personality, stretched between different cultures and demands of society… or was he driven by the realization of the value of moments and their disappearance once they are prolonged, shaped into a socially acceptable form, extended into what we are or what we become once we let it all roll down… or was he someone who couldn’t accept the fact that he wasn’t what he hoped he’d be or maybe he just wanted to watch himself from a distance, leaving things as they were and himself involved in them as it all was… a bit like Orasio Oliveira from Cortazar’s Hopscotch… home – away – back home, but home isn’t home anymore, and you are not you and it’s all good as long as it remains untouched, just a trace laying in a snow, until it melts or the new snow falls over it.

Divertimento, the first novel of Julio Cortazar.

When we were still playing life… that’s what Divertimento is about. This playing of life which comes to the point of “growing up”, growing out, the life awaits, and the games should be left behind. But the notion of game is ambiguous here… Playing because of playing, playing because one needs to remain detached from reality bares a risky path to the vanity. Not a vanity towards reality (reality – one of the most abused words ever) or “real life”… no, not that. This is a vanity which comes from isolating art from everything. (I’d say a vanity of trying to be a-political, in the broadest sense of this word… but I won’t go into that now).
The story is circular, almost like in this great movie Doni Darko. It’s the search for knots only in order to have something to unknot, creating them even there where there are no knots, just to prolong the game, while the game prolongs itself towards its end, as the string has an end, even when it’s rolled in a ball… I guess some of us love to search for the knots… it’s the feeling of complexity of reality, of its details and beauty (-> knitted scarf) But they were creating them so that they could search for them, leading themselves to the realization of this fact, painting a sword, which will cut the string… Pity noone realized that sword-fight could be a game too…

Ha!

What do you think? I had left?

You’re mistaken.

I was only standing out at the gate
– with a golden grin –
waiting to hear your laughter
at my assumed departure.

No, I cannot leave –
howsoever much “you and I” may grieve –
for I’m your conscience that’s asleep
“Asleep…tired…or it malingers”!

And if that’s a joke, you see, it was TSE –
or, to be more precise, his compound ghost –
who implored me not to leave, saying:
“There will be time, there will be time…”

And yes, I agreed.
Indeed, there will be time
to leave.

~ CR

I’ve just seen the film It’s All About Love. Two people saving their lives from some other people. She is the world-famous ice skating star. They are about to divorce. She gets into some trouble since the mafia living from her fame wants to replace her with another girl and get rid of her.
So they get together again,trying now to run away.

LET us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky…

They visit a one-night cheap hotel. But not to find an overwhelming question. For there will be no time anymore.
People have started flying in Uganda. It’s snowing and it is July. A man on the radio is reminding everybody to empty the water from their glasses as the yearly phenomenon of all water turning into ice is about to happen again (so buy some antifreeze).

In the room the women come and go Talking of
Michelangelo.

The snow that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
Came in this soft July night,
To say good night but not to fall asleep.

For there will be no more time
For the white snow that slides along the street,
There’ll be no time, there’ll be no time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be no time to murder and create.
And look! There has never been the time
for all the works and days of hands
To lift and drop a question on your plate.

There is no time to wonder, “Do I dare?” for, I
dare.

We have disturbed the universe.
There is no more time
For a minute to reverse
decisions and revisions.

I won’t have to presume.
I’ll just say, I have gone at dusk through narrow
streets
And watched the snow in this July night
And was happy to be by your side.
Like a feather
Scuttling across the clouds in your eyes.

And the afternoon, the evening doesn’t sleep
peacefully.
And it’s not scary.
The tea and cakes and ices were enough
to force the moment to its crisis.

The moment of my greatness might soon flicker,
And the eternal Footman might hold my coat, and
snicker
And I’ll be afraid.
But not from him.

The cups, the marmalade, the tea,
this talk of you and me,
have squeezed the universe into a ball
It was worth it, after all…

And Lazarus came but was silent.

We have lingered in the chambers white and deep
By Snow-white and the seven dwarfs
Till our voices fade
And we fall asleep.

And how on earth can this film be so ubelievably misunderstood???!!!!! All the reviews do such an unjust to it, which is a shame for the world of art criticism…

“… No sense in asking it “Where do you come from?”. It’s getting lost but never being lost. No, it’s not scary, it’s being astonished, having big eyes, forgetting the question “How did I come here”. It’s so senseless when you were always there. Memorial of the present.” (Christian)

“Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.” (Cortazar)

The short story The playboy of Glenageary by Joseph O’Connor (an extract from Synge: A Celebration, edited by Colm Tóibín), inspired by real events in the life of JM Synge, speaks of the playwright in first person.

I find this story an ironic testimony of the playwright about himself. Himself and his dried out life. He’s writing in future tense, like everything is determined. He knows everything, not only about himself – he knows everything even about the one he loves. Is there anything more boring from pure determination, especially after it is known, uncovered… But
he is aware of this boredom, and narcistically in love with it. In love with himself, his lack of vividness, his “oldness” (with 36!?!), his lack of daring, lack of fighting for himself. He keeps it as the most unchangeable physical law. He alone is the gravity itself. And all the other things are just mare planets turning around in a predetermined way. He is everything to those he cares for (the mother, the lover). He is always behind: behind the stage, behind her life, even behind his own life. Married only to himself and his mother. And after finding all this out, he can only expose it in half content, half ironic way. The most interesting combination, I’d say!
It might seem that there is a big similarity between the storyteller of this story and Prufrock (both are ironic and both in a way narcistic), but while Prufrock wonders if he should dare, while he thinks, reflects about it, this storyteller is far away from any sort of wondering. For him, it’s all set forth,
like a drama play. For Prufrock, on the other hand, the universe is too big to be squeezed into a ball.

I can’t accept that Prufrock is striking against the lust (which would be, in this case, going against the life itself); the whole poem is so full of passion, and to give Prufrock a role of a “moral teacher” or of the “voice of conscience” would do the unjust to the poem. The lines that make me say this, are first those where he says “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.” Now, I don’t think this negation is simply something that Prufrock expects as a potential answer to his “disturbing of the universe”; it is also what he himself agrees with – that all these possible “warnings” cannot simply “squeeze the universe into a ball”, as “that is not it at all”.
I think lust is one of those things belonging to “this world”, the world of everyday life, and it falls under the things Prufrock would like not to criticize, but to subject to the burden of time. When he says that there will be time to wonder “Do I dare?”, he tells us two things:
1) we all the time stand in front of the point which, if crossed, we start daring (that’s why the second reflective questions “and, ‘Do I dare?’” – dare to act against this everyday life, to put questions, to question the time itself and the entire meaning of life;
2) the question of daring shows that Prufrock isn’t afraid of lust (to dare is, in a way, a lustful action, it’s a way of stepping over the borders of what is simply given).
Prufrock knows there’s something wrong with this usual, unreflected living, but he is, on the other hand, uncertain if questioning it would make any
sense, if it would bring anything or just miss the point. He knows in the end he wouldn’t be satisfied (”And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid.” – afraid of not knowing the sense of everything, of life, of love, of lust, of time, of finiteness, of death).
Although it might seem that motives of Lazarus and John the Baptist are directly referring to lust and sin, lust and sin are here more symbols for something mortal, human, which cannot be understood by a simple reflection, cause “this is not it at all”.
As for the mermaids, maybe we should remember Ulysses at this point: Prufrock maybe wants to say that he’s too far in his thoughts in order to be able to hear the song of enchantment; he can see them and hear them, but he remains outside of their game. He has been among them, has played the games of love and passion, until human voices – our thoughts, reflections – wake him and he drowns.
In any case, I don’t think it is possible to put such a poem in the frame of only one interpretation. But it is wonderful to discuss its possible meanings!