Thoughts on Like a Sky Inside (Jakuta Alikavazovic)

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Upon ascending the peristyle of the Louvre, one first glimpses the Venus de Milo, standing alone on her pedestal at the end of the large hall. It’s a moment of indefinable emotion, elusive and never to be recaptured.

In Like a Sky Inside, a young woman spends a night alone in the museum but cannot sleep, even at the foot of the world’s most famous statue. Jakuta Alikavazovic explores the deep impression a family, particularly the narrator’s father, leaves on a child, shaping the adult’s worldview through the prism of childhood.

The narrator attempts to distance herself from her father, believing she can grasp the background, illusions, and expectations. Yet, this understanding fails to prevent her emotions from lagging far behind her intellectual insight. What do we truly know of our parents from the carefully contrived stories, purged of all ugliness, socially presentable yet revealing so little? This novel is a cunning meditation on the many forms of disappearance within our lives.

Jakuta Alikavazovic also contemplates the nature of the art object. In a setting as iconic as the Louvre, surrounded by masterpieces whose reproductions are ubiquitous, Alikavazovic challenges the narrator’s, and thereby the reader’s, perception of originality and authenticity. The solitary experience of the narrator with these artworks in the dead of night echoes Walter Benjamin’s concern with how mass reproduction strips an artwork of its ‘aura’, the unique presence in time and space.

Like a Sky Inside is translated by Daniel Levin Becker.

Amazed Contemplation

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Kind met doodshoofd (Vanitas), Simon van de Passe, after Crispijn van de Passe (I), 1612

The last days of dear old winter. Much of this year spent in a haze, reading little but well.

I read Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, a remarkably fine and wise contemplation of self-knowledge and the abyss of depression. Much of this explores the reduction of the human. The book also echoed a sentence I once transcribed from an attempt to read Hegel: This release of itself from the form of its own self is the highest freedom. That reading of Hegel resisted coherence, but that sentence, a coalescence of poetry and philosophy cut so deep I have transferred it from notebook to notebook.

The Vast Extent by Lavinia Greenlaw plays with light and attentiveness. I entered the aura of the text and did not want to leave. It is an extraordinary work that slips away from genre and definition. It works on the edge of autobiography but never quite removes the mask.

Spinoza looms over this year’s reading following my fascinated scrutiny of George Eliot’s translation of Ethics. I’m slowly reading Eliot’s Journals. Unlike Woolf’s diaries, these are economic, writing that subtracts ornament and distraction, but remains somehow rich and expressive.

Lengthening Days

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How delightful, even to elders like us, to feel Spring breathing once more over air and earth! We have been quite happy and contented with Winter, however severe; nor have we ever felt the slightest inclination to be satirical on that hoary personage. On the contrary, there is not a Season of them all whom we love better than hale, honest Winter.

— John Wilson, Streams (April 1826)

Thoughts on Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H.

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To escape the neutral, I had long since forsaken the being for the persona, for the human mask. When I humanized myself, I’d freed myself from the desert.

I’d freed myself from the desert, yes, but had also lost it! and also lost the forests, and lost the air, and lost the embryo inside me.

The mask—humanisation—that we put on to help us elude the harshness of reality. A personal encounter with a cockroach inside the wardrobe of her former maid provokes a profund reflection on originary existence that exceeds humanity. The year opens thus: with The Passion According to G. H. by Clarice Lispector. This is no Metamorphosis. Lispector’s narrator is not transformed but ritually ingests a part of the cockroach’s body.

The demonic precedes the human. And the person who sees that presentness burns as if seeing the God. Prehuman divine life is of a presentness that burns.

This exploration of the prehuman and divine in Lispector’s narrative echoes themes in Spinoza’s Ethics, particularly as interpreted by Clare Carlisle. This is the conflation of God and Nature that Carlisle addresses in Spinoza’s Religion:

When Spinoza identifies Nature with God, however, this conception of Nature must be expanded, beyond consciousness and extension, to comprise the infinity of attributes which, he declares, belong to God. Spinoza offers Natura naturans as, so to speak, an alternative name of God. This divine name works to free the concept of God from the cultural baggage-particularly the anthropomorphic and moralising connotations-it had acquired over many centuries.

Lispector’s assessment of humanity through G. H. is not without hope, but as Spinoza writes in Ethics: “The emotions of hope and fear cannot in themselves be good.” We are steeped in anthropomorphism and fake morality, which inhibits the emergence of a clear understanding of what it is to be human.

Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H. is best ingested slowly. It is a fine start to this year’s reading, but I do not wish to end the consequent introspective mood that it provoked. I read Ronald W. Sousa’s translation and will remain with the book in Idra Novey’s translation.

Emily Dickinson shares Lispector’s fervent interest in the relationship between Nature and the God, conceptions aligned with my limited understanding of Baruch Spinoza. As I’ve only dipped into Ethics, and read Spinoza only through Clare Carlise, an amusing project might be to combine my rereading of Dickinson and continued reading of Passion with George Eliot’s translation of Ethics, which may lead into Daniel Deronda and Clare Carlisle’s The Marriage Question.

Between the Lines

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Chantal Joffe: Emily with Sugar I, 2016

How to read well amidst infinite streams of information and data? Arriving at the closing pages of a long book, Anna Karenina, in my case, feels like more of an achievement than it should, but it is all too easy to get distracted. Paradoxically, inhabiting the world of a long book is one of my favourite ways of spending time on this planet. This year I’d like to embrace the resilience found in the pages of long stories like War and Peace and Moby Dick. Slowly journeying between the extended anchor points of the opening and closing pages of long books, percolating through time, allowing the linearity of time to be dissolved. Less is more and more.

Anna Karenina gave me a richly varied cornucopia of bilious old men, strutting peacocks, beautiful women, awkward peasants, uncouth nobility, cattle, rural politics, scything techniques, abundances of a different type, but what lingers are the exquisitely and precisely rendered emotions. Beware of the green-eyed monster which mocks the meat it feeds on. In Anna Karenina, the Lord of Jealousy steps in, inhabiting the text as a fully developed character You might read any number of books on the subject but come to Anna Karenina to truly understand its malignant force.

This year begins with Clarice Lispector’s The Passion according to G. H., translated by Ronald W. Sousa. I’ve been unable to read beyond the first paragraph, which I reread, inscribe into two different notebooks and now into the internet. It recalls a passage I love from Michel Serres’ Thumbelina: I am sometimes unknown to myself and on display at one and the same time. I exist, therefore I am a code. I am calculable and incalculable, like a golden needle, plus the haystack in which, buried, its brightness lies hidden.

I keep looking, looking. Trying to understand. Trying to give what I have gone through to someone else, and I don’t know who, but I don’t want to be alone with that experi-ence. I don’t know what to do with it, I’m terrified of that profound disorganization. I’m not sure I even believe in what happened to me. Did something happen, and did I, because I didn’t know how to experience it, end up experiencing something else instead? It’s that something that I’d like to call disorganization, and then I’d have the confidence to venture forth because I would know where to come back to: to the prior organization. I prefer to call it disorganization because I don’t want to ground myself in what I experienced — in that grounding I would lose the world as it was for me before, and I know that I don’t have the capacity for another one.

Thank you to those that sent messages in response to my last post. Your interest is greatly  appreciated. It is always gratifying to know that these words travel through different conceptual worlds and times to enrich readers.