Russell Hoban - Fremder

Listening to Étude No. 9 in F minor, Opus 10. You can hear the world of it trying, trying, trying to become.

Ilse Bak in Arts International , September 2016:

You have to become Chopin, become the world of him. In the Opus 10 F minor study the effect is quite uncanny. That left hand! The repetition is strange: once you’re in it you don’t want to stop; you feel yourself trying to get to a place that you never arrive at. The end is the abandonment of something — hope maybe.

28.8.16

Chopin and Caspar David Friedrich — Friedrich 1774–1840 — Chopin 1810–1849 — white bones of cliffs at Stubbenkammer — oval aperture of grass and trees through which appears sharp-toothed abyss like dentate vagina with the sea beyond — 3 figures: on left Friedrich’s wife in red dress pointing down into abyss — on right his brother at very edge leaning back against dead stump — in centre Friedrich on hands and knees, almost falling over edge.

Friedrich’s drawings more pianistic than his paintings, more etudinous, more mazurkian, more nocturnal — good drawing — boats and ships with real rigging and working tackle — great owls, etudinous and nocturnal Uhus.

Sonia D says how can I be modern thinker and like Friedrich better than Lamia Quick — thinks anything distorted or abstract better than anything straight — the strangeness in the straight too quick for her & Lamia.

12.09.16 Dr Burke’s lab

The Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction — on the light box is a Petri dish in which 10 ml each of potassium bromate, sulphuric acid, and malonic acid, plus ferroin to give colour, have been added to 10 ml of a solution of sulphuric acid, water, and cerous nitrate. In the pink liquid there are bluish-white wavelines forming concentric circles that expand and collide and disappear. Those that hit the edge of the dish don’t stop or rebound, they vanish as if they’ve gone through the glass to (one can’t help thinking) another world where they keep expanding.

Extract from letter, E. Gorn to B. P. Belousov, 12 November 1969

… It seems to me that oscillation might well be the universal communication pattern of which your chemical reaction is one of an infinite number of manifestations. Communication of what and to whom or what? An interesting question.

13.09.16

Alternative worlds: A world in which Richard Soames doesn’t take me to the May Ball and a world in which he does.

14.09.16

What if God decided to actualise a possible world which is on the whole less perfect than other possible worlds?

Substituting the name of Richard and the not-taking of Helen to the ball in Leibniz’s Arnauld-starting-for-Paris proposition (Leibniz — An Introduction , C. D. Broad). Words in square brackets mine:

There is no general property [except plainness] possessed by [Helen] (comparable to the definition of a circle) from which it necessarily follows that [Richard] will [not take her to the ball]. But, since it has always been certain that he will [not] do so (for otherwise God could not have known it beforehand) [and God has known it from before the first day of Creation] there must be some timeless connection between [Helen] (the subject) and [not being taken to the ball by Richard] (the predicate). If [Helen] were not to [be not-taken to the ball by Richard] this would destroy the notion which God had of [Helen] when he decided to create [her]. For that notion, considered as the notion of an as yet merely possible individual, includes all the future facts about [Helen] and all the decrees of God on which these facts would depend, considered also as merely possible. On the other hand, says Leibniz, the supposition that [Richard] did not [not take Helen to the May Ball] would not conflict with any necessary truth.

Thanks a lot, Leibniz.

Seventeen miles through the rain running in front of Ahab’s chariot from Mount Carmel and the killing of the priests of Baal to the gates of Jezreel. The image of Elijah wide across the desert and the sky, the long muscles of thighs and calves sharp and shadowed as the hard feet strike the stony ground. Running with the power of his god in him under the black sky and the rain. To have that just once.

*

There were two photocopies of a different handwriting. The first was of a notebook entry that I guessed had been written by Izzy Gorn:

23.8.16

In the storm a safe place, a calm and wild place. Oh the great secret. The forever-moment that has always been and will always be, the centre to which the universe configures itself. The magic place, the good blackness. The dancing of the heat on the infinite sands, the pyramids, the ziggurats, the lightning and the sphinxes of it, the pleasant palaces and rainbows. Now the satyrs are quiet and full-fed, now they sleep while the wild dogs howl. Broken is the great vessel of the alone, the aloneness is all spilt out. Broken the forty jars of silence wherein I crouched like forty dead thieves. Broken, broken, broken the solitary madness where the lizard-men ran silent on the ceiling of my mind. How they screamed and wept, how they dropped and one by one burst on the stone of Yes. The Yes of the death of the lizard-men.

The remaining photocopy was of a printout:

PYTHIA 04.11.52 04:00:01 NO EDIT ATT THNKSC SPEED I

BY NIGHT ON MY BED I SOUGHT HIM WHOM MY SOUL LOVETH I SOUGHT HIM BUT I FOUND HIM NOT I WILL RISE NOW AND GO ABOUT THE CITY IN THE STREETS AND IN THE BROAD WAYS I WILL SEEK HIM WHOM MY SOUL LOVETH RAVENS RAVENS RAVENS WHAT FEEDING ELIJAH THE BLACK YES THE BLACK ALIVE STILL BUT WHERE IS MY LOVE BY NIGHT ON MY BED I SOUGHT HIM BUT GONE GONE GONE. I WILL SEEK HIM IN THE BLACK I WILL FIND HIM WHOM MY SOUL LOVETH WHEN THE TIME CAME HE DID NOT TASTE THE TASTE OF DEATH.

In the margin an unknown hand had written on the photocopy:

L-

Maybe you’re right.

M

I don’t know how long I stood there reading that. I felt like an island of stone with time flowing around me. Speak to me, I said to my mind.

No answer.

I left Katya a note, put a fresh filter in my breather, a switchblade and the stunner in my pocket (I didn’t wire myself for bio because it was more likely to get stolen than used), took the lift up to the roof, and waited quite a long time until an eastbound wirecar clattered in. The only other passengers were a young Euroforces corporal quietly being sick in a corner and three heavyset women with headscarves and Corporation Sanitation badges reading Russian newsfaxes. The wirecar shook and rattled through the dark; the night sky crouched over London like an animal over its prey: my kind of time.