Every Tonal Difference, Every Sound

The Egoslavian birthdayiest month of the year continues: as of this moment, all three posts on the blog's front page are birthday posts. Gyorgy Ligeti was born eighty-six years ago today. As always with me and composers, I love most if not all of a composer's work but always love the solo piano pieces best. Here's Ubuweb's typically generous Ligeti sound page.

Earthgirl and Planet and I had dinner last night with B, the young woman who stayed at our house when moving to DC for a new job while looking for an apartment who has become not only our cat-sitter but our friend. The combined ages of Planet and B is ten years younger than me. As always, I thought, what the fuck world will my daughter be inhabiting when she is my age in 2047? It seems to me the descent to clusterfuck is increasing both in angle and in speed. When I got home I found myself link-fishing the clusterfuck. I can still get angry, to no effective purpose, apparently. Then I listened to Ligeti piano sonatas while looking for poems for this post.

• Austerity and neo-liberalism lead to the neo-fascist right. Duh, of course, but worth reminding.
• Pierre Omidyar and Narendra Modi.
• Categorizing the poor.
• Building a lasting legacy of death.
• Is violence cultural?
• A primer on the new religion of the gun.
• When intellectuals go to war.
• NYT's public editor slaps Michael Kinsley around. Psst. Michael Kinsley doesn't care.
• If Pope Francis pisses off the asshole Netanyahu then Pope Francis gets a point in my book.
• Consent is impossible.
• Skull-blogging, face-in-the-frost edition.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.

from MOZART'S THIRD BRAIN

Goran Sinnevi

Translated by Rika Lesser

CV

Not-Orpheus is singing   He sings his nothing   He sings his night   

He sings all the names   The name of nothing   The only name    Since   

long ago   He didn’t know it   And knew it in his night   

All things sing   All names sing   Every tonal difference, every

sound   All music in its destruction   In its sublation   Toward which point?

The mountain of nothing hovers   Before it crushes us   With its night   With its

   song  

In the evening I walked through town with you, Dearest, along the river   

A clear cold spring evening, the half-moon shone   As if walking in a foreign city   

Though I recognized parts of it   You said it was almost like   

walking in Prague, where we would have been if my mother hadn’t fallen ill   

When we stood by one corner of the Hotel Svea, where I played in a dance band in

    1957,   

the huge flock of jackdaws, in the trees by the bastion near the castle, flew   

out over the river, in micropolyphonic conversation    As in a piece by Ligeti   

That night I dreamed I crossed a bridge spanning the river, now very broad   

The long bridge was swaying, huge ocean swells entering the river from the sea   

I walked with a girl, kissed her on the mouth, on the opposite bank   

In the morning you came into my bed, Dear, we slinked like teenagers, so my   

       mother wouldn’t hear us,

where she slept, in the room outside ours   She’s already much better   

I look at my face in the bathroom mirror   Will I manage to go out into the Brain  

Trucks pass   Traffic goes on, in the great exchange of goods   

Gulls, trees, people   The degree of virtuality in different goods, the phantasms   

also in what we eat, conceptions of origin, contents, effects

Fear    Cultivated tastes    We are in the immediacy of memory    Only in a flash of

astonishment can memory be broken   But even lightning is informed    I look at

    the

      magical   

diagrams of Giordano Bruno, read his texts   See that all this is exactly as in   

Jung, fundamental magical forms, for guiding the divine,   

the unknown within the soul   Also the similarity with tantric forms      

    Yes, that’s   

        how it is,   

I think, both Freud and Jung are magicians, the difference in rationality is   

only marginal, Jung’s a little older, Freud’s more modern, a continuation of   

Descartes, developed later in Spinoza’s pneumatic model for the passions,   

and yet both are found, subsumed in Bruno’s love-flow, the lineage backward,   

the tantric flow, also Plato’s Diotima, her flow . . .   

Hölderlin saw the stream of people in dark water, streaming over   

the ledges in the human-geological world, the levels of the abyss,   Para-   

       dise’s various degrees of stasis   

What use can I make of these magical forms? I’m no magician    And yet

I acknowledge their power, also within my self   If they prevail, sovereignty   

is crushed   Libero arbitrio   There the forms also break down   

The stream of love breaks down    Fluid lightning    The flash of vibrating being   

But also the flash of darkness   The light of Beatrice’s eyes, their lightning

    flash   How  

am I to understand this? How to understand unknowing   That I do not!

INFINITE RICHES IN THE SMALLEST ROOM

Lucie Brock-Broido

Silk spool of the recluse as she confects her eventual mythomania.

If it is written down, you can't rescind it.

Spoon and pottage bowl. You are starving. Come closer now.

What if I were gone and the wind still reeks of hyacinth, what then.

Who will I be: a gaudy arrangement of nuclei, an apple-size gray circle

On the tunic of a Jew, preventing more bad biological accidents

                                From breeding-in. I have not bred-

In. Each child still has one lantern inside lit. May the Mother not

Blow her children out. She says her hair is thinning, thin.

The flowerbed is black, sumptuous in emptiness.

Blue-footed mushrooms line the walkway to my door. I would as soon

Die as serve them in a salad to the man I love. We lie down

In the shape of a gondola. Venice is gorgeous cold. 3 December,

Unspeakable anxiety about locked-in syndrome, about a fourth world.

I cannot presume to say. The violin spider, she

Has six good eyes, arranged in threes.

                                The rims of wounds have wounds as well.

Sphinx, small print, you are inscrutable.

                                                            On the roads, blue thistles, barely

Visible by night, and, by these, you may yet find your way home.