Ordinary finds

A double literary birthday:

Above: Samuel Butler (born Dec. 4, 1835 - died 1902) - one of many non-stereotypical Victorian writers, author of the Utopian satire Erewhon, which speculates on what will happen when evolution makes humans redundant and machines the dominant force…

Below: Thomas Carlyle (born Dec. 4, 1795 - died 1881) - Scottish non-conventional philosopher and author, best known for Sartor Resartus, an odd compendium of fiction and philosophical satire. Carlyle was influenced by German Transcendentalism, and is an odd branch on the tree of philosophical progression towards existentialism…

Thomas Carlyle, 1867

December 4 marks the birthday of important Austian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 -1926).

Rilke was in many ways a proto-Modernist, seeking to create poetry that kept a transcendental, even mystical, sense alive in the face of anxiety, alienation and solitude as unavoidable consequences of humanity’s development.

In his masterpiece Duino Elegies (first begun in 1912, then put on hiatus due to Rilke’s struggles with depression, only to be renewed in 1922) Rilke believed he had found a way to describe the ineffable. Yet even the joyous beginning of the tenth and final elegy, has to give way to a coda describing the inevitability of suffering:

Some day, in the emergence from this fierce insight,

let me sing jubilation and praise to assenting Angels.

Let not a single one of the cleanly-struck hammers of my heart

deny me, through a slack, or a doubtful, or

a broken string. Let my streaming face

make me more radiant: let my secret weeping

bear flower. O, how dear you will be to me, then, Nights

of anguish. Inconsolable sisters, why did I not

kneel more to greet you, lose myself more

in your loosened hair? We, squanderers of pain.

[…]

But if the endlessly dead woke a symbol in us,

see, they would point perhaps to the catkins,

hanging from bare hazels, or

they would intend the rain, falling on dark soil in Spring-time. –

And we, who think of ascending

joy, would feel the emotion,

that almost dismays us,

when a joyful thing falls.

Portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke by Paula Modersohn Becker, c. 1907

~~~~~~

Tantric Trance - Robert Gibbons

. 

Walked into an invisible room soon after she left inside the moment of Being room surrounding one’s own existence & stayed there until I had to head out into the larger world, when this Time as if miming Olson’s he who carries his house on his head is heaven with birch poles & deer skin funnel carrying it with me within Time, say when asking Luc if his Thanksgiving went well & it did splendidly he said or today after plumbing the depths tracing the roundedness of Eros & Death, the cyclical in Duras’s Hiroshima mon amour via close attention to the text via Proust Barthes & Deleuze, I breathed new air outside as the train rolled by on the outskirts of town reading Maine Central & Canadian National & Wisconsin Central wondering why I hadn’t taken a pen to jot down the names here & there pulling into the parking lot behind the bank close to the railroad tracks finally finding I had taken one along as bookmark marking the page Blanchot notes the depths of Death inside himself Rilke expressed during his work in Paris learning such depths from the various vagrants he observed already walking inside their own anonymous Deaths, the poet resolving there & then working in the vastness of Paris to cultivate Death as an ongoing process a force of Good for his own ongoing Being just as I’d hoped to do inside the invisible room of the moment of Being writing this down as I am at the end of Merrill’s Wharf right next to the Harsh Mistress & within view & walking distance of Charlie Johnson’s long-liner the Seneca recently returned from a journey south of the equator.

Robert Singletary, born Dec. 4, 1945: Snow on the Chesapeake Bay, 1979 (Smithsonian)

Tod E. Gangler, American photographer, born Dec. 4, 1953 - from his Seattle Documentary Survey Series:

Totem and Chief Seattle, 1980 (Smithsonian)

More recent colour photography from Tod Gangler here at Benham Gallery, Seattle.

Classic Harlem photography from Aaron Siskind (born New York, dec. 4, 1903 (d. 1991)):

Cook at Father Divine Mission, Harlem, ca. 1935 (Smithsonian)

“Early in his career Siskind was a member of the New York Photo League. Working with that group, Siskind produced several significant socially conscious series of images in the 30’s. Among them the “Harlem Document” remains the most famous.” (Wiki)

Click thru to the Aaron Siskind Foundation…

Harlem Renaissance time tonight:

Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Jessie Faucet pictured together at Tuskeegee in 1927 (photographer unknown)

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale - Picturing Literary Modernism exhibit

Countee Cullen in Central Park, June 20, 1941 -

Photo: Carl Van Vechten

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library - Picturing Literary Modernism

Fania Marinoff and Carl Van Vechten (photographer unknown), July 5, 1923.

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library - Picturing Literary Modernism

Max Jacob, 1934 - photo by Carl Van Vechten

“Mœurs Littéraires” from Le Cornet à dés:

When a pack of gentlemen meets a different pack, it would be strange if greetings were not interspersed with smiles. When a pack of gentlemen meets a single gentleman, if there are formal greetings, they will trail off — and perhaps the last of the pack will make none at all.  
It seems that I wrote that you bit a woman on the nipple and drew blood. If you think that I wrote that, why did you just greet me? And if I thought that you would do such a thing, why would I greet you? Now we’re at the home of a large bespectacled woman wearing a knit shawl. You shook my hand, but when we found ourselves in the room where her commode was kept, you threw cushions from the commode at my head. (Louis Quatorze cushions).  People say that I was throwing cushions too, just so they can blame me too, but I don’t know whether that’s really true.

When my pack meets you, if I am the last one and make no greeting, don’t let yourself think that it’s because of that business with the cushions. And if my pack meets your pack and smiles are exchanged, don’t let yourself think that one of them comes from me.

Ted Joans:

“Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman 1959,
with Leroi Jones and A.B. Spellman Digging”

(drawing on wood)

via Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s exquisite blog: Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities