quare id faciam?

Additions

New page added to the emerging sketch gallery tonight: a pretty varied handful of old self-portrait sketches.

posted by paul bowman @ 1:30 AM 5 comments

Another excerpt

More (see last post) from Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.

Amalia had told me that one entered the attic from the left wing. I had imagined a spiral wooden staircase, but instead there were stone steps, quite comfortable and practical – otherwise, I later realized, how would they have been able to carry up all that stuff they stashed away?
    As far as I knew, I had never seen the inside of an attic. Nor of a cellar, for that matter, but everyone knows what cellars are like: subterranean, dark, damp, always cool, and you have to bring a candle, or a torch. The gothic romance is rich in the subterranean, the monk Ambrosio wondering gloomily among crypts. Natural underground passageways, like Tom Sawyer's caverns. The mystery of darkness. All houses have cellars, but not all have attics, especially in cities, where they have penthouses. But is there really no literature of attics? And in that case what is Eight Days in an Attic? The title came to mind, if nothing else.
    Even if you do not go through them all at once, you can tell that the attics of the Solara house extend over all three wings: you enter an area that stretches from the façade to the rear of the building, but then narrower passages open and bulkheads appear, wooden partitions that divide the spaces, routes defined by metal shelving units or old chests of drawers, the interchanges of an endless labyrinth. Having ventured down one of the corridors on the left, I turned once or twice more and found myself back in front of the entrance.
    Immediate sensations: heat, above all, which is natural just beneath a roof. Then light: it comes in part from a series of dormer windows, which can be seen when you look at the front of the house, but which on the inside are largely obstructed by piles of junk, so that in some cases the sunlight barely filters through, reduced to yellow blades astir with an infinity of particles, revealing that the penumbra must also be crazed with a multitude of motes, spores, primordial atoms caught up in their Brownian skirmishes, primal bodies swarming in the void – who spoke of those, Lucretius? Sometimes those slants of light ricocheted off the glass panes of a dismantled buffet of a full-length mirror that from another angle had looked like merely another dull surface propped against the wall. And then the occasional daylight, darkened by decades of encrusted pluvial detritus but still able to make a pale zone of illumination on the floor.
    Finally, the color: the attic's dominant color, imparted by the roof beams, by the crates piled here and there, by the remains of wobbly chests of drawers, is the color of carpentry, composed of many shades of brown, from the yellowish-brown of unfinished wood to the warmth of maple to the darker tones of old dressers, their finishes flaking off, to the ivory of old papers overflowing their boxes.
    If a cellar prefigures the underworld, an attic promises a rather threadbare paradise, where the dead bodies appear in a pluverulent glow, a vegetal elixir that, in the absence of green, makes you feel you are in a parched tropical forest, an artificial canebreak where you are immersed in a tepid sauna.
    I had thought cellars symbolized the welcome of the mother's womb, with their amniotic dampness, but this aerial womb made up for that with an almost medicinal heat. And in that luminous maze, where if you pushed aside a couple of roof tiles you would see the open sky, a complicit mustiness hung in the air, the odor of silence and calm.
    After a while, however, I no longer noticed the heat, gripped as I was by the frenzy of discovery. Because my Clarabelle's treasure was certainly there, though it would take a lot of digging and I had no idea where to begin.

 
(Have to say that enchanting as the bit-by-bit encounter with the old house's forgotten places/spaces is for me, as it figures in the unfolding of this story, here in particular the scene comes over a little clumsy, choppy somehow. Is it partly a difficulty of translation? – can't help wondering. In any case, I suppose, it's a lot of impression to render fluidly in a few paragraphs.)

posted by paul bowman @ 2:43 PM 0 comments

An excerpt

I asked Paola what my political leanings were. 'I don't want to find out I was a Nazi or something.'
    'You're what they call a good liberal,' Paola said, 'but more from instinct than ideology. I always used to say politics bored you – and for the sake of argument you called me La Pasionaria. It was as if you sought refuge in your antique books out of fear, or contempt for the world. No, that's not fair, it wasn't contempt, because you were fervent about the great moral issues. You signed pacifist and nonviolent petitions, you were outraged by racism. You even joined an antivivisection league.'
    'Animal vivisection, I imagine.'
    'Of course. Human vivisection is called war.'
    'And was I ... always like that, even before meeting you?'
    'You skated over your childhood and adolescence. And anyway I've never really been able to understand you about these things. You've always been a mix of compassion and cynicism. If there was a death sentence somewhere, you'd sign the petition, you'd send money to a drug rehab community. But if someone told you, say, that ten thousand babies had died in a tribal war in central Africa, you'd shrug, as if to say that the world was badly made and there's nothing to be done. You were always a jovial man, you liked good-looking women, good wine, and good music, but I always got the impression that all that was a shield, a way of hiding yourself. When you dropped it, you used to say that history is a blood-drenched enigma and the world an error.'
    'Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend.'
    'Who said that?'
    'I don't remember.'
    'It must be something that involved you. But you always bent over backwards if anyone needed anything – when they had the flood in Florence, you went as a volunteer to help pull books out of the mud at the Biblioteca Nazionale. That must be it, you were compassionate about the little things and cynical about the big things.'
    'That sounds fair. One does what one can. The rest is God's fault, as Gragnola used to say.'
    'Who is Gragnola?'
    'I don't remember that either.'

 
From The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco 2004, chap. 4. (The most recent of audio titles I've had playing in the truck.) The novel's principal character is an antiquarian bookseller who's lost all memory of identity & personal connections – but almost none of books & their contents.

posted by paul bowman @ 12:05 AM 0 comments

All saints

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

Isaiah 25: 6–9

The Old Testament reading from this morning's service of worship at Emmanuel Lutheran here in Catonsville, Baltimore County.

posted by paul bowman @ 12:00 PM 0 comments

Laughter

Laurie Bertrand posts most wonderful informal photo portraits of children from time to time. Man, what a gift she has! Here are a couple of new ones of her nephew Isaiah, posted last week.

Later: Looked through old posts a bit for a few past favorites: Olivia ('wonderful' hardly seems adequate here), Isaiah, and Isaiah. Hard to pick favorites, though, frankly, because every one she posts is brilliant.

posted by paul bowman @ 5:30 AM 2 comments

Eighteen

Yesterday in 1988 I showed up on a jobsite for the first time and was initiated into employment in building construction. I'd graduated from high school in May and turned 18 a couple of weeks previously, mid-October. I intended to go to bible college and become a pastor, paying my way through by taking up a 'trade', as had the pastor of my family's little church and a couple of the young men he'd brought on full-time or part-time as church staff. I'm not sure about which noble idea I was more completely in the fog – ministerial calling or the virtues of gaining experience in the building trades. Anyway, along with a few other men of varied backgrounds & stages of youth who'd already done so in the previous year or two, I went to work for another fellow in the church who had a small drywall company. All of these men were to my eyes role models in one sense or another, all physically vigorous & extremely hard-working, establishing families, devoted in one form of service or another to the life of this church. I wanted to be part of that little world of men. This, I think, though I wouldn't have distinguished it then from the ideals of church-&-family, evangelical fervor, self-sacrifice, &c., might have been the clearest notion in my head when I & my bible showed up on a jobsite in Baltimore for the first time, now more or less exactly half of my life ago.

posted by paul bowman @ 5:23 AM 4 comments