Isola di Rifiuti

[Werner Presber]

via Isola di Rifiuti, The Flats: 
http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2006/12/flats.html

"(…) Thomas Pynchon, in London, stretching out the (slightly) nasalized 
o’s and n’s, brandishing the sentence like a cutlass (“Or a cutlet,” ’s 
what he’d add): “Evening drew on, the vast jangling thronged somehow 
monumental London evening, light falling seemingly without a 
destination across the wind-attended squares and haunted remnants of 
something older, and they went to eat at Molinari’s in Old Compton 
Street, also known as the Hôtel d’Italie, reputed to be one of the 
haunts of Mr. Arthur Edward Waite . . .” Of the fayre Afton isle, its 
lingual verdancies, Pynchon speaks, in the voice of maths student 
Yashmeen Halfcourt, (though one’d think—and pardonably—he ’s yanking 
the reader’s chain re: the readerly response to the very words in the 
very book in hand): “On this island, . . . as you will have begun to 
notice, no one ever speaks plainly. Whether it’s Cockney rhyming codes 
or the crosswords in the newspapers—all English, spoken or written, is 
looked down on as no more than strings of text cleverly encrypted. 
Nothing beyond. Any who may come to feel betrayed by them, insulted, 
even hurt, even grievously, are simply ‘taking it too seriously.’ The 
English exercise their eyebrows and smile and tell you it’s ‘irony’ or 
‘a bit of fun,’ for it’s only combinations of letters after all, isn’t 
it.”

Or, here, Pynchon about the goings-on on the Isle of Mirrors, one of 
the Terre Perse, “Lost Lands,” sunk off the Venetian coast: “The 
classical anamorphoscopes . . . were mirrors, cylindrical or conical, 
usually, which when placed on or otherwise near a deliberately 
distorted picture, and viewed from the appropriate direction, would 
make the image appear “normal” again. Fads for these came and went 
beginning as early as the seventeenth century, and the artisans of 
Isola degli Specchi were not slow in learning how to supply this 
specialized market. To be sure, a certain percentage of them went mad 
and ended up in the asylum on San Servolo. Most of these unfortunates 
could not bear to look at any sort of mirror again, and were kept 
scrupulously away from reflective surfaces of any kind. But a few, 
choosing to venture deeper in the painful corridors of their 
affliction, found after a while that they could now grind and polish 
ever more exotic surfaces, hyperboloidal and even stranger, eventually 
including what we must term “imaginary” shapes, though some preferred 
Clifford’s term, “invisible.” These specialists remained at Isola degli 
Specchi under a sort of confinement within confinement so strict as to 
provide them, paradoxically, a freedom unknown in Europe and indeed 
anywhere, before or since.”

Saturday, after a nap. (Typing th’above caught me in the reticular bag 
of sleep, yellow (canary in a mineshaft-color’d) “graph paper” with 
quarter-inch squares.) The air is pinging dub-molecular ’roundabout. 
Voices dredging for lost voices in the aether, or a voice struggling 
against an aether’d stranglehold, no rebuttals allow’d, applejack 
popping its cork in the coldbox. What sweet confinement to wake to an 
empty house. What it is about the Pynchon: he locates the affliction 
and pushes harder against it. Tarries with it, niggles it, makes it 
perceptibly worse (to make it perceptible). Akin to something I’ve 
quoted before, by the Italian painter Marco Celotti, in “Reflections of 
the Head Painter”:

     . . . Clarity begins in the furrows.

     It is fictional to think that art does not touch the sores, that it 
is afraid to put its multitude of fingers on the festering wounds of 
uninvolvement. Moreover, it is bad fiction.

     To an aesthetic of buttery consistency, art could suddenly 
contribute its often rejected bag of rusty nails. Out of the blue the 
former concubine takes a road, an address. It dons its mottled robes, 
fishermen’s hooks, pulleys, ropes and winches. It discards its purses, 
its golddigger pans, its safes and vaults, the inner sanctum of the 
money-lenders. . . .

     Ah, the beauty of these pulsating nostrils on the new proud head . 
. .

     Who is to say that Titian’s brush (the same one picked up by the 
king) has not fallen again on the ground of broken teeth of the 
Bolivian miners?

Or Colorado miners, as the present “case” ’s got it? Is that it? 
Asymptotically approaching it? Here’s a story. In the verdancy of one’s 
years, one fell into mad pursuit of a piece of writing somewhat larger 
than usual, somewhat unratify’d by sense, or less ratify’d, somewhat 
perversely “flying off at the handle”—a broken back single of a 
metaphor—and the writing proved meet (and publishable) only because it 
fail’d at its intent: that of “breaking through” into some new clarity, 
some reduction, some marc tramp’d out of the leavings of the 
bottle-able red. One believed, with the negligent belief of youth, that 
one’d make clarity emerge out of the renegade hobblegobble of sound, 
that a limit-function ’d cause one to split some ripe seam through 
sheer malarkey-peddling, and out’d tumble, pared down and apt, once 
wash’d of the rosy complect, a searingly precise, uhh, couplet. (In the 
shallowness of my youth, what I overlooked: how long a row that is to 
hoe, how long one might hack and scrape up great dusty piles of weedy 
utterables with never a patch of clean-thinking in view. Akin, I say, 
to Pynchon’s mirror-makers. One shouldn’t, though, confine oneself to a 
single likeness . . .)

In “a Kontinuum of space and time” there’re bound to occur dismal 
reiterations, fandangos needing an “edge,” not unlike a Moebius strip 
or a (Franz) Klein bottle, topological jizz like ’at, chromatic scales 
weighing the eyelids shut, shipwreck’d in the estuary—

     when the recurrent momentum of things
     completes itself nothing has an ending(…)

via Isola di Rifiuti, The Flats: 
http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2006/12/flats.html




	
		
___________________________________________________________ 
Der frühe Vogel fängt den Wurm. Hier gelangen Sie zum neuen Yahoo! Mail: http://mail.yahoo.de