placed, set.

However, if purely aesthetic questions were at stake, questions of love and alcoholism would not be so paramount to this study of Durrell and Lowry--despite the obvious fact that these themes are paramount to the novels themselves. Both writers deserve unflinching attention to their style, yet their themes touch upon aspects of the human condition which itself must be treated aesthetically--arguments as to why writing or making love under the influence (of alcohol and thoughts of another, respectively) continue to simultaneously draw out the worst and best of the subjectivity presently at risk. For I hesitate to refer to the persons of Lowry and Durrell: the impression their authorship makes of their personality is favorably hazy, such is the achievement of their art that regardless of how autobiographical it appears, always present is the distance that reminds the reader of that troublesome notion, the autonomy of art, its blameless separate sphere that is most blameworthy in the eyes of political-minded critics (e.g. Terry Eagleton).

back

Quite equal to the sound of a lone chirping in the night was the thought--I have wasted, somewhere, another opportunity! And where was its sign? In the land of the honest, into which I am loathe to peek. What motivates one to throw around words that sound fine together while advancing some half-buried theory of the Gothic, let's say--or what inhibits one into merely offering these ideas succinctly and usefully? Two opposing forces, that's all. The one wants to expand, savor, and never be done with an alluring thought. The other wants to know that this thought can be acquired at a reasonable price. Which are we to trust? In good writing, the choice should not be available to us. We cope with the linguistic overgrowth and blame ourselves for not getting the point--a pleasurable guilt, for a second reading will certainly resolve every ambiguity...

When the enthusiasm for vocabulary outstrips the exigency for an argument, the reader should at least be grateful for the opportunity to enhance his or her vocabulary. Peering into that blinding darkness of philosophical verbiage is a rare treat: only stylists of the first order can deliver the experience. The scenario of criticism turning into fiction is less likely than I previously thought, at least in my own criticism: guilt for abandoning the primary text is inescapable, and any bit of Durrellesque fiction I include in the critique is scrupulous to a fault, citing the master automatically without daring to stake a claim to originality.

Such fiction is self-consciously secondary while refusing to appear naive: such a work as the Alexandria Quartet would be treacherously difficult to reproduce, yet the fear of disastrous failure is less severe than the dread of one's own fiction being rejected or ignored. Thus criticism can at times be formulated as a training ground, even at the graduate level: an introductory composition course asks basically the same questions of the transfer from explorations of personal relevance to an objective reading, while bona fide literary criticism is a more varied arsenal of similarly self-centered questions...

Such as?

coffee

For throughout Under the Volcano we cannot escape from the pain of composition--it smarts perhaps more because the autobiographical protagonist is not a writer, or he hasn't touched his book on alchemy for months, has still a formidable collection of books from which to draw inspiration and facts but not his own misery. This is his contention, finally, with learning: he has reached his own apex though he is no wizard, he has put his sources together on paper while increasing his tolerance for tequila, realizing mescal has as much of the philosopher's stone as he will ever acquire. So much depends on the right mixture of alcohol and sleep deprivation--he says it himself, this consular Firmin, in a conversation with his younger, non-biological French brother.

"You are interfering with my great battle," the Consul said, gazing past M. Laruelle at an advertisement at the foot of the fountain: Peter Lorre en Las Manos de Orlac: a las 6:30 P.M. "I have to have a drink or two now, myself--so long as it isn't mescal of course--else I shall become confused, like yourself."

"--the truth is, I suppose, that sometimes, when you've calculated the amount exactly, you do see more clearly," M. Laruelle was admitting a minute later.

"Against death." The Consul sank back easily in his chair. "My battle for the survival of the human consciousness." (227)

The start of this drinking session began with the Consul's promise, after M. said No to tequila:

"--like Oxygenee, and petrol...If I ever start to drink that stuff, Geoffrey, you'll know I'm done for."

"It's mescal with me...Tequila, no, that is healthful...and delightful. Just like beer. Good for you. But if I ever start to drink mescal again, I'm afraid, yes, that would be the end," the Consul said dreamily." (226)

Until this point mescal has not so obviously been omitted as the bouts of elation and self-laceration muddle Lowry's brilliantly-worded landscape. I ought to warn the reader against looking back too far in the text; the language will stop you cold. The ingredients to the Consul's ontological stew will be revealed as we progress to the end, which from page 227 is a very long way off indeed. The crucial question--has he not been drinking mescal the whole time?--must be answered thus: just wait until he breaks his promise not to drink mescal.

atmospheric session

Is it too late in the day? Should I have begun as soon as I got home with groceries and showered? Has my mind already gone off into the common?

They want you to teach writing and literature because you are always strong with words and ideas. You just think you don't have them until there's a prompt, a pressure, a deadline, an end of times over the horizon. But it's all nonsense. Talk to yourself a little and you'll find, you can do this anytime!

Every word has the potential to turn the others into gold. Every song can change the tone subtly until you've hit the wall, then look back thinking, this could have been otherwise. I let it simply go on too long. But you'll love it later in the evening, removed from the scene; as if control issues were at stake, that you felt inclined to know the outcome already while the writer advocated risk, chance, compromise. Then the person--the owner of the personality, rather the manager and naysayer--remembers he wants to step back anyway, that he does not enjoy writing. Try to never mix up the two characters, try indeed to kill the person (smother him with rambling sentences), convince him he's inconsequential (deny his very subjectivity), and finally, rip off his head. The neck has been complaining for some time.

It's a process that simply takes longer to get started in the conscionable day.

Are you looking around again? Employing geometry to indicate you'd rather not write now--the appendage angling towards the ground as if to kiss it and snap back up? "The pain of composition was due," says Durrell's Pursewarden, to the fear of madness. "Force it a bit and tell yourself you don't give a damn if you do go mad," you'll find it comes quicker, "you'll break the barrier."

crate

All that you can think of--is false and we bury the past, obviously to make it up later. The extent to which it matters is unknown. How it appears before us, maudlin tight-lipped! This is the fetish of fantasy in the Alexandria Quartet--not stealing memories from each other, the characters live in the same very philosophical space, where sin is as fluid as virtue, because everything wafts around by fantasy and erudition. Never unicorns or wizards, but succubi and doctors.

The only way I could know that I had read these books thoroughly enough was to write them myself, a few scenes and ideas of their implications, simply me removed from the text by a few days, and let us hope, after a few drinks. So that I might reveal more than I would otherwise; that I might let loose, why else? Though I am not drinking in the day. Despite the funny little secret that that entails--others haven't a clue!--as in the recent French movie (my girlfriend saw it not me) some sort of freedom ought to be achieved that carries a slight guilt. Just to know that what you are about is wrong somewhere--this adds responsibility to an otherwise drifting life...set in motion by the energy of crime, in Sade's sense of nature progressing, life advancing, only by infractions of what seems right. We needn't libertinage if there is nothing against it. Turn us outward in the wind with no strings and life fades directly, faces contort into smudges, as of too many every which way until at last, a blur. A digital image splintering into puff.

Fire and disease, rage, spin-offs. Carelessness. Obeying the impulse that permits no fissure--go there. Try not to be trite. Jumping around, then. The end of a neck, an extension of terms, the material of a tent draped yet tapered from a set of spheres, white letters on a pair.

title waving

Asked if this worked, I hesitated. A moment passed; I realized, why I'm hesitating has something to do with the work they have done without me. This is a cause for pause! As if waiting around to be picked, assuming the world would know. Did you call them? I didn't. How did he know then? Assumes cameras are on him constantly. He wears striped pants under black so he might foreclose and no one will recover. A damn cat leaping off the counter.

How did you get this working, with a bore's help?

Deadly and insanely sick. A ceremony. How would something cruel look for us, the artists? We've heard of cruelty. Devise a system that solves for painless cruelty. Indeed, we've got it. Love. Mythmaking lovers, Durrell. Or the other source: drink. It is indeed painful but the entire point is to distract from while enhancing pain, through poetry. The fall into the ravine, not a volcano, in Lowry is likely to ruin the image without alcohol and, it seems, pot. He walked into a marijuana bar in the last 10 pages, and lit a pipe. Someone had offered to light it for him while a Mexican insulted him; the Consul by this point--by any point, really--is hazy enough to mutter that these insults are tiresome: and they are. The Consul seems to die for insulting the way a Mexican was insulting him, for it was strictly the Consul's Englishness that made for the tired old pun. The Mexican spun around, and around. A fly gathering force until the Consul is blasted in the chest--quite a "dingy way to die" is his thought, recognizing the backward thrust as from a gun.

He had just identified it and advised the owner not to use it since it throws off steal shards. Enough land in Geoffrey's body to send him over the volcano's edge and, it would seem, down into it. The screaming faces and burning walls, the finale to his perfect moment--the drunkest clarity of the entire story, or perhaps not: the scene is late, just before his death. This carries finality already, and reminds us that to drink oneself sober is the best route to the bottom: the volcano having been gorged through and exposed in the middle of it, La Sepultura. If the Consul jumps, it will be into that ravine, this is clear. But the jumping is the last mescal, premeditated. One more and that is that, and so, he sips on the final drink. Doesn't quite plunge. He is not a suicide, but a pointless murder, faintly honorable if only for the fact of a fractured, drawn-out insult provoking it.

recent blog tack

I at last said, what is stopping me from recreating criticism in my own mind? Let's do it, then. What? Recreate criticism. What is that? It is making a new place to play for a secondary activity. Why? It lets us know who is good and for which reasons. Can you write under this strain? Precisely because of this strain I have kept writing--the thing I love is the thing I enjoy hating most.

Get a lot of air in here? Have you captivated the audience enough to tell them that tonight they will hear a story and a critique?

This shouldn't matter as much as it does. But there are intellectuals, and there are artists. They have different names because I want them to. Because I want to know which one I really am.

An ancient question, really. Though the flame is too hot now, too waxy, to allow an accurate score. We see postgrads lingering around in a hard-wood floored living room, eating each others'...

Dizzy spells. We eat the others' bad moments. We talk to the dead. We don't want to write another paper--they always reek of opinions set down merely to annoy the artists. I tell you, they are different people. They are very few. I will prove that I am one of them and that since I have learned so much--about them---I will know that playing with punctuation is primarily a sin. Of course, one cultivates a taste for that. The department? Of English? An introduction to sin! This is what I will bring to it. You thought you lived because you played these games online, and people you could see eventually on your screen just sort of sat there like you are. And this was life--

Who took the banter out? Was it pre-focused, so that in going off like that it is repeating the discourse recorded and plugged into it--you see, a classroom. Looking round. What happened...to literature? Has it been kept alive? Where is the...rub?

Inside a bubble. I hate the blogosphere. I wish it were inside so that I know what's inside always turns out to be outside the inside. Like Schenectady, that literary trope of an equine city.

quotes, Durrell's Justine.

"Nevertheless there is no woman too humble, too battered, too old, to receive those outward attentions--those little gallantries and sorties of wit which I have come to associate with the Gallic temperament; the heady meretricious French charm which evaporates so easily into pride and mental indolence--like French thought which flows so quickly into sand-molds, the original espirit hardening immediately into deadening concepts." (38)

"The guileless playing of hermaphrodites in the green courtyards of art and science. Poetry as a clumsy attempt at the artificial insemination of the Muses" (39).

"Capodistria has the purely involuntary knack of turning everything into a woman; under his eyes chairs become painfully conscious of their bare legs. He impregnate things. At table I have seen a water-melon become conscious under his gaze so that it felt the seeds inside it stirring with life! Women feel like birds confronted by a viper when they gaze into that narrow flat face with its tongue always moving across the thin lips." (39)

"...the living limbo in which my beloved Jusine wandered, searching with such frightening singleness of mind for the integrating spark which might lift her into a new perspective of herself" (40).

"The sad thirteenth child of Valentinos who fell, 'not like Lucifer by rebelling against God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him.' Anything pressed too far becomes a sin." (40)

"Broken from the divine harmony of herself she fell, says the tragic philosopher and became the manifestation of matter; and the whole universe of her city, of the world, was formed out of her agony and remorse. The tragic seed from which her thoughts and actions grew was the seed of a pessimistic gnosticism." (40)

"Catching hold of the lapels of my coat she gazed earnestly into my eyes and said: 'What do you believe? You never say anything. At the most you sometimes laugh.' I did not know how to reply for all ideas seem equally good to me; the fact of their existence proves that someone is creating. Does it matter whether they are objectively right or wrong? They could never remain so for long." (41)

"As for Justine, her face was lit by a sort of painful academic precision." (44)

"How well I recognized her now as a child of the city, which decrees that its women shall be the voluptuaries not of pleasure but of pain, doomed to hunt for what they least dare to find!" (47)

"I saw then what I should have seen long before: namely that our friendship had ripened to a point when we had already become in a way part-owners of each other." (48)

"'Idle,' she writes, 'to imagine falling in love as a correspondence of minds, of thoughts; it is a simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded inside of each of them. Around this event, dazed and preoccupied, the lover moves examining his or her own experience; her gratitude alone, stretching away towards a mistaken donor, creates the illusion that she communicates with her fellow, but this is false. The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. All this may precede the first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point--for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.' How characteristic and how humourless a delineation of the magical gift: and yet how true...of Justine!" (50)

Yes, I think that shall work: let us move around four texts with utmost devotion to simultaneity.

this...like the other

Somehow, now, I have been put in the wrong class--it seems. I want to float; no, this isn't it at all! It's just that everything is already over, and I didn't finish! Wearing thin already, it's positively heinous, as I would say if I were quaint. But it's instead...some deathly thrash band, calling me out to learn some new words before I get back to the thesis. That thesis--is scary at times. I have thrown out everything and am trying to write to Durrell from the realm of...poetry. Simply the aesthetic attitude in creating mode--look, this word seems plain dirty now. The aesthetic. Ambivalence and the like, ambiguity, occupy different spaces...not defensive as yet. Who cares anymore about them? But they are not a scourge on the differentiating mindframe as is aesthetics. So entirely removed that I cannot say where I am when I bring it up: suddenly back in my basement, mixing elements and staring off, writing! This is the space for poetry, even if I would produce only dismal prosaic lines about the same nothing I'm trying to escape. The space...of poetry? The notional space? Can Borges help?

At least allow me to explain that I'm after a process, truly. Something to rely upon. Calling it a battle between criticism and fiction--this has been a very long temporary pursuit, but it's due to my being a student still. This era will end on Friday; and of course I'm stuck wondering what I'm about. The project has to take up its own life, carry me along. I'll comment upon it. Please, allow me repose! Sitting on a divan in a boxcar tossing out quips, the humor of the secretly sick artist, hiding all and everything and thereby not making it up so much as allowing it to pass, borrowing his own dirty laundry.

Durrell and Lowry could be bad influences on me, who have grown up on Joyce, the Beats, Woolf. Only here the pain of existence is more prevalent, it makes each text glow. The others merely sing; they have style with content, with erudition and even spiritualism. In Lowry the problem is as obvious as the genius, in Durrell the intellect is as problematic as love.

Each has a symptom that plagues, the negative that produces the positive. The alcoholism of Lowry is legendary; in his life he posed as various egos, an exaggerating personality to deal with in conversation. Where's the truth--why should it matter, this is the Consul. His drinking as an author is not too close to the surface in the character Geoffrey Firmin; the quality is sincerely fictive, exposing everything that an artist should but still so we do not blame him.

The moral is certainly around here somewhere, but if Darley is struggling to conceptualize Justine, it is because Clea has difficulty painting her without kissing the painted hand and putting down the brush. The next level: Darley's easiest way of knowing the world is through Clea, the artist who came of age but not fruition preoccupied with another, the same Justine who involves Darley in the literary process. She is interested in philosophy like a syphilitic finds aspects to reflect upon her medicine, the places it takes her--love is the vehicle. Balthazar declares "all our women are Justines." And so, her involvement in ideas is telling for the redemption necessary to purge one of her: becoming an artist, or ceasing to try. For at that point she is no longer needed and returns to her husband, whom she never needed at first, whom she warned about the impossibility of her ever loving!

Yes, well, the best way of digging around in Durrell is explaining to yourself the triangulation. It is all slippery, yet centered, and so: we cannot stay for long in this set of texts alone. An entire trinity awaits, with a few onlookers besides. That little stage produces mixed results by default; try now to actually mix the elements and put them with something already mixed. Then mix. Do you see? This sort of reading has to approach poetry, it has no other choice. It is not seeking to establish anything but my own voice with the help of a batch of masters. Forget that they're all male. I write to a female audience, and yet feminism can't get a foothold.

One cannot wonder what that all means without feeling guilty already--now this is the space from which these writers write! Bad conscience, which Nietzsche explained thoroughly according to his dialectics (which took several books to come into a dialectical shape) and Freud then conceptualized with his damn trinity. The origins, the true causes, are fascinating to contemplate, but not a part of this project. I would rather fabricate my own cause for shame, the strongest motivator of these books even if the author feels it not, for it is in the background, the edges of society are ever peeked into--the writer could be mucking it up or anguishing over it, whatever the pleasure is. Perhaps lionizing the whore while condemning the critic: Justine is the concubine of individuality, Darley is the artist too intellectual for Pursewarden to call an artist, because preoccupied with the question of "writing" rather than willing to suffer on account of it. And the most suffering is the greatest art, certainly: this is proved by Pursewarden's letters, which we are not granted permission to see for both its shameful content (incestuous) and its unutterable beauty--too much pressure, one would expect, for the author, too much awe in the narrator leading up to the letters' discovery. Pursewarden's blind sister Liza, raised in mutual isolation, the other partner in the fateful taboo of Durrell's text, the sin raised up to show at what cost true art is settled: and they must be burnt. As a writer contacted by the widowing sister, he makes that decision, and we are spared the scenes perhaps barely alluded to by the artist: Pursewarden takes contrary views deliberately, saying (in my paraphrase), that words being what they are, and people being what they are, we ought to discard of language forever as a tool that can express one's meaning. But he doesn't write in Sade's space.

from a status

That tired old canon. I wish it would come back already. Put Durrell on it. Write on him like...well, Borges. Let's be clear. Imitative and honest, admitting nothing to theorists. They'll eventually pull a few things out to correct, solve.

A literary event, a doctor visit, poof--a new reading to put on the table, let the audience gawk. The book is reborn, in your hands! It's what you get out of it, yes.

... Ver más

Clea smacks Darley across the face, causing the blood to surround his teeth, as if to mortify his grin--but we are told he's upset, livid. His response to being smacked for suggesting he'll write a book of criticism is not a grin!

Darley, that lecher "with chalk on his sleeve," bespectacled--needed wakening from someone who has lost herself and can only revive by alerting another of his slumber. And sincerely, thanks goes to Clea. The literary world ought to hear about this, the panel has got to be notified.

(They want smacking--more than the artist who here in Durrell's text was filling the silence with a dull remark about the future. The truth is he writes three of these books for us: we only know what we know because he interfered with the past, rendered it artistically. Yet he ever doubts that he is a writer. He is not an artist, he tells us. The moment he realizes it is finally poignant in the fourth book: until then, it was a slowly dawning matter of fact.)

pain, etc.

The evil in each version: the love of the sadist and the writer.

Justifications for perversion from a rhetorical assault: the wounds he opens in one's morality cannot let one rest.

Durrell's Justine creates herself, seeks herself, debases and threatens (telepathically) with--herself. Catharine--who is actually Sade's Justine telling her own story by the name Catharine--does not go in for sin straight from the home as does her sister. She carries virtue until she is finally struck through the breast and into the heart so that the lightning rips through her, a cavity, passageway, orifice through the regions of her very life. Heart, arteries, blood and rhythm: destruction of the sex she's been subjected to--chapters upon chapters, positions upon torturing position, of deliberate, elaborated rape.

But we also get protracted treatises on why this is natural, how crime is the energy that moves us. Progress, growth, etc.

And where it turns from pain to pleasure is only in the 20th century, with Durrell running through the metaphysical ways Justine is caught up in desire: though the pain is still crucial: "We use each other," she says, "like axes to cut down the ones we really love."

formally wizened

Without error, compiling data that serves others in different spheres--this has been repeated. Water encircling a dry space seems necessary. If he picks up the sandpaper and goes to work the result will be a surface from which there's too much to choose. Argot: the bloody nose in the delayed act of surfacing. It drips, tickling. Life might still teach the alternate routes! This is passing however and in its place we see a leather belt slamming down upon the kitchen table, to cut through the cloth.