A time of stagnation

From Marina Van Zuylen, Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art:

The feeling of control that accompanies the act of locking oneself up to write, the pride in having unsuspected resources, reinforces the notion that creating has set one in a world apart. It is strengthening, both despite and because of its ability to isolate. When Mondrian or Flaubert discusses the relationship of their straight line or perfect phrase to a sense of ontological security, they are splitting the world between the rigid (with its connotations of self-discipline, rigor, and control) and the arabesque, the overly lyrical I -- all things that might well lead them out of their invulnerable worlds. To these artists, but also to those individuals whose bouts with obsession will traverse this book, there is a real terror involved in the unrestricted, the potentially mutable.
...
Do not show your passion, but sublimate it into style. We are reminded of Hobbes's proclamation: madness is a matter of "too much appearing passion." It is not the actual emotion itself that is unsettling to Flaubert, but the temptation to be dragged down by it and the sickly need to exhibit it to others. The heart must never speak and the artist must assume a god-like self-sufficiency; it is the only way he will be protected from the danger of others. The same detachment that Flaubert requires of his narrators, he mercilessly exacts from himself. He is willing to renounce all human contact for the price of peace of mind.
...
The simultaneous cowering from and craving for the void, for a time of stagnation, is a constant in the monomaniacal imagination. Many of the characters in this book are attracted and repelled by free time, drawn to and squelched by obsessive activity. Movement, while it fends off the demons of introspection and provides temporary relief from anxiety, does not satisfy the soul's craving for a higher order; it is a mere temporary solution. Idleness, however, richer in existential possibilities, can breed an intolerable sense of dread.

Brain food

"Nutritious brains"!

Squeak!

Went with my Clarissa students to see Quartett at BAM this evening. Some lovely moments: Isabel Huppert is a sight to behold, and I am fascinated by this notion of transforming Laclos's portrait of eighteenth-century libertinism for the modern stage (but can it really be that Heiner Müller never finished reading the whole of Dangerous Liaisons, as the program suggests? It is not a long novel!). But I found the music utterly awful. Embarrassingly awful! That spells ruination for the production as a whole, since it so much depends on the successful evocation of a sensibility.

(The only other Robert Wilson production I have seen, also at BAM, was much more effective - it was the 2002 Woyzeck - what was happening on stage was quite similar, and Isabel H. is the superior actor, quite mesmerizing at moments - but the Tom Waits music, performed live by a real orchestra, was so lovely in that case that it really brought the whole thing to life for me in a way that worked. The techno moments in this current production really made me squirm, but more generally even the snippets of classical stuff seem banal and thinly imagined - live music, for me, would have made a huge difference, as what was happening on stage was highly watchable, and the language and concept are engaging.)

I have hardly read any books recently! Or, rephrased, I am reading a lot for work stuff and between that and the Worm Triathlon's brain-tunneling effects plus marathon training obsessions, there has not been a lot of Light Reading going on round here. Sebastian Faulks's A Week in December was slight, a disappointment to me as I really loved his last one; William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms was better (and tapped into standard academic's fantasy of walking away from current life for something completely different and under the radar), but not his best. My Columbia colleage Mark Taylor's Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Living and Dying is an unusual and interesting book that really caught my attention, despite the fact that I am not its ideal audience (too pragmatic, more on the ethical and less on the metaphysical/existential end of intellectual pondering).

There is a passage on idleness that particularly resonated, and that I will share here (I was going to say "that I will share when I am less fatigued," but in fact it is precisely the things that make the passage speak to me that mean I am now unable not to transcribe it given that I have mentioned it!):

Nothing is harder for me to do than nothing. The issue is not merely psychological -- it is metaphysical, ethical, even religious. I guess my problem with doing nothing shows how deeply Protestant I remain. I have never been able to forget my grandmother's severe warning to me when I was a child: "Idleness is the devil's workshop." For her the idle person was not merely lazy but shiftless, useless, worthless. As the work of the devil, idleness, I was taught, is sin and sin, of course, breeds guilt. Even today I never feel more guilty than when I am doing nothing. I doubt I will ever completely overcome this sense of guilt and, indeed, sometimes I'm not even sure I want to do so.

What makes idleness so dangerous and thus so tempting is its purposelessness. Idleness, like play, has no end other than itself. If you can explain why you are idle, you are not idling. Redemption from this sin, my grandmother drilled into me, comes from work. That is why she always kept me busy--sometimes working, sometimes playing, or what she thought was playing. The problem was that my grandmother never really understood how to play. Forever suspicious of idleness, she had the remarkable ability to transform play into work, and she somehow managed to pass on this talent to her daughter, who in turn passed it on to me.