... or should that be: making one's self crazy?...
In the interstices of watching these films, and scanning Joyce's thesis so I can report on it (the airplane and hotel for her defense in Paris are already organized – which reminds me: I also need to buy a flight to Washington to attend my eldest sister's memorial), I've been trying to read only books related to AIDS: easy enough in terms of finding them (they are all on four-and-a-half three-foot shelves – yes, there are a lot of them), but of course rather difficult in terms of finding the emotional patience to stick with them.
So, I made what seemed an easy choice: Hervé Guibert's Paradise, one of his last novels – which is, I think, the first Guibert I've finished. They are mostly quite short, and gracefully readable, in English or in French; but, well, do I have to explain why I don't always finish novels about AIDS?... okay, well, let's face it, they're mostly downers.
This one is very good, if perhaps a little too heterosexual for my tastes; but, although I expected the ending to be fairly wrenching, I wasn't quite ready for the chaotic skill and range of it – hugely disorienting and upsetting, really, not so much because of any individual passages (although they included torrents of images suggesting infection, sex, betrayal, death, and damage) as because of the entire dementia-ridden nightmare of disconnections: although it is not difficult to imagine the dislocations and inconsistencies of a novel that ends in dementia (at least not for anyone who became accustomed to Robbe-Grillet or Burroughs or a mass of writers since them), a skilled writer like this one can make you experience it, perhaps more than you would like.
(It made me think of my own drafted, probably-never-to-be-finished novel, and its considerably gentler dementia-oriented ending – which you can read towards the end of my long blog entry The Voyage to Europe; and that connection was actually rather encouraging, as it occurs to me that if I am incapable of writing a long novel, perhaps a short one would do. Well, maybe someday.)
It was really fairly crazy-making: and wonderful, and impressive – far more so than Collard's shallower egotism, in fact. But it was definitely a rapid and uncomfortable descent into the maelstrom: a kind of reading, thinking, and in fact remembering that I tend to avoid these days.
So it's nice to realize, yet again: I can handle it....
•••
But, after some hours of restless sleep while stormy winds beat the windows – and I don't mean sleep at night: finishing the novel at midday led to an afternoon of avoidant, depressive unconsciousness – I woke around dinnertime, had some tea, and put on a CD.
And how beautiful, how wonderful a piece was given to me, to make me feel better, more able to get back to work, to living: Robert Sessions' beloved piano miniatures From My Diary (1940), which I used to play back when I had a piano in the house. (Yes, I agree: it would be good for me to have a piano here – we'll see.) I suspect that many music students know these works, as they were examples in some popular music theory/history anthologies; I wonder if those other musicians remember these tiny, amazingly human pieces with as much affection as I do.
Best of all: the lovely, shimmering space outlined in the first miniature, between the pedaled bass and the answering quasi-harmonics of the treble....
•••
A small addendum on Guibert, after reading what others have to say about him online: it may seem ridiculous to complain of Collard's egotism, compared to Guibert's – very well, Guibert spent his entire life writing about himself, photographing himself, trying to meet important people to aggrandize himself, etc. – but Guibert's egotism doesn't bother me: it's not only more skillful, it is also not so shallow – Guibert is obsessed with himself not because it [he] is himself, but because that's what he knows best. Though it is amusing to see how irritating his self-obsessed success must have been for other Parisians (Duras hated him, and threatened to leave a major publisher unless they stopped showcasing him), it doesn't seem terribly important – he is an interesting writer, and of course nine-tenths of the successful artists of London, New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and other major cities are guilty of the same self-advertisement, the same manipulations, the same 'planned' friendships....
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