Nouveaux déroulements/New events in Pondicherry

Vous savez qu'il y a différents fils dans ce blog au fil de ma curiosité. En ce moment, l'Art de la Mémoire m'intrigue, j'y reviendrai. Et le fil de la diaspora indienne dans les Caraïbes apparaît, disparaît, et reparaît. Aujourd'hui, je vous fais part d'une invitation à un ensemble de cérémonies et d'événements culturels à Pondichéry qui commence aujourd'hui et qui commémore ces liens intercontinentaux et transocéaniques. Je n'y serais pas. Je le regrette beaucoup. Vous me raconterez. Ou du moins, je compte sur Animesh Rai!

There are several streaks in this blog, shaped by my curiosity. At the moment, I am intrigued by the Art of Memory, which will be featured again soon. Another streak, that of the Indian diaspora in the Caribbeans, comes and goes. It's back! I would like to share with you an invitation to ceremonies and cultural event about to take place in Pondicherry. They celebrate these lasting ties across the oceans, between continents. I'm going to miss it. Wish I could be there. You'll keep me posted. I'm hoping I can count on Animesh Rai for an interesting report!










Contribué par Arabella Hutter avec l'aide d'Animesh Rai

Glissant forgotten?

You did not think I had forgotten Glissant, did you?! Here's a good occasion to meander on the Glissant side.

You might remember I find reading his texts, or rather understanding their meaning, rather difficult. The language is poetic, dense, flowery. I have discovered the best approach to his thinking: hearing Glissant read his texts. Check out the extraordinary reading in the clip below (you need to fastforward the introduction which is not relevant). The voice and accent are uniquely poetic, communicating through our ears and our eyes the essence of the text.

Edouard Glissant reads his text.

Glissant oublié?

Un petit crochet du côté de Glissant, n'allez pas croire que je l'ai oublié si facilement. Et si Glissant vous intéresse tant soit peu, il vous faut absolument regarder/écouter ce clip - en ignorant l'introduction du début qui est sans rapport. J'ai déjà discuté dans ce blog du fait que ses textes ne sont pas faciles. Pas de tautologies immédiatement assimilables chez cet auteur. La langue est touffue, dense, en acrostiches et acrochecoeurs. Je découvre que la meilleure manière d'aborder ses écrits, c'est d'entendre Glissant les lire. Témoin ce passage extraordinaire, lu avec cette voix et cet accent uniquement poétiques.

Glissant nous lit un de ses textes.



Contributed by -- Arabella Hutter

Passion, eroticism, daring: O'Keefe

I had promised myself not to blog about the O'Keefe exhibit at the Whitney. But I just can't help it, I have to share. I'll keep it short. My kids learn at school that a text should have an introduction, a middle that goes into details and a conclusion. I'll limit myself to the middle bit with details.

One of the texts written on the wall of the exhibition (I should ask my grandmother, but I think there was a time where nothing was written on the walls of exhibitions? Anybody?) talked of Georgia O'Keefe paintings' "gently pulsating... " something something. Gently?! O'Keefe? Some of her work might be pulsating, but there is strictly nothing gentle about Georgia O'Keefe. Thank god. Her vibrant passion is everywhere.
Every time I see I read I feel women's passion which has been so under expressed over the centuries, I vibrate in unison: The Brontë Sisters, Frida Kahlo, Jane Campion, Agota Kristof. Their passion is different, I think, from the male version, though this is dangerous terrain that can slip quickly into stereotypes. A feminine passion with nothing gentle about it, but strength, transcendence, intensity. And for O'keefe's work, drama, and daring, present in so many of her paintings.

We are often served over and over the same type of paintings by one artist. For O'Keefe, the desert and the flowers. But there is so much more to her work, so many paintings which don't look like "an O'Keefe" where she tries, she experiments, she probes.
A company which produced fabric asked her to create paintings in the 1920s to advertise for their wares, something in the erotic vein of her abstract paintings. I was floored. Which company nowadays would ask an artist to create paintings with obvious references to the female sexual organs? Such a far cry to the exploitative approach of American Apparel's teen porn. It's discouraging sometimes to feel we're going backward in terms of feminine emancipation and of breaking away from stereotypes.

That's it. There. Full stop.

Contributed by - Arabella Hutter

Haiti all broken up

Sad about Haiti. As if they needed one more problem. Could something good come out of the catastrophe, a new sense of cohesion, in this country racked by violence and corruption? But probably not, say Schopenhauer, Maupassant and the pessimist in me.

Feels also weird, absurd to think we are so connected by the event right now and to the Haitians - and in a few months, a few years, it will be a vague memory. "Wasn't there a big earthquake in Haiti? A big earthquake in Turkey? A mudslide in Colombia? A collapsed bridge in India?" To many Haitians, it will not be a vague memory but family they've lost, a physical mutilation, a further impoverishment.

Contributed by - Arabella Hutter

Un truc infaillible de la Grèce ancienne

Vous aurez sûrement vu des livres qui promettent des techniques infaillibles: "Améliorez votre mémoire!" C'est en fait un art ancien. Quand les livres étaient rares, et le papier encore plus, il était avantageux de pouvoir mémoriser de longs textes ou discours. Un art mnémonique se développa en Grèce et à Rome, repris ensuite au Moyen Age et à la Renaissance (cf The Art of Memory, by Frances A. Yates). La tradition attribue la création de cet art au poète grec Simonides de Ceos. On raconte qu'il assistait à un banquet quand le toit s'est effondré. Il a survécu mais la plupart des autres convives furent tués. Les corps étaient si mutilés qu'il était impossible de les identifier. Simonides aida les parents des morts à les retrouver parce qu'il se rappelait parfaitement où chaque homme avait été installé. Ce qui lui aurait donné l'idée de "placer" des objets mnémoniques. Le principe est simple, on visite par l'esprit un lieu connu comme un temple ou sa cuisine, on crée une image pour chaque point que l'on souhaite se rappeler et on place cette image dans l'espace: dans le four, sur la planche à pain, suspendu au robinet. Des arguments si l'on est un politicien, des preuves si l'on est avocat, ou une liste pour les courses. Essayez! C'est assez surprenant. Et amusant de placer une ampoule en équilibre sur le dos d'une chaise ou une cartouche d'encre dans le four. Stimule l'imagination, d'une manière si marquante que nous en reparlerons.

One ancient Greek's trick to memorize. For free!

You've seen self help books promising "Improve your memory! This is actually a very old art. When books were rare, as was paper, it was an advantage to memorize. An art of memory was developed in Greece and in Rome, and later in Europe (described in The Art of Memory, by Frances A. Yates). The tradition attributes the creation of this art to Simonides of Ceos, a Greek poet. He is said to have been at a banquet when the roof collapsed. He escaped, but many died. The corpses were mangled beyond recognition. He helped their relatives identify the remains because he remembered where everyone was sitting. This would have given him the idea of "placing" memories.

Basically you visit in your mind a place you know, for example a temple or your kitchen, and you create an image of each thing you want to remember and place it in a specific area: on the stove, in the refrigerator's door, in the sink, hanging from the tap. It could be arguments if you were a politician, facts, if you were a litigator, or a shopping list. Try it! It's actually fun. Helpful also if you are going to the Prospect Range event in Brooklyn, January 30th, and need to memorize a poem.

I will return to the Art of Memory soon, because there is more to it than a simple trick.

Contributed by -- Arabella Hutter

Arshile Gorky and fauvism, cubism, surrealism, expressionism, etc.

Gorky is such a talented painter. His composition are stunning. His palette in mind blowing. And he never quite grew up to be his own painter. Going through the exhibition, you get the Cézanne period, the Fauvist period, the Picasso monumental mythological women period, then the Picasso cubist period - my favorite, while the painting of himself and his mother is incredibly powerful (The artist and his mother, below).































Above: Organization, below: Virginia landscape

Then you get the feeling he saw a Kandinsky while in his surrealist period, and then you wonder how much he was influenced by De Kooning, how much they built up their expressionist style together. Maybe that's the most personal of his style, but it didn't impress me most, the compositions didn't seem as assured as during his previous periods. It still gives the impression he never came to his own, as if he couldn't own painting.

I felt like saying, go for it, Gorky, you can do it. The last years of his life were marked by personal tragedy, as they say, which is unlikely to have helped him reach maturity. But altogether, through all the different periods, the work is really beautiful, with plenty of drama in them..

Contributed by - Arabella Hutter

Maupassant and Schopenhauer

Anybody who has read the often cruel, dire short stories by Maupassant will be easily convinced that he was an adept of Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy. Maupassant described people in France at the end of the 19th century as greedy, cowardly, corrupt or plain stupid. Referring to an earlier blog about pink vs black vision of life, I would like to remind you that Schopenhauer and Maupassant are right according to that theory. But am personally still looking to buy a pair of pink glasses if you can recommend a source. Interestingly the most pessimistic writers in the 20th century have to be the Italians: Vega, Pirandello as well as the film directors of Italian realism, Dino De Risi being the most ferocious. Their vision of humanity is even starker than that of Maupassant, without such redeeming figures as the prostitute in "Boule de Suif" offering to share her lunch with the bourgeois who are snobbing her on a stagecoach trip.

Above: The
Innocents,
by Honoré Daumier

On the
right:
Being
tired, by Walter
Gramatté.

Here's the end of one of Maupassant's short story, should we say, sardonic?

"Schopenhauer had just died, and it was arranged that we should watch, in turn, two by two, till morning.He was lying in a large apartment, very simple, vast and gloomy. Two wax candles were burning on the stand by the bedside. It was midnight when I went on watch, together with one of our comrades. The two friends whom we replaced had left the apartment, and we came and sat down at the foot of the bed.

The face was not changed. It was laughing. That pucker which we knew so well lingered still around the corners of the lips, and it seemed to us that he was about to open his eyes, to move and to speak. His thought, or rather his thoughts, enveloped us. We felt ourselves more than ever in the atmosphere of his genius, absorbed, possessed by him. His domination seemed to be even more sovereign now that he was dead. A feeling of mystery was blended with the power of this incomparable spirit.

The bodies of these men disappear, but they themselves remain; and in the night which follows the cessation of their heart's pulsation I assure you, monsieur, they are terrifying.

And in hushed tones we talked about him, recalling to mind certain sayings, certain formulas of his, those startling maxims which are like jets of flame flung, in a few words, into the darkness of the Unknown Life.

"'It seems to me that he is going to speak,' said my comrade. And we stared with uneasiness bordering on fear at the motionless face, with its eternal laugh. Gradually, we began to feel ill at ease, oppressed, on the point of fainting. I faltered:

"I don't know what is the matter with me, but, I assure you I am not well.'

And at that moment we noticed that there was an unpleasant odor from the corpse. Then, my comrade suggested that we should go into the adjoining room, and leave the door open; and I assented to his proposal. I took one of the wax candles which burned on the stand, and I left the second behind. Then we went and sat down at the other end of the adjoining apartment, in such a position that we could see the bed and the corpse, clearly revealed by the light.

But he still held possession of us. One would have said that his immaterial essence, liberated, free, all-powerful and dominating, was flitting around us. And sometimes, too, the dreadful odor of the decomposed body came toward us and penetrated us, sickening and indefinable. Suddenly a shiver passed through our bones: a sound, a slight sound, came from the death-chamber. Immediately we fixed our glances on him, and we saw, yes, monsieur, we saw distinctly, both of us, something white pass across the bed, fall on the carpet, and vanish under an armchair. We were on our feet before we had time to think of anything, distracted by stupefying terror, ready to run away. Then we stared at each other. We were horribly pale. Our hearts throbbed fiercely enough to have raised the clothing on our chests. I was the first to speak:

"'Did you see?'

"'Yes, I saw.'

"'Can it be that he is not dead?'

"'Why, when the body is putrefying?'

"'What are we to do?'

"My companion said in a hesitating tone:

"'We must go and look.'

I took our wax candle and entered first, glancing into all the dark corners in the large apartment. Nothing was moving now, and I approached the bed. But I stood transfixed with stupor and fright: Schopenhauer was no longer laughing! He was grinning in a horrible fashion, with his lips pressed together and deep hollows in his cheeks. I stammered out:

"'He is not dead!'

But the terrible odor ascended to my nose and stifled me. And I no longer moved, but kept staring fixedly at him, terrified as if in the presence of an apparition. Then my companion, having seized the other wax candle, bent forward. Next, he touched my arm without uttering a word. I followed his glance, and saw on the ground, under the armchair by the side of the bed, standing out white on the dark carpet, and open as if to bite, Schopenhauer's set of artificial teeth.

The work of decomposition, loosening the jaws, had made it jump out of the mouth.

From "Beside Schopenhauer's Corpse"

contributed by -- Arabella Hutter

Pessimistes à qui mieux mieux

Carnaval, de James Ensor

Les nouvelles de Maupassant sont d'une lucidité souvent cruelle. On s'imagine très bien qu'il ait été influencé par la philosophie pessimiste de Schopenhauer, ou du moins convergé avec ce penseur. Voici un extrait révélateur d'une nouvelle:

"Schopenhauer venait de mourir, et il fut décidé que nous le veillerions tour à tour, deux par deux, jusqu'au matin.

Il était couché dans une grande chambre très simple, vaste et sombre. Deux bougies brûlaient sur la table de nuit.

C'est à minuit que je pris la garde, avec un de nos camarades. Les deux amis que nous remplacions sortirent, et nous vînmes nous asseoir au pied du lit.

La figure n'était point changée. Elle riait. Ce pli que nous connaissions si bien se creusait au coin des lèvres, et il nous semblait qu'il allait ouvrir les yeux, remuer, parler. Sa pensée ou plutôt ses pensées nous enveloppaient ; nous nous sentions plus que jamais dans l'atmosphère de son génie, envahis, possédés par lui. Sa domination nous semblait même plus souveraine maintenant qu'il était mort. Un mystère se mêlait à la puissance de cet incomparable esprit.

Le corps de ces hommes-là disparaît, mais ils restent, eux ; et, dans la nuit qui suit l'arrêt de leur coeur, je vous assure, Monsieur, qu'ils sont effrayants.

Et, tout bas, nous parlions de lui, nous rappelant des paroles, des formules, ces surprenantes maximes qui semblent des lumières jetées, par quelques mots, dans les ténèbres de la Vie inconnue.

"Il me semble qu'il va parler", dit mon camarade. Et nous regardions, avec une inquiétude touchant à la peur, ce visage immobile et riant toujours.

Peu à peu nous nous sentions mal à l'aise, oppressés, défaillants. Je balbutiai :

"Je ne sais pas ce que j'ai, mais je t'assure que je suis malade."

Et nous nous aperçûmes alors que le cadavre sentait mauvais.

Alors mon compagnon me proposa de passer dans la chambre voisine, en laissant la porte ouverte ; et j'acceptai.

Je pris une des bougies qui brûlaient sur la table de nuit et je laissai la seconde, et nous allâmes nous asseoir à l'autre bout de l'autre pièce, de façon à voir de notre place le lit et le mort, en pleine lumière.

Mais il nous obsédait toujours ; on eût dit que son être immatériel, dégagé, libre, tout-puissant et dominateur, rôdait autour de nous. Et parfois aussi l'odeur infâme du corps décomposé nous arrivait, nous pénétrait, écoeurante et vague.

Tout à coup, un frisson nous passa dans les os : un bruit, un petit bruit était venu de la chambre du mort. Nos regards furent aussitôt sur lui, et nous vîmes, oui, Monsieur, nous vîmes parfaitement, l'un et l'autre, quelque chose de blanc courir sur le lit, tomber à terre sur le tapis, et disparaître sous un fauteuil.

Nous fûmes debout avant d'avoir eu le temps de penser à rien, fous d'une terreur stupide, prêts à fuir. Puis nous nous sommes regardés. Nous étions horriblement pâles. Nos coeurs battaient à soulever le drap de nos habits. Je parlai le premier.

"Tu as vu ?...

- Oui, j'ai vu.

- Est-ce qu'il n'est pas mort ?

- Mais puisqu'il entre en putréfaction ?

- Qu'allons-nous faire ?"

Mon compagnon prononça en hésitant :

"Il faut aller voir."

Je pris notre bougie, et j'entrai le premier, fouillant de l'oeil toute la grande pièce aux coins noirs. Rien ne remuait plus ; et je m'approchai du lit. Mais je demeurai saisi de stupeur et d'épouvante : Schopenhauer ne riait plus ! Il grimaçait d'une horrible façon, la bouche serrée, les joues creusées profondément. Je balbutiai :

"Il n'est pas mort !"

Mais l'odeur épouvantable me montait au nez, me suffoquait. Et je ne remuais plus, le regardant fixement, effaré comme devant une apparition.

Alors mon compagnon, ayant pris l'autre bougie, se pencha. Puis il me toucha le bras sans dire un mot. Je suivis son regard, et j'aperçus à terre, sous le fauteuil à côté du lit, tout blanc sur le sombre tapis, ouvert comme pour mordre, le râtelier de Schopenhauer.

Le travail de la décomposition, desserrant les mâchoires, l'avait fait jaillir de la bouche. "

Tiré de "Auprès d'un corps", de Maupassant

Contribué par - Arabella Hutter

Inspiré par Les Nouveaux chemins de la connaissance, Raphael Larrère, France Culture

antipathie/sympathie et Schopenhauer

Alors que l'antisémitisme de Schopenhauer est détestable, sans parler de sa misogynie, sa défense des animaux étonne. Deux siècles d'avance sur son temps dans ce domaine. Sa vie personnelle a certainement eu une influence sur ses sympathies et antipathies. Ses sentiments compétitifs envers Spinoza. Un système de pensée stricte et sévère qui, ici encore, n'a probablement pas séduit ses connaissances féminines. Sa solitude. Brisée seulement par la compagnie de ... son caniche,une race de chien aux formes suggestives?

sympathy/antipathy for Schopenhauer

While Schopenhauer's antisemitism is detestable, as is his misogyny, his defense of animal rights is quite amazing. Two centuries in advance of its time. One could argue that his personal life had a lot to do with these likes and dislikes. His competitive feelings towards Spinoza. Again, a strict and stern system of thought which is likely to have been a poor fit for his feminine acquaintances. His loneliness. Only relieved by ... his poodle?

Contributed by - Arabella Hutter

microblog: Schopenhauer and genius

According to Schopenhauer, genius is a non utilitarian relationship to the world.

microblog: Schopenhauer et le génie

D'après Schopenhauer, le génie est un rapport non utilitaire au monde.

The dangers of History

Sarkozy is eliminating history/geography from France's school curriculum. Not surprisingly. History does not serve him. In the USA, while history is taught in order to gel a sense of identity around the country's originating myth, geography is ignored. Could be unpleasant if Americans got too nosy about the blurry world beyond their borders. Similarly, the historical past of France is a dangerous precedent to refer to: Revolutions in 18th and 19th Century, La Commune (control of Paris by its working class in 1870), Le Front Populaire (workers movement in the 1930s), May 68, etc.

Below a small passage from "London", a semi autobiographical text about my years in Thatcher's capital in the 80s.

"Our individual pasts slip gently into oblivion, after two or three generations. Mine, as I revisit it, is melting with history: the Thatcher era. The power of the intellectual elite is weakening. When the middle class ruled, they needed to reinforce the principal source of their wealth: knowledge. There is no knowledge without memory, without a past. Now that money has supplanted middle class and its culture, it is in corporations' interest that historical landmarks such as unions, human rights, freedom, equality are forgotten. Will history survive? Will anyone still take an interest in us? Will archeologists dig up Camberwell, looking for artifacts from 1980's squatters?"