COARCTATE

For the intelligent and sensual lovers, now available from amazon US and UK, Mark Daniel Cohen's Coarctate: Antigone's Return and Selected Poems.

For a preview, read the Introduction here.

ENJOY!

EyeCorner Press - ISBN: 978-8792633002

IT IS WHAT IT IS

Last night in Torino. I'm having spaghetti alle vongole at a place recommended by Giuglia, a waiter who served me lunch at another place. “Oh, you came,” she said, and was ecstatic. Spaghetti alle vongole was not on the menu, but Giuglia made sure that I got them. In my eating-out experience, if you care to pay attention to the one waiting on you, you may be surprised. They may let you in on things that they don't necessarily share with others. As it turned out Giuglia is not only a very professional waiter but she also used to pick strawberries on Samsø in Denmark. She needed the money to get herself a certification to teach hatha yoga for children, which she acquired in India at the famous Mysore place for yoga instructors. So Giuglia is many things. I gave her my email and told her that if she ever came back to Denmark she could come and see me, and we would do some yoga together. “Oh, you're so elegant and quiet,” she said. “All Libras are.” I don't know about elegance, but it's true about quietude. I can be quiet.

Thus, while having great food at Chiosco dello Zoo, in quietude, I was thinking about connections. Harold Pinter came to my mind. He was 44 when he met Antonia Fraser, a 42 year-old aristocratic woman, married to an important politician, and with 6 children. He was also married. But what the heck, when lightning strikes, it strikes. He assaulted the poor woman with love poetry, writing that is even embarrassing, and flowers, so many flowers that it's impossible to imagine. She ditched everything, moved in with him, and when both their spouses finally gave them their divorces, they married in 1980. When they first met, however, he told her that he wanted to marry her when he would be 80. “I'll be 78,” she replied. But he didn't care. They married long before that, though, and they lived happily ever after, until Pinter's death. They thus had 33 years of love. As can be read in Fraser's memoir, Must you Go? in all Pinter's love letters to her there's one idea that prevails: the power of connection between them. As he put it: “everything we do, connects the space between death and me, and you.” Antonia's favorite poem is, however, the one titled: It is Here. The last lines read:

What did we hear?
It was the breath we took when we first met.
Listen. It is here.

On the way back to the hotel I was trying to listen to the sounds in the street. On Saturday evenings, the Italians like to drink, order the wrong things—she, the ice cream, he, the tiramisu, then she eats his tiramisu and he eats her ice cream, an ad hoc solution which they both agree on by sealing the pact with a kiss—and inspire. I entered a bookstore that was still open at 10 pm. I picked up the book entitled Le Più Belle Poesie d'Amore, and found myself agreeing with the Austrian poet Erich Fried, that love is what is it, nothing more, nothing less. In love, if “yes” is said, it is not said as a favor, but rather as a manifestation of the acknowledgement that love is what it is. Here, in Italian rendition:

QUEL CHE È

È assurdo
dice la ragione
È quel che è
dice l'amore.

È infelicità
dice il calcolo
Non è altro che dolore
dice la paura
È vano
dice il giudizio
È quel che è
dice l'amore.

È ridicolo
dice l'orgoglio
È avventato
dice la prudenza
È impossibile
dice l'esperienza
È quel che è
dice l'amore.

CONTINUITÀ

- Spaghetti alle vongole, anche oggi, e ancora una volta? 
- Si, sempre.
- Ah, sempre! La donna della continuità.
- Si, sono io. Grazie.
- Grazie a lei.

RADIO

I’m sitting so close to Lars Vogt, the world renowned German pianist, that I really get pulled into his timing. He begins with a formidable Janacek, In the Mist, and I’m convinced that I’m in the mist. Or at least well on my way. There is after all only about two feet distance between us, Janacek and I, mediated by a performer in trance. The president of the Schubert Society in Roskilde, who arranged the concert, announced already, by introducing Vogt, what he thought we all ought to feel, namely gratitude of the highest, for after playing for 60 people in the beautiful Biedermeier Hall at Hotel Prindsen, Vogt is going to play Albert Hall for 6000 people. God Save the Queen (from such hassle) —Like we were in need of having people tell us what to be grateful for! But grateful we were. I was, and I wasn’t afraid to show it. I went wild in the end, and I was the only one. 59 people in their 70s behind me—yes, we’re still in the provinces, and yes, there were still empty seats in the front row—were either in pain or were showing their enthusiasm as if they didn’t have any. Of course, it hit me that these people must have thought that they all had to behave nicely what with the concert due to being broadcast on the Danish radio channel P2 on Tuesday. Now, you can’t have all that ecstasy show, or hear, can you? Schmucks. I think I’m going to listen to the concert again—oh, the Janacek was so sublime, and so was Schubert, well Schubert always is—and I can anticipate that I’m going to have a good laugh listening to myself yell Bravo. Bravo, indeed. Such playing tonight, for a quiet crowd in the background, made me think that I was left completely alone on this planet. Alone only with the sounds, the mist, and the silent sweat pouring over the keyboard. For some reason I’m convinced that the radio will transmit whatever wavelength I got to ride into thankfulness.

REASONS

My best friend sends me an email telling me that he was invited to lecture in Norway. “Norway will never let go, will it?” he asked, knowing the answer in advance, at least where I'm concerned. But then I have a way of influencing the people close to me, so Norway has also become special to him. I took him to Norway 9 years ago, and he still keeps talking about it, even though this is the first time he returns. Five hours later, my car flew swiftly on the road, green lights or red lights all the same, to find myself in the company of The Oslo String Quartet. I took a sit in the front row, and praised my luck that although arriving in the last minute, I still found all the seats right under the players' noses unoccupied. Well, this is Jyllinge, after all, and thank God for it. The people in the country have a way of keeping themselves in the background, which, especially at concerts, suits me excellently. The string quartet! Ahhh! Sitting right there, up front, and close up, how sublime! It's not only the breathing into the instruments that you can hear, and which gets to resonate even more than otherwise, but you also get to see the sweat coming down the necks of the performers. The drops of bodily water were so intensely dispersed that I got some on my Max Azria pants. "I breath Norwegian air," I told myself, and it's enough to make me utterly ecstatic. It enhances the autumn smell in Olden which I'll be breathing in October. Thank God. While looking at the crooked cross, and listening mainly to Schumann, I pledged with myself to make a real move for the presidency of the Schubert Society which has arranged the concert, rather to my dissatisfaction—WTF, get some Schubert on the program, for Christ's sake—and then show my satisfaction at the enforced realization that I was right to move to Roskilde in the first place. Three years ago, I said to myself, why the fuck Roskilde, when it hit me. For three reasons: Bach was here, Schubert was here, and someone else I liked was here, but now I can't remember. And yet, reasons are reasons enough. It maybe that everything passes, my memory included, but everything is not always everything. At least that I remember.

SUPREMES

Georg Cantor is on my mind. As forever, actually. And I feel like saying that where his continuum hypothesis is concerned, if you buy it, then it saves you the trouble with doubting either the extent to which numbers are there, where you believe them to be, or their cardinality. Cantor's numbers are large. Infinitely uncountably large. For the weak-hearted, like myself, there is more than enough right there to make you faint. By analogy, if the idea with things unending is to have an application beyond the world of hypotheses, then it can be thought of in terms that mediate between action and expectation. If your action is based on epistemic belief in transfinite numbers (also metaphorically speaking), then the expectance to see the consequences of such action impact on others falls down to zero. Hence, you expect nothing. Therefore, then, the only sensible thing to do where expectance is concerned is not to say that you're waiting for things to happen—as one would if one were part of a religious cult in which belief is tied to the promise of things actualizing at some point; one is still waiting for the Messiah—but to say that if things happen, they happen, and if they don't, they don't. This means seeing everything as secondary to the way in which the continuum itself unfolds. If one can't imagine abstracts, one can listen to Bach and consider his recitative technique in the context of liturgical mass. The recitative ceremonial in liturgy follows very rigid formulas based on repetitions, and yet, for all its objectivism, the recitative is also emotional as it works as a constant recognition of the structure of the infinite. I'm listening to Bach's O Ewiges Feuer, O Ursprung der Liebe, and I feel like thanking Cantor. For the continuum. For making us sing, alone or in unison: it's there, es ist da, all of it, in all its supreme beauty and unending sensual memory of numbers. Numbers played on us. If the music stops for a while when we get blasted, it only does so, because the singer needs to take a breath.

INEVITABILITY

I'm in Gilleleje this weekend, a summer resort in the north of Denmark. This morning it rains. A soft rain that makes all the pine trees in the garden look bigger. I sit on the swing and let the drops envelop my face. My nephew, Paul, knows that this is the moment. When to ask me metaphysical questions. He begins, however, with a concrete approach: “what relaxes you?” he wants to know “—and don't say Norway.” I say Norway. He doesn't ask me why, because he knows already, so we don't waste time on that. But I tell him that doing nothing in Norway entices me to think of how, for the most part our choices are both arbitrary and inevitable. This also means that we don't always rationalize what feels right. It's like family relations: they are also both arbitrary and inevitable. Which also means that I'm saying enough already. “So,” Paul goes, “this means then, that we should never resist what feels right, even though we often have to match people's saying that we also have to do right by them.” More rain is falling, yet neither of us is going inside.

RADICALS

I'm having this exchange about fonts with Mark Daniel Cohen, who, like me right now, is pouring himself over InDesign designs. Those witnessing our fragments here, must remember that not long ago, in a post about theorems, we cut a deal for a book (in the comment box). Now the book is done, and it will be available on amazon.com next week. Stay tuned.

So, while uploading files here and there, Mark asked me what I thought of the letter E in Bembo italics. Well, I've been swooning already over his good taste in the layout, so I let him know that, yes, not only have I noticed the Es, but also that I got carried away in fantasy by the letter R and its connotations of regal feet—the Regina allowing graciously for the next letter to appear, but not so fast, not so fast. Her garment must unfold, so obviously, and necessarily, there's a lagging distance between R and whatever other letter that follows it. The cover, of course, suggests such royal preoccupations, which Mark did just for me.

Then he told me that he found it rather disturbing that the play “Coarctate: Antigone's Return,” following my introduction, starts exactly on page 33, which is the number he used for the draft file of the table of contents, a fictive number he gave the draft to get a sense of space. So, to begin with, there were 17 entries for 33, which makes a total of 561. Now, 5 + 6 + 1 is 11 + 1, another set of 3s. Ohhhh, yes, how lovely, we can all agree, for lack of better words or arithmetics.

Now, some would wonder why I choose to share all this private info. Because we are radicals, and because radicals like good stories. And because radicals can both laugh at themselves, the stories they tell, and the stories that numbers tell. This is what I call never ending entertainment. This is what I call laughing seriously. If you want to know what I mean, here's a preview of Mark's book, via my introduction: “A Touch of Tongues.”

Hopefully many of you out there will hurry to buy good writing next week, packaged in sublime design, and having all those other cosmic numerical geometries on top of everything else.



"In this volume, Mark Daniel Cohen offers, in the first part, a fresh and intelligent look at Sophocles, re-writing Antigone almost as a Beckettian version of Tristan and Isolde. The modern-day domestic drama is continued in the second part of the volume, in which selected poems aptly combine the trivial and the sublime, the mark and measure of every great classic. Camelia Elias writes the introduction under a contaminated spell."

DATE OF RELEASE: AUGUST 25, 2010 from EYECORNER PRESS

RECOMMENDATION

If you have to go to Norway on a short trip by boat, make sure that on your way back you book yourself first class. You'll need all the champagne in the fridge, and everything else in the sweets department to drown your frustration with having to come back. As I perambulate back and forth on the deck, I'm being pursued by Italians who share my feeling of being frustrated. Their reasons are, however, different. Nonetheless, my bubbly brain picks on their swearing and cursing: porca miseria, they keep saying. I lose them, but back in the Commodore Class Captain's Cabin, I can't seem to be able to lose their expression. All the same. A bit of practicing is never damaging. Quite the contrary. As I'll be in Torino at the end of the month, I can anticipate my going up and down the corso, saying to myself: porca miseria, I could be in Norway instead of here right now. By Jove, how we can master wasting time! Jævlig trist.

CLOSER

In the 10 years I've been 'doing' Norway, not once did I not have sunny days in Oslo, and that in spite of occasional bad weather forecasts. And not once did I not dig the churches heavy style. Since the beginning, I've always fancied the idea that the whole of Norway is one big church, and that there really isn't anything you can do here other than worship, and get closer to the light. This was corroborated by Leonard Cohen last night, who, in a new song, decided to disclose the secret: that the Name must be blessed. Well, Leonard has been into worshipping for a long time, but as he sang this new one here, it was clear that the 'Norway thing' also got him. How he kneeled, suddenly, and with a different force and humility than in some of the previous songs! One could not be mistaken about why he did it. Today in another church, the New Yorkers rode the worshipping wave. The a cappella quartet, The New York Polyphony left us all breathless, and thinking that we really do need to live more lives. One is not enough for all that worshiping that we want to do, and worshipping through singing must be the only thing worth doing on this planet. As one of the singers put it, “it's next to impossible to escape the gravity of the flat keys.” Indeed.

GENERATION

Vincent closed Controversy today with a talk about people in their 40s. What he wanted to know was one thing rather than ten, namely: do people in their 40s live authentic lives, or are they a bunch or hypocrites? Although this is a singular and straightforward question, the invited guests were all over the place in answering it, and had a hard time staying on topic. Quite unusually also, in the middle of the show, one of the guests got replaced with another of Vincent's and my former colleagues, Pelle Guldborg Hansen. That was a good move, as the person who left the show was only interested in talking about himself and his 15 years of cocaine abuse, which he now kind of regreted as it didn't get him any closer to what he imagined he would get out of it.

In fact, one of the problems with people not staying on topic was also due to the fact that they all talked about what 40-year olds imagine, or what we learn to imagine, and then consequently desire. There was no consensus on what we supposedly want. The discussion took a turn towards gardening, with the conservative retards insisting on the value of minding their own pots and plants, rather than those of the entire world, and the more idealistically oriented ones insisting on the idea that what one calls one's own garden is an illusion. Here Pelle was right to talk about what he calls the fiasco generation, and insist that where we go wrong is in not being able to keep up the pace with the way in which morality codes change. As some ideals simply become irrelevant, they need to be replaced with new ones. Yet, in our search for new ideals, it is not sure that we realize that we have to exhibit basic empathy towards each other all the time. Implicitly he was also going against the nonsense formulated by the others on the show that hypocrisy comes in different forms; some types are better than others, and some types are downright good or at least pragmatic. The argument for the latter was that, in principle, we don't want to alienate our mothers in law by telling them that their food is crap, when we can be nice about it, take their bad cooking in stride, and say instead that it is heaven. As far as I'm concerned, last I've checked hypocrisy was still hypocrisy. It is never good, and it is certainly not a sign of either good manners, good behavior, or authentic living.

Vincent's last question on what we pass on to our children was relevant in light of the missing consensus on where we have them now or on where we want them to get to. Here everyone went back to the garden, and it was clear again that context means different things to different people. The conservatives were adamant in their belief that as they have access to full agency and free will, they can thus also do whatever the heck they want to their kids, among other things, instill in them good values, however indeterminate these may be. The ones on the show with pluralistic inclinations insisted on the fact that our kids are not really ours, as many others contribute to their upbringing each in their different ways, some better than others.

For all the divided opinions, and towards the end of the show, no one wanted to see themselves as fucked up, which is perhaps a good thing all together. Feelings about one's own worth may be what they are, but it is still ideas that have more potential. This being said, I'm happy to say that as long as we value ideas more than we value time, or even the time it takes to get us where we want to be ideally, then we're all safe. After the age of 40, there is basically only one question to pose. I'll leave it to Patrick Kavanagh to enlighten us all, while also expressing the usual gratitude to all those who want to bother making TV summer programs that rescue us from disappearing entirely in our thoughts or dreams of winter. Vincent, thank you.

AFTER FORTY YEARS OF AGE

There was a time when a mood recaptured was enough

Just to be able to hold momentarily November in the woods

Or a street we once made our own through being in love.

But that is not enough now. The job is to answer questions

Experience. Tell us what life has taught you. Not just about

persons—

Which is futile anyway in the long run—but a concrete, as it were, essence.

The role is that of prophet and savior. To smelt in passion

The commonplaces of life. To take over the functions of a god

in a new fashion.

Ah! there is the question to speculate upon in lieu of an answer.

—Patrick Kavanagh

SMOKE

“Some things go up in smoke,” I say, after dinner with family in a relaxed environment, and while thinking of Glenn Gould. My nephew, Paul, never minds playing something for me, which is great, yet, I have a hard time with the background noises. The man in the house is pottering about in the kitchen, the water is running through the faucet, and the moonlight is distorted. According to Glenn it wasn't Beethoven who needed sound enhancement, but Mozart. “Play Mozart with the hoover in the background,” he said, “and you're set.” “This sound goes up in smoke,” I say, while Paul is plonking away undisturbed. “No matter,” he says, echoing me and Beckett, and emulating a hybrid of the body language of Valentina Lisitsa and Glenn Gould taken together. “You know,” he says, “I've just realized that I never saw you smoke.” He knows I'm against it. “And you look so silly in that wrap. I like you better in your elegant mode,” he goes, and then reassures me, however, that he knows that I'm merely playing silly. I want to look like a Hollywood babe on the red carpet going to a concert. “Let's go out and smoke a cigarette,” he says, and I oblige him. We both agree that what with moons out of whack we can afford to be not only silly but also stupid, for I tell him that I really think that all smokers are rather stupid. Phillip Morris also thinks so. I've seen him on TV saying it. He was serious about it, and he wasn't afraid of people refraining from buying his nicotine just because he thinks that all his customers are stupid. “I wish stupidity would go up in smoke, now that I'm not in Norway anymore, breathing fresh air” I say. “I don't even like Norway,” Paul says, to get back at me for having missed me a whole month. I want to kick him, but instead I give him a kiss. He's the only one I know who sports Norway like a pro. He, on the outside. Me, on the inside. The stupid thing about Norway that he tells me is not something I take seriously, for I know exactly where it comes from. “You kiss all the time,” my sister says, but she knows that Paul and I are in the middle of putting things right. In their order. Beethoven can't even see what has just hit him: a ray of light and smoke, a touch of softness on the silk and sorrow, creating a sound that only lunar things can hear.

Paul plays Beethoven from Camelia Elias on Vimeo.