Just a moment with Mary Ruefle . . .

Mary Ruefle
CavanKerry Press

A few days ago, I quoted Mary Ruefle on her sense of the "moment":

[W]e have only fragments -- but even this seems fitting, for what is the moment but a fragment of greater time? (Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey, 13)

Now that I'm re-reading her book, I learn the size of that fragment:

Okay, three seconds -- as the approximate duration of the present moment has been defined -- not quite the speed of light, but about the time it takes to look at the moon. (Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey, 17)

I'd never heard this fact before -- or maybe I heard in a moment of distraction and thus didn't hear -- so I looked it up and found a book by Peter Swirski, Literature, Analytically Speaking, that speaks of this established fact:

A good place to start may be with the research into the duration of the present moment originally conducted by Frederick Turner and Ernst Poppel. In a series of experiments, subjects were asked to reproduce the duration of a light signal or a sound or else to respond to the dilations of time intervals in the so-called metronome test (designed to measure the extent to which people subjectively group intervals). These early experiments have established what, since then, has been confirmed by a multitude of studies in developmental and adult psychobiology: the duration of the personal subjective "now."

It turns out that in most people the dimension of the present moment is about three seconds, although for some it can be about a half-second shorter or longer. (Swirski, Literature, 163-164)

Apparently, this fact holds for -- among other things -- poetic recitation, and Swirski informs us that Miroslav Horlub (whom we also met on this blog) inferred that the three-second line appears to be a "carrier wave" in poetry throughout various language systems (164-165).

What's the practical significance of this fact? I don't know. Maybe practice reciting poetry in units of the moment? Translate poetry that way as well?

Ruefle: "another catches fire"

Samuel Pepys

Portrait by John Hayls

Wikipedia

I've started re-reading Mary Ruefle's recent book, Madness, Rack, and Honey, and since I'd only just finished it the day before, I was struck by what was surely an intended resonance:

In poetry, the number of beginnings so far exceeds the number of endings that we cannot even conceive of it. Not every poem is finished -- one poem is abandoned, another catches fire and is carried away by the wind, which may be an ending, but it is the ending of a poem without end. (Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey, 1)

The resonance was with a journal entry lifted from The Diary of Samuel Pepys and placed between the last essay and the "Acknowledgments:

Then we fell to talking of the burning of the City; and my Lady Carteret herself did tell us how abundance of pieces of burnt papers were cast by the wind as far as Cranborne; and among others she took up one, or had one brought her to see, which was a little bit of paper that had been printed, whereon there remained no more nor less than these words: "Time is, it is done." (Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, quoted by Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey, 311)

But what is time?

For what is time? Who can easily and briefly explain it? Who even in thought can comprehend it, even to the pronouncing of a word concerning it? But what in speaking do we refer to more familiarly and knowingly than time? And certainly we understand when we speak of it; we understand also when we hear it spoken of by another. What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not. Yet I say with confidence, that I know that if nothing passed away, there would not be past time; and if nothing were coming, there would not be future time; and if nothing were, there would not be present time. Those two times, therefore, past and future, how are they, when even the past now is not; and the future is not as yet? But should the present be always present, and should it not pass into time past, time truly it could not be, but eternity. If, then, time present -- if it be time -- only comes into existence because it passes into time past, how do we say that even this is, whose cause of being is that it shall not be -- namely, so that we cannot truly say that time is, unless because it tends not to be? (St. Augustine, The Confessions, Book 9, Chapter 14, edited by Philip Schaff)

Ruefle disagrees?

[W]e have only fragments -- but even this seems fitting, for what is the moment but a fragment of greater time? (Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey, 13)

Does the moment tend not to be, an infinitesimal, or is it a fragment, a temporal atom? In either case, my allotted time is up . . . for today.

The Tree of Unknowable Noumenon

Gazing Upon the Ding-an-Sich
Beckett and Giacometti

I've borrowed this image from the site of Paul McVeigh, who tells us:

Beckett and Giacometti in the latter's studio in Paris in 1961, looking at the Tree that Giacometti has just made for Waiting for Godot. Ironically, there is no photo of the Tree itself and, since it ended up being stolen, we can only guess at what it looked like.

Or perhaps, as in Kantian philosophy, the two were envisioning the Tree as the Ding-An-Sich -- the Thing-Per-Se, the unknowable noumenon -- the object as it is in itself, independent of the mind, as opposed to a phenomenon, which can be apprehended, and that is why we cannot see the Tree. Where did McVeigh obtain this photograph? Perhaps from Mary Ruefle:

One photograph I adore, and keep always by me, shows Samuel Beckett, Albert Giacometti, and a young critic/admirer whose name I do not know standing in a gallery where Giacometti's set for Waiting for Godot is on display (though you can't see it) -- a single tree. If you know Giacometti's work, you can imagine it. The photo was taken in the early sixties, before Giacometti died, and in it Beckett and Giacometti are looking up, up, up at the tree: Beckett has the look of someone praying before a crucifix, and Giacometti has a slightly more self-conscious look, as if admiring the thing but also hoping someone else might see in it what he sees in it -- which is only natural, as he himself made the thing; and the young critic/admirer is not looking at the thing at all, he is looking at Beckett and Giacometti. He is much, much younger than they are, and he does not see the Thing; he sees the two men instead, because it is obvious he mistakes them for the Thing, and he is not there to see the Thing, he is there to see what he takes for the Thing, the two men. While the two men are looking at the Thing. (Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey, page 301)

We do not see "the young critic/admirer" described by Ruefle. We will have to take her word for the fact of his merely phenomenal existence. But Ruefle's 'word' is at times hard to take since she plays with them and their meanings. For example, why does she write, "The photo was taken in the early sixties, before Giacometti died"? Look at the photo. Does Giacometti not look alive? He of course is not yet dead! If she had written, "The photo was taken in 1961, five years before Giacometti died," the statement would have been readily understandable. Also banal, mundane, quotidian. She would never have written such words. Instead, she wrote something far more baffling . . . and intriguing.

I reached the end of Ruefle's book, page 309, yesterday evening -- actually, just the end of her lectures, for she has a bit more to say after those. But page 309 is end enough to recall beginnings, such as pages 1-2, where she writes:

Paul Valéry also described his perception of first lines so vividly, and to my mind so accurately, that I have never forgotten it: The opening line of a poem, he said, is like finding a fruit on the ground, a piece of fallen fruit you have never seen before, and the poet's task is to create the tree from which such a fruit would fall.

You have found here only the fruit left by Giacometti's missing Tree, and if you are a poet, you know the task that lies before you now . . .

Liar! Liar!

Mary Ruefle

Photo by Marco40134

Here follows a lengthy lecture by Mary Ruefle on lying, which you can also read in Madness, Rack, and Honey (page 264):

SHORT LECTURE ON LYING

In this lecture I only lie three times. This is one of them.

What!? You're here already? You must have read too quickly! Go back and read the entire lecture again! Take your time! Think it through!

To be frank, I misquoted Ruefle's first sentence. She actually wrote, "In this lecture I lie only three times."

You can report my distortions here.

The Extension of 'Man' . . .

Mary Ruefle
"Readings"

I'm still reading Mary Ruefle's Madness, Rack, and Honey, and I read the lines below yesterday on the subway, and they struck me because I recently edited a philosopher's paper that was making a similar point:

Writing and reading are ways the brain can contain itself outside of itself. If you can't remember the ingredients you need to make dinner you make a list and voilá -- a bit of your brain gets carried outside of itself. Eventually -- more millenia -- books came into being, and the human brain was able to keep expanding. A book is a physical expansion of the human brain. It is not an object to be treated lightly. When you hold a book in your hands, you are holding a piece of cerebrum in your hands. (267-268)

The philosopher gave a similar example, but was more concerned with showing that smartphones are extensions of our brains.

Somehow, I'm reminded of McLluhen . . .

Burrowing further into Mary Ruefle's Madness, Rack, and Honey

Mary Ruefle - 1955

My own madness is that I'd rather read than do anything else but write, except that the world I've 'chosen' to live in expects me to earn my living and support my family and act like the responsible person I'm not, so I expend most of my scraped-together sense of responsibility on reading and re-writing other people's writing. In short, I edit, a kind of madness. I'd rather be writing like Ruefle:

"The Burrow" was in one of our textbooks. As the class sat reading silently, the silence seemed different. I was infuriated by my inability to understand what was happening in the story. What was happening? Deep inside myself I could not believe that anyone else was actually reading. I was convinced that a mistake had been made, that the printing plates -- for I pictured them as such -- had gotten smashed and all mixed up. There was a mistake. Was I the only one who noticed? Hadn't the teachers bothered to read the story? Their secret was out! There was a very special kind of attention that only I was able to pay to the story -- it was absurd. And then I had a moment of doubt. Who wrote this? Perhaps he was the mistake, and not the story. I sat in the silent classroom and I heard all kinds of things -- I heard the non-ticking clock tick, and the sweat beginning to form on my body, and the window glass was about to break into pieces. The pencil sharpener on the wall was salivating. I flipped to the back of the book where there were brief paragraphs about each of the authors, who they were, where they came from, what they wrote. Yes, I was certain now, the mistake was not in the story, but in its author. There was a mistake in the man. There had to be a mistake in the man because I was told where and when he wrote but not why. And of all the stories in our book, this was the one that remained starved and unfed unless I learned why he wrote it at all. I decided to hate the author. I decided to hate the author because he made me feel as if all my life I had been waiting for something to happen, and it was happening and it was not going to happen. It was many years before I understood that this was the secret labyrinth of reading, and there was a secret tunnel connecting it to my life. (189-190)

A couple of years back -- if I'm not mistaken -- on this blog appeared a commentator of literary ability named Daniel Richter who liked Kafka and crafted a blog titled "The Burrow of Bucephalus," twining two Kafka tales, "The Burrow" and "The New Lawyer," for the latter introduced Alexander's horse as a lawyer.

In the passage above, a young Ruefle decides that Kafka was a mistake. Not just his story, but the author himself. A measure of his greatness, I suppose. But was Kafka a mistake? Or was Ruefle? Is Richter? Am I? And if we are . . . then whose?

Mary Ruefle: "far far away"

Mary Ruefle

Google Images

I'm continuing to cleave a way for myself through Ruefle's thronging words, quoted, or her own, in Madness, Rack, and Honey (208), and I came upon these words of hers reminding me of something:

When I was forty-five years old, I woke up on an ordinary day, neither sunny nor overcast, in the middle of the year, and I could no longer read. It was at the beginning of one of those marvelous sentences that only Nabokov can write: "Mark felt a sort of delicious pity for the frankfurters . . ." In my vain attempts I made out felt hat, prey, the city of Frankfort. But the words that existed so I might read them sailed away, and I was stranded on a quay while everything I loved was leaving. And then it was I who was leaving: a terror seized me and took me so high up in its talons that I was looking helplessly down on a tiny, unrecognizable city, a city I had loved and lived in but would never see again. I needed reading glasses, but before I knew that, I was far far away. (184)

The memory springing up was an experience from my ninth summer, halting in the hot sunlight as I plowed my grandmother's large garden and watching an enormous, white-hooded eagle fly overhead and catch my overheated imagination . . . an experience I later, much, much later, spoke of in a poem:

On Big Creek Ridge

The summer I plowed grandma's far garden,
an eagle caught my eyes with curved talons.
I glimpsed an obscured form against brown ground
stretching curious furrows straight and long.

I showed it to a stranger, the lover of a Japanese woman I knew in Berkeley, and he pointed out to me that the curious furrows were not just of the plowing I'd been doing, but even more of my own brow, furrowed in curiosity.

And I'm now far, far away . . .

Ruefle's Rueful Quote

Mary Ruefle

Google Images

I've been editing articles all day and into the night, so I have little to report for now and will just quote some words of wisdom from Mary Ruefle:

I used to think I wrote because there was something I wanted to say. Then I thought, "I will continue to write because I have not yet said what I wanted to say"; but I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.

I therefore have no excuse for not writing more, if Ruefle is right, for I should be writing to learn to hear what I've been listening to.

But what if I've also not even been listening . . .