herbertpfostl.com

now nearly gone.

Incantation in repetition.

Proud to see my Schrift-Landschaften published by
the very fine Epidote Press.



Pictured here as displayed by the always wonderful NIEMAND.

http://www.epidotepress.com/schrift-landschaften/
http://prehistory-for-niemand.tumblr.com/post/149571133065/httpwwwepidotepresscom-epidote-press-is-an

grace of certain things.

But certainly, he came more and more to be unable to care for, or think of soul but as in an actual body, or of any world but that wherein are water and trees, and where men and women look, so or so, and press actual hands. It was the trick even his pity learned, fastening those who suffered in anywise to his affections by a kind of sensible attachments. He would think of Julian, fallen into incurable sickness, as spoiled in the sweet blossom of his skin like pale amber, and his honey-like hair; of Cecil, early dead, as cut off from the lilies, from golden summer days, from women’s voices; and then what comforted him a little was the thought of the turning of the child’s flesh to violets in the turf above him. 

- The Child in the House In: Selected Writings of Walter Pater, Ed. Harold Bloom, Columbia University Press 1974

- Stefan Lochner (1410-1451), Madonna mit dem Veilchen, Detail.

Inferences I. 
Text fragment: Walter Benjamin.

eternally established.

   
   









...the principle that children tell little more than animals,
for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.

- Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow    
- Robert Bresson, Au Hasard Balthazar

stones and flowers.

It was so utterly wonderful to find I could go so heartily & headily mad; for you know I had been priding myself on my peculiar sanity! And it was more wonderful yet to find the madness made up into things so dreadful, out of things so trivial. One of the most provoking and disagreeable spectres was developed out of the firelight on my mahogany bedpost - and my fate, for all futurity, seemed continually to turn on the humor of dark personages who were materially nothing but stains of damp on the ceiling. But the sorrowfullest part of the matter was, and is, that while my illness at Matlock encouraged me by all its dreams in after work, this one has done nothing but humiliate and terrify me; and leaves me nearly unable to speak any more except of the natures of stones and flowers.

- John Ruskin, from a letter to Thomas Carlyle, 23 June 1878

- Pressed flower from Rosa Luxemburg's Breslau Penitentiary Herbarium. In: Rosa's Letters. Mousse  Publishing,   2011

among the facts of the world.

In Walser, an absolute sense of decency about language does not let agony express itself. The reality is made manifest, the fact of agony, not agony. It is necessary to speak of things, not of words. Marvelously, everything that is utterable is said when one simply states the case.

- Massimo Cacciari, Songs of the Departed in POSTHUMOUS PEOPLE. Vienna at the Turning Point. Stanford University Press, 1996

- Walser in Herisau, 1949 image taken from 50 Watts

light issued.

at THE BROTHER IN ELYSIUM

sometimes a balm.

In 1883, an earthquake that lasted ninety seconds shook the south of Italy. In that earthquake, he lost his parents and his sister; he himself was buried by rubble. Two or three hours later, he was rescued. To ward off total despair, he resolved to think about the Universe - a general procedure among the unfortunate, and sometimes a balm.

Jorge Luis Borges - Benedetto Croce 

Image - herbert pfostl rescue emblem

kleist - arch.

On the evening before that most important day of my life, in Würzburg, I went for a walk. When the sun went down, it seemed as though my happiness were sinking with it. I was horrified to think that I might be forced to part with everything, everything of importance to me. I was walking back to the city, lost in my own thoughts, through an arched gateway. Why, I asked myself, does this arch not collapse, since after all it has no support? It remains standing, I answered, because all the stones want to fall down at the same time - and from this thought I derived an indescribable heartening consolation, which stayed with me right up to the decisive moment: I too would not collapse, even if all my support were removed.

Heinrich von Kleist, Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge, November 16, 18, 1800

Image: Ravenna, Kirche San Vitale. Geweiht 547, byzantinisch. Kapitell im Chor.

tell them I've had a wonderful life.

At the age of ten he constructed a working model of a sewing machine out of bits of wood and wire.

It was not true that he couldn't hear, simply that he wouldn't listen.

He took The Brothers Karamazov to the front.

Continued to wear his uniform for many years after the war.

His sense of humor was "heavy".


And this is how it is: if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be - unutterably - contained in what has been uttered!


I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.


What we say will be easy, but to know why we say it will be very difficult.


The solution of the problem of life is to be seen in the disappearance of the problem.


The inexpressible (that which seems mysterious to me, geheimnisvoll, and that I am not capable of expressing) provides the ground upon which all that I am able to express acquires meaning.


The sense of the world must lie outside the world.


What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics.

A whole generation of disciples was able to take Wittgenstein for a positivist because he has something of enormous importance in common with the positivists: he draws the line between what we can speak about and what we must be silent about just as they do. The difference is only that they have nothing to be silent about. Positivism holds - and this is its essence - that what we can speak about is all that matters in life. Whereas Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent about. (Paul Engelmann)

I ought to have done something positive with my life, to have become a star in the sky.


His last words were:  "Tell them I've had a wonderful life."



- Text and images from:
Ludwig Wittgenstein The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk 
Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir by Paul Engelmann

to disinvent.

I should like to erect here a modest stele to the memory of Sir Arthur Helps (1813-1875), a secretary and confidant of Queen Victoria. It was probably he who invented the marvelously useful verb to disinvent. The only illustration of this word in the Oxford English Dictionary (Vol. III) is a quotation from Helps dated 1868: "I would disinvent telegraphic communication." The word is not listed in Vol. I of the Supplement (1972), but a recent use will be found s.v. fantasy in the same volume. If I were younger, I would found the Coverers' and Disinventors' Club.

Erwin Chargaff, HERACLITEAN FIRE. Sketches from a Life before Nature.

(Footnote in the Trembling of the Balance chapter)

Image from the German edition: Das Feuer des Heraklit (KLETT-COTTA, Vierte Auflage, 1988)

sternenkind

A MILLION NIGHTINGALES ARE SINGING

The Stars. Blue. Expanse.

Flaming song of stars!

A million nightingales are singing.

Springtide light is flashing.

Myriads of eyelashes are flaring up in quivers.

The green happiness of spring-night banquets

Commences its own rutting shine.

Balmy showers take their magic turn:

Millions of nightingales are singing.

Do I recognize a friendly ghost?

I will earnestly contend for it.

The sign wants to be carved into perceiving:

Who knows when my dream-life will be blazing?

Ghosts resemble our gentle animals,

They are fast to sense the nature of attraction.

They heave and hover and weave about

And keep us very gingerly under their spell.

I do not want to lose this light-swarming silence.

An old theurgy must stir here soon from gentleness.

Millions of nightingales are singing.

Kindred voices are urging us through the night.

It seems a moon is smoldering arcanely.

But the night she is too warm, so full of breathing pleasure!

Myriads of sparks fly as if in rut to seek each other.

They whirr back and forth and yet still as a part of spring.

The ghost of spring, the ghost of spring is prowling in the wood-lot!

The broad-leaved forest can wander and anticipate itself,

It sways and waltzes to all the old ways of transformation;

The night is laughing: Big Dipper's daring, Libra is keeping watch.

Here are flashing myriads of dance-besotted queries -

Millions of nightingales are singing.

Millionen Nachtigallen Schlagen

Translated from Theodor Däubler's DAS STERNENKIND.

For my Kirston, on this day, and for bringing his book to me.

An edition of Däubler's poems in letterpress available from us soon. 

every log that falls.

The successive thump of logs on the paving of the courtyards. They were unloaded from carts, house by house, as the cold weather loomed. The wood fell on the ground and announced winter. Baudelaire stayed awake. There was no need of anything else but that sound - dull, repetitive. The sun already knows that soon it will be imprisoned "in its polar inferno." It is as if auscultating labored breathing: "Trembling. I listen to every log that falls."

Anatole France, with the amiable skepticism that sometimes prevented him from understanding, recounted that one day a sailor showed Baudelaire an African fetish, "a monstrous little head carved out of a piece of wood by a poor negro." It's really ugly, said the sailor. And he threw it away in scorn. "Watch out!" said Baudelaire anxiously. "It might be the one true god!" It was his firmest declaration of faith.

The two last fragments from LA FOLIE BAUDELAIRE 

by Roberto Calasso

(Image: Félix Nadar - Charles Baudelaire au Fauteuil, 1855 - Paris, Musée d'Orsay)

last things.

the forsaken toys of others.

Your letter has drawn me from the solitude in which I had shut myself up for nearly nine months, and from which I found it hard to stir. You will not guess what I have been about. I will tell you for such things do not happen every day. I have been making a list of from two to three hundred radical words of the Russian language, and have had them translated into as many languages and jargons as I could find. Their number exceeds already the second hundred. Every day I took one of these words and wrote it out in all the languages which I could collect. This has taught me that Celtic is like the Ostiakian: that what means sky in one language means cloud, fog, vault, in others; that the word God in certain dialects means Good, the Highest, in others, sun or fire...I asked Professor Pallas to come to me, and after making an honest confession of my sin, we agreed to publish these collections, and thus make them useful to those who like to occupy themselves with the forsaken toys of others.

- Letter from Catherine the Great, dated 9 May 1785, from Curious Versions of Modernity, D.l. Martin, MIT Press 2011

Marcel Schwob: The Passive Adventurer.

Mayer André Marcel Schwob was born into a family of rabbis and doctors. The mother, Mathilde, was a Cahun, descendant of Caym de Sainte-Menehould, who had followed Joinville across the sea and — it is said — had, in the presence of the holy Jean de Acri, nursed and healed him from cholera. Through his mother's grandfather Anselm, Rabbi of the Jewish community Hochfelden, Schwob had inherited the wide brow, sensual mouth, and a half-sad smile in his eyes. Marcel had the pride of his clan and frequently preferred not to consort with some people of his race. Names, words, and legends were rushing through his brain. At three years of age he spoke German and English. There was a great silence in the house at Rue de I Eglise in Chaville. The mother tiptoed up the stairs, and even the Prussians, as they were stealing wine from the cellar, behaved very tenderly towards the all too precocious child, who was suffering from brain fever. During his sickness, while he was lying in bed with closed shutters, Marcel continued to set out on long journeys. He was somewhat rachitic and dreamed of swimming across the English Channel. Upon his arrival, there was Jules Verne, who embraced him. Another friend, with whom he had conversations as soon as he had scared off the German tutor, was Edgar Allan Poe. He put his little table in order, prepared his room for the encounter. He immersed himself in conversations with Edgar and Jules and, consequently, he despised his peers and their childlike stammering. His concentration was so great, that during these soliloquies he did not notice the hours that passed, nor the years. All of a sudden he was fifteen years old and devoured the Grammaire Comparee of Auguste Brachet. His uncle, Léon Cahun, author of the Vie Juive, became his protector and teacher. Who, incidentally, could be Schwob's teacher if not a Cahun. Conservator at the Bibliothèque Mazarine, he knew the histories of adventurers, of sailors and soldiers, he had traveled through Asia Minor, along the Euphrates. He knew very much, even in Uygur.

At the Lycée, Marcel met Georges Guieysse, a strange and melancholic classmate. They quickly became inseparable and worked together. Each of Marcel’s pages goes through Georges’ hands, and like a renaissance humanist Marcel writes him letters in Greek, with greetings in Arabic, or just a simple shake hands. Marcel confides in him that he is often incredibly tired, thoughts slip away, memory is gone. Why not go as kitchen boys to Australia or Canada? Regrettably, George had seemed absent for some time. When they saw each other, he left it to Marcel to invent itineraries, which they would have embarked upon eventually. He sat huddled in a corner and watched the scholar, prey to the spleen. On 7 May 1889 Georges Guieysse shot a bullet into his heart. He was twenty years old.

From then on Marcel resided in the sober and often empty halls and archives of the Bibliothèque Mazarine, where he unearthed documents about Villon and the Coquillards. He became a writer. One evening in autumn, when the rain is already cold, he encounters a little working girl of childlike intellect, Louise, and falls in love. She is thin, haggard from consumption, a poor little girl with chestnut colored hair and vague, mocking eyes, who writes letters to him in colored pencils. Marcel is delighted by the little silly things that Louise always tells him. For example: My Loulou, my hair has fallen out, cover your nails, which grow, and the little flakes of your skin, which are falling. I have a tummy ache. I have sown back the nose of my doll, now it is shorter and also thicker, and I forgot to leave holes for the nostrils. I will continue my silhouettes later, but I must have lost my scissors. Don’t forget to bring me another pair when you come, that you may help me perhaps. Pichciquinki.

The scholar had become addicted to playing. His pockets were filled with cotton, nails, and colorfully hemmed fabric. He spoke in falsetto with the publishers of magazines, whom he despised, and he smiled a lot. Meanwhile Marcel worriedly took care of the girl, for her condition was serious. The doctors were dismayed by Louise's surroundings, the little room without a breath of air, and only one small window that was always closed. Louise smoked one cigarette after another, cigars, Marcel’s pipe, and always drank coffee. Soon Louise was dead. After the burial the unhappy writer returns to the room, bedding all the dolls into a trunk, he takes them home. His friends watch over him, for as soon as Marcel is alone he becomes afraid of the dead one dying again. He sees her ghost laugh in the corners of the house. His tearful eyes keep suggesting new appearances. Marcel locks the scissors and the pocket knife into a little box and throws the nails and cotton scraps away. He becomes superstitious and longs for sleep. But sleep brings the echo of arrant laughter to him. Did the girl grow up in death, have the tomfooleries gone? The next morning, in the mirror, he finds that his hair has fallen out overnight, that his forehead has become wider still.

He becomes accustomed to morphine. These are moments of magnificent solitude. When the friends have left, he bolts the doors and windows, no sound gets through. They are the everlasting hours, eternity piled in layers in his room. Afterwards he became the great sheik of knowledge and of the grimoires, as Doctor J.C. Madrus called him, dedicating the fifteenth volume of his translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night to him. Madrus has a honey-sweet voice and his laughter makes Schwob lose his patience now and then. He was dressed in long coats with patched seams and dangling buttons, but the inside pockets were filled with gold. In the remarkable stories that Madrus was telling, tales of money kept recurring. Schwob soon preferred to restrain this friendship. He thought of writing Vies Imaginaires, of men that lived like dogs and holy women fooled by cunning monks, and those who curse themselves, yearning to fall lower still. This was the society that Schwob now mingled with. He noticed that he smiled when he read his lines: “Don’t embrace the dead, for they suffocate the living…the dead bring pestilence.” Schwob was already sick and knew that he would never get well again.

In a pavilion at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, Marcel saw a Chinaman named Ting, and he employed him. He resolved to set out for the places of Robert Louis Stevenson, “55 percent artist, 45 percent adventurer,” with whom he had corresponded. Schwob and Ting set sail on board the Ville de la Ciotat on course for the Australian sea. When he heard of Schwob's departure, Jules Renard, one of his acquaintances, noted: “He will live his stories before he dies.’ Greasy functionaries strolled upon the ship, colonial civil servants who kept entering into conversations, and a not very tidy family with four thickset daughters with heavy red braids and an albino son, who looked like a plump farm-girl, dressed like a man. The journey soon seemed much too long. In Colombo he beheld, fatigued, the Babel of religions. He watched caravans of men praying in a cave and saw the feast of the Tamils. Increasingly more tired, he was breathing laboriously, the warm wind covering him with dust, gnats tacked to his skin. The landscape often appeared ominous to him, Australia’s long beaches white as death, with shrubs that swayed like scalped hair. They call him tulapala, talk-man in Samoa, coercing him to tell them tales deep into the night. He shakes the hand of king Mataafa, who resembles Bismarck. Schwob did not see Stevenson’s grave, on top of Mount Vaea, between the flowers. He found not what he was seeking. A certain captain Crawshaw showed him postcards from Stevenson. In one of them he advises secrecy and digression, asking him to catch Wurmbrandt in Toga, and to bring him. Wurmbrandt was an Australian adventurer who appealed to Stevenson. This pilgrimage to the shadows of enchantment had come to nothing. What remained was a catalog of aimless wanderings. He had met whiny swindlers, who dragged themselves about, suggesting business, wrecks of charlatans, and wormy duplicates of the rogues and criminals who he had always been so familiar with. Thus offended by the crowd, he yearned for his room in Paris.

He locked himself up in the house to breathe in his return. Océanide, Vaililoa, Captain Crabbe were the titles of the books he would never write. And never did he want to leave again. He felt like a “vivisected dog.” Why don’t the dead return, to converse for half an hour with the invalids? His face changed color a little, became a golden mask. The eyes remained imperiously open. Nobody succeeded in closing them. The room reeked of mourning.



Translated by Herbert Pföstl from Isabel Matthes’ German version of Fleur Jaeggy’s essay - published in DER PFAHL I, Matthes & Seitz Verlag, 1987

Dedicated to my Kirston.
hp


Note:
Please see Minna Zallman Proctor's wonderful new translation of Jaeggy's Schwob essay in These Possible Lives, published by New Directions. 

https://www.ndbooks.com/book/these-possible-lives/

hp, April 2018

hermes

...der Heilige gibt den halben Mantel, die Gottheit den ganzen Schleier.

...the holy man gives half of his coat, divinity the whole veil.


- Franz Hessel, Ermunterung zum Genuss.
- Southern Netherlands, Reliquary of the Virgin's Veil, early 15th century, detail

thank you, woolgathersome, for bringing this image to me.
hp

a vagabond melancholy.

There on the pier, stabbed by an ice pick, the Empress Elizabeth, symbol of the oldest European monarchy, which must die at the villainous hand. The contemptible Lucheni raved about making noise and killing someone in the public eye. But it was really the enduring vagabond melancholy of Elizabeth Wittelsbach that, in the mysterious dialogue of souls, summoned the madman to Geneva from Piedmont and anointed him as her assassin. For that matter, even the Italian government was a Lucheni. (Perhaps in its death wish, Vienna itself summoned him.)

- Guido Ceronetti, The Silence of the Body