books read so far in 2021

 

“Always be reading something, he said. Even when we’re not physically reading. How else will we read the world?” - from “Autumn” by Ali Smith

books read (so far) in 2021:

”The Snow Queen“ by Michael Cunningham:

A New York tale about 2 brothers, one gay, one straight and the straight brother's girlfriend who live together in a shabby apartment. The girl is dying of cancer, the gay guy one night, on a walk through the park, sees a strange light and miraculously the girl recovers afterwards, but only for a short time. I did like the book, although it really was nothing out of the ordinary. A bit melancholic, a Big Town Tale.

“Mansfield Park” by Jane Austen:

Better than I thought, but I didn’t like the ending: far too straight, too moral, too puritanical. After all the trials and tribulations and heart-rendings they all go back to what society deems right and each one gets his deserved reward and “Cinderella” her prince. All a bit disappointing.

“The Eye” by Vladimir Nabokov:

Short and amusing.

“Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov:

Great, amusing, good style, beautiful phrases, loved it (and it was long due). 

“The Neapolitan Novels“ by Elena Ferrante:

The saga comprises all the four books (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Story of the Lost Child) and I loved them all. A great epic and a wonderful tale. One of the best books this year. Ferrante really is a good teller of tales.

“The Sympathizer“ by Viet Thanh Nguyen:

Another very good book. The underlying theme is the estrangement, the feeling of never really belonging, of a Vietnamese American. It is an unexpectedly strange book, part spy novel, part historical recounting of the Vietnam war. Very strong, brutal, psychological, philosophical. I loved it.

“The Unicorn“ by Iris Murdoch:

I have made it my task to read all the books by Iris Murdoch. This one, although praised as one of her better ones, did disappoint me, though. Too gothic, too weird without really touching on relevant themes. A time-waster. I have read much, so much better by her, i.e. The Bell, The Dark Prince, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, The Philosopher’s Pupil, The Book and the Brotherhood. 

“Detransition Baby“ by Torrey Peters:

Another surprise book. Written by a trans woman it functioned as mind opener to the problems, thoughts and general difficulties of trans people. The book, the story itself, centers around three persons, one pregnant, biological woman, her boyfriend who impregnated her but is a guy who transitioned to woman and detransitioned back to man, and the former girlfriend of the guy, another trans woman, who all want to raise the baby together. So the book is also much about what motherhood means in our strange times. I really liked it.

“The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet“ by Becky Chambers:

I felt the need to something just “entertaining and light“ and found this little Science Fiction novel. A light read with a funny crew of mixed species (one a polyamorous reptile). What I liked was the overall optimistic tone. It is Book One of the so called Wayfarer Series, I started the second book, but then it turned out to be too much and began to bore me.

“Annihilation“ - Southern Reach Trilogy No. 1 by Jeff VanderMeer:

Another Science Fiction, but this time of the heavy, weird, strange, mysterious, sort. An expedition of 4 women to a strange Area X turns to disaster for everyone, strange encounters and slow take-overs by a weird alien life form. The book is mesmerizing and gripping, one gets drawn into the story, there is a definite build up of tension. The only disappointment was, that it doesn’t give you answers at the end, to get those you would have to read part 2 and 3. But I liked the sinister psychology.

“When We Cease to Understand the World“ by Benjamin Labatut:

A spanish author, the book is on the shortlist for the Booker International Prize 2021. I loved it. It is mainly a recounting of scientific breakthroughs in the last century, like dynamite, warfare, cyanide, mathematical findings, or the findings of Heissenberg and Schrödinger in quantum physics. So you get a bit of insight into the science and how everything came about but also a lot about the people, the scientists, their psychological dramas, obsessions, diseases, psychosis and tribulations. To me an insightful, fast, interesting and rewarding read. The overall tone throws an unfavourable light, though on how science really can be good for humankind in the greater picture.

“The Gathering“ by Anne Enright:

Irish author, whom I wanted to read for quite some time now. This book won the Booker Prize in 2007. It is the story of a woman narrating the story of her family, mainly her relationship to her dearly loved brother, 1 year older, who met an untimely death. It is quite sad and full of negative feelings towards her family, her estranged husband and is, in general an outlook onto the world from the perspective of a middle aged woman, seemingly disappointed from life. Very Irish, all this suffering. Not really one of my favourites. 

“Snow” by John Banville:

An unusual Banville, but a good one. In the disguise of a detective story, and making use and enjoying all of the genre’s possibilities, Banville tells of the mysterious murder of a catholic priest, played out in the restricted, puritanical, bigot, times of Ireland in the 50s and touches on failures in the ethics of these times, of the church and society. A light read, a heavy topic, good prose, a gripping tale and an accusing finger in the wound of how we dealt and let be dealt with society’s weakest: the children.

“The Plot“ by Jean Hanff Korelitz:

I fell to the hype. My bad!

Although at the beginning a promising read (because of insights into the world of writing, struggling and publishing), it soon turned to be a disappointing while, admittedly suspenseful time-waster. Quickly forgotten. 

“Real Life“ by Brandon Taylor:

While a bit slow in getting into gear the book soon develops surprisingly into an interesting, very sensitive, insightful and warm, intimate emotional portrait of an introverted young man in Alabama, queer and black, overcoming his traumatic childhood, slowly exploring and coming to terms with his feelings of inferiority. He finally starts to start his life and resolves to alter his self-protecting social distancing. All this is set in motion on a weekend of finding unexpected, troubling and confusing love.

Warm, sometimes violent, often baffling, but tender and very touching.

“Autumn” by Ali Smith:

The first of four seasonal works, a real revelation. Artistically woven, contemporary. It was on my list for years and I’m happy I finally found the time. I think it an amazingly artistic achievement, cinematic, contemporary, witty, colorful, imaginative, full of little stories and strung together by insightful musings about the absurdities of life, the meaning of it all, of age, of love, of friendship and generally, of living. 

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Relational Mirroring

Relational Mirroring

The world, so quantum physics tells us, is fundamentally made up of relations and events rather than permanent substances, it is better understood as a web of interactions and relations rather than objects. It, the world, and everything in it, really only exists because it is defined by the interactions and relations which everything has with everything else. Without these relations and interactions everything or anything would not exist because it would not have an effect. If something does not have an effect it can safely be regarded as non-existent. There is nothing that exists in itself, independently from anything else.

This is not only true of the, admittedly enigmatic world of quantum physics, it also holds true in our everyday life and the relations we humans have with each other. We only feel that we are truly living if we see us mirrored in the eyes of someone else, that is, to be recognized, to be noted, to be having an effect. Humans, being social herd animals, long to be recognized and mirrored by the herd, their fellow animals and even being falsely mirrored and only fragmentally pictured seems to be better than not being seen at all, of not having an effect. If one has no effect on anyone or anything, one might just as well not exist. We only truly live in a relational web, in a never-ending game of mirrors. 

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Memory and The Suspension of Disbelief

Memory and The Suspension of Disbelief:

I am what I am. And this is mainly due to what I remember.

Remembrance, memory, is the main ingredient that gives my life continuity and perspective. Memory provides the glue to bind together all the myriads of fragments of the millions of moments in my life that otherwise I would not be able to comprehend as a continuum. 

Out of this mosaic I construct a coherent picture of myself and my life. Naturally the picture that is thus painted is singular and individual and may not even be true, but it serves as the picture, my picture, of myself, of what I am and of how I see myself in the context of my surroundings.

Memory functions as my own individual little time machine that enables me to become aware of my personal history, my joys and sorrows, my successes and failures that all combine to form that what is Me.

This story of Me can only be fully enjoyed, though, if I adopt the attitude of a theatergoer, a reader of tales or watcher of films, the attitude all storytellers rely on: For the duration of the show, suspend all disbelief.

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Variation

Variation

Staying at home, 

reflecting on the diversity of life, 

on bacterial infection of the knees, 

on ghostly ghosting images of metamorphosing half-beings, 

marveling in repetition and variation, 

delighting in encounters of transitional images of reflections of self and others, 

erupting in creational scribbling bursts of endlessly repetitive circumscriptions of flowers. 

There is never the thing but the version of the thing. 

There is always only a fragment of a fragment of a fragment. 

There is variation. 

There is life.

 Robert Faeth

Variation:

Thing 1 and Thing 2 are similar but not the same. 

Thing 1 has at least one property that is different from Thing 2.

A variation is a different form of something, a variant, a transformation of the melody or theme and in series of variations diversity, development and evolution, thus maintenance of life, is made possible.

It seems that whether or not variation would exist in reality is fundamental. 

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My flowers are reflected In your mind - poem

 

My flowers are reflected

In your mind

As you are reflected in your glass.

When you look at them,

There is nothing in your mind

Except the reflections

Of my flowers.

But when I look at them

I see only the reflections

In your mind,

And not my flowers. 

...

from ‘The Florist Wears Knee-Breeches’, Wallace Stevens’ (1879-1955):

                                                                              https://robertfaeth.de/_Congrat-2018-19

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“Blue Hour” - musings on the colour blue

 

“Blue Hour” - musings on the colour blue:

In this, our world, blue is not such a common color. In fact it is a rare one. Yes, the sky, should it be free of gray clouds, is blue and then it is an overwhelming sight. And yes, so are waters, rivers, oceans when the blue sky is reflected in them. But as a naturally occurring pigment it is rare. In consequence only a small portion of plants bloom in blue and only a small number of animals use blue as their distinctive coat color. They all have to revert to tricks of chemistry or physics of light (structural, reflecting, refracting, light-bending surface of butterfly wings for example) to achieve this special blue look in the eye of the beholder.

Apart from means of appearance for us humans the color blue has developed, as did other colors, a very specific transcendental meaning. 

Blue is both invigorating and soothing. It harmonizes, it is symbol of the invisible, it delights and makes us happy with its richness and manifold nuances. Blue is a metaphor for expanding our boundaries. It gives wings to our spirit and it makes the soul loose itself in reverie. It is a color closely related to the feeling of longing and sorrow, of dreams, melancholy and magic. Blue is the color of contemplation, the color of internalization. 

The color blue even enters the realm of time in the Blue Hour, Die Blaue Stunde, a very fine hour, an intake of breath, a time, a small break between day and night, an exceptional condition in the everyday banality. It is an hour of secrets and enchantments, a time where borders begin to blur.

Blue is a mirror of the mysterious dephts and infinite distances… the color of the outmost locations and of the last straight lines which are closed to life…“ (Ernst Jünger in „Das abenteuerliche Herz“, The Adventurous Heart)

“We love to contemplate blue“ said Goethe, “not because it advances to us but it draws us after it“.

Goethe was just one of so many others who fell under the spell of this very specific light-wavelength of 435 Nanometers, which our visual senses interpret as BLUE.

Countless painters have payed homage to the color blue. There is the Chagall-blue which we often see in glass stained windows, there is the blue period of Picasso, there is the German expressionistic artist group Der blaue Reiter, there is the painting of Kandinsky which gave name to that group. Kandinsky praises blue as a heavenly color. French artist Yves Klein created a blue which hence is called Yves Klein-blue. 

Derek Jarman, in his last film “Blue“, already the mark of death on him, said that blue “is always hope“.

Blue plays an important role in religion, it symbolizes heaven, the all-embracing and protecting sky. The cloak of Mother Mary, the Madonna, the queen of the skies, is blue. So is the coat of Odin, German god of storms and wars. Blue is the color of godly might, not only in Christianity but long before that for example, in the Egypt of the Pharaohs.

There are gems which play an important role in the rich symbolism of blue, mainly lapiz lazuli or the blue saphire which are cherished in many cultures for their medicinal and healing powers.

I myself am a huge fan of the cerulean. Blue is the color of the sky as we imagine it when we hear or speak the word “Sky“. Blue has this quality of inducing contemplation and the more intense the color gets the more it awakens in us this longing for pureness and -maybe- even transcendency.

Blue, more than any other color, is the color of the artist, the poet, the musician, the thinker and philosopher.

So, for today here are some blue snippets and pieces I happened to find, all concerning, dealing with, telling of, this strange indefinable elusive blue feeling we get when Blue enters our vision:

Hans Arp (1886-1966), important French-German artist of the twentieth-century avant garde, a pioneer of abstract art, in an excerpt from one of his famous poems, „Singendes Blau“ (Singing Blue): 

Es klingt

es rauscht
es hallt 

es widerhallt
es sprüht
es duftet
und wird andächtig singendes Blau.

das Blau verblüht zu Licht.

        

It rings
it swooshes
it reverberates
it echoes
it sprays
it scents
and becomes devoutly singing Blue.

The Blue withers to light.

Novalis (1772-1801), German poet and philosopher, important voice of the German romantic movement, created the image of „Die Blaue Blume“, a magic, rare blue flower and thus gave an embodiment to the movement. Romanticism for Novalis was not a sentimental, nebulous, kitschy sentiment but a romanticised poetic longing for a world in which everything is a continuum of interacting connectedness and a means of understanding the world in its totality by connecting seemingly disparate opposites in the process of romanticising, the common with the extraordinary, the limited with infinity. “The world has to be romanticised, only then one re-discovers the original sense of it. Romanticising is nothing but a qualitative potentialisation.“

“… The youth lay restless on his bed and remembered the tale of the stranger. Not the riches have woken this insatiable longing in me, he said to himself, all this greed is far from my mind, but the Blue Flower I long to see. (Die Blaue Blume sehn’ ich mich zu erblicken…). It incessantly stays in my mind and I cannot think and write poems anymore“. (Novalis, „Heinrich von Ofterdingen“)

Paul Claudel (1868-1955), French poet and writer, picks up this image in his poem “The Delphinium":

… The big blue flower says: Have I not 

succeeded in bringing

from the depth of the blackest sapphire 

this fire purer than snow? …

Georg Trakl (1887-1914), Austrian expressionist poet, writes in his poem „Kindheit“ (Youth):

... Und in heiliger Bläue läuten leuchtende Schritte fort.

I wish to be able to convey this wonderful phrase to readers who are not familiar with the German language, but I cannot. There is such a grand melody in it. A rough translation would be: “And in holy Blue luminous steps chime away…“

Elke Laske-Schüler (1869-1945), German-Jewish poet, in one of her texts, about the color blue:

… one has to look for it, it blooms preferentially inside the human being. And he who has found it, still delicate and fragile, a blue amazement, an ecstatic looking up, shall care for his heavenly flower.

Gottfried Benn (1886-1956), German doctor, essayist and poet, in his poem „Die Blaue Stunde“ (The Blue Hour):

… Ich trete in die dunkelblaue Stunde -

da ist der Flur, die Kette schließt sich zu

und nun im Raum ein rot auf einem Munde

und eine Schale später Rosen - Du! …

… Du bist so weich, du gibst von etwas Kunde,

von einem Glück aus Sinken und Gefahr

in einer blauen, dunkelblauen Stunde

und wenn sie ging, weiß keiner, ob sie war.  …

… I enter in this dark blue hour -

there is the hall, the chain closes

and now in the room a red on a mouth

and a bowl of late roses - You! - …

… You are so soft, you tell of something,

of a bliss derived of sinking and of danger

in a blue, a dark blue hour

and when it is gone no one knows if it was …

Maria Müller-Gögler (1900-1987), German poet and teacher, in her poem „Blaue Stunde“:

Abends, wenn die Ufer blauen,

goldumsäumt auf silbergrauen

Fluten ferne Segel gehn,

aus den offnen Fenstern Frauen

von den schweren, sommerlauen

Lüften weich umschmeichelt spähn,

schwankend zwischen Wunsch und Grauen

in die fremde Ferne schauen,

bleibt die Zeit verwunschen stehn,

bis im Schwarzen alle grauen,

silberzarten, zauberblauen,

süßen Töne untergehn.

In the evening, when the shores turn blue,

and on silver grey floods bordered in gold 

far away sails go,

out of open windows women,

softly caressed by weighty airs of summer balm

peer out into the wide distance,

looking, wavering between wish and horror,

into the foreign distance,

then time stands enchantedly still

until inside the black all grey,

silver soft, magic blue,

sweet tunes vanish.

And as an ending line a poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger (*1929), German author, writer, essayist, poet, publisher and translator):

Die Visite

Als ich aufsah von meinem leeren Blatt,

stand der Engel im Zimmer.

Ein ganz gemeiner Engel,

vermutlich unterste Charge.

Sie können sich gar nicht vorstellen,

sagte er, wie entbehrlich Sie sind.

Eine einzige unter fünfzehntausend Schattierungen

der Farbe Blau, sagte er,

fällt mehr ins Gewicht der Welt

als alles, was Sie tun oder lassen,

Ich sah es an seinen hellen Augen, er hoffte

auf Widerspruch, auf ein langes Ringen.

Ich rührte mich nicht. Ich wartete,

bis er verschwunden war, schweigend.

The Visitation

When I looked up from my empty page,

there stood an angel in the room.

A most common angel,

probably undermost batch.

You can’t imagine,

said he, how dispensable you are.

A single one amongst the fifteen thousand shadings 

of the color blue, he said,

matters more in the weight of the world

as all what you could ever do or not do,

I saw it in his light eyes, he hoped

for contradiction, for a long struggle.

I did not move. I waited, silently,

until he had vanished.

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‘Waves’ - poem

 

Waves

I am glad you stayed with me. 

When I sit at the seaside and watch the waves 

it is beautiful. 

And when it rains and I have to sit on the terrace to watch the waves 

it is beautiful in a different way. 

Life is beautiful and living is an enormous thing. 

Dying is nothing. 

Living is the harder part and far more sensual.

                      

 Robert Faeth

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‘A Mind of Winter’ - poem

 

One must have a mind of winter...

... and not to think 

Of any misery in the sound of the wind, 

In the sound of a few leaves, 

Which is the sound of the land 

Full of the same wind 

That is blowing in the same bare place 

For the listener, who listens in the snow, 

And, nothing himself, beholds 

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

excerpt from “The Snowman”, Wallace Stevens, (1879-1955)

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... when to be and delight to be seemed to be one ...

When to be and delight to be seemed to be one:

A quote from Leonardo da Vinci and excerpts from poems by Wallace Stevens:

Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.

 Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519)

... The partaker partakes of that which changes him. 

The child that touches takes character from the thing, 

The body, it touches. 

The captain and his men 

Are one and the sailor and the sea are one. ...

 out of “It Must Change" by Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955)

... But he remembered the time when he stood alone, 

When to be and delight to be seemed to be one, 

Before the colors deepened and grew small. ...

out of “ANGLAIS MORT À FLORENCE" by Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955)

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It is never the thing but the version of the thing

 

 

Dry Birds Are Fluttering in Blue Leaves

It is never the thing but the version of the thing: 

The fragrance of the woman not her self, 

Her self in her manner not the solid block, 

The day in its color not perpending time, 

Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord, 

The weather in words and words in sounds of sound. 

These devastations are the divertissements 

Of a destroying spiritual that digs-a-dog, 

Whines in its hole for puppies to come see, 

Springs outward, being large, and, in the dust, 

Being small, inscribes ferocious alphabets, 

Flies like a bat expanding as it flies, 

Until its wings bear off night’s middle witch; 

And yet remains the same, the beast of light, 

Groaning in half-exploited gutturals 

The need of its element, the final need 

Of final access to its element— 

Of access like the page of a wiggy book, 

Touched suddenly by the universal flare 

For a moment, a moment in which we read and repeat 

The eloquences of light’s faculties.          

                                                                                    

 Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955

Only as a child we live through moments of true revelation, true originality, true first times. This is the time when we discover the world and for a while everything we experience is new, astounding, surprising, exciting and truly baffling.

Then, as time moves on and we get older and more used to this strange world we have been thrown into, things start to repeat themselves. We discover patterns, we create categories and pigeon-holes, we sample, classify and structure and weave out of this complexity a cloth of understanding in order to make this world comprehendible and endurable. Out of new, possibly frightening things we create less frightening, easily recognizable and manageable patterns.

This is the time when the world for most begins to loose its magic. Only a few preserve a childish sense of wonder. But if you do this, then the world never stops to surprise and everything, a flower, a landscape, an object, is not just something which falls under the category flower, landscape or object but is an individual manifestation out of the great variety of flowers, landscapes and objects.

The world is a conglomeration, a cumulation of varieties. There might not be such a difference between two flowers on a meadow but if you look closer there is all the difference. And most of times the difference lies within yourself. It is you who makes one flower differ from the other because you allow it to differ, you allow it to become an individual and not a category.

“It is never the thing but the version of the thing.“

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‘Transition’ - poem

Transition

I am in transition.

I am aside. 

I am not at the heart of things anymore.

I am not in life.

In summer I shall feel again.

In summer I shall feel what is good.

In summer I shall feel what is beautiful.

In summer I shall feel.

Over time everything is slowing down, 

even oblivion.

Robert Faeth

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I Wonder If My Ghosts Would Have Known

I Wonder If My Ghosts Would Have Known:

In everyone’s life there are moments when one holds still, as if suddenly being aware and listening to whispers of the past which seem to ask: Is this what you wanted when you set out, when you decided to go along a path which then let you, inexorably, to exactly what and where you are now. Is this what you then dreamed of, what you desired to become?

And I dare say that probably for most of us the answer is no. It certainly is so in my case. I certainly had different plans, different ideas, different concepts even of what life in general and my life should be.

Am I in any way disappointed, in life, in myself, in fate? The answer is a clear and strong: No!

Yes, not everything worked out the way I would have wanted it to. There have been failures, there have been misunderstandings, there have been losses and gains, there have been dramas, there have been grievances, joys, frriendships, encounters, memories. And in the end it all sums up to: There had been a lot to learn on this way. 

And this is the real gain: The gift of learning and understanding.

My life, my art, all it ever was is an endless lesson. It never stopped, not then, not now.

Sometimes I no longer feel like an artist, I even have the feeling that this is a thing of the past. I was never the artist anyway, someone who makes art to make a difference, someone who points out socio-political grievances, for example, an active, socially active member of society. A lot of what I do is nice to look at, it has, in terms of formal aesthetics, a good composition structure, but it has no social relevance, not even an innovative character. I still use the form and colour vocabulary of the last two centuries and only have a rudimentary philosophy about life and what art should and could say about it.

But I enjoy the formal aesthetic, I like the beautiful. It brings structure and a frame into the surrounding chaos, small islands of happiness, often short-lived, often diffuse, flickering.

What brings me comfort is that I have been lucky enough to experience and recognize beautiful things in life, I know what beauty is, I know the Good exists.

I have been given the gift to share a small portion in the wonder of the fundamental fact of artistic creation: The putting in place of something where otherwise there would be nothing. I have not been an artist for many, the transformative effect of my art has not worked for many, sometimes only just for myself. I have been my own artist, my own transformative power. Sometimes that is enough.

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