It occurs to me that even when I'm fiercely immersed in something –
hmm, when am I ever that? – I can't think even of a remote example:
okay, let's say, when I opine about Henry James' 'late' writing, and try
to explain what I love about its aural effects, I suppose I look for easy
and pleasurable ways to reinforce or, en passant, add
credence to a claim,
but all these observations are made in passing. What they
serve is a poetic
.
intent: to fashion a clarion call, not not to "make
a point" (indeed I’m
almost only ever talking about One Thing), but to have it arise out
of whatever is engagingly at hand. If I find myself suddenly thinking up
an argument with a more scholarly scent (I suppose that's happened here
and there), like a flash itch to see something in terms of what I
understand
to be semiotics – I play fast and loose with that, too: the aim is never
.
consciously to define anything, but rather give a visceral take on the
sort
of minute limited breath of a thing that tends to interest me. I love
playing
just a few notes. Example: choose any two contiguous sentences James
wrote
after 1910 – like this, from a letter to his niece Peggy: “I glory in the piling
up of complications of every sort. If I could
pronounce the name James
in any different or more elaborate way I should
be in favor of doing it.”
.
It’s perfect, personal and completely James. A kiss and a handshake.
I am driven by whim to find and settle on whatever caters to the whim.
But when the whim arises out of an immersion as odd and wide and full
of suggestion as mine is in Henry James, it will be a whim with a
built-in
mission – certainly to underscore my view of the 'whole' – that is my
overall
feeling called up by reflecting on something – someone – I love.
Everything
.
I write, like each photo I take of New York, amounts to a love letter.
But
as with anyone I love, I really do welcome departures – upsets –
incursions
of something unexpected. With whatever or whomever you love, you always
want, I think, more truth. So it's not a masturbatory return to a fond
fantasy.
The thing you return to is alive, not dead, and you seek in it and bring
to it
evidence of the quirk, the unforeseen, the untoward kick & slap.
Actually,
.
James' language gives this to me all the time. It's not some dreamy sea
of cadence; it constantly surprises; at its best it follows the mind so
closely
that it recreates it. I find simply by charting my reactions to it, I
establish
as much of a relation with it as I can imagine having. Not that it may
not
rivet me to learn the facts about the Dreyfus Affair or Belgian soldiers
in the Great War, but they will be the ushers at the wedding.
.
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