oli-olio

God creates the sun and the moon.
Sistine Chapel (unretouched).

January 27, 2015

In the beginning, Miss Lonelyhearts . . .

 

One more from Jack’s two-filing-cabinet olio commentary. I knew I’d find a reference to Nathanael West if I began looking. I should add that there in his two-room apartment was besides desk (full of mechanical pencils) and chair, a mattress and two lamps, a television though hooked up to nothing but a dusty VCR.

This comes from his thick Genesis 1 folder.  The section in question begins, “As usual von Rad is extremely helpful” – and Jack types this (from von Rad on Genesis) out:          

  

There has been an increasing disinclination to interpret the concepts contained in v. 2 in terms of the mythological conceptions of tx hx ex neighboring religions.  The Hebrew word for “priveval flood” 9x (t’h­ôm)probably has a linguistic affinity with Tiamat, the Babylonian dragon of chaos.  A more direxct connection, amounting to a “borrowing” cannot be assumed.  Nor can it BE ASSUMED THAT THE Hebrew bôhu goes back to the Phoenician mother goddess Baau. Bôhû is a noun (always connected with tôhû) which means emptiness desolation. Tôhû is connected more with the concept of the wilderness or even with the wilderness itself . . . .  So it is inappropriate to suppose, as has long been the  case that P had to resort to strange and semi-mythical conceptions to elucidex ate the primal state of chaos.  The conceptions used  in v. 2 are cosmological keywords which were the indispensible requisites of Priestly learning.  The relationship of Gen. l to Babylonian mythology now looks quite different from the way it did to the “Babel-Bibel” conflict at the beginning of the century.

     A comparison with the Ras Shamra mythology leads to essentially the same result.

    That is no result at all for anyone not Teutonic and anal.

The handwriting resumes:

So last night I decided to watch Lonelyhearts, the 1958 movie based on the play based on Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, sort of.  West must have been spinning in his suicide’s grave.

     But some of his words – and images – manage to make it to the screen, including the sad letter of the girl born without a nose, which, it struck me so I had to stop the tape, is a reference to the Gogol story: did I never see this before in the eight or ten times I read the novel?

     The story has one of the most delicious beginnings imaginable: the barber Ivan Yakovlevich whose last name has been lost, his wife fond of coffee taking fresh rolls out of the oven and Ivan Yakovlevich’s asking for a roll but no coffee not to put her nose out of joint; his putting on his frock coat over his nightshirt to sit at table; his cutting the roll in two and finding “something whitish” in the middle of it, which he pokes at first with his knife, then with his finger; finally his thrusting two fingers into the roll and pulling the “something whitish out.”  Says Gogol: “It was a nose.”

     Maybe a better beginning than Genesis.  That one man’s nose can go missing and turn up in another man’s breakfast roll, be tossed into the Neva, be seen in uniform, apprehended by the police, returned, and refuse to be stuck back in place tells how little control we have over anything.  The order Yahweh has made out of chaos is a rumor.  An illusion as in that chapter in Miss Lonelyhearts, when . . . .

     It’s “Miss Lonelyhearts and the Dismal Swamp” (one of only two natural lakes in Virginia, incidentally).  Having been dragged into bed and dragged back to bed by Fay Doyle, Miss Lonelyhearts falls sick.  For two days he sleeps; but “on the third day [underline!] his imagination began to work.

     “He found himself in the window of a pawnshop full of fur coats, diamond rings, watches, shotguns, fishing tackle, mandolins.  All these things were the paraphernalia of suffering.  A tortured highlight twisted on the blade of a gilt knife, a battered horn grunted w/ pain.

     “He sat in the window thinking.  Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another.  Mandolins are tuned GDAE.  The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy.  Man against Nature . . . the battle of the centuries.  Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune.  Every order.  Every order has w/i it the germ of destruction.  All order is doomed, yet the battle is worthwhile.”

      And he enters the fray in a mock-epic fugue state: “A trumpet, marked to sell for $2.49, gave a call to battle & Miss L – plunged into the fray.  First, he formed a phallos of old watches & rubber boots, then a heart of umbrellas & trout flies, then a diamond of musical instruments and derby hats, after these a circle, triangle, square, swastika.  But nothing proved definitive & he began to make a giant cross.  When the cross became too long for the pawnshop, he moved it to the shore of the ocean.  There every wave added to his stock faster than he could lengthen its arms.  His labors were enormous.  He staggered from the last wave line to his work, loaded down w/ marine refuse – bottles, shells, chunks of cork, fish heads, pieces of net.

     “Drunk with exhaustion, he finally fell asleep.”  Poor sap.

     When he awakes, he’ll find Betty there, putting his room in order, but Shrike will arrive soon after to take every dream (and every order) apart.  Or, it (they) will fall apart under his “hands,” his barrage of words.

     No center can hold for more than a beat or two.  Things will fall apart whatever the God of the universe intended.

     Tell me that’s not the case!  In the beginning the Word and the Word with God and everything getting made - then, before it’s properly out of the oven, falling into black-out.

ב

A photocopy of Jack’s actual notes is here.