I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PANIC-Requiem for Martin Heidegger (1978).

Panic was a Dutch punk band.  Their album 13 came out in 1978 and “Requiem for Martin Heidegger” was the final track.  I love the album cover (and no I had never heard of this band either).

The lyrics are wonderfully simple (and no you won’t learn a thing about the man) with the completely singable chorus of “Hi-Degger, Hi-Degger, Hi-Degger, Hi-Degger, Hi!”

There are some other lyrics (including ein, zwei, drei, vier) and “Is he in heaven, is he in hell, where has he gone?  no one can tell.”

There’s some introductory chatter which I think is in German, but may be in Dutch.  But that’s all irrelevant, because this is three minutes of classic 70s punk.  And the video is a hoot too.

[READ: October 30, 2013] Wittgenstein’s Mistress p. 120-180

Although I read the first half of this book rather quickly, I took some time off before reading this section.  The good news is that this book does not require constant attention.  The bad news is that because there are so many details in the book (whether “relevant” or not) it’s easy to forget if she has talked about the different pieces before.  And that is kind of the point from her a well, since she constantly questions whether she has talked about something or not.

I’m breaking from my normal summary for a minute because I wanted to bring up something that struck me as I was reading this.  Several times throughout the book I found myself searching the web for ideas and facts that she mentions.  And it struck me that, while yes, in her world, the internet wouldn’t be working anyhow—there’s no electricity even—but she would not even have the concept of being able answer her questions with a few clicks.  This book wasn’t written that long ago, but when it was, the internet as we know it didn’t exist.  So our narrator does not know that she could have answered all of her questions in just seconds.  If this book was written now, it might even be seen as a “point” that the world no longer has such easy access to information.  But that is not an issue in this book.  Rather, our narrator simply knows that unless she is willing to dig through boxes or really wrack her brain to be able to remember where she found the information (and we know that’s not going to be successful), she simply won’t “know” what she knows.  And it’s interesting to imagine what it was like to read this book back in the 1980s without being able to quickly confirm  that indeed Wittgenstein said this or Heidegger said that or even that any of the artists she mentions really did what she says.   And I find that really fascinating.

Vaguely connected to this idea is her wondering about some details of the Savona soccer jerseys and then saying “One is scarcely about to return to Savona to check on this, however.” (122).

But on to the book itself.  One of things that I have enjoyed a lot about this book is her making statements and then undermining them.  Like this sequence:

Then again it may have been Vermeer who had eleven children.
Though possibly what I have in mind is that Vermeer left only twenty paintings.
Leonardo left fewer than that, perhaps only fifteen.
Not one of these figures may be correct (123).

And then a few lines later

“Actually Vermeer left forty paintings.”  [Wikipedia tells me that 34 have been attributed to him].

She has also been fascinated with Emily Brontë and her sex life.  So we get this amusing idea:

Emily Brontë was one more person who did not have children.
Well, doubtless it would have been extraordinarily interesting if Emily Brontë did, what with the considerable likelihood that she never even once had a lover (126).

I also enjoyed a section in which she discusses the familial relations between people:

Urilo’s father may have been Renoir.
Although he could just as well have been Degas (131).

Or

Willem de Kooning is descended from Rembrandt, one would have heard (136).

I really enjoyed when she talks about famous people greeting each other,

Good morning Rembrandt.  Good morning to you, Spinoza.
I was extremely sorry to hear about your bankruptcy, Rembrandt  I was extremely sorry to hear about your excommunication, Spinoza (142).

or later, when talking about St Theresa and St Jon of the Cross (whom she knows nothing about) and how if they may have met in a shop–“even if one doubts that either of the latter two would have been called Saint yet, naturally”…

Buenos dias, Saint Teresa or Buenos dias, John of the Cross, surely being a little clumsy for in a drugstore in either event

She also talks a lot about the successes of students of famous painters (and a reintroduction of Rembrandt’s students fooling him with painted coins on the floor):

Many more pupils than one had suspected may well become equally as famous as their teachers (137).

I also enjoyed the concept that you never hear if a famous baker was descended from another famous baker.

And then there’s a lengthy section about cats and her own cat that she had in Corinth, New York.

Perhaps I have not mentioned that my russet cat climbed into Willem de Kooning’s lap.
My russet cat once climbed into Willem de Kooning’s lap.
The cat did this on an afternoon when Willem de Kooning was visiting at my loft in SoHo.
I have forgotten the date of this visit, but I do believe it was not long after the afternoon on which Robert Rauschenberg had also visited… (135).

The cat also may have climbed into William Gaddis’ lap

What interested me most about the cat discussion though was what I took to be a kind of nod to Schrödinger’s Cat.  She never mentions it explicitly, which surprises me somewhat as I would have thought that would be right up her alley, but I felt like she alluded to it somewhat:

And surely one cannot be equidistant from something that does not exists, any more than something that does not exist can be equidistant from whatever it is supposed to be equidistant from either. …
It is easier to think about the cat as not existing than about Vincent as not doing so, incidentally (145).

A little later she has a lengthy section where she imagines people (and cats) in a room together.  De Kooning, Van Gogh, El Greco, Rembrandt–“things are actually getting cluttered, to tell the truth.” (150).  She also imagines Van Gogh painting a picture of broken bottle (called Broken Bottles).

Around this time she begins repeating somethings from earlier in the book–like that she read pages of a book and ripped them out and threw them into the fire and that she signed a mirror in lipstick.

And there is more discussion about historical women (she imagines she is Helen of Troy) and she also talks about Artemisia…

“So she was raped too, naturally.
At only fifteen” (159).

I’m curious about a feminist interpretation of this book.

The end of the section talks a lot about the books that she found in the basement.  First she talks about pulling a muscle in her shoulder when she moved the lawnmower that was in the way of the boxes.  There were eight or nine or eleven cartons full of damp books.  Most were in German (no less than seven by Heidegger).  She talks a bit about Dasein (I studied Heidegger, so I enjoyed this section), although two were in Spanish.  One was a translation of The Way of All Flesh (which she imagined was called The Way of All Meat) because of the word carne in the title.

“Naturally one would sincerely doubt that anybody one believed had already written one book called The Way of All Flesh would have then written another book called The Way of All Meat.

There was also a translation of Anna Karenina (which she was able to tell the title of even in another language).

Wittgenstein makes another appearance in this section with the statement that she once read that Wittgenstein “used to think so hard that you actually see him doing it (interestingly, she had earlier talked about the trouble of doing diacritics on the typewriter, but now there has been a few things in Italics–can you do italics on a typewriter?).  Oh and also that Wittgenstein had pet seagull when he lived near Galway bay.  She has some more details about him–he worked as  gardener in a monastery, and he inherited a great deal of money and then gave it away.  She concludes, “I believe I would have liked Wittgenstein” (175).

Then seemingly out of nowhere she starts talking about Lawrence of Arabia and Peter O’Toole.  And then later Marlon Brando.  This brush with reasonably current pop culture LoA came out in 1962) stands out quite a bit.

But she is soon back to classics.  And this third portion ends.

I have no real expectations for the ending of the book.  I have seen enough “no spoilers” not to expect anything like a sudden plot appearance, but I’m still very curious if it will end in any definitive way or if we will learn anything about what “happened” to her.  I’m looking forward to it.

For ease of searching, I include: Schrodinger’s Cat, Emily Bronte.