Jacob Smullyan, Part TwoSo many of [my students] made the same errors,” wrote Delmore Schwartz, “that, in a way, they were no longer errors. Moreover, the longer I thought about some of the errors, the more they seemed to be possible enlargements of meaning and association which might be creative”: “error’s fecundity.”
On today’s show poet/editor/musician Jacob Smullyan returns to regale us with tales from his sumptuously entertaining, mercurially metaphysical, highly questionable, entirely (or partially?) erroneous book, Errata. Felix Culpa!—or is that the author of another book?
This is # XXVI:
S was not accustomed to the ground, to being close to it. He did not kneel, on cushions or otherwise; he did not squat. He sat properly, on chairs, and stood and was perhaps not very bendable. The part of himself he was concerned with was the upper part, and the lower supporting structure was a distant affair. The ground was something dirty, to be avoided at all costs. Only in extremis, in the case of severe illness, say, would he and the ground approach one another, as when stricken by poisoned food he crouched in agony by a filthy toilet, or passed out from a wound.
For S to kneel in his room, alone, then, his head to the dusty floor, his knees aching, was therefore not a matter of exercise.
And this is # XXVII. Italian Concerto
A brief, unforgettable, unbearable moment, just before the final phrases: the imaginary soloist’s plaintive melos attains an ecstatic depth, its forlorn pain and poignant isolation absolute, unreachable. The catharsis of the sublime, we are told by Aristotlean tradition, is tied up with falsity—tragedy is a killed virus that enables us to process pain and safely overcome it. This aspect is undeniable. Yet the coin has another side—the virus of the tragic would mean nothing if it did not only uproot but embody the truth. And the paradox of tragedy ultimately is greater than any pat resolution where layers of representation are kept separate, unlike in reality. For in tragedy, we feel genuine pain and despair, and also joy. When Bach wrote these notes, in faith, he was not pretending or merely employing an ingenious psychological artifice—he shared his heart, which genuinely felt the deepest pain and despair—and also, not orthogonally, the deepest joy. These are not separate.
Jack Foley writes this about Delmore Schwartz: “Again and again he returns us to a place he calls ‘the new world’; to a person who is at once innocent and guilty, ‘wrong’ and ‘right’; to the realm of the ‘true-blue American’ who is also (and necessarily) the ‘would-be Hungarian’; to the whirl-a-gig of exile and home.” Such considerations apply as well to the work of Jacob Smullyan.
The image included here is Smullyan’s self portrait from 1986.
Part Two of Two.