A serendipitous find in the library.....
or how I found Alfred Kubin's THE OTHER SIDE
I was in Bierce, the Libary at the University of Akron. I was wandering around the Meyerink/ CALVINO area in the Ps.
There was a book that caught my eye, THE OTHER SIDE. One of those truely generic sounding titles, but with a publisher NOT TO MATCH: DEDALUS. a temptation to read the blurbs . . . further curiosity..... reading.......
A bit of research indicated it was the Kubin's (a full time artist) only novel. He wrote it while depressed (how could I go wrong?), too depressed to draw. The year was 1908, he was a friend of Kafka. Kubin illustrated it as well.
I am not yet finished, but its a wonderful piece of creative fiction. ATMOSPHERIC, it is the definition of an atmospheric novel. BLEAK then BLEAKER...... the 'universal' for Bleak . . .
Its a dark brooding tale, mythical places, grotesques ( a swordsman with scars on each cheek that gave him the appearance of having 3 mouths....), ideas ('In death the subject becomes a diagonal between time and space.') . . .
from an erudite surrogate:
http://www.babelguides.com/view/work/9070
or: http://www.alfred-kubin.com/Kubin-Werke1.html for some art.... or a video:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3lkl3_expo-alfred-kubin-18771959_news
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The book is both out of print, and costly to buy (I am severly tempted to own a copy). And I may put it in my librarything.com list, as read, but in comments 'procurement pending.'
an excerpt, and the art to go with it:
From: THE OTHER SIDE by Akfred Kubin, 2000 Dedalus European Classics, 2000. pp 137-139.
III: The Confusion of the Dream
That night I went to sleep with
momentous thoughts in my mind. Rather less momentous was the dream I had, but it
was so strange I feel I must recount it here. I saw myself standing by the great
river, looking across longingly at the Outer Settlement, which appeared more
extensive and picturesque than it was in reality. As far as the eye could see
was a confusion of bridges, towers, windmills, jagged peaks, all
interspersed and interconnected, as in a mirage. Large and small, fat and
thin figures were moving around in the chaos. As I looked across, I could sense
the miller standing behind my back. 'I killed him', he whispered and tried to
push me into the water. To my astonishment my left leg lengthened until I could
step into the seething throng on the other side with no trouble at all. Now I
heard ticking all round me and saw a large number of flat clocks of all sizes,
from a clock for a tower, to a kitchen clock and right down to the tiniest
pocket-watch. They had short, stumpy legs and were crawling all over each other
in the meadow like tortoises, ticking excitedly. A man dressed in soft green
leather and wearing a cap like a white sausage was sitting in a tree bare of
leaves, catching fish in the air. Those he caught he hung on the branches and
they dried in an instant. An old fellow with an abnormally large trunk and short
legs approached; apart from a pair of grubby drill workman's trousers, he
was naked. He had two long vertical rows of nipples; I counted eighteen. With a
great deal of huffing and puffing he filled his lungs full of air, now the left
side of his breast swelling up, now the right, and then, with his fingers
running up and down the eighteen nipples, he played the most delightful
accordion pieces. At the same time he moved in time with the rhythm like a
dancing bear as he let the air out. Finally he stopped, blew his nose on his
hands and threw them away. Then he grew an enormous beard and disappeared in the
tangle of hair. In a thicket nearby I disturbed some fat pigs. They ran away
from me in single file, getting smaller and tinier until, with loud squeals,
they disappeared in a mouse-hole by the road.
Behind me - it made
me feel uncomfortable - the miller was sitting by the river studying a huge
sheet of newspaper. After he had read it and eaten it up, smoke came pouring out
of his ears. He turned the colour of copper, stood up and clutched his sagging
paunch with both hands, all the time tearing up and down the bank, sending
fierce looks in all directions and emitting shrill whistles. Finally he fell in
a heap on the ground, turned pale, his body growing light and transparent
so that one could clearly see two little railway trains whizzing round his
entrails. Each seemed to be trying to catch the other as they shot like
lightning round one loop of his gut after another. With a shake of the head and
somewhat taken aback, I was about to offer to help the miller when my words were
cut off by a chimpanzee planting out a circular garden round me at top speed
from which thick clusters of fat, apple green stems like giant asparagus
shot up out of the damp ground. I was afraid I was going to be trapped within
this living fence, but before I really knew what was happening, I was liberated.
In his convulsions, the dead miller, now no longer transparent, had laid a ring
of hundreds of thousands of little milky white eggs, from which legions of slugs
emerged and at once devoured their procreator. A pungent smell of smoked meat
spread, causing the fleshy stalks to decay and collapse. In the distance the
Outer Settlement disappeared in a web of shimmering violet
threads.
I noticed a huge shell lying conveniently by the bank of
the river, like a rocky reef, and jumped onto it. Another disaster! Straining
with the motion, the shell opened and the business became precarious. Inside I
could see quivering heaps of gelatinous matter and. . . I woke up.
139
a most enjoyable book, and finding proves the observation below:
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que me figuraba el Paraíso bajo la especie de una biblioteca
http://www.palabravirtual.com/index.php?ir=ver_poema1.php&pid=314
Jorge Luis Borges, 1960
POEMA DE LOS DONES in EL HACEDOR
Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche
esta declaración de la maestría
de Dios, que con magnífica ironía
me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.
De esta ciudad de libros hizo dueños
a unos ojos sin luz, que sólo pueden
leer en las bibliotecas de los sueños
los insensatos párrafos que ceden
las albas a su afán. En vano el día
les prodiga sus libros infinitos,
arduos como los arduos manuscritos
que perecieron en Alejandría.
De hambre y de sed (narra una historia griega)
muere un rey entre fuentes y jardines;
yo fatigo sin rumbo los confines
de esta alta y honda biblioteca ciega.
Enciclopedias, atlas, el Oriente
y el Occidente, siglos, dinastías,
símbolos, cosmos y cosmogonías
brindan los muros, pero inútilmente.
Lento en mi sombra, la penumbra hueca
exploro con el báculo indeciso,
yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso
bajo la especie de una biblioteca.
Algo, que ciertamente no se nombra
con la palabra azar, rige estas cosas;
otro ya recibió en otras borrosas
tardes los muchos libros y la sombra.
Al errar por las lentas galerías
suelo sentir con vago horror sagrado
que soy el otro, el muerto, que habrá dado
los mismos pasos en los mismos días.
¿Cuál de los dos escribe este poema
de un yo plural y de una sola sombra?
¿Qué importa la palabra que me nombra
si es indiviso y uno el anatema?
Groussac o Borges, miro este querido
mundo que se deforma y que se apaga
en una pálida ceniza vaga
que se parece al sueño y al olvido.
