This book has me in its grip.Reading The Recognitions is like wandering in a labyrinth, and around each corner there's a new revelation. One feels a little lost at times, but there are familiar sights. Can we trust our guide? Gaddis gives you the sense he knows the way...until he lets go of your hand...and pushes you into the darkness saying, dilige et quod vis fac. You must cling to those words, because that's the only thread this Ariadne offers - except for the follow up text message he sends: btw thngs fal aprt :-()We begin our recognitions...at the beginning. The title. It's a reference to a text mistakenly attributed to Pope Clement I. One of the characters, Basil Valentine, later explains, The what? The Recognitions ? No, it's Clement of Rome. Mostly talk, talk, talk. The young man's deepest concern is for the immortality of his soul, he goes to Egypt to find the magicians and learn their secrets. It's been referred to as the first Christian novel. What? Yes, it's really the beginning of the whole Faust legend…What can drive anyone to write novel...?That's almost an outline of Gaddis's book too.There's an apocryphal account that Clement was martyred, thrown into the sea with an anchor tied around his neck.The Recognitions revisits this in various ways with the reoccurring image of "that tale about the sky being a sea, the celestial sea, and a man coming down a rope to undo an anchor that's gotten caught on a tombstone".This novel is an exercise in recognitions - within the text, the characters, ourselves. Gaddis intended that we recognize and understand these references and allusions, and apply their meaning to the overall story. He has paid us a high compliment, and respects us as thinking readers who are willing to work with him,What writing is all about is what happens on the page between the reader and the page . . . What I want is a collaboration, really, with the reader on the page where the reader is also making an effort, is putting something of himself into it in the way of understanding, in the way of helping to construct the fiction that I am giving him. - William Gaddis, Albany, April 4, 1990The effort is worth it, for this book is a delight. But never mind - it stands on its own even if we don't get all the references. As Jonathan Franzen says about it, "Peel away the erudition, and you have The Catcher in the Rye: a grim winter sojourn in a seedy Manhattan, a quest for authenticity in a phony modern world."There's help with the erudition - it's been enthusiastically annotatedGaddis has a style of writing that I easily respond to. His themes are ones I want to read and think about. Eliot and Dostoyevski are the most significant names here; none of Gaddis's reviewers described The Recognitions as The Waste Land rewritten by Dostoyevski (with additional dialogue by Ronald Firbank), but that would be a more accurate description than the Ulysses parallel so many of them harped upon. Not only do Gaddis's novels contain dozens of "whole lines lifted bodily from Eliot," but The Recognitions can be read as an epic sermon using The Waste Land as its text. The novel employs the same techniques of reference, allusion, collage, multiple perspective, and contrasting voices; the same kinds of fire and water imagery drawn from religion and myth; and both call for the same kinds of artistic, moral, and religious sensibilities. ...Life proved terrible enough by the 1950s to produce in The Recognitions the most "Russian" novel in American literature. Gaddis's love for nineteenth-century Russian literature in general crops up in his novels, his letters, and in his few lectures, where references are made to the major works of Dostoyevski, Tolstoy (especially the plays), Gogol, Turgenev, Gorky, Goncharov, and Chekhov. Gaddis shares with these authors not only their metaphysical concerns and often bizarre sense of humor, but their nationalistic impulses as well. - William Gaddis by Steven MooreThe first few pages of The Recognitions are like a separate novel, pared to its essentials. Call it The Spanish Affair . It's an account of the ship Purdue Victory , Camilla, Spain, and Reverend Gwyon. It ends with "They never forgave him for not bringing the body home". These pages sit in my memory like whole other books do. The rest of the novel can be seen as the sequel. The story continues with the son Wyatt. We first meet him as a "small disgruntled person", four years old, shocking his stern (great) Aunt May by exclaiming "You're the by-Goddest rabbit I ever damn saw!" I wanted to hug that child right there. I love this unhappy mirror version of Christopher Robin. IN WHICH WYATT EMPTIES THE POT ON WHICH HE MEDITATED FOR AN HOUR OR SO EACH MORNING INTO A FLOOR REGISTER.The old Aunt May who raises him is a hard woman, yet oh, she breaks one's heart too, "when she made things, even her baking, she kept the blinds closed in the butler's pantry when she frosted a cake, nobody ever saw anything of hers until it was done". The father, Reverend Gwyon, had "the look of a man who was waiting for something which had happened long before", buries himself in old obscured religious writings...but "the book most often taken from its place was Obras Completas de S Juan de la Cruz, a volume large enough to hold a bottle of schnapps in the cavity cut ruthlessly out of the Dark Night of the Soul.Later he falls under Mithra's spell.Wyatt grows up warped by this upbringing.He becomes the man who seems to believe that, where there is God, do not stay; where there is no God run away as fast as you can. He planned to enter the ministry, but early on had found the Christian system suspect.There's a long cast of characters that drift in and out and we lose sight of Wyatt for long stretches. Names are changed! Identities are mistaken! Life and art are so entangled that their boundaries are not clear. We constantly overhear fragments of conversations, catch glimpses of the characters as they hurry by. The frame of The Recognitions is forgery: in culture, religion, art, relationships, sex, business, money. Its subject is an examination of meaning - what is real? what is love? what is God? can we ever really know who we are? The personage Wyatt was in part based on the real life infamous art forger Han van Meegeren. His paintings are at best competent, and without mystery or depth. See if you agree from this sample.And take a quiz: Vermeer or Meegeren? Meegeren made clumsy technical mistakes that should have alarmed the experts. Copying masterpieces is now an industry in Southern China, "the world’s leading center for mass-produced works of art. One village of artists exports about five million paintings every year — most of them copies of famous masterpieces. The fastest workers can paint up to 30 paintings a day."Millions of *masterpieces* churned out like cheap garments...(said in the voice of an angry Dr. McCoy).Wyatt, I think, was a better painter than all these, starting with his copy of Bosch's table painting. He carried its themes in his head too, the ever watching eye of God and The Seven Deadly Sins.The copy of this painting underscores one of the themes of The Recognitions, the theme of forgery, and it is asking: what is original? Is it even possible to be original? That romantic disease, originality, all around we see originality of incompetent idiots, they could draw nothing, paint nothing, just so the mess they make is original...Even two hundred years ago who wanted to be original, to be original was to admit that you could not do a thing the right way, so you could only do it your own way. When you paint you do not try to be original, only you think about your work, how to make it better, so you copy masters, only masters, for with each copy of a copy the form degenerates...you do not invent shapes, you know them, atiswendig wissen Sie, by heart... And to carry the question further, has mankind, that master forger, outdone the creator? Each one of us is merely the latest link in the chain of human experience. Everything we know, believe, have, is founded on what has been passed down from the previous generations. Religion, culture, music, science, art. Nursery rhymes. Jokes. What claim to originality do we really have? Everything is a collage built from previous works, a blatant example being The WasteLand yes, and The Recognitions too. So, we can search out the allusions, and the bits and pieces directly copied from other writers. Our understanding is deeper, the experience is richer of course. But the new work stands on its own. Bosch's painting is also used to introduce the theme of existential meaning and purpose. Its watchful eye of God raises a question: does anything mean anything at all, if it is not looked at by God? Wyatt says, This...these...the art historians and the critics talking about every object and...everything having its own form and density and ...its own character in Flemish paintings, but is that all there is to it? Do you know why everything does? Because they found God everywhere. There was nothing God did not watch over, nothing, and so this...and so in the painting every detail reflects...God's concern with the most insignificant objects in life, with everything, because God did not relax for an instant then, and neither could the painter then. Do you get the perspective in this? he demanded, thrusting the rumpled reproduction before them. -There isn't any. There isn't any single perspective, like the camera eye, the one we all look through now and call it realism, there...I take five or six or ten...the Flemish painter took twenty perspectives if he wished, and even in a small painting you can't include it all in your single vision, your one miserable pair of eyes, like you can a photograph, like you can painting when it...Like everything today is conscious of being looked at, looked at by something else but not by God, and that's the only way anything can have its own form and its own character, and...and shape and smell, being looked at by God.The cynic Basil Valentine replies: Yes, I remember your little talk, your insane upside-down apology for these pictures, every figure and every object with its own presence, its own consciousness because it was being looked at by God! Do you know what it was? What it really was? that everything was so afraid, so uncertain God saw it, that it insisted its vanity on His eyes? Fear, fear, pessimism and fear and depression everywhere, the way it is today, that's why your pictures are so cluttered with detail, this terror of emptiness, this absolute terror of space. Because maybe God isn't watching. Maybe he doesn't see. Oh, this pious cult of the Middle Ages! Being looked at by God! Is there a moment of faith in any of their work, in one centimeter of canvas? or is it vanity and fear, the same decadence that surrounds us now. A profound mistrust in God, and they need every idea out where they can see it, where they can get their hands on it. Your...detail, he commenced to falter a little,- your Bouts, was there ever a worse bourgeois than your Dierick Bouts? and his damned details? Talk to me of separate consciousness, being looked at by God, and then swear by all that's ugly! Like Eliot, sometimes Gaddis steals his material outright. The letter that begins "You: The demands of painting have the most astonishing consequences" was entirely written by Sheri Martinelli and used without her knowledge. She was the inspiration for the character who wrote it, Esme.There are so many odd characters in this book worthy of mention:Ed Feasley "He was not afraid: not a grain of that fear which is granted in any definition of sanity. In college, he had entertained himself and others, quiet evenings in his rooms when his allowance was cut off, by beating the back of his fist with a stiff-bristled hairbrush, then swinging his hand in circles until the pressure of descending blood broke small capillaries and spotted the rug and ceiling with spots turned brown by morning; or standing before a mirror with thumb and forefinger pressed against his carotid arteries until his face lost all color and he was caught by consciousness as he fell....He liked a Good Time."Fuller "We would believe that Fuller had had a childhood only in helpless empiricism, because we all have. But it was as unreal to him by now as to anyone looking at his face, where time had long since stopped experimenting. That childhood was like a book read, misplaced, forgotten, to be recalled when one sees another copy, the cheap edition in a railway station newsstand, which is bought, thumbed through, and like as not left on the train when the station is called."Recktall Brown "Recktall Brown's laughter might seem to rise the entire distance of his frame, a laborious journey, complicated by ducts and veins, cavities and sedulous organs whose functions are interrupted by the passage of this billowing shape which escapes in shambles of smoke"Basil Valentine "There were moments when Basil Valentine looked sixteen, days when he looked sixty. In profile, his face was strong and flexible; but, when he turned full face as he did now, the narrowness of his chin seemed to sap the face of that strength so impressive an instant before. Temples faintly graying, distinguished enough to be artificial (though the time was gone when anyone might have said premature, and gone the time when it was necessary to dye them so, instead now to tint them with black occasionally), he looked like an old person who looks very young, hair-ends slightly too long, he wore a perfectly fitted gray pinstripe suit, soft powder-blue Oxford-cloth shirt, and a slender black tie whose pattern, woven in the silk, was barely discernible. He raised a gold cigarette case in long fingers. Gold glittered at his cuff."Agnes Deigh "...a stout woman [with a muscular arm which, on a man, might have been called brawny] She wore a knee-length fur cape, a green summer cocktail dress with a scalloped hem, what appeared to be gold paper stars pasted on it, and décolletage which exposed a neckline of woolen underwear. She advanced with a distinct rattling sound"Frank Sinisterra "...he found himself rescued from oblivion by agents of that country not Christian enough to rest assured in the faith that he would pay fully for his sins in the next world....he tried a brief defense of his medical practice on the grounds that he had once assisted a vivisection."Gaddis obviously was fond of these creations of his, in spite of their flaws. And there are so many quotable passages - if God did not relax for an instant in the Flemish paintings, neither did Gaddis in his descriptions. A character's suit is given a paragraph, Crémer's shrug still hung in his shoulders, and he emphasized it with a twitch, throwing the exact lines of his neat blue suit off, for it was a thing of careful French construction, and fit only when the figure inside it was apathetically erect, arms hung at the sides, at which choice moment the coat stood up neat and square as a box, and the trousers did not billow as they did in walking, but hung in wide envelopes with all the elegance that right angles confer, until they broke over the shoes, which they were, fortunately, almost wide enough at the bottoms, and enough too long, to cover. That's too much - and it's brilliant. I think of the infamous opening, It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.Ha, that makes me laugh every time. Though I'm laughing *at* it.There's a lot of laughing *with* in The Recognitions. It's satire at its finest.And there are animals: a Barbary ape; a black poodle that "spies" on Fuller; an ill-fated kitten; Huki-lau the Hawaiian poodle dog in a chastity belt; Paris cats that "go to sleep on Paris windowsills and ledges high up, and fall off, and plunge through the glass roof of the lavabo; "cats hung in telephone wires, Cow kills woman. Rooster kills woman. Dogs eat Eskimo".And Mad Men ad men campaigns: Kanthold Korsets Necrostyle - the wafer-shaped sleeping pill, no chewing, no aftertaste. Zap - the wonder-wakener. Cuff - it's on the cuff. Pubies - for men and women over forty, start living again.THE GHOST ARTISTS ...We Paint It You Sign It Why Not Give an Exhibition? Arsole Acres - from the Latin ars meaning art Some of the many motifs that run through The Recognitions: the constant random snatches of overheard conversations are like a Greek chorus; Christianity is relentlessly contrasted to its pagan origin; characters pause in distress to brush a spot of moonlight off the sleeve; mirrors - distorting, creating, confirming, paralyzing "Wyatt was sent to bed for saying he could not move, as though the mirrors in the arms of the cross on the wall had gripped him from behind". Art, so much art - paintings, sculptures, churches, ornaments. Mummies and babies, roses and lavender, windows. Body parts. And death: suicide, murder, disease, drowning, calamity. And suits! Jonathan Franzen bitterly claims The Recognitions is "difficult". Maybe. I'll confess that I was better prepared for it than most people. I shrewdly majored in painting at university. The skeletons in my closet were helpful too - some closely resemble the characters in this book. Perhaps that is why I... umm...I tell you The Recognitions is MY book...I don't want to share it. I...I'll bury it. And dig it up from time to time! just as I did with those poor feral kittens from my childhood: dead from worms, buried elaborately with solemn service, the free Gideon bible from school in hand, laying flowers kindly donated from mommy's flowerbed - and yes - exhumed on the odd occasion to see how things were coming along.
Is that how he meant it? Before Otto could answer she went on, lowering her eye again, - No, how did he know what he meant. When people tell a truth they do not understand what they mean, they say it by accident, it goes through them and they do not recognize it until someone accuses them of telling the truth, then they try to recover it as their own and it escapes.I want to tell what I mean, what my truth is, without fearing what came out is not what I meant, without hoping what came out sounded smarter than what I really meant, without pretending that was what I meant if someone else puts what I said in wider words than my chasm could fit. I can't finish reading my reviews the whole way through to even spell check them. I want to write what I mean and be understood. Is there a way to tell the truth as a bell? I want faces, lives, stories, truths, people being real, other people, places. Touching, not owned, not my life. It is my not alone. I know the world is fake, cold, spent. It doesn't have to be that way. That's what I want. The enough part when I know it doesn't have to be that way. It's not always that way.“-This … these … the art historians and the critics talking about every objects and … everything having its own form and density and … its own character in Flemish paintings, but is that all there is to it? Do you know why everything does? Because they found God everywhere. There was nothing God did not watch over, nothing, and so this … and so in the painting every detail reflects … God’s concern with the most insignificant objects in life, with everything, because God did not relax for an instant then, and neither could the painter then. Do you get the perspective in this? he demanded, thrusting the rumpled reproduction before them. -There isn’t any.”I want to tell you that I want this. I think about this all of the time. I write about this all of the time. It's my running into my fire even though I'm going to be wrong, it's going to get me no where. I just want stories to be real. Stories are real. They are everywhere. Some people see the perspective in everything and they can tell that truth.It was the uncircumscribed, unbearable, infinitely extended, indefinitely divisible void where she swam in orgasm, soaring into a vastness away from the heaving indignity of the posture she shared; the world of music so intensely known that nothing exists but the music; it was the world of ecstasy they all approximated by different paths, one world in which temporary residence is prohibited, as the agonies of recall attest: “Love’s dart” that wounds but does not kill; the ill complained of, but prized above every joy and earthly good; “sweet cautery”, the “stolen heart,” the “ravished understanding,” the “rape of love”: in Provencal, conoscenza. Thus Saint Teresa, quadrupedis, “dying of not being able to die”.I'll tell you that I don't believe anyone wants to be a painting, a muse, the rowboat or the book of love/heaven/Santa's list.He wants to be Ibsen for just that moment, and dedicate his play to someone who's been kind to him, is that lying? It isn't as bad as people doing work they have no respect for at all. Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of... recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it and, it shouldn't be sinful to want to have created beauty?This is all I have ever wanted.Tell them, as the composer predicted, there's nothing left but knowledge and evidence, and art's become a sort of tailbone surviving in us from that good prehensile tail we held on with then.No, people die. There will be another eye, another feeling and God is not dead. I wanted mirrors. I wanted to see something. When they become real to me and people who are real become more real to me because it is all together in me of things that happened. I would want to read How to Make Friends and Influence People to make friends too. The burned sun spots on the retinas when your dream is allowed like when Stanley is alone on the ship to see hard and arms and fire. When you are alone with the god dreams art and you are painting it yourself. It's when you dream your life away instead of what really happens like romantic encounters that never actually happened. You want this, you expect this. Maybe they don't really want the world. Maybe people don't actually want to pry into anyone's life. It doesn't have to mean that. I want the enough part that's not suspicion. I guess they say that this is a girl thing to do to analyze encounters to death until they don't resemble what transpired. It's playing a song in your head until you can get home to listen to it on repeat for hours. One way is painfully better and the other is not enough and it is the best you've got. It's making your own life. Maybe it's wrong or maybe it's trying to live on separate planes. One isn't always as hard as the other. I liked reading about the people interactions and seeing the two sides, like different places to live that's not always as hard as the real one. Who am I kidding? I never want to get married. I love art. I never gave a shit about what anyone expected to happen once they made the art. I'm copying and copying and not living and living for what could be good enough. I want to tell you that is what art is to me. It's a way to not be suspicious. To capture a lost moment, without being suspicious. I want to recognize and make art so that everything can always be like that. I would copy and not even know I was doing it. I'd repeat their faces and try to find everyone. I don't blame anyone.“Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.”I'm awfully tired of me going on about what I wanted to say, what I couldn't say, what I meant to say. Can someone say it for me so I could sing along? There can be another The Recognitions review. I know about trying to live life and trying to find ways that makes it not so hard.
What do You think about The Recognitions (1993)?
Gaddis’s first novel is a big, ambitious thing, a juggernaut, overwhelming, a planetary body’s worth of kinetic energy packed into its 956 pages. “Planetary” is a descriptor I come back to again and again while thinking about this book- it not only reflects the geographic scope of the novel, which unfolds across oceans and continents (though for the greater part we do not leave the microcosmic nocturama of New York City), but also the attempt to put a world’s sum of knowledge and history into one work, to recreate the world of accumulated human experience within this massive triptych’s unity. “Unity” is another word appropriate for The Recognitions, for as multifaceted and hydra-headed and sprawling as the novel appears, the book is affixed to a structure as deliberate as a map of the stars for any particular season- warp The Recognitions back in on itself, make of it a mobius strip, and I believe one would find the beginning and ending of the novel conversing with each other, events unfolding in parallel, phrases and images resurfacing at precise moments, which of course adds depth and resonance to that all too perfect title. As you sail your way across the churning ocean of this book, you will have your moments of recognition, not only within the reflexive texture of the text, whose component parts speak to and among each other, but your own personal world, the world outside, will begin to engage a conversation with the novel. For there is something mysteriously breathing about this book, and descending into it or rising out of it is akin to what it must be like to penetrate the atmosphere of a planet and fall into the rich air of earth, for those who have spent a stint on a space station. Or, more apropos of the novel, like the emergence from the abyss of the sea into the fecund air and bright blue cloud-ripped sunlight sailors on submarines must experience when returning home- a world retrieved- brought from the depths into the air as if fished for. Going into or out of the novel, from its world into your own or vice versa. Ascent and descent. Emergence and recognition.Of course, everything is achieved through language. Gaddis’s use of language in The Recognitions, the style of The Recognitions, its mythologizing and allusion-laden style, is where the “American heir to Joyce” comparison is validated. Gaddis appears especially like the Joyce of Ulysses in this context, but we must delimit and narrow this comparison, because the similarity in the appropriation and layering of mythical, historical, and religious language and imagery into the text, and a certain kind of “writing around scenes”, where important narrative points are told obliquely, is where the similarity ends. Gaddis is not playing the parodist of styles that Joyce is in Ulysses, Gaddis is not interested in interior dialogue, stream of consciousness, in fact he remains distinctly exterior to his characters, eliding dialogue with ellipses and fragmented sentences, leaving much to be completed by the reader, assumed, read into- there is no interior representation of Gaddis’s characters, only their actions are shown and their broken voices remade into mosaic. If one had to compare the Gaddis of The Recognitions with Joyce, it would be, I think, more the Joyce of A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man. There is the same obsessive infiltration and exploration of Catholic ritual, that ritual extended into the secular world, there is the same brooding over the spirit and the Ideal as represented in religious texts and contrasted with their representation and use in secular artworks, there is the exploration of the suffering caused by seeking perfection and coming into contact with beauty, the suffering of the artist and the conflict of attempting the spiritual within the material world. The allusion-heavy, mythologized language in The Recognitions serves to eliminate centuries, to collapse the intellectual history of humanity, so that into these moments in the months surrounding Christmas 1949 in New York City and the world at large, the eternal can flow through the gestures of these characters. It gives a seemingly limitless depth to the reading experience, as allusion and reference bloom into recognition, as image and word create resonance that echoes beyond the walls of the specific place of 1949 America. Gaddis, like Joyce, universalizes the mundane, very effectively, through precise reference. And while The Recognitions is most certainly a (postmodern?) comedy, a scathing satire and a polemical cultural critique of the shallow products of “The Age of Publicity”, it shares a great deal thematically, and in its tone, its prose-hues, with the Russian-Christian morality epics of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. The spiritual struggle at the heart of the book, the manner of characterization, the moral dilemmas it presents, even the descriptions of New York City as a frozen winterscape, recall vividly moments out of Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov, even to some extent the social satire of Anna Karenina. The same kind of weary, exhausted late-Christian conflict, searching representations of eternity for something to validate the finite, flawed nature of human life, and coming away empty-handed and with no answer wetting the lips, pervades.And so The Recognitions is about art and art forgery, about authenticity and (the impossibility of) originality, about the crisis of the individual in a universe at best indifferent and at worst openly hostile to dignified living. It is a brilliant, necessary cultural critique that emerged from mid-20th century America, dripping with that thick black blood (sangre negro de mi corazón) that courses coldly through the mechanized American heart, that seems now to ring more true than ever (especially in the party scenes composed of the overlapping babbling of voices ultimately testifying to nothing but the vanity of the speakers, a prophecy of the social media age if ever there was one), a satire of the narcissism and shallow preening of contemporary mores, which have since only progressed further into fragmentation and alienation, an excoriation of the money-driven society, of blind faith in technology, market forces, media, the myth of “progress” and the vulgarization and commodification of personality, religion, art, conversation, relationships, information. It is howlingly funny and at the same time bleakly pessimistic. It reaches to find meaning in the higher pursuits of man, but collides only with layer upon layer of fraud. It finds the reek of money at the heart of everything. It is an epic of a fallen, sunken world, a world submerged, where everyone is already drowned and trying to claw their way out of personal purgatories and into the light of a sham sun in the sky that might as well be the fires of hell in the underworld. It is two mirrors turned to each other and the retreat of the face reflected into the winnowing abyss, but all the reflections have something to sell, and are thus validated as real, here in this chimeric world. It pursues the pursuit of redemption and atonement. As much as it is about Art and Artifice it is about Death, as much as a painting (or a book) is dead as soon as it is completed, and feigns eternity, and feigns timelessness, as do all of our higher aspirations.The dedication that opens the book, to Gaddis’s daughter Sarah, is from TS Eliot’s poem “Marina”. It is a thing of great beauty itself, and any reader of The Recognitions will find in it echoes of that text, those texts communicating, so why not, in the spirit of appropriation, reproduce it here in full, if for no other reason than to beautify my own work with someone else’s labor.MarinaQuis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?What seas what shore what grey rocks and what islandsWhat water lapping the bowAnd scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fogWhat images returnO my daughter.Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaningDeathThose who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaningDeathThose who sit in the sty of contentment, meaningDeathThose who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaningDeathAre become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind,A breath of pine, and the woodsong fogBy this grace dissolved in placeWhat is this face, less clear and clearerThe pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger–Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eyeWhispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feetUnder sleep, where all the waters meet.Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.I made this, I have forgottenAnd remember.The rigging weak and the canvas rottenBetween one June and another September.Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.This form, this face, this lifeLiving to live in a world of time beyond me; let meResign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbersAnd woodthrush calling through the fogMy daughter.
—Geoff
Big, angry, sad, and rich. I felt changed after reading this, which is something I can say of few books. People speak of this book in hushed, religious tones sometimes, and it makes me nervous: wondering: am I like you? Of course: I was 19 when I read the thing, so maybe this book was just adolescence's departing revenge upon succumbing to pseudo-adulthood.Still, ten years later, even though I haven't read it since, certain scenes and moments reverberate, call themselves back. I'll forever take note, in each person I meet, whether they check the dirtiness of their nails with their fingers curled or outstretched.
—Matthew
100 Words in Search of PrecisionThe purpose of both Religion and Alchemy is to realise Perfection.Christianity places an obstacle in the path: Original Sin. We are born with an Inherent Vice. Nobody will give us assurance.Our need for meaning and happiness is so great that we fall victim to fraud and pretence.Gaddis suggests we must love and we must be active, in order to be happy.We need to construct an undivided Self, a Whole, not a Soul.There is only the Self that Lives, therefore the Life that is Lived, the Life that is Loved, the Life that is Contemplated.Review:My Review is here:http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/2...Voyage Out of the Marina (Haiku)We are awakened, Lips parted, ready to sailIn hope and new ships.[Apologies to T.S. Eliot for Hai-jacking his poem "Marina"]Fake You (Haiku)Are you real or fake?How would I recognise youIf I saw your face?Inherent Vice (Haiku)I remember youAs the Inherent Vice Guy,Voicing great AdVice.Recognition (Haiku)I crave for you theRecognition you deserve,Even though you're dead.Reading Progress:The quotations in my Reading Progress are parts of the text that stood out in my quest for significance and meaning in the novel.A Few of My Favourite ThingsAt the link below are some passages fashioned out of indigo that appealed to me for their economy, simplicity and/or beauty:http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/2...A Glossary of AbstractionsAs I made my progress through the novel, I decided to make a Glossary of Key Words, almost all of which were Abstractions.You can find the first section here:http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/2...It's quite intuitive and incomplete.I did it before I got a pdf copy of the novel that I could search.One day, when I have the time, I'll have a crack at the 81 references to "recognition".Annotations:There is an invaluable reading and thinking resource here:http://www.williamgaddis.org/recognit...My Reading Experience:I've written about my experience of reading the novel here:http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/2...
—Ian Agadada-Davida
