An Addendum to the “Knee – Jerk Reaction”

A Knee-Jerk Reaction

Adore = admire, be crazy about, be gone on, be mad for, be nuts about, be serious about, be smitten with, be stuck on, be sweet on, be wild about, cherish, delight in, dig*, dote on, esteem, exalt, fall for, flip over, glorify, go for, honour, idolize, prize, revere, reverence, treasure, venerate. Yes I love this Collection of tales ‘n’ whimsy, this was a reread, I read some of these stories a good few years ago as Cosmicomics & this complete collection, with all Italo Calvino’s tales gathered up for our delight, doesn't disappoint - in fact this is one of the most joyful books I've read in a long time, just love it.

The Addendum
I started this book in the closing days of January, thinking that this was a reread of a book that I had first read & adored sometime in my teenage years, I realised rapidly that what I had actually read was Cosmicomics which makes up part of this books & gives the book it’s title. On finishing The Complete Cosmicomics, I went on Goodreads to shout, sing & kind of express my love for this wonderful collection of …. what? Of Hooey, giddiness, Fables, applesauce, flapdoodle, song and dance, yes! Song and dance, as in the sense of implausible stories, and yet this is still not correct because whilst reading this collection of tales, I believed every word that Qfwfq said to me, Oh yes did I mention that this beautiful anthology of tomfoolery is narrated by an unknown entity answering to the name Qfwfq. Perhaps I should start this again but with the relevant background information.

The Facts? ( Wikipedia)

The Complete Cosmicomics came out in 2009  & collects almost all of the Cosmicomic stories by Italian postmodern writer Italo Calvino.
The single volume collection includes the following:

• The 12 stories that comprise Cosmicomics
• The 11 stories that comprise t zero (also published as Time and the Hunter)
• 4 stories from Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories
• 7 stories newly translated by Martin McLaughlin (available for the first time in English)

Translator Martin McLaughlin explains the origins of the seven new stories in his introduction to The Complete Cosmicomics:

“

A little-known third collection – La memoria del mondo e altre storie cosmicomiche ("World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories") (1968), a volume not available commercially in Italy – offered 20 fictions in all, 12 from the previous two collections [Cosmicomics and t zero] and eight new pieces (seven of these new items are translated here for the first time into English; the other new 1968 tale, the title story, was translated by Tim Parks as "World Memory" in the 1992 volume Numbers in the Dark). 

”

 The Truth?

At the beginning, way before the Big Bang and all that loud kerfuffle that came & followed it, all matter was focused in a single point, there was no space, no time, all these came later as witnessed by Qfwfq. In fact in various guises he was around & either inadvertently created or was a part of everything, he remembers being a Mollusc, remembers the earth when there wasn’t an atmosphere, he tells the tale of when the moon used to come so close to the earth one could jump up and collect moon milk & how it moved away.

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Opinion?

All of these stories start with some scientific fact, theory or concept, that may or may not have since been found to be pure hokum and from there Calvino works his magic, creating journeys of scientific discovery & fairy tale from exactly the same set of words, yes I don’t know what I mean either, an example is that the picture above relates to the tale “The Distance of the Moon,” and this is based on the premise stated by Sir George H. Darwin that at one time the moon was a lot closer to the Earth, from this Calvino creates a tale of unrequited love that has more pathos than anything I’ve read in a while and yet they also have an absolute joy about them. This is a writer playing with words like Lego bricks, like a child building something merely to delight in knocking it down, there’s a playfulness that just makes me smile, makes me grin & whilst I maybe sat on a chair at home or someplace else inside I’m Dancing Dancing Dancing, to the wonderful tunes of  Qfwfq and his producer Italo Calvino.

Biog’

Qfwfq, is as old as the universe and has taken various forms and is described as "not surprised by anything", and characteristically "not at all sentimental about being the last dinosaur"

Italo Calvino, (1923 - 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).

Such barghests of the minds design

Dark Things, Poems by Novica Tadić

Anomie (Anomy), in societies or individuals is a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals. The term was introduced by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, in his influential work “Suicide” (1897). When a social system is in a state of anomie, common values and meanings are no longer understood or accepted, and new values and meanings have not developed. According to Durkheim such a society produces in many of its members, psychological states characterised by a sense of futility, lack of purpose, emotional emptiness and despair – Striving is considered useless because there is no accepted definition of what is desirable.

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Although Durkheim’s concept of anomie referred to a condition of relative normlessness* of a society or social group, other writers have used the term with reference to the individual. In this psychological usage anomie relates to the state of mind of a person  who has no standards, or sense of continuity or obligation & that has rejected all social bonds.
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Someone Whispered To Me In A Dream 

Someone whispered to me in a dream
that on this Earth, there’ll be no
more water, only blood.
We’ll drink each other’s blood
as we have always done
and won’t dream of it anymore.
Over dried out springs,
bones of dead animals and last humans
will pile up.
Young hyenas with our faces
will titter and fight
around their gnawed and dry remains.

The individual may feel that their community leaders are indifferent to their needs, that society is basically unpredictable, lacking order and that goals are not being realised, leaving them with a sense of futility & that they are no dependable sources of support.

May I open the door into the world of Novica Tadić

About The Knife

I think well about the knife,
think, think.
For you covered in feathers,
I am permitted to be a monster.
Because of the curse of drink,
I collided with a fence, fell down,
And became a quarrelsome and desperate man
Ready to jump into the fire._
_________
My blood wouldn’t let me rest.
____________
Mercy walked away from me.
Now, quickly, you do the same

In his introduction to “Dark Things” Charles Simic, writes that “Tadić is a poet of the dark night of history” going on to say that his protagonist, like the condemned Christ, in some painterly depiction of Ecce Homo is surrounded by an enraged mob, who although wretched themselves find some pleasure in the mindless torture of others.

Straitjacket

A Straitjacket
Is being woven
And cut to measure

On you.

This theme appears to haunt Tadić, like some personal barghest and as such it is this weltschmerz that inhabits all his work, the meek & mild are merely badly abused playthings of the powerful, who themselves are wretched and played upon by those more powerful. There are great but no good, this is a world where the hand not seen carries a dagger and the hand seen is not raised in salutation but merely to club you or holding some other means of doing you down. Dark Things is a world of folk/fairie tale, but one devoid of hope or moral compass, a world where Prince Charming, is no handsome hero out to save the heroine, his motif, if defined would be his own will regardless of harm, his name a term of abuse, a sarcastic tag hung upon him by those with the power to do little else but snipe from behind masks of ill intent.

Armful Of Twigs

Armful of dry twigs
I carry to the fire
through busy streets.
I can't see the stake,
don't know who is being
burnt alive or why.

Flames rise in the glow
beyond the ecstatic crowd
singing, shouting and firing guns.

(This dream, I am not
bound to forget.)

Don't sway like that, O my curtain.

On a more personal note, I first came across this writer sometime in the early 1990’s through a wonderful anthology of East European poetry called “Child of Europe”, this had a fantastic collection of poets/poetry such as Tomaž Šalamun, Gojko Đogo & Sylva Fischerova, but for some reason Novica Tadić, was the poet that stayed with me, one that I kept returning to in particular the poem “A Conversation” which doesn’t appear in this collection, however I’m posting it here because it was the reason I went on to buy the book.

A conversation

One of the Cyclopes
Met me in the street and
asked
---------where was my
where was my
where was my
other eye little eye
_______
I don’t have it
I don’t have it
I don’t have it
It never
Opened

This for some reason resonated with me, baffled me no end, I kept trying to find why this rung true for me and the closest I could get was to do with hope or lack of it, that the other eye that was being constantly denied represented a hope that couldn’t be acknowledged, but was there - it had just never opened from beneath the sealed eyelid, never had a reason to open. This is probably nonsense and nothing like what Novica Tadić had in mind when putting those words on paper, he was just writing his response to a world gone mad, in fact Charles Simic states in his introduction that “if Hieronymus Bosch had gotten around to writing poems, they would sound like Tadić’s, He also said that the only way to write realistically about the Balkans is through Surrealism.

Novica Tadić was born in 1949 in a small village in Montenegro, but lived most of his life in Belgrade dying there 2011. The author of fourteen previous collections of poetry, he was considered the most respected living Serbian poet and linguistic “heir” to the late, great Serbian poet Vasko Popa. The author of many celebrated collections, including The Object of Ridicule, Monster, The Unknown, and Dark Things, Tadić has won almost every major Serbian literary award, including the prestigious Laureat Nagrade. In the last two decades, he served as editor of several Serbian literary magazines, and his books of poems have been translated into more than two dozen languages.
Prior to the publication of Dark Things (BOA, 2009), only one full-length collection of his poetry had previously appeared in English: Night Mail: Selected Poems (Oberlin College Press, 1992), this was also translated by Charles Simic.

People Went By

People went by in waves,
Stared at and admired
All sorts of things in shop windows,
And bought a few.
____


The one dressed in black
said to the one with a briefcase.
“Why do I need that?”
And didn’t wave away his hand
as ordinary mortals do
when they deny something
to themselves.
_____


As years pass,
I find that little tableau
more and more bewitching
and appealing.

____

A day will come
When I’ll only
think about that.

Dušan "Charles" Simić  1938) is a Serbian-American poet, translator, essayist and was co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn't End, and was a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Selected Poems, 1963-1983 and in 1987 for Unending Blues. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007
Charles Simic
BOA Editions


* Normlessness, Durkheim never uses the term normlessness, American sociologist Robert K. Merton studied the causes of anomie, or normlessness, finding it severest in people who lack an acceptable means of achieving their personal goals.