“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” – Vincent Van Gogh
In this post, a strange idea to introduce, among other fragments.
Bach and Handel were born in the same year (1685) and in neighboring towns, but, strange as it may seem, they never met. I read that in Thomasine McGehee’s 1963 book “People and Music.” In preparing my Randomary project, I had found the book in among the “free” shelf at the library.
Is not the discard shelf itself a fragmentation of sorts?
First, a sidestep to that master of fragments, the late M.L. Boyd, aka Mike Mailway, whose “grab bag” newspaper columns both listed and celebrated fragments: elements that approach even if they do not mix. This sensibility is imbued in the vignette about Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Handel – a nugget worthy of Mike Mailway. He might have distilled it to the single italicized sentence above.
McGehee reported that Bach once walked the 33 miles from his town of Kothen to Handel’s town of Halle, to meet the famous musician. When Bach reached Halle, McGehee writes, “Handel had already left, hurried away by the rush of his affairs in the great city of London. The man turned away disappointed. There was much he had wanted to hear from Handel and much he had wanted to say to him.” McGehee writes that “Bach, the great German musician who was neither too proud nor too vain to walk to meet a man with wider fame than his own.”
Fragments in literature fascinate me. In reviewing my 366-paragraph Randomary project, with its images of the sea and other waters repeating like so many waves, I came across an excerpt that reinforced the overall sense of fragmentation. The segment, from “Armaggedon” by Leon Uris, is itself about fragments, describing remnants of a recently past civilization; the pieces blending and then bolstering a kind of sardonic punchline in the final sentence, as true now as when the book came out in 1963:
“There were no seals on Seal Rock. The gulls owned it for now. Sean walked past a monstrous structure housing the Sutro Baths, a relic from before the turn of the century. It held a half-dozen pools of varied temperatures, an ice rink, a collection of junk, curios, old autos, pre-earthquake pictures, a hundred rattly-bang music boxes, Tom Thumb's clothing, penny movies, all in this mammoth hole along with talking birds, mummies, miniature towns made out of matchsticks, bowling games, voice-recording machines, and a magic well which accepted pennies, nickels and dimes, catering to that American mania for throwing money in pools of water.”
For years I have collected aphorisms – best defined as a short statement of general truth or principle. As many of the aphorisms I’ve collected are extracts from larger works, in spirit and construct I view them as fragments. From Randomary I extracted Toni Morrison’s words, “A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine.”
All this as a kind of set-up to the “strange idea” I mentioned at the top. I refer to what I term “common.Sounds”.
Perhaps inspired by works such as “Concordances,” in which poet Susan Howe rearranges unrelated texts and gives them new meaning, I began to see a kind of poetry in sets of separated, liminal fragments. And I found them in an usual place: cartoons in The New Yorker magazine – or should I say, the texts that border the cartoons (preferred term “drawings”.)
common.Sounds are coalesced lines of text, usually three, lining either the upper or lower edges of the drawings.
I began to see something like whole sentences or self-contained verse when these separate sections of copy are read straight across the first through third columns. Rearranged from their intended order, the passages, from an article or short story, take on a new sensibility. While many of these are syntactically suspect, that is part of their joy; they are surprising in how much they work together, forming what I see as a kind of poetry.
As I strive to make sense of this idea, I realize I need to give them a name, taken from one such example:
Whirring, yes. Whining was common./ Sound better? Thigpen wanted to know.
In common.Sounds the forward / indicates the column breaks, and the … ends each example.
Here are a few more examples:
Charlie Parker, clutching a saxophone/ goat man said once we were alone …
Then in the midst of a wave of glamor- /speak, in his undemonstrative way, all-encompassing …
to begin. “When you were here, I/ blundered through each other’s past …
Democratic state senator told me/ butter handled by other entities/ including state courts …
A few more common.Sounds:
The freewheeling realm of animation/ pressure, enduring several mishaps ...
What do you tip the guy/ who specializes in wage theft …
To the phones. In our hands and our kind/ long preceded the introduction …
Everybody knew from the news,/ A kind of tentative silence took hold …
Philosophical, and logistical quandaries./ Feel like I’ve made it safe for people who are like ...
agonizing deaths. By the early sixties, obvious how./ Like croton oil, asbestos ...
But Frank loved it. He and Doram de-/ bit. One conundrum of screenwriting ...
To the phones. In our hands and our kind/ long preceded the introduction ...
La Cava, who started as a newspaper/ beneath a broad-shouldered barroom ...
The scene following the one painted by/ a package bomb. Only thanks to come. ...
Office is the nerve center of the Brit - / remind me of chaos theory ...
A niece’s wedding or in a karaoke bar/ his parents birthplace two years later ...
and I would go down for dinner. We/ remembered. I was watching a movie ...
he put her in her fridge, in the carton./ most beautiful movie she had ever seen ...
side of glass dividing wall weeping./ minor, the police in Marseille arrested ...
can be emancipating even if complete./ of the light bulb, street lights and flood- ...
I have been thinking about beach glass. My wife and I both love it, and have kept a trove of it since collecting it on the beaches in Port Townsend, Washington, in 1990-98 when we lived there. Over the years we filled a box weighing probably 5-10 pounds and filled with mostly clear and brown and green chunks of surf-rubbed glass and pottery shards and other debris. We have carried these beautiful shards for more than 30 years. That they are fragments is what I believe appeals, aside from their inherent beauty and uniqueness of each piece. I believe they equate to memory, or dreams, and are thus worth preserving. — N.R.
Every shard tells a story!