Osip Mandelstam

Bazlen’s acoustics. On Roberto Calasso’s Bobi (2026). by Gerardo Muñoz

Roberto Calasso’s short and epigrammatic posthumous book Bobi (Anagrama, 2026) on the opaque figure of Roberto Bazlen has just appeared in Spanish. It is a nebular autobiographical book that does not attempt to render legible the subterranean and oblique figure of Robert Bazlen, but rather to filter some of his obsessions and tonalities, many times through his own voice. Calasso is well qualified to write such book as a frequent stroller companion of the anonymous man of Trieste. There is no aura of the detective mystery about the person’s auratic psychic life, establishing a sharp contrast to Del Guiudice’s polyphonic narrative in Lo stadio di Wimbledon (1983). But in this short memoir book, I am particularly intrigued by a moment when Calasso inscribes Bazlen’s vortex of thought and life as an affinity for the acoustic. 

Calasso quotes Bazlen (we assume that from his own memory): “Bazlen used to say regularly: “This does not sound too good”, and immediately we knew what he meant. His capacity to recognize sound was thorough” [1]. Calasso tells us, moreover, that he cared little about cultural or intellectual polemics of his time. All that matter was sound, the grain of the voice. His meridian crossing was the song and rhythm of another. It is this proximity to the light of the voice what allowed Bazlen to conceive life and writing as a unified sensible reality; mutually interdependent, and always intertwined like the threads in a rigged tablecloth. To inhabit the world without judgement – of History, of morality, of punishment and guilt, of retribution – means to secure an aperture to an acoustics that will remain close to us, albeit incomplete, in the dissonance and impropriety of meaning.

To be able to attune oneself to the voice is a practice that retreats from the order of the world; that is, to descend into anonymity in order to inhabit a subterranean region, which speaks to Bazlen’s insistence on tugurios or spelonche, which Calasso does not hesitate to render as naked spaces, miniature deserts or caves to immunize oneself from the chatter of the world: minima chôra where something could take place or not. It is hard to define them but we know perfectly well what these are. Perhaps we can be more emphatic: to listen to the voice is already the encounter. And very much like Osip Mandelstam’s figure of the interlocutor, true poetics (and first and foremost that of life) “is ever moving toward that more or less distant, unknown addressee, whose existence the poet cannot doubt without also doubting himself. Only a reality can bring to life another reality” [2].

Bazlen’s notion of writing as the writing of life, experience as writing, very much like Mandelstam’s dialogic poetics, finds a tugurio so that language can emerge in absolute presence. And this is precisely what Bazlen understood in the becoming of life against the metabolic strain of survival, since the repression of the voice will result in the annihilation of what is most alive. Calasso recalls Bazlen’s affirmation: “In a world of death – there was an epoch where one was born alive and would later die. Today, on the contrary, one is born dead – and only a few are able, little by little, to be alive” [3]. 

For Bazlen there is no community of the living granted in immanence, because to live means to conquer the putrefaction of the culture of death, which is only permanent revolution and hostility. But one cannot conquer death from death; that is, by means of the beautiful soul’s literary prose of the world. It does not take Hegel to say that this is still unwarranted insubordination and permanent bondage. What is then to be alive? It is a resurrection that takes place as an existential decision, that is “at a point in life when a fundamental decision has to be made. I believe that was his passion, and his masterpiece” [4]. This is Del Giudice’s indictment, although surely not fully at odds with Calasso’s autobiographical sketch of Bazlen. In the melodic contact the possibility of a vita nuova is transfigured in not-knowing because the Western modernity is devoid of any notion of ethical destiny. Indeed, “et tout le reste est littérature”, as Verlaine famously wrote. For Calasso’s spectral portraiture in Bobbi (2026), the adventure is to remain alive well beyond completion and needs, as evidenced in our encounter with his languishing voice and memory.

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Notes 

1. Roberto Calasso. Bobi (Anagrama, 2026), 83.

2. Osip Mandelstam. “El interlocutor”, en Gozo y misterio de la poesía (El Cobre Ediciones, 2005), 71.

3. Roberto Calasso.  Bobi (Anagrama, 2026), 55-56.

4. Daniele Del Giudice. A Fictional Inquiry (New Vessel Press, 2021), 123. 

Plastic spirit and depth. by Gerardo Muñoz

In an issue of The Listener in 1935, the renowned British art historian Kenneth Clark penned a short article titled “The Future of Painting” that can be read as an early eulogy to the tradition of the pictorial craft. As a provocation – this was still the high tide of Modernist art – the ‘future’ of painting for Clark was undeniably reaching a point of irreversible exhaustion, at least in the Western tradition. In a phenomenological reduction of two major strands of modern painting – what he called “pure painting” that included Impressionism and Post-Impressionism; and, on the other, “super-realism” as the artistic consciousness that bypassed  “spiritual salvation”, such as that of Surrealism and other visual experiments – Clark’s indictment deployed an indictment on what he sought as the end of the “plastic spirit”: “We must keep in mind the possibility that in the western world the plastic spirit is really exhausted and that art will be lost for many decades” [1]. 

For Clark, it was not that art ceased to exist as an autonomous practice of sensorial activity; it was rather that its imaginative and spiritual endeavors had a future only if mediated and “linked up” (sic) with the evolution of a “new social economic system” driven by the standards of productivity and mass spectatorship. Unlike Clement Greenberg’s reflexive plea of modernist painting as the triumph of the dialectical inversion of flatness over depth, for Clark the convergence of pictorial relation with social objectivity resulted, in the tradition of a post-Cezanne world, in draining the inherent sensible communication of painting and myth. This meant that modernist painting tout court was devoid of any mythical relation. In fact, one could very well claim that the outwardly material support (the flat canvas) of the picture became its most dramatic corroboration. Modernist painting was the triumph of social symbolization insofar as it served as a reminder of the objective space that could only be taken as unserious gratification of its own objectivity.

It does not take too many readings of Greenberg’s large claim on modernist painting to see that behind “flatness”, its very surface, lurks variations of the aura of subjectivity, expressed in “success of self-criticism”, “resistance to the sculptural”, and the drive towards systematic consistency viewed in the mirror of the “convergence of spirit with science; their concern does show the degree which Modernist art belongs to the same historical and cultural tendency as modern science” [2]. Or so writes Greenberg in his landmark text. If Greenberg goes out of his way to invite modern science into the field of aesthetics it is precisely because Modernist art has been able to spell out the potential for representation into an autonomous surface that has given up depth to the conscious effort of its material limitations as its primary concern (imagination, the divine, the liturgical theatrical aura are all secondary). It is perhaps against this backdrop that one can understand what Clark means by the exhaustion of the “plastic spirit” that underpins his prophetic understanding of the decline of painting. 

But what is, ultimately, the “plastic spirit”? It is not referring to sacred representation nor artistic inspiration of the artist, but rather the receptive affinity of the pictorial gesture with nature without ever being reducible to its material support (flatness). If painting exists, it is because its lovely being “is neither sensuous nor spirit, but rather the ungraspable, diffusing over the figure…this being is ungraspable yet perceptible to everyone is what the Greek language called [kharis] and we call grace” [3]. What the ‘plastic spirit’ discloses in its suspension of judgement through very disclosure of appearance is the imperturbable space, and by extension ungraspable, where figuration arrest an instance of eternity. In this sense, it always resists any assertion towards the future, because it dwells in the opening of a space “there” that fails to coincide with the material extension and limitation of the canvas.

This is what perhaps Walter Benjamin had in mind in an early fragment where he reflected on painting as an art of paradise or a state other-than-being grounded in visual contours: “Painting, too, generates space spiritually; its generation of form is likewise grounded originally in space, but it generates space in an­ other form. Not the dimension but the infinity of space is constructed in painting. This happens through the surface, in that, here, things develop not their dimensionality, their extension in space, but their being toward space. The depth yields infinite space. In this way, the form of concentration is given, but this now requires for its fulfillment, for the allaying of its tension, a presentation of the infinite in itself and no longer as dimensional and extended” [4]. Was not this the ungraspable caesura between depiction and nature already pointed out by Schelling?

Painting is depth, or at least it is about a certain way to accout for depth. And depth, fundus, before it takes the form of a flat spatial region in ‘thereness’, it is eminently the display of the figure that emerges from it. This “space otherwise” – that is not just a different spatial arrangement or geometrical calculation – is something of the infinite that makes both flatness and the diachronic arrow of time collapse in its unattainable rigor brought to bear in the affection through figures and colors. Every painting shows therenesss, but that is only possible through the depth of interiority that remains invisible. This can illuminate what Osip Mandelstam said of the plastic spirit when writing that “painting is also much more a matter of internal secretion than of apperception, that is, of external perceiving. To appreciate a picture you must go through a process making of restoring it” [5]. It is in this renewal that the imperturbable depth of painting fulfills before the abdication of the future. And from the “depths of nature” into the blossoming manifestation of appearance, painting recalls, beyond words, what in the sequence of time is understood, and yet often neglected, as the ungraspable. 

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Notes 

1. Kenneth Clark. “The Future of Painting”, The Listener, October 2, 1935, 578.

2. Clement Greenberg. “Modernist Painting” (1960), in The Collected Essays and Criticism (University of Chicago Press, 1993), 91.

3. F.W.J. Schelling. “On the relationship of the plastic arts to Nature” (1807), Kabiri: The Official Journal of the North American Schelling Society, Vol. 3, 2021, 146.

4. Walter Benjamin. “The Rainbow, or the Art of Paradise”, in Early Writings 1910-1917 (Harvard University Press, 2011), 225.

5. Osip Mandelstam. Journey to Armenia & Conversation about Dante (Notting Hill Editions, 2011), 79.

The name Beatriz Viterbo. by Gerardo Muñoz

The central question that “The Aleph” raises is as banal as difficult to answer: who is Beatriz Viterbo? For one, she is dead. Borges’ Leibnizian experiment with the infinite point of the universe is that even assuming that we account for all the possible predicates of this person we still cannot exhaust who lurks behind “Beatriz Viterbo”. In a way, Beatriz remains encrypted in a house soon to be demolished, remaining unattainable and mysterious in the passing of the world. As we know, there have been critics that have taken up the detective task to understand the significance of the name Beatriz Viterbo by probing the story’s dedication to Estela Canto, who later became the rightful owner of the original manuscript, and that connects to Dante’s Divine Comedy in terms of its cantiche structure as well as the figure of Beatrice [1]. However, as Giorgio Agamben once said regarding the Italian poet, it is utterly senseless to attempt to identify a subject behind Beatrice, since what is at stake in Dante’s poetics, perhaps of all poetics, is the experiment of language as an experience of love [2]. What the name Beatriz Viterbo enacts is no different. 

Indeed, in Borges’ Beatriz Viterbo this experience of love is one that fundamentally lacks images and predicates of this world; which means that love, if to be held as an intensity of the living, in the name harbors the region between life and death, between memory and forgetting. These distinctions are not oppositional, but rather an angular index that defines erotic intensity; and, as we know, the name is the supreme vehicle of the impropriety of oneself because it precedes it. As Borges writes in “The theologians” also included in The Aleph: “There are some that look for love in a woman in order to forget her; in order to cease thinking about her” [3]. The fundamental formlessness of love does not depend on neither images nor acts, but on the enduring vocative or song (canto) that shines forth in the open secret of the name. 

This is why the portrait of the deceased is insufficient for the narrator of the story. In a moment that is the clearest parallelism to the concatenation of “things seen” in the aleph, the name appears four times in repetition: “Beaitriz, Beatriz Elena Viterbo, Beatriz querida, Beatriz perdida para siempre…” [4]. If Osip Mandelstam once remarked that the “eye is an instrument of thought”, one could say that the the voice of the name is the instance where language and thought coincide without remainder; a convergence of Heaven and Earth, of the dead and the living in the grain of the voice. There are no static images of Viterbo because her mysterious life, the unlived life with the narrator, is precisely the missing image guarded by the name. In the basement, facing upwards to peek into the aleph, we are told that he, Borges, will be able to “establish a dialogue with all the images of Beatriz” (“podrás entablar un diálogo con todas la imágenes de Beatriz”). But what the aleph cannot yield is the missing image that is only the event of his irreducible linguistic contact proper to his memory. Once again Maldelstam: “The word, the name, is a psyche…does not signify an object, but freely chooses, as though for a dwelling place, some beloved body. And around the thing the word hovers freely, like a soul around a body that has been abandoned but not forgotten” [5]. But what is not forgotten is not that quality or that image of a person, but the enduring rustling of a name that recalls the oldest human experience: the mystery of the voice.

It might also be for this reason that Beatriz Viterbo recalls not just Dante’s divine and eternal Muse, but the world of the dead; the vetus in ‘Viterbo’, that is, the oldest or ‘most ancient’ life that dwells in the underworld, because its direct provenance is the archaic Etruscan civilization [6]. If Beatrice, as the trope of transcendence beyond the Earth has been a repeated object of literary interpretation, Viterbo as the vetus burial has rarely generated any interest (if the house of Viterbo is being demolished, this also means that in her proper name is the burial site at the end of remembrance). 

In the cadence of the name “Beatriz Viterbo” we can hear the transit between the living and the dead, the invisible and the present, the possible predications as well as the defaced; a work of oblivion in virtue of its own caducity. “Me trabajó otra vez el olvido”, writes Borges towards the end evoking the erosion of forgetting in the void of nonpresence: the working of eros pushes to the end, towards absolute oblivion through the very accruing of remembrance. Life is this immemorial that is encrypted, as if were, in a handful of names. 

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Notes 

1. Emir Rodríguez Monegal. Jorge Luis Borges : A Literary Biography (Paragon House, 1988), 414.

2. Giorgio Agamben. “No amanece el cantor”, in En torno a la obra de José Ángel Valente (Alianza Editorial, 1996), 49.

3. Jorge Luis Borges. “Los teólogos”, in El Aleph (Alianza Editorial, 1999), 50.

4. Jorge Luis Borges. “El Aleph”, in El Aleph (Alianza Editorial, 1999), 189. 

5. Osip Mandelstam. “The Word and Culture” (1921), Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1975, 531.

6. Adolfo Zavaroni. Etymological Dictionary of Etruscan Words (2024), 310.