[1910 – 1999] – •→http://www.paulbowles.org/
Paul Bowles was born in Queens, New York, in 1910. He began his travels as a teenager, setting off for Paris, telling no one of his plans. In 1930 he visited Morocco for the first time, with Aaron Copland, with whom he was studying music. His early reputation was as a composer and he wrote the scores for several Tennessee Williams plays.
Bowles married writer Jane Auer in 1938, and after the war the couple settled in Tangier. In Morocco Bowles turned principally to fiction. The Sheltering Sky—inspired by his travels in the Sahara—was a New York Times bestseller in 1950, and has gone on to sell more than 250,000 copies. It was followed by three further novels, numerous short stories, nonfiction, and translations. Bowles died in Tangier in 1999.
∇ ‘Here I Am’ ⇓
When I am here I shall not mind, I shall merely murmur: If no one comes and sees me here it will be all right Here it is hard to believe that anything is free Come let us lapse into freedom Let all these things become less than dust Let me not think at all ever Let these things come closer together Let everything be slow and soft Let the wind blow over the roof at noon Let the great city lie slow under the sun at noon Let everything be soft here because there is no dust Let anything except what is coming come That’s the way I’ve always felt◊ Up Above World ↓ [PB reads excerpt]
At some point in the night, she had a dream; or was it possible that she was partially awake… she was only remembering a dream. She was alone and on the rocks, and the dark coast beside the sea. The water surged upward and fell back languidly and in the distance she heard surf breaking slowly on the sandy shore. It was comforting to be this close to the surface of the ocean and gaze at the internet nocturnal details of its swelling and ebbing.
And as she listened to the faraway breakers rolling up on the beach, she became another sound, that twined with the intimate and pleasure waves. The vast horizontal whisper across the bosom of the sea, carrying an ever repeated phrase, regular as a lighthouse flashing. Dawn would be breaking soon. She listened a long time. Again and again, scarcely audible words were whispered across the moving lovers. A great weight was being lifted slowly… While the little unhappiness became more complete and she woke.
◊ Nights ↓
There have been times, what with this and that, and the first group of words was not enough. And some shelves of memory lies a misplaced summer, not stored away for later savory. Surely it ended early, with unexpected fogs, but the wind sliding past through our measured darkness. No voice could be enough, what with this and that, the hours falling faster.
When striped snakes shall creep upon us
And the nervous screams of birds
Make silent all the fountains and the orchards and when these
Have caught upon the wing each wing
That flutters from the sky
Then shall I and then shall I
Rip out the smiles from garden walks
Transform the minnows into hawks
Tarantulas and bees
Then shall I and then shall I
Unmake each whining thing.
♦ Baptism Of Solitude ↓
Immediately when you arrive in Sahara, for the first or the tenth time, you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence prevails outside the towns; and within, even in busy places like the markets, there is a hushed quality in the air, as if the quiet were a conscious force which, resenting the intrusion of sound, minimizes and disperses sound straightaway. Then there is the sky, compared to which all other skies seem fainthearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it is always the focal point of the landscape. At sunset, the precise, curved shadow of the earth rises into it swiftly from the horizon, cutting into light section and dark section. When all daylight is gone, and the space is thick with stars, it is still of an intense and burning blue, darkest directly overhead and paling toward the earth, so that the night never really goes dark.
You leave the gate of the fort or town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony plain and stand awhile alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call ‘le bapteme de solitude.’ It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears…A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.
…Perhaps the logical question to ask at this point is: Why go? The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude he can’t help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in time or money, for the absolute has no price.
Owsley Brown’s Night Waltz is an elegant and soulful document of discovery. Interviewed in Morocco during the last months of his life, Bowles journeys back to his early years as a contemporary and occasional collaborator of other such iconic figures as Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Orson Welles. Bowles’ uncut compositions — performed by the Eos Orchestra — are punctuated with stunning visual essays by filmmakers Nathaniel Dorsky and Rudy Burckhardt. Long after retiring from his more well-known profession, Bowles kept music as a vital part of his life, tapping out fresh rhythms on his Tangier table tops until the end of his days.
◊ The Sheltering Sky ↓
⇐ The Sheltering Sky is a landmark of 20th-century literature, a novel of existential despair that examines the limits of humanity when it touches the unfathomable emptiness of the desert. Academy Award-winning actress Jennifer Connelly (A Beautiful Mind, Requiem for a Dream) gives masterful voice to this American classic.
This fascinating story follows three American travelers, a married couple and their friend, as they find themselves adrift in the cities and deserts of North Africa after World War II. Along the walkabout, their ignorance of the dangers that surround them peels back the veneer of their lives. The author’s life as an expatriate in the North African nation of Morocco informed his rendering of the desert, which itself is a cruel, unforgiving character in the novel.
On the terrace of the Café d´Eckmühl-Noiseux a few Arabs sat drinking mineral water; only their fezzes of varying shades of red distinguished them from the rest of the population of the port. Their European clothes were worn and gray; it would have been hard to tell what the cut of any garment had been originally. The nearly naked shoe-shine boys squatted on their boxes looking down at the pavement, without the energy to wave away the flies that crawled over their faces. Inside the café the air was cooler but without movement, and it smelled of stale wine and urine.
At the table in the darkest corner sat three Americans: two young men and a girl. They conversed quietly, and in the manner of people who have all the time in the world for everything. One of the men, the thin one with a slightly wry, distraught face, was folding up some large multicolored maps he had spread out on the table a moment ago. His wife watched the meticulous movements he made with amusement and exasperation; maps bored her, and he was always consulting them. Even during the short periods when their lives were stationary, which had been few enough since their marriage twelve years ago, he had only to see a map to begin studying it passionately, and then, often as not, he would begin to plan some new, impossible trip which sometimes eventually became a reality. He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler.
The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home. Before the war it had been Europe and the Near East, during the war the West Indies and South America. And she had accompanied him without reiterating her complaints too often or too bitterly.
At this point they had crossed the Atlantic for the first time since 1939, with a great deal of luggage and the intention of keeping as far as possible from the places which had been touched by the war. For, as he claimed, another important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking. And the war was one facet of the mechanized age he wanted to forget.
◊ Bernardo Bertolucci‘s ‘THE SHELTERING SKY’
. . . Final scene featuring Paul Bowles’ monologue ↓ «Are you lost»
¤ In The Red Room ↓ [read]
◊ Let It Come Down ↓
One of the most enigmatic artists of the 20th century, writer, composer and wanderer Paul Bowles is profiled by a filmmaker who has been obsessed with his genius since age nineteen. Set against the dramatic landscape of North Africa, the mystery of Bowles begins to unravel in Jennifer Baichwal’s poetic and moving Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles. Rare, candid interviews with the reclusive Bowles–at home in Tangier, as well as in New York during an extraordinary final reunion with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs–are intercut with conflicting views of his supporters and detractors. At the time in his mid-eighties, Bowles speaks with unprecedented candor about his work, his controversial private life and his relationships with Gertrude Stein, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, the Beats, and his wife and fellow author Jane Bowles.
‘I think there’s a good deal of sadness in my writing. I was preoccupied with violence. Violence in my imagination, there was no violence in my life ever. Maybe that’s why I gave up writing music. I don’t see that there was any alternative, really. People love to speak of the process of life as having a meaning. But that is a religious concept really, it comes from it.. It’s an outcropping of a belief in supernatural powers.’
[w. burroughs] «There is sort of that particular sort of New England and strain that has a sort of horror of anything … anything religious…»
On his way through the borderlands of consciousness, he had a fantasy. From the mountain behind the farm, running silently over the icy crust of the snow, leaping over the rocks and bushes, came a wolf…
Everyone was humiliated there at the house, except […?]. Funny she humiliated everyone [ . . . ? ] of course was constantly being humiliated. There’s a line in […?] that in between the rows of corn, the heated beetle pants as if grub is not there. She said, «Why d’you say that?» And I said, «Was image.» She said, «Yes, but it’s false, so you see it’s false. Do the beetles pant?» And I said, «Why, don’t suppose they could; no, they’re insects.» She said, «That’s right.» Still think she was right, not because she was [ . . . ?] but because she kind of had the wrong idea of what poetry was, and you don’t make poetry out of falsities! Well, I don’t think that I can make anything much of that which is false, no.
Paul most decidedly preached ‘cause his culture was French, his background. He’s in Paris and a whole Gertrude Stein nonsense language business, you know, knocking everything into a hat, the dada business, it all had its influence. Paul started as a composer. He was a main in the 30s and 40s, and after all it’s an extraordinary thing that one person should be a novelist and a composer.
‘The music that I wrote long ago, I listen and I can’t believe that I ever did it!’
He liked to say that, you see ‘…sat and learned how to write large pieces.’ He had to sit in one place and do it, and you couldn’t travel.
‘The music is lost and disappeared, and so I found it more interesting. But when I was nothing but a composer, I itched to write.’
[ . . . French with subtitles . . . ]There’s a remark that Gore makes in his book. He says, to categorize is to control, therefore [ . . . ?] categorize.
The room was airless [ . . . ? ] close to his chair and looked at the night table to see if the carafe water was there. Then my mother opened – top sheet of my bed had been stripped back to the floor. There, on the far side of the bed, dark against the whiteness of the lower sheet, lay Raki asleep on a side, and make it.
‘You want me to describe myself. If I could do that, I would assume that I existed and I was a person, and I’ve assumed that I don’t exist and I’m not a person. Therefore, what applies to people doesn’t apply to me, you know, is a way of escaping.’
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