Reading The Loop by Jacques Roubaud, part 6
Map 1: §7 —> I§66 —> §7
Map 2: 34, 35, 36, 37, 225, 226, 227, 37, 38
I attempted to read this section (because one main narrative section and its interpolation/s can be considered a single section, right?) last night, and failed. I attempted again just now, and more or less succeeded. I mean, I read all nine (!!!) of those pages, but I fell asleep multiple times while reading both last night and today.
Interestingly, the section is all about speed, particularly the speed of memory. Or it's about the (non) speed of memory: the fact that memory is a rapid succession of static images. That's a huge oversimplification, but that's the best I can do right now; there are only so many references I'm willing to look up, and fewer I'm willing to investigate as thoroughly as would be necessary to fully understand Roubaud and then explain him without (over) simplifying. How much should I want to know about Hermogenian rhetoric?
This afternoon, before attempting to read nine little pages in The Loop, I finally, after 3.3 months of living in this room, put some pictures up on my walls. I was (and still am) surprised by how emotionally difficult the relatively simple process of decorating was. I suppose there are memories attached to all of the images I put up (or each image is a series of images which are memories), but those memories, taken as a whole, are not even 50% negative/difficult. Probably they're not even 25% negative/difficult. So why was decorating so emotional? I would hypothesize that it has something to do with the idea of settling and/or staying put, but since I decorated my first room in Tübingen (when I thought I was only staying for four months) without any (remembered) difficulty, that hypothesis quickly falls apart. Perhaps it was just a mildly negative reaction to change: I disliked my decorating immediately, but have, over the last couple of hours, come to like it very much.
The one thing I didn't know I really wanted to know about Hermogenes of Tarsus was something Roubaud thankfully included in The Loop (particularly since once I did know it, I knew I had always wanted to know it):
"Hermogenes, born in Tarsus, had such a great reputation as a sophist at fifteen years of age that the emporer Marcus Aurelius traveled far in order to hear him. But at twenty years of age, he suddenly lost his gift, apparently due to natural causes. . . . He died at an old age, poor and unknown—no one thought of him after his art had deserted him. When his corpse was examined, it was discovered that his heart was larger than normal, and covered with hair."
That's pretty much how I felt after hanging pictures today: hairy-hearted. I think perhaps I have been in need of an emotional shave for a while now.
