The ways of Paradise by Peter Cornell

The ways of Paradise by Peter Cornell

Swedish memoir

Original title – Paradisets vägar

Translator – Saskia Vogel

Source – Subscription book

I had some money come and I decided I wanted to get the Fitzcarraldo subscription and paid for the 20-book subscription as I knew that it would have some great books I had heard about this book earlier this year, and out of the new and upcoming books from them it was easily one I knew I would read the second unit hit the floor through the letterbox, something that maybe doesn’t happen as much as it used to for me as a reader. When I heard Peter Cornell had put together the pieces left behind by an unknown academic researcher  who for thirty years, had spent the previous three decades working on something, what was found is her within this book. Fare to say it is no Pessoa or Bolano trunk full;l of papers or a hard drive of many nearly finished novels. This was just a hundred or so pages of writing. But this was 1987, an age before Google thought this was a man connecting the world, and like the knots in Rushkin’s pieces, he talks about tightening knots around his prose, and this is what is left is like an espresso shot a brutal hit of Knowledge and connections. He links those brilliant minds of the last 2000 years here, there, and everywhere!!

1. Leonardo da Vinci’s and Dürer’s labyrinthine ‘knots’ without beginning or end can be seen as maps of the universe. They are, along with a few late drawings, the kind of hieroglyphs that may have been stimulated by Leonardo’s well-known exercises around the imaginative eye – to lose one’s self in the damp patches on a wall or other fragmentary forms. ‘One gets the impression that the Leonardo] drawings held at Windsor Castle, which symbolically represent the world at once in its birth and its final cataclysm, stem from similar visions.’ See Gustav René Hocke, Die Welt als Labyrinth, 1957; Ananda K.

Coomaraswamy, ‘The Iconography of Dürer’s “Knots” and Leonardo’s “Concatenation”, in Art Quarterly,1944

Knots and labyrinths a a recurring theme in the book

The three pieces in the book run over and interconnect with one another. They all seem to revolve around labyrinths or the complex nature of the world and how one thing can connect to another. The Greek history of the minotaur and labyrinth through Rushkins integrate knot drawing and then ending with the chaos of Jackson Pollock, but the feeling of a connection through how the pieces connect.. Almost like a knight tour of a chess board, the text moves forward but never quite the way you think it will. You can see the mind of those thirty years crossing and reconnecting these pieces like a giant Meccano set of his mind. This just has to be read !!

1. Various types of fantastical tales, ‘contes fantastiques autour des contes originaires. Jurgis Baltrusaitis, La quête d’ Isis: Essai sur la légende d’un mythe, 1985.
2. Ibid.
3. ‘The centre of the world’, the heart of the world’. This concept recurs in all cultures even as their geographic and topographical situations may vary: country, cave, mountain, tower, temple or city. These imagined places arise from fantasies of a holy land, described as follows by René Guénon: ‘This “holy land”, above all others, it is the finest of lands per the meaning of the Sanskrit word Paradesha, which among the Chaldeans took the form of Pardes and Paradise in the Western world; in other words it refers to the “earthly paradise” that constitutes the point of departure in each religious tradition. Here was the or-igin, here was spoken the first, creative Word. See ‘Les gardiens de la Terre sainte’ (1929), in Symboles fondamen-taux de la Science sacrée, 1962.
4. Possibly in André Breton’s object Souvenir du paradis terrestre from 1953, a rugged rock, 11.5 x 9.5 x 5 cm, its title inscribed into the rock.
5. ‘Paradise, from Old Persian pairidaeza, meaning ‘en-closed garden,park

The first five little vignettes of info

I am just a huge fan of digersive books of the way some writers let their minds wander and connect the dots a certain way. More accessible, maybe now, in this age with Google, this book predates Google and such; thus, the work that went into it being the way it was must have been years of refining the prose. This is A scholar caught in a Borgesian library where, like Borges, a writer who could never write a novel, his writing is like that espresso shot perfect complex and just enough of a hit. This prose is like this. I imagine a huger work pruned over those thirty years, but as you do that, the mind connects other things, and the whole thing becomes like an Escher painting or a Mobius loop where there is a point that it seems like it is an endless connection with the world and that is what happens here. It is a man caught in an Escher world, a labyrinth of his mind slowly closing as those prose-like knots grow shorter and shorter. Oh my god, I am just off on my own tangent now. Let’s just say this will quickly be the book of the year for me. I can’t see anything coming near it apart from my next read, a similar, if longer, book from Fitzcarraldo by a great German writer. Have you a favourite digressive work of literature ?