Man Who Mistook His Mistress For A Violin
The man who mistook his mistress for a violin
is the subject of a book by J. M. Coetzee.
Mistaking music for a mistress is a sin
more serious that to eat bread without saying motsi.
When sex becomes a contest in which you subject
erotic will to your opponent who’s a wench,
don’t treat her like a piece of bread and don’t object
if she declares she is not ready yet to bensch.
Motsi is the Hebrew name of a piece of bread a Jew may not eat before saying a blessing, hamotsi lehem min ha’arets, meaning “He who brings forth bread from the earth.” Bensch means “bless, ” and in the context of eating bread it refers to the blessing that in Hebrew is called birkat hamazon, meaning “the blessing for food.” Coetzee’s description of himself as “the man who mistook his mistress for a violin” is clearly an allusion to Oliver Sacks’s story of the man with visual agnosia who mistook his wife for a hat.
The poem was in part inspired by Tim Parks’s review of J. M. Coetzee’s “Summertime: A Fiction, ” a novel that may or may not be autobiographical (“The Education of ‘John Coetzee, ’” NYR (February 11,2010) :
Following Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002) , Summertime concludes J.M. Coetzee's autobiographical trilogy. It is a teasing and surprisingly funny book, at once as elaborately elusive and determinedly confessional as ever autobiography could be. If Boyhood and Youth were remarkable for Coetzee's use of the third person (the author declining to identify with his younger self) and the present tense (a narrative device more commonly associated with fiction than memoir) , Summertime takes both distancing and novelizing a step further. Despite our seeing Coetzee's name on the cover and hence assuming the author alive and well, we are soon asked to believe that he is now dead, the book being made up of five interviews conducted by an anonymous biographer who is speaking to people he presumes were important to the writer during the years 1972–1975.
Coetzee writes about the affair he has, possibly fact, possibly fiction, with a psychotherapist called Julia:
John, she says, was actually “a minor character” in a drama played out between herself and her husband. While the latter was traveling, the lovers enjoyed an “erotic entanglement” in the marital bed. Yet John was peripheral to her life; at the one moment when she was ready to leave her husband and he could have become a major player, he “took fright” and snuck out of the hotel where she was sleeping….Certainly there’s comedy to be had in the description of this willfully unassertive man partnering a woman who sees sex “as a contest, a variety of wrestling in which you do you best to subject your opponent to your erotic will.” “He was not in my league, ” Julia complains. When John tries to persuade her to moderate her lovemaking to fir the slow movement of a Schubert string quintet, the better to “re-experience” the sexual feelings of a bygone age, Julia shows him the door. “The man who mistook his mistress for a violin, ” she comments.
1/30/10
poem by Gershon Hepner
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Misaking A Mistress For A Violin
MISTAKING A MISTRESS FOR A VIOLIN
The man who mistook his mistress for a violin
is the subject of a book by J. M. Coetzee.
Mistaking music for a mistress is a sin
more serious than to eat bread without saying motsi.
When sex becomes a contest in which you subject
erotic will to your opponent, wife or wench,
don’t treat her like a piece of bread, and don’t object
if she declares she is not ready yet to bensch.
Motsi is the Hebrew name of a piece of bread a Jew may not eat before saying a blessing, hamotsi lehem min ha’arets, meaning “He who brings forth bread from the earth.” Bensch means “bless, ” and in the context of eating bread it refers to the blessing that in Hebrew is called birkat hamazon, meaning “the blessing for food.” Coetzee’s description of himself as “the man who mistook his mistress for a violin” is clearly an allusion to Oliver Sacks’s story of the man with visual agnosia who mistook his wife for a hat.
The poem was in part inspired by Tim Parks’s review of J. M. Coetzee’s “Summertime: A Fiction, ” a novel that may or may not be autobiographical (“The Education of ‘John Coetzee, ’” NYR (February 11,2010) :
Following Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002) , Summertime concludes J.M. Coetzee's autobiographical trilogy. It is a teasing and surprisingly funny book, at once as elaborately elusive and determinedly confessional as ever autobiography could be. If Boyhood and Youth were remarkable for Coetzee's use of the third person (the author declining to identify with his younger self) and the present tense (a narrative device more commonly associated with fiction than memoir) , Summertime takes both distancing and novelizing a step further. Despite our seeing Coetzee's name on the cover and hence assuming the author alive and well, we are soon asked to believe that he is now dead, the book being made up of five interviews conducted by an anonymous biographer who is speaking to people he presumes were important to the writer during the years 1972–1975.
Coetzee writes about the affair he has, possibly fact, possibly fiction, with a psychotherapist called Julia:
John, she says, was actually “a minor character” in a drama played out between herself and her husband. While the latter was traveling, the lovers enjoyed an “erotic entanglement” in the marital bed. Yet John was peripheral to her life; at the one moment when she was ready to leave her husband and he could have become a major player, he “took fright” and snuck out of the hotel where she was sleeping….Certainly there’s comedy to be had in the description of this willfully unassertive man partnering a woman who sees sex “as a contest, a variety of wrestling in which you do you best to subject your opponent to your erotic will.” “He was not in my league, ” Julia complains. When John tries to persuade her to moderate her lovemaking to fir the slow movement of a Schubert string quintet, the better to “re-experience” the sexual feelings of a bygone age, Julia shows him the door. “The man who mistook his mistress for a violin, ” she comments.
1/30/10
poem by Gershon Hepner
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?
quote by J.M. Coetzee
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I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
quote by J.M. Coetzee
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As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies, as a form of abstract thought. I don't wish to deny the uses of the intellect, but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere.
quote by J.M. Coetzee
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As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies, as a form of abstract thought. I dont wish to deny the uses of the intellect, but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere.
quote by J.M. Coetzee
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.
quote by J.M. Coetzee
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I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.
quote by J.M. Coetzee
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The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law.
quote by J.M. Coetzee
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We are not by nature cruel.
quote by J.M. Coetzee
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Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.
quote by J.M. Coetzee
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That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.
quote by J.M. Coetzee
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In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.
quote by J.M. Coetzee
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In the whole wretched business there was something generous that was doing its best to flower.
J.M. Coetzee in Disgrace
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Not Communicating To Oneself
Listening to Beethoven we sense
the inspiration pouring from the master.
Johann Sebastian Bach sounds as intense,
but far more distant from disaster.
He seems to want to have a conversation
with anyone prepared to pay attention.
Although we lose him when his great elation
exceeds the limits of our comprehension,
we know that he is trying to communicate,
as if he’d just found, lying on a shelf,
the notes he’s trying to communicate
to us, and not, like Ludwig, to himself.
The proofs of Beethoven’s profundity
lay in the notes that for him had no sound,
while Bach, with effortless fecundity,
encouraged all of us to be profound.
J. M. Coetzee contrasts his relationship to the music of Beethoven and J. S. Bach. Whereas he imagines Beethoven as a genius from whom inspiration pours forth while oblivious to the people who may be listening to him he imagines J. S. Bach as a teacher who is attempting to instruct him while he sits next him while he is playing. As a rider, Coetzee added that there are moments when J. S. Bach’s inspiration exceeds the listener’s comprehension. These are the moments of his greatest inspiration. Listening to this report I was reminded of Richard Eder’s comment on Ceotzee when reviewing his book “Diary of a Bad Year” (“A Writer, A Muse, Their Laundry, ” NYT, January 1,2008) :
I think of the childlike simplicity of late Beethoven on a profound return trip from profundity.”
10/7/08
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Elizabeth, Lady C, claims to be writing at the limits of language. Would it not be insulting to her if I were diligently to follow after her, explaining what she means but is not smart enough to say?
quote by J.M. Coetzee
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals.
quote by J.M. Coetzee
Submitted by Veronica Serbanoiu
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In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life.
quote by J.M. Coetzee
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If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.
quote by J.M. Coetzee
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My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms.
quote by J.M. Coetzee
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There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.
quote by J.M. Coetzee
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