No Answers

I read something that made me think about a disused railway crossing on the outskirts of some overgrown, neglected plot of land at the height of summer. Yet what was remarkable about this image was that it came to consciousness as both a picture and simultaneously the words that made it up, so that each was as inevitable as the other.

It was then that I first wrote about Puerto Alcan, about its cobbled streets, its many cherry trees, the bookshop at the top of a hill, about the view from the cliffs above the town and about the little bridge over the river whose grassy path winds away to the churchyard.

I wrote about various places which, to those familiar only with the later Puerto Alcan, would make no sense. They would remember only the various Puerto Alcans that overlapped and overwrote the original Puerto Alcan. Or perhaps after all they might guess what was going on because of a certain, otherwise inexplicable scepticism that Puerto Alcan continues to uphold in relation to itself.

There are no answers, only choices

Sometimes expression takes a form that is naturally pleasing; the distinctions are not too close together, yet just sufficiently far removed that something is forced to expand within oneself in encompassing them, without quite reaching the level of intellectual effort.

"There are no answers, only choices," is for me a phrase most notable for the way it repeats. The first thing it does, as it appears, is to demand to be read a second time; it isn't that anything's escaped or been misplaced; it's simply satisfying to do so.

I feel that "answers" is a word with such a spectral void behind it; the prospect of "answers" seems onerous and definitive, dry as chalk, impossible except in bulk and at the risk of mortal exhaustion. But "choices" is a word that straddles time; it dips equally upon each side, and no great weight of anything can seem to shift its balance. The human choice, after all, is the greatest part of our lives, yet our lives may be the least significant thing of all. And so every choice is both small and great.

I appreciate also what this statement does to the impulse of questioning -- the way that it resolves it without actually addressing it directly; it stands to one side and softly suggests a different ground for enquiry. It remains legitimate to say: "There are choices" is not a meaningful rejoinder to the affirmation: "There are no answers." Yet the rejoinder is still intriguing, and perhaps more intriguing than the militant affirmation "There are no answers." A transfer of power -- and sympathy -- is implicit.

"Choices" are not what we expect -- as an answer. Choices indeeed are the very thing we overlook, in our failure to locate our answer. We are, in other words, inculcated -- even if only slightly -- in our search. To dramatise our loss as pure evasion on the part of what is sought is to misrepresent both the quest and our own potential to intercede and alter the terms of that quest.

Yet this defence itself offers up just so much, and then nothing further. And that is, again, at the heart of "There are no answers, only choices" -- another reason it repeats itself. It really suggests only so much; it is only a small movement that it has made, a mere nod toward the most probable direction. It can only sustain us so far, and then we must find our own paths, as before. It is revealing not as a light that can inexorably guide us, but as the lucent memory of something we have seen.

Lands of Memory

"He doesn't write to convince, or weave elaborate plots ... he neglects the ordinary mechanisms of suspense, intrigue, and drama. He plays with the association of ideas but his riddles are not meant to be solved. His purpose, if he has one ... is to immerse the reader in a shifting sequence of states of being and mysterious mental processes, repeating, amplifying and transforming certain elusive themes that are always accompanied by the counterpoint of memory."

- Esther Allen, Prologue to "Lands of Memory" (Hernandez)

Around the time of Clemente Colling

"I'll also have to write many things I know very little about; it even strikes me that impenetrability is intrinsic to them. Perhaps when we think we know them we stop knowing that we don't know them, because their existence is inevitably obscure, and that must be one of their qualities.

But I don't believe I must write only what I know. I must also write the other things."

(Felisberto Hernández. "Around the Time of Clemente Colling", 1942)

The Bridge in the Forest

I go down by the bridge which has a weathered, dry wooden hand rail, upon which small dry yellow leaves, always small, always dry, always yellow, always upside-down, have settled for no reason, as is invariably the case with weathered wooden bridges in summer forests anywhere. Picking up a leaf, I know I have to make a decision -- whether to drop it in the water beneath, whether to put it back, whether to turn it over. And, standing there, already I regret all the decisions I have made, which simultaneously seem to have been elected yet forced upon me, as if by an impetuously indulgent yet exacting destiny, so that I wish I had never gone down by the bridge, and even when I return the leaf -- first right way up then upside down -- to the same place I found it, it's as if already I have made a choice and the wrong choice, when before everything was mere freedom and possibility.

The stillness before the concert

As a child, I always loved the stillness before a concert began, so that I would take myself there earlier and earlier, not just when the queue was just beginning, and not even loitering harmlessly before they opened the doors, where through the windows you had already seen for twenty minutes or more someone's sister with long hair straightening the rows of chairs and putting the same folded programme, usually yellow or pale blue or pink, but seldom white or green, neatly in the middle of each one, but earlier still, before even those chairs had been unstacked from against the wall, or the lights turned on, or any of many difficult decisions upon which a concert depends been made or contemplated.

It is hard for me to explain exactly what I mean by "earlier", and even my insistence on "earlier and earlier" only takes one so far back in that regard. It is easier, rather than trying to imagine that hypothetical act of making distant, instead to visualise what the concert is as it begins; it's then that this distance ceases to be difficult, but instead becomes intuitive and impossible not to understand.

When the concert begins -- at the instant that the pianist, having raised his hands above the keyboard, then allowed them to curl up and wilt a little upon his wrists, and then just hold them there, waiting for the judicious, the aesthetic stillness in which we -- the audience -- somehow collaborate; at that moment, just before the first chord has been played, I close my eyes by looking very intently at some very small detail very far away, usually a part of the pianist, but sometimes one of the thick folds of curtain, or a scuff mark on the panelling of the stage, and concentrating in this way -- which causes one's eyes to close themselves naturally quite without thinking -- I try to erase the physical presence of the player and the auditorium, and instead deduce the true concert from the summer evening air outside and the scents of wine, cigarettes and flowers. So that whatever is played is really what the day preordained anyway; the concert is disposable, answerable to the day, the moods of the day, the moods of the world that sprawls within it; it is simply a means by which other things realise themselves, in the same way that heresy makes no sense until one steps into a church, at which point it loses its unwieldy, hysterical edge and seems instead as reflective and contrapuntal a mystery as any other.

To my mind, everything leading up to that moment is the true concert -- the concert that ends with the first chord, at which point everything else becomes mere commentary. And precisely because this seems too brief an experience, we must go back further and further, starting the concert earlier and earlier, starting the concert sometimes even long before its performer has been born, so that we can wait breathlessly ever longer for those final moments, the final silence before the first chord, and then the piano's long applause.

The friend who kissed Lucy

I always envied my friend who kissed Lucy, although I am not so sure if it was a friend of mine or not, since today I only recall the existence of this person because of his connection with her in this regard.

It seems possible therefore that my mind is simply making up the whole thing, so that it has an excuse to think about Lucy. Or more probably, given that clearly it has long cared for her too much, my inability to put a name, face or background to this so-called friend of mine simply demonstrates quite how possessive it has become, begrudging Lucy even the perfectly legitimate claims her various contexts -- which is to say, the ways in which she is known to different people -- make upon her.

I test the thought a little further, and find it to be sound. Now that I think of Lucy, the things I should know that surround her either vanish or start to change and reconnect themselves to other ideas, as if to leave her a constant space, wide enough that her hands and feet and dress won't touch anything and be left with a dirty mark.

On the Failure of the Project

There is nothing really to be said about the failure of the project. Algernon Blackwood wrote: "The passion and mystery of homeless and wandering men, seduced by the beauty of great forests." In the same way, the project is always larger than anyone imagines, and directed toward the very people least able to withstand its rigours.

The project exists not to be solved, but to be experienced. It is therefore best entertained by those who can do nothing to advance its cause. For, in them, it exists as the pure force -- the force of moving impossibly forth.

From "Ancient Sorceries"

"Tell me, Ilsé," he said, unconsciously imitating her own purring softness of voice, yet aware that he was utterly in earnest, "what is the meaning of this town, and what is this real life you speak of? And why is it that the people watch me from morning to night? Tell me what it all means? And, tell me," he added more quickly with passion in his voice, "what you really are -- yourself?"

She turned her head and looked at him through half-closed eyelids, her growing inner excitement betraying itself by the faint colour that ran like a shadow across her face.

"It seems to me," -- he faltered oddly under her gaze -- "that I have some right to know --."

Suddenly she opened her eyes to the full. "You love me, then?" she asked softly.

"I swear," he cried impetuously, moved as by the force of a rising tide, "I never felt before -- I have never known any other girl who --"

"Then you have the *right* to know," she calmly interrupted his confused confession, "for love shares all secrets."

She paused, and a thrill like fire ran swiftly through him. Her words lifted him off the earth, and he felt a radiant happiness, followed almost the same instant in horrible contrast by the thought of death. He became aware that she had turned her eyes upon his own and was speaking again.

"The real life I speak of," she whispered, "is the old, old life within, the life of long ago, the life to which you, too, once belonged, and to which you still belong."

A faint wave of memory troubled the deeps of his soul as her low voice sank into him. What she was saying he knew instinctively to be true, even though he could not as yet understand its full purpose. His present life seemed slipping from him as he listened, merging his personality in one that was far older and greater. It was this loss of his present self that brought to him the thought of death.

"You came here," she went on, "with the purpose of seeking it, and the people felt your presence and are waiting to know what you decide, whether you will leave them without having found it, or whether --"

Her eyes remained fixed upon his own, but her face began to change, growing larger and darker with an expression of age.

"It is their thoughts constantly playing about your soul that makes you feel they watch you. They do not watch you with their eyes. The purposes of their inner life are calling to you, seeking to claim you. You were all part of the same life long, long ago, and now they want you back again among them."

- from Algernon Blackwood: "Ancient Sorceries" (1927)

Need

We hope for something without knowing what.

Perhaps it is sufficient to have that need; it does not matter that we don't know what we are hoping for.

Something is proven, something is given -- by way of the very things withheld from us.

The Hand

She said nothing. Instead, she rested the palm of her hand against her wrist, and all through the journey -- with the rattle and squeak of the carriage and the innumerable potholes we must have gone over -- nothing changed in the disposition of her hands.

I looked out the window, very far away; on the horizon nothing was moving now, not even the dots of the trees. And I felt as though the hand of the sky and the hand of the sun were resting there too.

Authenticity

It is not having nothing to say that matters; it is having nothing to say, and knowing that it doesn't matter, that matters.

Yet why should this matter? Is the thing one wants to keep potential in you, or in the world?

Someone said to me today that answers themselves have obligations; to remain the destined conclusion to an authentic search, they must keep alive within them that which provokes the search, that which promises to reward it; the "answer", in this sense, is that which it makes available -- the path towards it, the means of approach.

And then she explained a very specific mystery, though in such a way that the explanation of the mystery was only itself a different kind of mystery, and was efficacious precisely because it did not and could not end in itself, but instead was only one door upon yet another door.

Authenticity, then, as a keeping in motion, not in order to substantiate what is sought, but to substantiate the seeking -- to make the seeking authentic, by remaining beyond it, without concealing itself or contradicting itself, by being whatever is necessary to keep that seeking -- that motion of energy -- alive.

And at those moments

And at those moments my grandfather would grow very quiet and even a little grim, though he wouldn't leave the room; it was as if his cause held him there, but now it lost its lightness; the bright side of it grew dark and stormy. Lost for words, it wandered across his face and beyond it, so you only caught its distant ripples now and then across the backs of his eyes.

Occasionally he would rouse himself to add, half as a pleasantry, half as a kind of plea: "Nothing, after all, has really been forbidden us, not so long ago ...", or: "We are not really the makers of our thoughts. They come to us and take root there, and some more stubborn. But the stubbornest of all are the thoughts concealing thoughts, like soft moss that lives in the shadow, beneath the stone."

The analogies were either cursory or non-existent; he would seem on the brink of explaining something, only to find himself already at the bottom of the next valley, far hence or far behind. Even when he shook his head, "We all know and understand," he seemed to be saying, "what it is I am really talking about."

She talked all too easily about "burying old ghosts", about "clearing the air", about "moving on." There was something in this outlook of hers that I found deeply offensive, but I couldn't quite put my finger on what.

"It's her complacency," I said to myself. "It's her smugness."

But later I realised the truth of the matter. It had nothing to do with complacency. It had to do with the fact she felt today's life was somehow more authentic than yesterday's life, that somehow, merely by dint of having passed into the past, the person she was at some point fervently *being* was now like so much yellowed paper, was laughable and without rights, and could be discarded without conscience.

Whereas I see things in entirely the opposite way, whereby the past is always greater, since it has lived the longer, and it is the duty of our present to step about it respectfully. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that, in my case, the present is not really an event at all, but simply the space life makes available for contemplating the past.

What we share is the conviction of a separation of identity. But where she has conceived of a disposable past, I instead believe in a disposable present.

Yet nothing seems constant. I have all sorts of grand notions, revealing insights, thoughts about how the future can be different, how the future can start today -- as I ride back along the beautiful B2036. Yet when I arrive, everything I have felt feels stilted and unreasonable and pointless to express. Which reality, if either, is authentic?

I was sitting on someone's sofa, the friend and his father in armchairs to the sides. Against the darkness all about us, there was the faint blue crackle from what must have been a television set.

First the girl was sitting on the lounge beside me; then, out of caprice, she got up and set herself down again on my knees. Then she seemed to have forgotten where she was sitting, and snuggled close, so that the back of her head was against my chin and her long hair tumbling down my neck; I put my arms about her gently, holding the slim wrists between thumb and palm.

"You will not sleep with my sister, because, if you do ..." -- but whatever my friend was saying was an idle threat; I realised that neither he nor I had any right to determine anything in this place.

A moment earlier we had been wandering along the exposed walkways of an abandoned building. In the general darkness, it was almost impossible to see even where the walls began or ended. However, there were faint red lamps in the ceiling in places, so that within their vicinity you could just pick out the spirals of black wire about them. By pulling at these cables, as was evidently our agenda, we had been in the process of extinguishing those small lights, one by one.

Happiness

I am overtired, I say to myself; even my happiness is a form of tragedy, so that I never know whether to laugh or cry. Riding through town, A. assures me ominously that he likes to "make good progress." I don't. I ride at the speed limit, and am therefore only routinely rather than exhileratingly amazed by all those stopping suddenly, wandering across lanes, or pulling out of side roads. A. has broken most bones in his body; I have not.

"If you don't break the law, you will never break any law," I say to myself. "If you don't take a risk, you will never take any risk." But then I see the flaw in this argument: "It isn't the breaking the law that makes you free. Such a person is free beforehand; his violation of the law is simply the consequence of his freedom. One does not gain anything, therefore, from contesting limits; it cannot change one into someone else. And even something further: to break the law because one feels a need to break the law -- this is a sign of one's absolute dependency and subservience, such that those who never question the law or are indifferent to it, like A., are actually the stronger ..."

"Only what is truly oneself has the power to heal," said Jung. Or as Chopin put it by way of antithesis, discussing Liszt: "He would attain Parnassus upon another man's Pegasus."

Alcan's Tower

"If Alcan were to turn in his grave," Cristina says softly. "And yet, he has none ..."

"If Alcan were to turn in his grave?"

"And yet he has none," she repeats.

"But if he had?"

She shakes her head. "That is the tower's gospel - a possibility which cannot be raised, since it is already impossible even as a possibility. That word "trust" is the ghost of a possibility which refuses to sustain itself, and yet - see! - a tower and a city has built itself upon it nevertheless. When I speak of Alcan what I say cannot even be said. In saying it now I am going beyond what Puerto Alcan has to offer, which is why I could only have been born in that place. What I say I have not said; I have not moved from the space of thought even so far as conjecture, and so I must have said nothing. Yet that nothing is still radiant; it is empty; it rattles and echoes, like the sound of old bones tumbling down a stairwell. For centuries its builders must have hearkened to that sound as they hammered and chiselled, intent upon the city which was already a city, intent upon the pasts they had already lived and forgotten – their spectres and shadows playing like the starlight on the oceans, their weary arms rising and falling, their weary feet passing and repassing. Centuries with the strong windless summer in their hair."

Somewhere a candle is burning

"I have felt all my life ..." I begin -- and then I say some words; the needle clicks in the same groove a few times; eventually it moves on, someone has started cleaning in the hall; they are making supper. Remedies, remedies!

I repeat part of the phrase -- "both substantiated by and separated from"; I am growing somewhat weary, I try to convince myself, of this contrapuntal nature of mine; I am so used to the way of opposites that mirrors are more a surface than a depth, more themselves than their contents, more a capacity than a transformation.

"This secret, unforgettable, inescapable certainty that somewhere a candle is burning, this faith by which I live, without even knowing what it means."

Not at night some summer on a sill beneath a sash above a flint-topped wall, but somewhere in a heart somewhere. Somewhere, a candle is burning.

30th October 2001

This place exists because it has to; it has an obligation to exist. But it has no obligation to make itself known to me, even if I have the obligation to depict it, all the same.

26th June 2001

I feel convinced I live in a world in which all who surround me have beliefs, or, if you will, convictions -- more or less compelling -- for me, or anyone, -- more or less realistic, more or less incomprehensible. This sentence proposes nothing in particular, and yet I could write a novel to explain it.

"It seems the problem has solved itself," she said, "writing as you do."

"Writing as I do," I repeated.

"Yes. Now no one knows what's true and what isn't. You are free."

But it seemed instead to me that it was not freedom I had gained so much as the incapacity to tell the truth and have it registered as true.

"Suppose a habitual liar tells unprovable stories about his own past for twenty years, and then he starts to tell the truth, and only the truth, about that same unprovable past," I began: "Surely there must be a significance of some kind ..."

"A significance, yes, but only for him."

"And yet I am convinced that is the wrong answer, all the same."

For a moment I want to write on impulse:

1st November 1989

Perhaps it is true that nothing can ever really be learned; it is just the same thoughts and feelings, round and round again, so that one grows conscious at last that one is only the dream of oneself, tirelessly running along corridors one only imagines as one's feet touch the floor.

But if I cannot even be honest with myself, then what use does truth hold for me? I prefer to think of it, even in its inapplicability, even in the heaviness which comes with it, the heaviness it spreads across and among the things it touches.

14th September 2001

“Too close to home,” I muttered involuntarily as I heard for the first time in seven years the opening bars of “Shepherd me, O Lord” -- “or rather, too far from it.”

How different things could be, and how I still long for that past –- a longing which is like no other desire I know; it makes me feel physically thirsty, a thing I feel in my head and at the back of my throat –- a deep, vibrant longing that is simultaneously tender and sharp.

My family

"My family," he said, "has been crippled since birth by a passive and all-pervading insincerity. This insincerity is so rampant, so far-flung, so innate that not only can't we see it; we can't even imagine such a thing could exist. Yet you have only to look at us a moment, look at any of the views or feelings we profess to hold, to see the reality of the matter.

We are dishonest about the smallest things, like thinking well of the world, for example. Deep down, we don't think well of the world; it's just that we convince ourselves to feel guilty for not thinking better of it. We give money to charity not because we think it helps, but because we like to pretend to ourselves that we hold moral values, and that the lives of those about us are important.

We are dishonest about our desires, and you see this again and again in the way we live, always pretending to be involved in something, to have elected projects toward which we tirelessly strive, yet never really putting down roots anywhere or committing to anything, as though we were victims of our own success. Nothing really bad has ever happened to us; we've always been healthy; we've always had money, and we've always been miserable about the fact that there's nothing we really want or believe in, yet nowhere else we can really think to go, either, and absolutely no way we can ever admit the way we feel.

It wouldn't be so bad if it were just other people that we disdained; but the worst thing is, we can't even be true to ourselves as a family. We can't even be honest about our own deaths. When one of us dies, the rest of us put our heads together, and though we all want to tell the truth for the first time in our lives, instead we regurgitate the same old hackneyed platitudes, as if there were no lengths to which we wouldn't go to avoid admitting how unfulfilled we are, and how much of a travesty our lives are. So we hastily get together our collaborative obituaries that frankly are unrecognisable as lives, and, having delivered our studiedly deviant speeches in an appropriate key, try to forget about the whole affair as quickly as possible.

On the 27th of October 2000 one of us wrote almost touchingly:

I embrace all that contains me, but I would rather embrace all that does not contain me; I would rather hold close to me the things that can neither be possessed nor understood.

I seem to have an instinct to sell myself into bondage; freedom is not a thing to be enjoyed, but rather to be bemoaned from the standpoint of its absence. I sometimes wish I could hold two things together - freedom and the knowledge of being free.

Yet this isn't all that we've written; we've written exhaustively; if you multiplied all our diaries and essays and stories and poems and music and put them all together, and that quite apart from all the letters we write, it might seem a regular industry of verbiage, almost an independent press of our own making. Yet wherever you dip into the family annals the problem is the same -- insincerity, the call of it, the fear of it, the impossibility of living without it, even if the alternative is simply to be authentic in the only way really available to us, by not pretending to live at all."