Noanswers's blog

The mildness of this window

Walking along an alleyway in the snowy evening I looked up at some arbitrary, particular window, thinking of the way I would have written about it, and then thinking about the way I would have read back the things that I had written, and the way that -- for want of a better turn of phrase -- they would come back (or seem, in my re-reading, to come back) as so non-commital. "What was it," I would ask myself, "that made it so important to notice this thing, while noticing it so little?"

I thought of the light of the window. "Mild", I would have written. And other words I would have written: "indifferent", "pallid", "unassuming." Then what was it that I wanted of such windows? What better agenda should they have propounded? And this was the key: I felt that they were protected by this indifference; this mildness nurtured something; the unassuming casement in fact was anything but, and in my head indifference was not a lack of power, but a vast, all-encompassing levelling off of things, an almost vengeful neutrality demonstrating the effortless mastery of both thesis and antithesis. It was this lofty indifference to which all real presences aspired -- an unmediated existence devoid of responsibility, existing for a secret, individual purpose, having to demonstrate nothing to anyone, not even to mean in terms of anything except itself.

And something of all of this comes back to me when I say these words. When I say "mild", I am not thinking of mildness, but something closer to martyrdom, and when I say "indifferent" I actually think of a difference so remote, so far removed that it no longer connotes or computes. When I say "pallid", I think not of a lack of light, but of a form of illumination averse to light, something that luminesces upon extraordinary terms. And "unassuming" is to me like the first line of a joke, since the word sets itself up only to conclude as something other than itself.

And then I take this back a step and think of the strange people I have written about, and they too are mild in this full sense. They have no reason to be, and for that reason every reason. They live ephemeral lives as conclusive statements against all things ephemeral. They neither care for nor believe in meaning, yet the authenticity of their existence is predicated upon it.

The Symphony

You know how in a dream, she said, perhaps you write a symphony, and you really hear it, in your dream. You hear every note; you listen to a part and, as it were, that part comes into focus and you say to yourself: Are these real harmonies, or am I just pretending that the notes harmonise? And so you pick through them as a chord, and say: No, all the notes are correct. And then you listen again to parts that interlace and stretch their wings, and again you say to yourself: Do these really harmonise, or is there something I am suppressing, something I am pretending not to hear? And again you work through each part and conclude yes, it is possible to do these things, and, if one did, this is how it would sound. And then, just when you are convinced of everything, you wake up and ask yourself: Was that real music that I wrote, or was it imaginary music? Within the dream I examined it and found it faultless, but now I am not so sure; how can I trust the person I was, in the dream? And what I heard, did I really hear? And if all is true, and I really wrote this piece, and I really listened to it, too, then why was it in my dream -- within which the lengthiest expositions seem trivial and pass in an instant -- and not in real life?

The Sword

With a single motion he hurled the sword which, whether hesitant or out of pure caprice, described a full circle above him before falling back neatly into its scabbard at the other end of a far distant room. On this note it was written: To achieve the impossible, first one must disillusion oneself of difficulty. One should not hurl the sword at its scabbard -- an imprecise, uncertain, irreverant gesture; instead one must hurl the sword to where it belongs; let it find its way. You are not suggesting a direction; you supply simply the energy with which it will guide itself. Think too: it is not an achievement you are seeking; it is the simple return of a thing to its rightful place; you throw the sword with dismissal; let it find its way. So then in life be like the sword, not meditated and mechanical, not carrying one's future by some relentless act of skill, but effortlessly returning, without a thought, to the true place that one belongs.

Grinalski

I turned at once to go to work, but in my day and age the steppe extends further than one suspects.
 
"Grinalski!" I said, "your transgression was simple and therefore the harder to condone, for while a colourful fault might fruitfully furnish a hundred means of expiation, the most basic of all faults permits but one." My foot disturbed a small stone beneath the cliff edge; it bounced and fell for a long while before striking against the rocks at the base of the chasm. With a firm half smile I watched its motion both with interest and also without interest, if it were possible to say such opposite things yet still convey something true. I mean that, as I stood there, I would have known if it bounced first left and then right; I would have known if it bounced the other way ,or not at all. Yet at no point was there anything explicit in my observation; it wasn't deliberate, yet neither was it clandestine and neither was it accidental. I observed, as it were, out of a sense of propriety for everything in the world that I touched; I observed so completely as a principle that I myself become something of a contrived figure, so excessive I find my fealty to the conventions of action and reflection, choice and consequence, denial and subjection; and I observe my contrived figure occupied in its own observation of contrived things, and this is a state of being I intend and have spent my life perfecting, even though I have no idea what it is or why I want it, and can only admit it in an account like this which was not written by me, and is not really about me at all, but only another person's perception of me.
 
I watched the stone fall, I suppose, with a sense of irony, where irony means that all things are debatable, even the very things we intend; and, for that matter, intention itself is highly debatable. I have never wanted to act for any reason except vanity, yet I would never care to yield to an emotional impulse, no matter how strong. Forster uses the phrase somewhere, lifted as I recall from Matthew Arnold, "to see life steadily and to see it whole", and that is how my creator must have conceived of me at that moment, though whether his impression was correct or not it would be impossible to say; all that can be known is that which we see for ourselves, and even knowledge is little more than interpretation, and interpretation depends on the validity of the observation, and by observing and not observing, as I have done, nothing or everything is valid, and thus paradoxically it seems there may be true, elemental facts which simultaneously are invalid, and there may be raging falsehoods which are worth far more to our ultimate experience and the creative order of the world (though that order, perhaps, is a falsehood of a different kind).
 
I wanted to say one last thing about propriety. To me the hallmark of a gentleman is precisely that there is no such hallmark. A gentleman knows very keenly what a gentleman isn't, but to conform to a set of strictures is also to be untrue to such an ideal. I say "ideal" without reservation, because I am free to displace the subject to which this connects at will, and, at heart, it is an ideal to which this definition strives; the only problem is all the real, historical gentlemen who stand in the way. *I am a gentleman in despite of myself*, because to prove anything implies that proof is necessary, and therefore I must have been a liar from the start. To act nobly is also to be conscious of acting nobly, and this consciousness is ignoble. That is the heart of the matter. So somehow one must act without really meaning to act, taking full responsibility for all that occurs without really caring what occurs. And yet, everything that occurs must be intentional, otherwise one is not acting but instead being acted upon. And so my foot displaces a stone, for example, and I watch without watching -- to attest to the fact that I caused the stone to fall, and as the cause of this event I owe the stone the respect of observing its trajectory. Yet, at the same time, I owe nothing to nothing, and am tied by nothing, and belong to nothing, and therefore I am ignoble, and therefore I am noble, and therefore I am a gentleman. And the day I know what a gentleman is, I shall no longer be one or want to be one, forever.

At that moment we both raised our pistols, and fired.

Memories of In the Little War

The first time I saw a dead man, it was a Turk lying face upward in a field of poppies. He did not look dead at all, but as if he had gone for a stroll, and decided to lie down there. For the most part, nothing happened. I went into town, and after a few glasses of wine rattled off a telegram: "Fighting continues; casualties mounting." Later on the radio I heard a truce had already been declared; the phone rang -- my editor: "Ech, you!" There are most probably other things to remember, I remember, but those are the things I remember (I now remember) of the little war.

Time is Running Slow

I don't know where that lyric came from. I had put up an advert for a singer in one of the music stores down Leith Walk. At the same time, not knowing what to do with the flat  I  had just bought, I had a single mattress on the floor and had ordered a set of desks from an office company on Grove Street. I had given up my job, since I felt it did not give me the time I needed to write the music I wanted to write. R. was using an instrumental of mine, "Memories of her future life" that in my private experience reflected many things, perhaps a book or even more than a book, but to her it was rightly a clean canvas. So I never tried to explain its history, and I embraced the equally private and equally definitive history she brought to it.

D.'s house

I remember a game of MERP at D.'s house high up on Cuilfail, whose chalky bluffs overlook the Ouse, and which subsequently I used without remembering as the setting both for Zalman's Las Cruces and for a play which was rehearsed there.

A few friends and I had bought the strangely beautiful MERP, a single book at once elaborate and succinct, delicately illustrated and finely finished; even the laboratory-like smell of its pages reminded me of nothing familiar.

I was never able to go long without food; but lunch failed to materialise; we were still trying to get on our camels, even before we could get started on our adventure. Hours passed, and with ill-placed humour D. was now demanding saving throws against their acid breath; the fact we hadn't moved an inch clearly amused him intensely. Forgoing all modesty I wandered brazenly to the kitchen and opened the large fridges myself; there was no food; there was absolutely nothing -- perhaps some celery and asparagus spears; there was no fruit, no cheese, no bread, nothing to eat.

And still we belaboured our camels and they spat at us, and soon it was night time. D. suggested we all sleep on the floor and pick up tomorrow. I was in no position for any of that, and walked home in the darkness half way across the town.

I never played MERP again, and never visited D. again, but I still remember the vast glass doors that slid open upon his verandah, and the enormous solitary house, filled with every kind of anything; it was one of those "architect designed" houses which are fulsome and extreme but most of all opulent and absolutely without soul of any kind, so that your heart sinks and not even newly but from a distance as you approach, such is the size of the shadow they and their grounds together cast.

 

I sometimes wonder if one can really learn to love something by telling oneself for a very long time that one loves it. At the end of this I see multiple outcomes. The first sage says: "You chose to love it because secretly you always had loved it, so your original choice was authentic and true." The second sage says: "You cannot love anything truly that you try to love, because love is not about trying; love is effortless. You fail." The third sage says: "Love is entirely dynamic. You reason about it in metaphysical terms, but the reality is merely a measure of degree. The more you try, the more you love. It is only idealists who are unhappy." The fourth sage says: "Telling is not the same as doing, and love cannot be reconstructed in words. So do, act, and you will never know the truth, but the reality of your love will be there, and always beyond you." The fifth sage says: "Love cannot be reasoned about, for it is simply an emotion. If you don't love, then you don't love. Don't waste time and thought trying to reason why or convince yourself you feel any differently than you do." The sixth sage says: "You cannot lay hands upon love because you do not understand the word." The seventh sage says: "Who are you to say "I", when what could you possibly know about yourself?" The eighth sage says: "Yes, this is entirely possible, but not in this way, because to express a quest as a quest is to undermine it; so you must go on trying but you must empty yourself of any desired objective, for only in this way can you encounter the objective you desire." The ninth sage says: "That is not the real question, but only a question concealing a far deeper question." The tenth sage says: "There are no questions; there is only life, in contrast to which all questions are the same -- the things that are not a part of life."

In our immaturity we always have something to say; in our maturity we are silent, even though we have now earned the right to speak. I remember not the content but the enthusiasm with which I used to discuss literary ideas, the naive optimism with which I sat down to write, convinced not only that I was intelligent and perceptive and filled with unique and inimitable insights, but most especially that the world would be a worse place without my writing. In exactly the same way I remember my first motorbike; I remember the calculations and cogitations running through my head as I selected it from among all others, little guessing that a thousand others would be making exactly the same cogitations and calculations, based on exactly the same information, and equally convinced, as I myself had been, that what we were doing was cunning, creative and unique. I remember with shame the fact my rides effortlessly filled themselves with events - a high-side off the uneven camber at a roundabout outside Ballencrieff, a supersonic bee in collision with which I fancied I set off a speed camera near Cockenzie, dropping the bike after having just washed and polished it on Marchmont Crescent, the mysterious episode of the fork lift truck in one of the shipping warehouses at Hull docks, an interesting piece of 2-up braking on the slip road into Dieblich.

What I failed to realise as I zealously recounted these things was that at best they were "just life" and at worst they were not just idle chatter but misleading or even fraudulent chatter. I harped on about the suspension of my bike, wasting the time of those qualified to give advice and who, more fool them, considered me a credible witness. Heavier springs and thicker oil certainly changed the dynamics of the front forks, but at the end of the day I had no real idea what I was talking about, and I probably could not have recognised a correctly set-up bike if I had been sitting on it from the start.

Last year I took out an R1 and a Super Blackbird; yesterday I took out a Blade. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that ten years back I would have had something to say about all three of these highly tuned machines. But now all I recognised was my own ignorance, and the fact that anything I could say had already been said. Desperate to seem urbane, clued-up, genuine in some sense, I found I was retelling someone else's story and passing it off as my own: "Well, I think it's just that I've always preferred heavier bikes ..." I said (J. had told me his story about riding the old litre Zs for years, and the way they wobbled round corners and were liable to pitch inexperienced riders into the hedgerow as they did so). And instinctively I caught myself: "Why am I saying this? Why am I even here? I'm making up a story about my riding preferences in order to justify or otherwise the purchase of a bike I neither need nor really want, and I'm even arguing about prices and looking down humbly when I'm offered the lamentable trade in for my last bike that I fully expected all the time, and countering the salesman's efforts to steer me toward a perfectly good and possibly excellent bike I declare out of caprice is beyond my price range when in fact my budget is actually unlimited -- if I really wanted to I could buy any bike in the shop for cash right now -- but I don't do things like that, and the reason I don't is because, if I did, it would transmit a sense of purpose and a degree of belief that I simply do not have; I believe neither in my needs nor in the ability of anything to fulfil those needs, so to pay more than a measly amount for anything is to offer undue credit to the strength of both.

Why even the test drive? I'm doing it so I can go to bed and say to myself: I'm a biker; I ride bikes. I'm doing it so that there will not be a long silence when the priest tries to explain what my life was, and what the things were that mattered to me. Instead it will all be clear; everyone will nod their heads sagely; they'll say "Ah, that bike bug. There's that bike bug; he really got bitten! In a turbulent world there were bikes; they were his beacon in the dark; they were the things he cherished. It was these that he lived for."

I was walking with my mother in law up a long and busy thoroughfare in which periodically there were signs for yachts and penthouses for sale. I had agreed to look for a cheap caravan, but instead I slipped into a side street suddenly made of stone, at the end of which a defunct cashpoint awaited me in a foreign language. Toying almost cursorily with credit cards, all of which proved unacceptable, a new opportunity presented itself; I stepped down into the buttery, and simultaneously across a continent. Canada was as it had always been, at least as I recalled it. A long line of first year students queued near Victoria House; a couple of minor North American writers were reading their poetry, but of course no one knew that they were minor; all I could smell was fresh soap and perfume. I was too late for the reading, and instead I meandered for some minutes among old and adjacent cloisters; when I returned it was to face an outspill of revitalised poets and poetesses. On impulse I picked up a pint of orange juice -- there were hundreds of promotional plastic bottles -- and drank it in a single gulp. I wanted to be a part of this strange crowd in which I placed no faith whatsoever, to be believed in and to believe in them, as they hastened past me with their notebooks, their phone numbers, their questions, their agendas, all implicitly secret, all undiscoverable, and yet as I stole that pint of orange juice I felt as though I still had it in me to enter an old yet new world and chastise it and frequent it and be loved by it.