I no more miss cigarettes, after all these years, than I miss being a child -- which is to say, I miss them equally and in the same way. Yet it is true to say what I have just said, whereas it would not be quite true to say simply and without this qualification: I miss them equally and in the same way as I miss being a child.
He wrote a book about actors and actresses, a work of fiction about the stage; today, he only remembers this now: it wasn't a very faithful book.
- Relax, she said. Every word you say is true. The stage is not, remembered in this way, a place within which one needs to fight for meaning.
"Do you care about them, then? The things you never talk about?"
"The only way to continue to care, to objectify that caring, is to speak about other things, in other ways. It's this that holds them in mind, that gives them a place, even if it is only a place made up of limits, and you only see it by the way my arguments twist a little too suddenly at their edges when they get too close."
"Yet this has gone on some time. Don't you hope that things may change?"
"What doesn't change is that I know that to begin would not be enough. There cannot be any gentle beginning, and there would also be no hope of returning to things -- to the balance of things -- as they currently are."
"And yet, still you hold things in balance. For how long?"
"Perhaps I also hope that some day I'll waver, and speak in despite of myself. In that way I threw halves of brick at an old Victorian chimney once. I didn't want to break it, yet I wanted to break it all the same. And so I kept on hurling those pieces of brick with half-hearted deliberation, forcing myself to think of other things so that I could throw them some more. Until that moment when, with real bitterness, I had broken the chimney, and was now able to remember how fine it had looked when it was whole, and how I knew in advance that I would never want to break it if only it could first be broken, which is why I had tried to forget myself, and assume a state in which both outcomes had actually occurred. Today, in place of halves of brick, I hold a pen."
"You write about yourself."
"I write by way of myself. It is the only way I can hold the world. Believe me, you would prefer me to write by way of myself than any other way."
Not holding dear by way of memory. Nor holding dear by way of not remembering. Nor holding dear because memory is relevant, just now. Nor holding dear because memory is irrelevant, just now.
Holding dear, instead, in such a discontinuous yet necessary way that when they say: "What, of all things, has this holding dear to do with?", then, among all the many negations and qualifications you do not have to think, for you answer immediately: "Memory. Memory, even if not as it stands or has ever stood."
The object perhaps means nothing, for who am I to hold relation to an object? Or rather, the object means everything, but not here, not to me, not now, and there is nothing I or any spirit can do to make things different. Yet what is this means of memory I cannot name?
Looking down, as from a distance, upon these lives of ours: it seems improbable we surmise anything correctly about them. Equally, it seems not the least bit important what we do with our thoughts in relation to them, or what our thoughts do with themselves in order to sustain the prospect of such a relation.
All the same, this is scarcely a time for disbelief or resignation; rather, it's the sense that something has been overlooked, and always overlooked -- overlooked brightly and overlooked prophetically -- namely that the fact of living can no more render the lived life tenable than the mere possession of happiness make us happy.
Or, as I say to my dreams sometimes, particularly when I do not believe they are really there: "We do not need to participate in our results."
Powerlessness -- like a deep-rooted objection to every particular water on account of its being too dry.
Not that one hopes thereby to find the true water, or to affirm such an idea as more or less possible; rather, that by continued hesitation in the face of want, one slowly develops an imperative. All waters thereby becomes the Water, even as all thirsts become the Drouth.
We part hands with our present, but not on account of anything we understand about it. Rather, by continuously finding no place for it, we have relieved ourselves of the need to understand it, so that ultimately it removes itself; it cannot clamour loud enough to be heard. As if a guardian who does not really love us so very much demands implacably: "Some day, all this will seem less important to you."
"Some day, you will smile about all this," I say to myself in turn, smiling even now, since I don't believe this pronouncement for a second; instead, with sudden clarity, the moment slots itself naturally into a past it never had, and I see myself with two suitcases toward the top of St. George on a still, late summer's day in 1992, and I know, exactly as I knew then, how sun falls through maple leaves on soft wood and backyards, dried faeces, broken bottles and old coins, as if upon the sign of something's name. There might be a door as well as a flight of steps, a room, a dressing mirror, a bed and a window, all looking back over the same street I walk up with my two suitcases, except that everything is in reverse, and I am no longer me but just a person passing by who has the possibility of being me.
Don't you, too, yearn someday to be alive? Isn't that what gets you up in the morning? We all have our particular fantasies, more or less irrationally impossible, on account of which it is best that we smile whimsically, to make clear that we are still in command of our lack of command, and can distinguish improbability from impossibility.
Yet, of the two potential commitments open to us, the commitment to impossibility is the more sane, a kind of dutiful dream, because it is a clearer recognition of practical limits, while the commitment to improbability is really just deviant hope, a lack of recognition that threatens every other part of life, that threatens everything with prosaic intolerance.
By all of which I mean to say a hundred things, and also this: the sad thing is the woman who buys her lottery ticket every week. The happy thing is the man who looks all ways, even down, when crossing the road.
Henceforth, I want to say, I have made enough with my mouth; now I want to make things with my hands. Except that -- or perhaps even "in fact" or "in proof of which" -- I don't choose to promise anything, even when I feel very strongly that this is something to which I should be committed.
I don't promise anything because the only promises I have proven capable of keeping have been those that don't really concern me, and therefore upon which nothing substantial hangs. It's because of this that I have always held what many deem an irreverent attitude toward the things that presumably I hold dear and the commitments that secretly awe and ashame me (often interchangeably and in equal measure).
At heart, the desire to hold close and swear allegiance, but without thereby diminishing a cause, without introducing an element of doubt and assailability. For this reason, ultimate respect owes its character not to closeness or fealty, but to the involuntary happiness with which one turns away, entirely devoid of and irreconcilable with one's subject. This way, one frees oneself of the need to safeguard one's mortality upon another's account; one sleeps without the fear of cursing things surreptitiously in one's dreams; one reaches out one's arms precisely because the only future to which it is worth committing ourselves is ungraspable, and nothing would have value if these things could be any other way.
The right-hand side of the window frame meant: "I am strong", and the left-hand one: "I am handsome." The bar which locked the windows: "I am bright." Finally, the left-hand windowpane, which was perfectly clean (the right-hand one was dirtied by he swallows), signified: "I am young." This last meaning was the most difficult to hold on to, and when I wanted to go over them all and repeat them to myself too quickly, once I reached this last one I would often get it wrong.
And then the one who said she wanted to marry a vicar. Except that's not true; that's not actually what she said: she said she wanted *to be a vicar's wife.* I remember asking her about it, this *being a vicar's wife*, and she looked at me slightly confused, as if to say: "Well, if you don't understand it, then you don't understand it." Clearly it wasn't the right question to ask, and, since it wasn't the right question, there wasn't really any answer she could have given me, anyway.
It was about this time that another girl, and one who, in retrospect, really should have known better, confided in my sister: "Christians worship Jesus, but Catholics worship the Pope." She also said that all the Catholics would go to hell -- but that was by the by, and my sister and I didn't believe she intended anything particular by it.
A certain author writes, like me, of a night-governed village within which there is a house with a heart-shaped window and a woman and a well, and the glow beyond that window is red, even as the village is, come morning, grey with mist, as though something has died. To what common dream, to what shared, subconscious truth does this particular combination of symbols attest?
I am not helped by such drivel as this, from which I quote: "To see or eat a hamburger in your dream, suggests that you are lacking some emotional, intellectual, or physical component you need in order to feel whole again. You may be feeling unsatisfied with some situation or relationship. It is also symbolic of your experiences and how you need to learn from them. Look at the big picture."
Such an interpretation is an offence against etiquette upon so very many levels, I seriously wonder how much longer we as world shall retain any capacity to dream resonantly, as though within the shadow of our own souls. Too soon, I feel convinced, our dreams will reduce themselves, not even in the final analysis, but in their very conception, to the banally personal, banally universal utility such interpretations propose; and a whole mode of experience and means of being shall be lost to us forever.
On this note, it occurs to me to say: I may write anachronistically -- which people hasten to point out with a kind of malignant joy, as though they imagine the only course left me now is to leap on a broomstick and fling myself out the window with a scream -- but I write in accordance with my life. It is no effort for me to write the way I do, because I think, feel and speak in exactly the way I write; and so, ultimately, there is no show to come to an end; there is no fear that I shall run out of words to say, and not know then what to do with my hands. Very probably, indeed, I shall run out words, but nothing shall thereby be liberated or put at stake. There is nothing to shake me from what I am, because I have always been this way, and the world I see about me subsists without me and makes no claims upon me.
Perhaps my point is simply that my world may not be familiar to you, but I have neither the obligation nor even apparently the power to make it familiar. It is the world into which I was born, even as others are born into other worlds everywhere, and if I write from a different place, it is simply because that is the only place from which I know how to write.
Something I find seldom enough – which is to say, often enough, since the fact it occurs at all is miraculous – is a significant correspondence between my own work and that of some other author as yet unfamiliar to me and whose work is already complete. And when this occurs, the similarities are invariably multiple, suggesting that what happens isn’t exactly coincidence, but, rather, a kind of threshold that needs to be passed. Then abruptly one finds oneself in the presence of another mind whose existence, in the broadest sense, is almost identical to one’s own, so that – as though the possibilities for being individual were strictly limited – one finds oneself often enough sharing not just an outward symbolism and set of literary motifs, but ideas, values, dreams, ways of seeing. All this places one in the uncanny position of being able to look back from a position of accomplishment upon work one has even yet to meditate, and see the logical – or one logical – end to which one’s present concerns might carry one – and thereby also presents the opportunity to take command of that future and change it with hindsight, here and now.
Though I said I didn’t believe we knew one another, he seemed very familiar about our non-acquaintanceship. It was, he said, exactly like the other gentleman; he, too, refused to believe the two of us had met before. Yet surely we must be one and the same, he surmised, when the two of us wore identical expressions of surprise and something more, too – a kind of furtiveness, a self-regard or lack of it, as though we shared a common desire not to be here, or, indeed, anywhere. As if confusion gave everything away, even the things we had no right to give away, as if it were not enough that nothing had really been demanded of us anyway …
But it wasn’t really this. It was, instead, one of those few circumstances in which it should have been legitimate to have used that verb “vanquen”, since it could not be that I really reminded him of anyone, or that the man he remembered reminded him of anyone, either. Both of us existed alike only in the sense that we sustained a relation toward something simultaneously beyond us and identical to us; both of us only existed in order that we could also always exist at some further level apart from ourselves – an encounter for which we would never be prepared, and it would be precisely in this lack of preparation that the encounter would actually take place. It would be our unreadiness that both occurred as an event, and simultaneously confirmed what had not occurred at all.
It is very hard -- it is a constant quest -- for me to find the books I am searching for, which is why I so often feel compelled to write myself; I may not have the mastery of those books I cannot find, but at least by way of my writing I can gesture in their direction. I can say: "The style should be like such and such," and "The subject matter should be like this," and "The cadences should work this way," and "This is how a story should end," and "We do not need to say all of those other things," and "This is something that is beautiful to me," and "This is how our world should be remembered."
I speak here in very general terms, because I have always been specific when I need to be, and if something cannot be understood, then it cannot be understood, and there's no point in fighting about it.
Jean Paulhan says:
The rest would have to be written in a different way, with different words, or rather, with something other than words.
But that is just where I am wrong. Quite the opposite: it must be writtenin exactly the same way -- pretending that the passage I spoke of doesn't exist at all, but that everything follows and is woven together into one. (Here, sincerity is a renunciation, and a way of losing oneself. As it happens to the man who is wounded, and repeats to himself at first, to give himself courage: "You don't feel anything, it is nothing." Thus he lies in order to make himself go on. As soon as he simply wants to see "what it is," he falls).
So I will tell it, in the same way. However, you must try occasionally to imagine this effort, underneath the story.
I don't know if it's just native English speakers, or native speakers of other languages, too. But I find it increasingly hard to converse at length in English without feeling that something has been lost; something is in the constant process of becoming lost. And when I try to put a name to it, the best I can do is to say that there is something complacent and vaguely disrepectful about our habitual relationship to this particular language. We seem neither to doubt its words can fully serve our purposes, nor our own ability to speak by way of it.
I can't help wondering how things would be if we recognised more widely the tangentiality of our relationship to language, if we recognised, as a general rule, that language has a discrete and objective identity which has nothing to do with the "meaning" we attempt to contain within it. Language is not our vehicle; it was not created for us, and we do not command it. We use it every day, yet we do not understand it. And, all too often, we live the full span of a natural life, speaking by way of it every day, without once asking what it secretly wants of us in exchange for the freedom it has given, without once considering it as anything more than a *tool*.
If there is to be a language between us, can it not be *our* language, rather than the language of anybody else? I would like a language of colours, for example -- a primary language, in the sense that colours do not *mean* something else, and if it's *something else* that you want to express, then colours cannot help you. But if you can limit yourself to what each colour expresses, and start from birth that way, never verbalising anything, but sharing meaning simply in the sense that two people simultaneously, in the face of a common experience, make some common choice ... And so, because they are colours from the start, they are untranslatable; there is nothing to translate. Language brokers between models; it translates by way of contract. But that which has never depended upon language is also immune to it: language cannot start; it cannot justify; it cannot prove; it cannot find purchase, and, most of all, *it cannot hold back* .
Even now, colours are what they are for the way that language falls short about them; their self-constitution, their quality without thing-ness, their absolute stability within themselves -- are all portals through which meaning may yet stream, if one's eyes can listen softly enough.
The soil is not soil.
The number is not a number.
The letter is not a letter.
The sentence is not a sentence.
- János Pilinszky
Whether to start from the stone in the road, and, if so or if not, then this one, or, if so or if not, then that one, or none of them at all, together. Then, if none, whether to start from a fallen leaf in the field, and, if not this one, then that one, or none of them, together also. Or, if this will not do, then both of these things to be excised, but something else to be put up in their place, if what, and not, for once, together?
They say the real strength is not to begin but to continue, yet to continue from what? Perhaps it is not so important, which is precisely why it is so important, and those who say: "a contradiction has become established" are precisely those who also say: "our take upon things is mean and impoverished; we lack a world out of disdain, because any life of difficulty can never come to good."
The best answer to a book is silence. Whether one reads it between the covers, or whether that is only the place within which it reads itself, and you have no right to confront it, as it is, on a bus somewhere, like a counterfeit or a mannerism.
Who knows what it is that must be done, ultimately, to make these things so, and thereby -- true or false -- our relationship to them?
This is a rare African Bloodwood, Mahogany and Tiger Maple Chopping Board, hand-made by Matt Christie of Green River Woods in Asheville, North Carolina from reclaimed timber. It is absolutely beautiful, perfectly smooth, and entirely functional.
It was accompanied by a couple of smaller "bar boards", one of which you can see below (the second I've already given as a present to our longest and best friends who live just over the "green" behind our flat).
If you're wondering what this has to do with anything, I actually came across Matt's work through his blog http://pasaudela.blogspot.com and his interest in Blanchot. But as soon as I saw the Bloodwood board, I knew it was just the thing for our Edinburgh flat.
Matt states: "I also offer a sliding scale based on income and degree of desire (why not), so please don't hesitate to contact me personally. Prices are negotiable for those without trust funds or criminally high discretionary income, and shipping anywhere is possible."
"Kafka suffered not from a lack of ideas but from a lack of continuations. Unlike so many other writers who were just as fragile psychologically, he came up against failure again and again when facing the hurdle of narrative technique. The problem was not the fading away of inspiration or his dependence on his moods but the magnitude of his self-assigned task. He demanded much more from his texts than formal unity; he sought a seamless linking of all motifs, images and concepts." (Stach, 246)
"Kafka conceded that it was possible to be a writer even while remaining silent" (Stach, 327)
"You are not satisfied with me; you object to various things about me, want me to be other than how I am. I ought to live "more in reality", ought to "go by the way things are," etc. Don't you see that if you want this because of a true necessity, you no longer want me, but want to get past me. Why hope to change people, Felice? That is not right. People have to be taken as they are, or left as they are. They cannot be changed; at most they can be thrown off balance. People are not made up of individual details that can be taken out and replaced by something else; rather everything is a whole, and if you pull at one end, the other begins to jolt, even if that was not what you had intended." (K., quoted in Stach, 303)
"As far as literature is concerned, my destiny is quite simple. My penchant for portraying my dreamlike inner life has rendered everything else inconsequential; my life has atrophied terribly, and does not stop atrophying. Nothing can ever satisfy me." (K., quoted in Stach, 468)
I am made silent
You are made silent
(S)he is made silent
We are made silent
You (pl.) are made silent
They are made silent
If we were to rate our time by years or decades, how dismal things might be. Yet were we to rate it by days or even hours, how different. I am determined, if only out of a sense of fealty -- not to me or to anyone, just a disembodied sense of fealty I extend to the world for permitting me to be a thought within it -- to try to say at least one unmitigatably happy thing tonight.
And so I say this: almost all the time, and for almost all lives, time moves forward, in a regular succession. As the Vulgate puts it: "non est priorum memoria." And yet sometimes, by a grace which comes from nowhere -- not from the heavens, which are only the shadow of the skies by another name, -- not from one's heart, which is simply the site from which one bleeds -- but from something which has no place in nature or beyond it, time turns back for a moment and gives us everything we ever had.
I don't know a word, but I do not intend to struggle for not knowing one, or hold this against anything, as if not knowing were a slur of some kind, or a lack of something. I am just writing that, for an instant, two people may be together again in a garden, for no particular reason. And yet, while they are decisively in the present, so too they are -- equally -- in the past. And everything about them -- the entire shape of things -- reforms itself to be as it must be; nothing lacks itself; each thing is true to its intention. Each thing -- *teleos*, I once said -- "fulfils the purpose for which it was conceived."
There is no reason for time to act this way; it makes no sense. Surely the past is the past; it doesn't come back; it doesn't hearken after us. Surely we are bound forever, inextricably, by all the decisions we have made; we aren't suddenly forgiven, and made young again, and given a new lease of life, as though living were without commitment or culpability?
And yet, when everything seems impossible, when everything seems least probable, it can happen that what has been lost returns without even trying, and not just lost but well and truly lost, not a piece of time, not even a frame -- things that no longer exist, things that no longer exist so palpably that they have never existed, the impress of the stroke that annihilates them so firm, it's as if it carves out a whole netherworld upon the underside, a blessing like a crooked hand, twirling and gesturing in the strange light toward a different dial.
I was trying to contrast two forms of life, but how can one hold clearly, even if simply by way of opposition, what one is not?
"There are people who hold things," I began: "they see something, and they pick it up, and then they live around it. You see it in their rooms sometimes, but not just in their rooms -- everywhere. What I say -- I don't know how to be clear. This subject doesn't matter; I don't know how to be clear about anything. It's as if, sometimes it seems to me, nothing has a beginning, anywhere. And when I say words, it's as if you're just saying something to the back of things."
I said: "When I say people who hold things, I just mean that their houses are full of them -- their flats, their rooms, any place they stay; it doesn't have to be a house. But they don't collect things haphazardly; they collect them for a reason. At the same time, they don't really collect them for a reason; they collect them for no reason at all. And I know this sounds like a contradiction, but actually it isn't. Because if they only collected things for a reason, it wouldn't quite be as if their heart were truly involved. But these lives I'm talking about -- it's as if every acquisition is a fresh surprise. It's as if, absolutely genuinely, these people live in a surprising world, a fresh and invigorating place, a place of marvels. And they believe in everything about them so naivelly, so childishly, that they can read the meaning into things, or else small things -- the knick knacks you find in second-hand shops -- they can hear and experience the imperious tranquility of these objects that have been orphaned, and foster them within their own lives -- well, forever!"
I said: "But maybe that's not clear; I don't know. I don't know if the lack of clarity is in them or in me, or if some things just can't be said, anyway. What I could say though, instead, is the same thing from the other side. Namely, that I don't collect things; I used to once, but I not only don't; I simply can't any more. I can't have things about me that have no use, because I have no life to pour into them, and I don't know where this strange, spontaneous life has gone. Don't get me wrong; I think it's mostly lack of belief. I can't believe that all of this, this room, if it were mine, could be more than simple clutter. And yet, this room is not mine; it's yours, and it's for this reason that I can experience its deep yet kindly conflict of objects, its exuberance. It's so alive I almost think I could hear every piece of rush and woodwork talking, if I lay my head on one of those cushions and closed my eyes."
I said: "Either way, it doesn't matter, and the funny thing is, it never does matter. I must have started so many explanations this way, and ended them this way, too. Maybe it's that I just don't care any more about explaining things, or understanding things clearly enough that I can explain them. I don't know what it is. Maybe this is why I talk so seldom about things like this, or maybe it's that, because I talk so seldom, I'm far from understanding how to speak correctly about them. But I also think I simply don't care to be understood, and I wish I did care, since those who hold things clearly -- which was how all of this started -- they couldn't exist without caring; they care about everything. Everything, ironically enough, except explaining all this, which they don't need to; they don't even need to understand that explanations should be forthcoming. For them, there is neither anything to explain, nor could anything be lacking without explanation. And some of them may not be the kindliest people, but they are alive, all the same."
"Yet when you don't care, " I said, "I think everything turns from you. It's as if you can't hold anything back, and in yourself, there's nothing to hold back, either; there's nothing there. So it's not as though you go round feeling vengeful and hyperactive, like someone out of Hamsun or Dostoyevsky. It's that language stops working; if you don't care for words, the feelings go away, and they take the world away with them; everything turns away, which is why you feel you're talking to the backs of things. And that goes away too, but it doesn't leave you with silence. It leaves you in confusion. You don't know what to care; you don't know how to care about; that's how you feel; it doesn't matter if the idiom is wrong because it's as true and valid as if the idiom were right, and right is only a different form of wrongness; everything is a kind of version of everything else, and you wish you could escape this state, except that I can't see any way to escape it. It isn't a state, so much as being unbound or disrobed. It is what one is, and there is nothing to cover it up, anywhere."
I said: "Maybe I should talk more, or less. But I don't know if more or less can make the case for clarity, meaning, necessity. I don't know what it is that makes one care about these things, and I don't even convince myself when I talk about them like this. I feel as though I were inventing the world without really caring enough to do anything properly; I don't put faith, I suppose, in what I say; I'm not convinced by my own arguments. And I don't know what one needs to do to language or to me to make me feel convinced; I don't know how caring comes into the world, except that we all seem to have it, and then, if it leaves you, all I can do is talk about it, except that I don't even know what I am talking about, and if you're trying to explain this ... I just don't know how one is ever to make an end of these things, except periodically it forces me, out of sheer frustration, to say that at least I care about not caring, and I never sought it to be this way."
"But how can dictation *ever* work?" he insisted. "How can someone know how to punctuate a sentence *properly* until he's heard the whole sentence? By which point, it's too late -- there's another sentence, now; our amanuensis will never catch up. But even if he did, it isn't the sentence alone, anyway: he has to listen out for the paragraph too, in order to assess fairly just how many consecutive semicolons a reader can stand. And even this isn't enough. What of the work as a whole? Isn't everything altered -- *everything* -- if one chooses to end even the first sentence with a semicolon rather than a full stop, and thereby things start by way of continuation, and before you know it an entire style is set in motion, perhaps something you never intended, something which carries you along? Because now your strength is not enough; your strength is equal only to your project. There is no surplus to hand; nothing has been set aside to hold the flock together; you can do little but point and gesture, as though you grew like a tear from the eyes downward, and just now where your head peeps out the rest of your body remains folded away in the cocoon above you, perhaps not even fully formed.
Indeed, you can scarcely raise your voice, as you rest the one hand on the back of the chair, reading over the words you have spoken, and you feel the urge to accept everything as it has fallen out, this serial legibility, and thereby allow yourself to be carried somewhere upon the thundering backs of your own words, rather than stand in the midst of their unstudied advance, and, since your strength is insufficient anyway, childishly strive to protect yourself by averting your eyes."
You tell us the truth, they say, but why? Why should we care that you tell us the truth? What is it about what is true about you -- rather than what is false, deceitful, and easy to reach -- easy, that is, in exactly the way that what is true about you is guileless, and hard to reach -- that should involve us one way or the other?
What is it, in brief, that makes your own truth true? Who is it that upholds your right to bear it? Who is it that will convince us that what you say has any reason to be listened to, so that we can permit ourselves to listen to it, in order to debate the probability that it's worth trying to understand?
And when all these objections have been answered, except that they cannot be answered, when all these objections have been overruled, except that they cannot be overruled, and when whatever else it is that is impossible happens to happen all the same -- then, and only then, will we accept that there might be something in what you say, after all.
