No Answers

The Locket

"Some boys would skip across the next meadow," she said, "for this locket. Some of them would make a face behind the teacher's back. Some of them would even put their face up so, their lips, that is, so that we could have them kiss us. In this way."

"Then what of me, though?" I said. "What is it you want of me, to win it?"

The locket chimed, as though it belonged to itself. It was swinging left and right, ticking against the chain. Swiftly, in her hand: "I don't know yet," she said decisively. "I don't know," -- as if she were suddenly dazzled, and I were not the right one to challenge her -- "But, soon enough, we'll wait and see ..." (she or the locket, now; I was not sure which one of them was speaking).

The Coldness at the Heart

Every day it seems to grow colder, and the Indians at work ask hopefully if I think there'll be snow this year, and I say we'll have to wait and see. And then next week it's colder still, and they ask again about the snow, since they've never seen snow, and I say that it doesn't work that way; sometimes it gets colder, colder than you think you can bear, but still there'll be no snow; that's just how it is. And then, as still it grows colder, the Indians ask if it's always this cold here, and I say I don't know. Then they ask if it's usually this cold this time of year, but I don't know this, either. They ask what's the coldest it's ever been that I can remember, but the cold isn't something one remembers: one experiences it; one lives in it; one almost dies, it feels at times, in it. But like all things definitive it come without herald, and vanishes without trace; like all things definitive, its heartlessness is a kind of ruin.

Water

There was a glass with water inside -- very, very pure water. But I could not drink the water; it was as if there were nothing there to know it had been drunk.

At the same time, whatever I put in the water to flavour it, I didn't like the taste.

"Why can I not just drink a glass I water," I insisted, "and yet know - even as I do so - that that is what I am doing? And know, afterwards, that that is what I have done?"

Medangan

I believe, but I do not believe

You believe, but I do not believe

He believes, but I do not believe

We believe, but they do not believe

You (form.) believe, but you (fam.) do not believe

They believe but we do not believe

The Recital

The concert hall was silent; there was no one inside. They had even turned down the lights on the stage. I felt self-conscious sitting there, yet how else was I to learn to play in public? How was I to learn to play in public without first learning to play upon a stage? And so I started to play. It was a muffled sound, nothing like my little Yamaha upright, whose delicacy of touch and temperament had always charmed me. How far away it seemed, just then.

Suddenly a woman came out from behind the curtains at the back of the stage.

"That's enough," she said. And then, in hushed tones: "You shouldn't have done that."

"But there's no one listening."

"You think this is the only place we can hear you?" she said: "What's played on this piano is heard by many, many more people than you suppose."

The Lecture

I began the lecture in a state of complete exhaustion. There was a glass of water on the table before me. I did not reach for it. Already I sensed that everything that happened here was self-sufficient, even the most trivial things. My stomach felt empty, but it was sufficient to its emptiness; it absorbed its lack of food: its own emptiness sustained it. In the auditorium, certain seats were also empty; it was rightful that they were so. Even as I began to speak, I recognised the absolute inevitability of everything I would say and everything I would fail to say, the people I would address and the people I would fail to address. I sensed that tomorrow already existed, and from among very many variants had plucked out today to be its predecessor. Today, at least, was the best it could find, given the time allotted it; and now, this very moment, it inserted me, the room and everything about me, into its rightful place within the past.

As I spoke I saw the shuttling of a subway train through a station; I heard the regular sound of each carriage in turn as it crossed the same space between two pieces of rail, and felt the syncopated staccato of the light within its windows.

But the train did not pass - a screech of brakes, the moan of a tunnel somewhere. With each sentence the carriages continued, in a constant present, rattling and blinking against the same empty platform, longer and longer, like a freight train with an infinite agenda.

As I spoke, I realised that it was spring outside. Then, speaking a little further, and with my back to the incessant flow of carriages, I started toward that place.

There was one

There was one alone who said: "I went into the church to find a priest; I came out to find a madman." Or else - in more tranquil times: "we are the ones who carry all things over."

Witness

There will always be those who must say: "I am my own worst witness; I cannot even sign myself."

Perfection

"This is perfect," she said.

"Yes," I said: "it is. But its merely being perfect does nothing to rationalise - that is to say, sustain - its perfection. It is perfect, and because it is perfect, nothing is any longer at stake."

How much more beautiful those with only half a faith, I reflected involuntarily - the great multitude that throngs the churches only on a feast day, in the hope of finding what a day later shall be forgotten - than those regularly certain of their way beneath all weathers.

Why write?

In "Festival Questions" Steve Mitchelmore notes an up-coming debate on the relative literacy of online bloggers vs. established academic critics, with respect (presumably) to largely literary fiction.

What interests me most is the ensuing discussion, which indirectly attempts to address the ontological status of fiction as art.

A question that recurs on this count (I'm not talking here about the specific flow of arguments above, but more generally): To what extent can any formalisation of fiction prove prescriptive? There is, if you like the action (the assertion: "Fiction is X"), followed by the reaction (the rebuttal: "Then if fiction is always X, then fiction is also Y, and Y is not fiction"). And the constant failure of formalisation -- as well as an instinctive sense, when you turn the thing around and say: "Very well, let's take as given that an explanation of exactly what is art exists" -- prompts me to conclude that fiction itself is very much about its own response to this argument. More than representation, more than beauty, perceived or otherwise, more than didactic elucidation, it remains the very thing that rebuffs such questions, and it is within such a general rebuttal that it defines itself.

Note that I don't mean by this that fiction is somehow inherently ambiguous, or contradictory, or disingenuous: fiction is simply this -- that which continues to escape.

From "Circewards"

“But you – I understand you very well,” she continued. “Some day you too will want to work your way to the heart of prohibition, for the all-encompassing mind beyond it is the space within which we must test our natural limits. Some day you will understand what it is to refute and countermand, and thereby what it is to mean and be. Even here, in this place, don’t you see that forbidding means everything? You can have anything, you know that? You can have anything at all,” she added. But she said it, I felt, in such a way that nothing was given; nothing was liberated or made more probable, as if she weighed my heart’s desires at their highest cost.

The Starmarket

My life is probably as full of life, hope and good things as anyone else's; and when people put this argument, and I acknowledge the truth of it, they tend to sit back rather quickly, as if they've proven something, and it's now only a matter of time before I'm forced to accept it and, as a consequence, become someone else. What they fail to reckon with is that just having these things doesn't give me an intellectual reason to be happy.

I work again on the star market. It's something one comes back to; it's like a garden; it's like anything at all. I see it as something capable of reflecting any meaning you search for within it, and the deeper you look, the deeper you understand its difference from the questions you ask of it. And the deeper you understand that, the deeper you understand what it means to be human, and how it is possible for so many of us to live together without feeling that the majority of our lives must be, in every way, inferior to the few, celebrated lives about us.

Many look to the starmarket for their fortunes; they see but the first face of it; they see its language, but they do not read the symbols; they do not see the words, or know why they have been written that way.

And yet, the further we enquire, the sooner we realise that the starmarket is not really about what fortune can give us or withhold, but only about the extent to which we understand ourselves.

There are those who lose hope, asking why these things should be so. Is the question not, rather, why we should be free to speculate upon such things? Is not every question a gift, since within it subsists the place to test our limits?

Redemption

Those who are most guilty sometimes are closest to redemption, for they have in them the facility perhaps to encompass guilt in its full measure, and, rounding upon it, throw themselves equally forth to the furthest point upon the other side. But those who are not guilty, those who have no cause to seek further -- theirs is the harder path, for they have neither outrage nor faith to carry them onward.

I say: "those who are not guilty." How, precisely, can that be true? - or false? Those who have not been judged, those who have been overlooked, and therefore whose crimes remain in potentia.

At heart, I ask one simple and insidious question: Is redemption any different from identity? Is the quest for the one any different from the quest for the other? Is the meaning of the one - at its limit - any different than the meaning of the other, in that same place?

Daisy heads in Denby

They've been floating overnight, and look more alive than I'd expected.

From "Irremediable"

Instead, I am standing on the platform at West Malling. Instead of what? Oh, everything.

Bibby

Mistress Bibby, naughty cat -

Don't you put your claws in that!

Tippy

Hello Mister Tippy Toes ...

How's your paws and how's your nose?

From "Szalb"

The room was suddenly silent, and I looked out at the bright, grey day beyond the window - a day which, for no clear reason, was destined to be forgotten. Involuntarily, I found myself trying, within its easy facility, to detect the fundamental deficiency that both gifted it with and limited it to the identity that it had.

...

For an instant, with a glittering hiss, the insides of my feelings flash by; who knows with what unique destiny they were created? Who knows when their rightful time might come? Who knows how we can ever reach the desire that drives us onward - the yearning to be here, though it's impossible, though everything's impossible, and both because and in despite of this?

Hatred

At school there was a child that everyone used to hate.

When I say hate, I don’t exactly mean “hate” as in “dislike”, and I don’t exactly mean “hate” as in “torture”, either. What we did had in it more activity than a feeling; at the same time, as an act it still remained part feeling, and thereby a lesser act – an act that knew it took at least a part of its sustenance from emotion, and therefore its fullest strength could not be trusted always to prevail.

I'm not sure how the hating started; it wasn't any particular thing, but rather a silent, common consensus that this child was available for hating. He had been made available, for reasons unknown. It wasn’t that he left something behind, or that anything suggested that he had been rejected in some way. He had been made available like a wrongdoer before justice, a kind of edifying beneficence to colour our own lives and make them stronger by our studied pursuit of his.

I should add, by the same token, that hating him wasn't exactly something we enjoyed, and it wasn't even exactly malicious on our part, though when I say "our part", here, I am not speaking of the whole - of which none of us knows anything - but of the individual. I don't think any of us individually wanted to hate him or to cause him pain, but when we hated him together, this was different: what we did wasn't anyone's fault now, and it wasn't even directed at a precise target, though we knew that whatever it was was contained in him.

And now that I reflect upon this, I think perhaps I see why all of this - this hatred - appears so abstract, and so far removed from real human affairs. All of us had our private identities; but what was private was fragile and ultimately unprovable. What we shared as a people was something to which we had all borne witness, something definitive to which we testified, and, in doing so, gave up a part of ourselves in solidarity for an inherited, common cause. Acting together accorded us glimpses of the true identity we had never had before - the identity that could not be known individually, but only experienced in collusion.

Indeed, I remember sometimes looking at him, when I knew he couldn't see me, with a kind of awe; I wondered how he could put up with this, day after day, with no end in sight - and so many of us, too, all wishing him ill. True, there was a kind of instinctive vulnerability in him, a sensitivity that meant he was easy to torment, because half the battle was fought by him against himself; all you needed to do was suggest a weakness to him, and he would then taunt himself with it, until it filled his eyes and he turned away quickly to try to find a corner of the playground, the abrupt movements of his shoulders the only sign of his inner torment;

I always found it an odd choice - one somehow lacking in dignity - that he chose to cry silently like this; it was as if, it seemed to me, we had already exposed him; we had already stripped away any dignity he had; he, indeed, had been a willing accomplice in this stripping away. So what we expected now was some kind of raw, human anguish, something involuntary, primal and somehow humbling for all of us. Yet instead he just took his grief away with him, as if we had no right to see what we had achieved, and I for one always resented this; I imagined a cat must feel the same way when it chased a mouse, and after the promise of a spirited fight, the mouse instead chooses to play dead, rather than fighting to the end. Finally they took the boy away from our school and sent him somewhere else; I have no idea what happened to him, whether he went to another school, whether he went home, or even if he went to a hospital somewhere.

This was announced after the calling of the register, amid much whispering among different members of staff, none of whom usually attended this classroom. It was a dramatic moment, but I think my last emotion was one of injustice. It was like a woman giving us milk every day, and then suddenly deciding we were going to have water instead. There might be good and respectable reasons why things had changed, but so far as I was concerned, we should always be able to contest - and indeed, this rebuttal, in our innocence, should be the only argument required - "We never asked for milk, yet you gave us it all the same. And now that we’ve grown used to it, you have no business changing things. It isn't as if offering us an explanation makes things better or justifiable: you don't have the right to justify anything -- we absolve you of that right, even as you must absolve us of all responsibility toward you, - and this includes the responsibility to be convinced by anything you may say."

From "Explication"

I cannot comment on it or explain it, since it is only here because of the space I have made available to it. I know nothing about this writing; this writing has to do with somebody else - me, perhaps.

From "Anonymity"

The room still retained that sense of presence which is only perceptible to those who have just abandoned one room and not yet made their home within another; and I was deferring as long as possible my need to accept the space which these walls contained, to spread out my books and papers and thereby annul its past forever.

From "Zalman's Daughter"

I passed the library, only to find Christiana again, sitting dolefully on the wet steps, still in her nightgown, and I suddenly wanted to gather her up forever and hold her tight against me, like a sharp little word wrapped up in a shawl. Under her arm she had a package of books to return, and, sitting down silently beside her, I felt an animal anguish for the leagues I hadn't climbed up, for the continents I hadn't crossed with her.

"Let's talk. Are you hurt? Are you hurt? Let's talk," she kept repeating. "Your heart cries," she added under her breath. It made so little sense, I thought she was talking about an umbrella, and so we started to argue about something, and she turned her face away and dipped the head of her parasol in the inky puddle at our feet. Now she was writing something, perhaps the name of a god, but the piece of space that I would fix after this one keeps flapping, and whichever piece you pinned up, it would be just the same. Everything was raining and writing about her.

From "No Answers"

Circe may choose to answer, and, if she chooses so, her name will answer, I reflected; but I will not have her name answer on any other account, stripped of and lost upon herself. If truth were general in the world, maybe things would someday relinquish their prerogative to remain in the places they have fallen. But, living in uncertainty as we do, nothing can be given without forfeit, or earned without penalty.

From "Tallensbury"

Now or soon or tomorrow things will be different, even if the space between here and there is dreamless and you only recognise yourself at the end of it by the things you know you have forgotten.

From "The Ballet Hall"

And perhaps, since you are remembering this today and today itself may be remembered, the waste and inertia of your past may themselves become a beginning, and there will be an end to these empty, useless days, as you close the squeaking door and the bland, yellow, indifferent light of upstairs, like the light of any heaven, continues to fall in the street after you have gone.

Illness

For some reason, I had been ill for months, but now I was better, - although my illness meant I was not really sure if I was better now, or just feeling that I was better; and, again, not knowing what that illness had been, I wasn't sure even if it was something simpler and not an illness at all, like an excess of work or stress or some kind of casual sadness that had taken hold. I was better now, but I didn't know what I was better than; I didn't know how I had recovered, and, by the same token, I couldn't know how much further I might recover yet. I didn't know where I was, in this time, except that somehow I had been ill, and I was either well or should become well soon, unless I fell ill again.

Awakened

At least it's not quite so cold as yesterday: I'm awakened by these words: not quite so cold. And I think to myself: by the same token, is tomorow morning to be no more than its distance from today? Such comparisons preempt the dawn; they stand in the stead of origination; they let something be, and thus fill the space where something else should rightfully have been, without either onus or affirmation.

Later

In English at least, "later" means "never", since the things destined to occur today cannot be deferred. They cannot occur later, and if they do, they are not the same thing at all, but just a similar thing which can be seen - in a historical sense - to bear some similarities with the thing that did not occur. Natively, though, they do not connect with one another; information cannot be passed from one to the other, and the promise of the one is not the promise of the other; the justification for the one is not the justification for the other; the absolution ensuing from the one is not the absolution ensuing from the other.

Trukklen

I go, and I do not go.

You go, and you do not go.

She goes, and she does not go.

We go, and we do not go.

They go, and they do not go.