The 1st June. I had promised myself that today I would begin to work again – to give evenings and weekends back to the effort to make a book, or at least a few essays. But what direction to take? There are, it is true, essays I’ve been asked to write, but I never wanted to make the mistake of scattering them into the wind. There must be a common theme, an underlying movement that would allow them to be grouped together one day, to come together into a book, or at least the draft of one.
I remember the notes I took a few weeks back in my reporter’s notebook. I said to W., who was there (it was a conference), ‘I’m onto something’; if I’ve never reread what I wrote then I think it is out of shame for the themes to which I am drawn. I would like, you see, to be drawn to other themes, to the pressing political questions of the day, or even to those philosophical ones in whose space they open. I feel trapped in the closed circle of my interests. Looking out of the window (it is before dawn, still dark) I can see myself and the lit box of this room just as, as Eco complained once, the novelist is trapped in his memory, his personal experience.
But what does Eco know? I am supposed to stop reading novels today, this 1st June, and return to philosophy. Ambitions for the summer: to become conversant with Bergson, and in particular Matter and Memory – not just to read it, but to know it through and through, to let it permeate my body so I can recall it without effort. This is always the test. Then there is Spinoza, whom W. is reading. And shouldn’t I read Benjamin, too? R.M. reminded me that I had said I would.
Then, the broader project of learning to write about music – to write, but to teach it, too. Next academic year, I tell myself, I will really make an effort. Students, when allowed, write on music and science fiction; v’ry well, I will learn to teach philosophy through both. Then, still more, the project of becoming completely conversant with Deleuze. But I remember how many books I have read over the last year which still require substantial notetaking lest they die completely to my memory. This is wearying.
No surprise, then, that novels are much more attractive. I’m tired of philosophy of reading and writing philosophy. Tired of the perpetual catch-up, the oceanic sense of knowing nothing and of being the avatar of a kind of thinking with which I am not keen to identify myself not because I disagree with it, but because it belongs to a time and a milieu when infinite nuance and subtlety were allowed and even indulged. Who am I to insist on this or that reading of X., distinguishing it from that proffered by Y.? Whence our ‘philosophy dogma’, W. and I, which means in my case the attempt to write as clearly and as simply as Flusser. But then, as I remind W., Flusser had a great deal to say.
How to find an idiom in which to write limpidly and profoundly? The second book, it is true, is an advance on the first, just as this blog is an advance on what I wrote at the previous one. Year upon year something is gained, if only a little. When I allowed myself to write prose passages no longer those of commentary in the first book, the effect was strained and pretentious. In the second, though I wearied of the book as I came near the end, it was less strained and less pretentious. All the same, neither book is a book, that must be remembered. Neither is even a beginning, but a kind of toiling before the beginning. Simply an attempt to write and to sustain a writing project from beginning to end. That was enough in those books, even as it means neither is a book.
Is it patience I lack? I think so. That and a too-great desire to write, to write anything, even this (how ridiculous!) Dawn. I couldn’t sleep, you see. Now my face vanishes from the window. What do I see? A white sky, daylight without depth. The world divided from me by the windowpane. It’s the 1st June, I remind myself, and time to begin work again. But my attention slackens, falling from writing. I read a few pages from Speak, Memory in bed and then remember the first thirty pages of Handke’s Repetition, which I began to read yesterday. Which prose do I prefer? Which is closer to me even as it seems farther – close and distant at once? Which one carries speech forward in me?
I had wanted to read books about memory ever since, last summer, I reread Rose’s Love’s Work. As though it were possible, remembering, to fold out a life, to explicate it, opening beyond the closed circle of interiority. Yes, to open that closed space beyond the particularities of a personal life. What does this mean?, I ask myself lazily. Why this perpetual desire to evacuate the self? I will not be able to answer this question or even to ask it, really to ask it, except in a prose that could not be paraphrased: an absolute idiom, collapsed into itself as a star collapses into a black hole. Where each word counts, each sentence, but only as they become something like echo chambers, letting speak the weakness that any firm and decided speech would betray.
It becomes clearer to me that such a writing cannot be made from the abstractions to which I tend, but must be embedded in detail, in the concreteness of detail. It is Handke who seems to give me an indication of such prose, and not Nabokov. As I read Repetition, I remember Bresson’s A Man Escaped, a film I have not seen for twelve years. Watching it with great attention (I had heard the director’s name, but only came across this film by chance on the television I had in my bedroom that dreadful year) I wondered at its modesty. I thought: v’ry little happens, but it is as though ev’rything happens, a great deal. We know little about the prisoner, but that little is enough as, for a time (the interval of the film) he becomes the cipher for something – but for what? For the ingenuity of a human life. For its patience, its suffering, its resistance. Today I think to myself: the film was made of details and no lofty talk. The well off characters of Bergman films seem so indulgent by comparison, always searching for drama. And then: Bergman is a theatrical director, a man of the theatre. He should not have had the temerity to criticise Tarkovsky.
But these are idle and intemperate thoughts. As if, today, there could be a choice between this or that auteur director! Think of Handke instead, I tell myself. And think of that curious fact about Auster: he allows himself to write clichés, stock expressions, to get the writing going. And it does go, making itself out of details and weaving a plot from itself. That it goes at all is marvellous.
This morning (it is 5 o’clock) I remind myself the first entries on this blog were about the narrative voice. That was eighteen months ago. Writing the last book on this topic and others, I tell myself, it is as if I had experienced that voice for the first time. As I finish this inconsequential post which I will have forgotten by 7 o’ clock I remember those friends who died over the previous years and the way we, their friends, have been scattered by their deaths. There is nothing to bind us. There are memories, yes, but no longer that central, radiating point from which light and warmth travelled in all directions. Each of us, as former friends, has been cast into the darkness, travelling a long way from our orbits like those probes (Voyagers 1 and 2) which have disappeared from the solar system.
Speak, memory. Remember what happened again even as the earth turns into morning and it will be time to go to work. Remember but let this memory appear against the darkness of that great forgetting which sets each of us on a course of our own. Only a simple prose, stuffed with details, made of them, will do. Through such details reported in a simple prose, the shame of living a personal life, closed upon itself, will be redeemed and a book will explicate itself beneath the pallid sky.
Nabokov:
I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it[….] Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the mute films of yore, and the portrait of my old French governess, whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books, is fading fast, now that it is engulfed in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own.
Happy forgetting that allows memories, personal memories to evaporate! How I would like to replace all my life with the streaming of words!
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