At the Threshold

1.

Opening the box in which I am to compose a new post this morning, I thought: what other medium would permit the wandering movement of writing? Lacking the strength to write – tired from my night out, from the Fantastic Four (not very good; see Batman Begins instead, or, best of all War of the Worlds) and beer at Tilly’s and the Bogeda (excellent – but I heard the barman at Tilly’s is linked to Combat 18 – is this correct?) – I look back over the last few posts with the happiness of having forgotten what it was that I had written. How different this is to going over and over the same manuscript, doggedly retouching what was written, reinforcing, with each revision, the sense of my authorship and propriety! Nothing is more boring than that.

But this is accompanied by another impression: what I write here bears on the same; it is of the same narrow group of interests that seizes my writing. How is this possible? What I am is only a contraction of a complex of habits; what is my style, my interests is produced through that complex; just as my handwriting has become more complex with age, the clean strokes of youth being replaced by the more complex strokes of adulthood, what I write and the way it is written is made by the encounters that have made me – made, that is, by what allowed me to contract a habit, a way of responding, a style of response, until what I am is only a cluster of such responses. At the same time, this cluster is organised along similar lines; my habits have a structure; they are ruled by metahabits, metastyles which, imposed upon one another, never quite fitting, produce what might be expressed as the style of my existence. So it is that writing, blogging, is only a variation on a theme, on a style; it is the interface between those events I experienced that led me to form habits and what I experience as I read, as I live, in the present.

An example. The way I speak, my accent, my tones and registers are formed by those encounters I had as a child and later. First of all, a West London accent, a Southall accent – that is the base. An accent of a comprehensive school, of the desire to fit in, of the happiness of a shared idiom, of solidarity with a particular class. Then, much later, a Manchester accent, assumed to fit in, so as not to cause trouble and to which I revert when pressed against the wall – when I have to defend myself. An accent stolen from record shop assistants and barpeople; the accent of those I heard on the bus – tones and registers which became mine and now, when I hear them, take me home.

The soft flesh of the mouth and throat, it is said, harden in the first few years of life; you will speak, henceforward, by and large as your mouth allows you; your body changes with what is said. Perhaps this happens later in life, too – or it is that your psychology, your software hardens. Now I find it hard to speak in other ways, and relaxation is reversion to a Mancunion accent or a West London one.

What, then, of writing and my narrow range of concerns? Perhaps our hardware and our software cannot be distinguished, and it is possible simply to speak of contracted habits. Then there is the danger of a blogging complacency: what marks itself here is only the complex of habits that I am, that forms my style. Marks itself, repeating itself and confirming a limited repetoire of responses to the world. I will become like the old bachelor who is unable to live with anyone else, like the spinster who holidays alone and eats alone.

Perhaps blogging affords a chance to break from this repetoire; perhaps it reveals, as you read or reread what you have written, the limits you will have to surpass – but how to surpass them? The answer: blogging is also the threshold, the response to what is new – that limit-edge of alteration where what is encountered may be brought back to the same but may also change the same, altering the complex of habits that you are. Age is a complexification, born as each encounter, like a snowflake, lies down upon another. There is never an exact fit from response to response, but a style forms itself; an identity is consolidated through time.

2.

The protagonist of Handke’s Across sees himself reflected in the mirrored ceiling of a supermarket. His whole book, he writes, is about what he saw there. But the book is full of vast tracts of description; it seems to be about anything but the protagonist. Understand this: that what he saw was not the one he was but also the one he could be; he lived at the threshold of what he was and what he might be. Grace, said the protagonist, is better called having time. Perhaps to have time is to have the chance to pause at the threshold, to response anew to what comes to meet you. Perhaps your own image might become unfamiliar and it is as though you grow younger.

Writing of that same revelation, the narrator of Across claims that the one he saw was not the father of his son, but something like the son of his son. What he saw was youth; what he saw allows him to move upstream of his middle age (he is surprised, he says, to find himself one of the older members of the staffroom at the school where he teaches) and the accretion of habits middle age names. He is getting younger; his period of leave, taken to complete an academic article, allow him to wander in a town that is becoming new to him. Thus does he write; thus does Across collect the writings of one for whom the world has been given anew.

Now I understand why the account of so many details crowd Handke’s Across: the narrator has experienced a liberation. It is necessary for him to write, only this writing belongs to the threshold which is being altered as he writes. Remake the thresholds! Discover the clean youthful stroke in your crabbed handwriting! That is what Handke’s book says to me and I remember what Kierkegaard emphasises about the knight of faith: he looks just like anyone else; he is there beside you, but when he walks, he leaps; his leaping is a walking. Is it possible to detect in Handke’s precise and descriptive prose just such a leaping?