The Beatitude of Writing

1.

This morning, if I am not quite hungover, I am still tired – pleasantly so – from yesterday’s barbeque and the long Sunday afternoon in a suntrap backyard. Tired enough to be unable to work away at the papers I am to present at the beginning of next months, but content enough not to worry. A content that is made not from the specifics of yesterday’s events as they would crowd my memory, but a beatitude that underlies them and, I know, gave them and gives itself to me now. The same beatitude as I would dream would one day give me writing – a dream, a hope, under whose sign what I write here is written.

Let’s say to write – to write literature – is to experience over and again the surprise of the strength to write. It is, the perpetual reassertion of what Kafka called the ‘merciful surplus of strength’. To experience the surprise of the strength of being able to write – that strength which does not seem to come to me, but to have been bestowed. Writing, it is as though I have been seized by a current that is always streaming through the world – a secret streaming that rattles tea-cups and scatters papers even as it passes through the trees and the houses. A streaming captured by the camera of Tarkovsky’s Mirror as it passes across the used tea things (a cup rolls from the table, the wind passes through the trees, miniscule events, but events in which everything happens).

Too quickly (but I have written on these themes before, and this should not be a surprise): Inspiration is explication, the turning of what inside over to the streaming of the outside. It is that exposition wherein I am posed outside of myself, and no longer according to the boundaries of the self. It is implication, whereby I am folded into the unfolding of all secrets, and the opening of all closed spaces. So is writing the streaming of that streaming; it is the joy and beatitude of a freedom which is not my own.

How marvellous that burst of strength that, sustained day by day, allows a writer to realise a book, a world, populated with characters, thick with plot! A book trusting in steady strength – that strength which laps forward day after day and each day lived in the propitiousness of writing. Miraculous time that allows a book to be born!

That, I presume, is why writers quit day jobs, why they seek to make the everyday that stretch of time in which a book can make itself. In the closed space of a study, the writer is always outside, unfolding in the strength that sustains the narrative.

But what happens when that strength fails? When it breaks down? Perhaps the author drinks; perhaps she turns to other concerns. But always the sadness of non-writing and unfinished work; always the non-bliss of a life lived outside writing.

2.

In the closing chapters of Goldberg: Variations, we find the fiction we have been reading revealed as a fiction – not by Josipovici, but by that author whose work it is supposed to be. That same author feels deserted by the work; the strength which he feels bore his writing these past three years, which sustained his research into late eigtheenth century life is no longer his. Oh he can write, but this is a writing which stages the wreckage of his belief in life and in writing.

He has told several related stories about Goldberg, the storyteller of repute who been commissioned by the insomniac Westfield, owner of a large country house, to read stories that will send him to sleep. Goldberg has left behind his wife, his children; this is the latest in a series of commissions which, as a jobbing writer, allow him to earn money. We know he loves them, his wife and children; we read letters in which he writes of his love. They are far from him, but he will return, perhaps with money enough to have the roof of his house repaired.

Then, when the fictional author is himself deserted by his wife, he will allow Goldberg to desert his wife, to write her a final letter which explains that freedom which has seized him such that when he leaves Westfield’s employ, he will not return to her and his children, but will wander in search of another life – or, better, in the claim of a search whose aim is only searching.

It seems so long since I arrived here, yesterday afternoon, intrigued by my comission, curious about the house and its owner, my heart suffused, as always, with love of you, and never doubting my ability to do what I had been asked. Now it feels as though it was only on arrival here that I really began to live, that all my life until that moment had been a happy dream, like the dream of childhood.

[…] If I did not have you of course I would not be myself but someone else, someone without substance and without purpose, without a role and without feelings. I look for this person and know he exists, that he is not so very different from the person who, in his misguided integrity, refuses to comply with the demands made upon him by Westfield. It frightens me to admit this, but perhaps that is the person I have been discovering mself to be in these last few hours, as I have sat here writing to you.

I can imagine myself now getting up from this table, packing my things, making my excuses, and departing. But not in order to return home. For that person has no home to return to. Not in order to come back to you and the house, to my wife and my children and my animals, but rater to wander out into the world, alone and invisible, without a place to rest his head, without skills, without even a language to speak.

These beautiful passages (there are many more) are a shock to the reader. Then, experiencing this shock, we learn what we might have suspected: that the chapters of Goldberg: Variations that we have read up to now is a sample of the book this fictional author has been working on for three years. A book that now means nothing to him, perhaps because his wife has left him, perhaps because he has left England in the wake of her disappearance for another life without another woman, and perhaps (though this could be a result of what happened) because he no longer believes in what he has written.

In the last chapters of Goldberg: Variations, this lack of belief becomes the substance of each chapter which now bear more transparently on the predicament of their fictional author. He no longer has the strength to believe in the world he was making; it is all frippery and fakery and now he will bid Goldberg to leave the same wife and children to whom Goldberg has dreamt of returning.

But he regains the strength. He is addressed by the voice of the other who instructs me to pay heed to what speaks in the between of the story. I have written of this voice in the last two posts here; I will not do so now. Let me say simply that what speaks is the beatitude of writing.

After this marvellous conversation, we find Goldberg writing to his wife once again. He doesn’t know if he is asleep or awake, whether he is writing in his dreams or whether what he writes is simply written in the depths of the night, when Westfield’s entire household is asleep. Even Westfield sleeps – but is it the sleep of a real character, or that sleep into which the book, the Goldberg: Variations, has retreated? That putting-to-sleep of a project and letting there come forward in its place what we, Josipovici’s readers, receive as the Goldberg: Variations?

Of what does Goldberg write in his final letter? Once again, in his faith in his wife’s love. In the faith of his return. He has passed from the time of destruction to the time of healing; the world is coming together again.

My dear. It is done. He is asleep. I have accomplished what I was asked here to do and I am very tired.

It seems so long ago that I left home. I am longing to return and see you and the children. I am very tired.

[…] I am very tired. I am very sleepy. It is all over[….] at the back of everything is the sense that you will be waiting for me, wherever I come home, to whatever home I come. Yes. You will be waiting.

And can we not say that this ‘you will be waiting’ is what the fictional author of Goldberg: Variations experiences as the between? Is it not, above all, the sense that writing, the beatitude of writing, is waiting for him?

3.

What right have I to speculate on the experience of writing a novel? I have never written one – or rather, though I might have tried, many years ago, the means deserted me, or, I should say, I lacked belief. Still, I wrote, and wrote from this lack, filling pages with the madness of a writing without topic, character or plot, a writing which was supposedly seeking its conditions of possibility: a writing that sought, by writing, to seize on its lack and to make good on this lack. Yes, a writing counterposed to what I experienced as the everyday but, for that reason, unable to seize itself as the truth of that same everyday, as the beatitude which sings out from tea cups and scattered papers.

Later still, I gave that up, or rather, once again, the means deserted me – I didn’t have belief to write in non-belief and writing disappeared, or rather, was reborn in the desire to make academic writings – dissertations and papers, books and essays. But the latter were only an experience of non-writing and non-belief. I thought: if I am patient, something will happen. If, patiently, I write a great deal, then that writing will be seized by the same belief-in-writing that once deserted me.

Has it happened? Is it happening, and if so, where? Certainly not in the academic prose I continue to compose – prose reworked over and over, prose redrafted dozens of times, prose overwrought and overwritten, contorted because it never seems lucid or simple enough. Perhaps what vouchsafes itself here is the dream of a writing that happens at one stroke – that is born in a simple forward movement which grants itself to me as simply as day succeeds day. Yes, that beatific writing commensurate with a beatific belief in the world and in my powers of writing as they are engaged by what lies outside them.