Dream image: an eye open in the middle of the palm of my hand. By writing it down will I make that image go away? Another bright day in the South. But I couldn’t sleep last night, and carry the night with me; the day has not really begun, or rather, it has not separated itself from what went before. No new beginning: the lost night voids the bright morning. The day is turned inside out. It is a photographic negative of what it should be.
Isn’t it in just such a negative that Mishima’s Toru finds himself? I remember the first pages of The Decay of the Angel, the last volume in The Sea of Fertility, as a series of horizontal lines. Short paragraphs, each a sentence or two sentences long, which precisely lay out a situation. The coast. A ship that comes across the horizon. Remembering, I say to myself: it is at this point Mishima knew the Absolute. At this point that he began to write as a dead man. For it was upon the completion of this volume that he took his life.
Toru: the photographic negative. Mishima, already dead, already seized by the movement of dying. It is as though he had cut his wrists, and his blood was already mixing with the horizon the ship crossed. The sea at the beginning of The Decay of the Angel is a sea of blood. Toru, the fourth incarnation, is only sixteen, but he is wise from a life lived three times over. Wise? No, not even that. He has seen everything. He knows everything. Later, in a botched attempt to take his own life, he makes himself blind. But there was nothing more to see.
Morning: my head is thick with cold. I cough, and blood from my nose spatters on the white sheet. It is the night coughing. The day has begun, but there is still the night from which it was unable to separate itself. Mishima, who wrote at night, would have separated night from day with a sword stroke. But just as in those grotesque accounts of botched executions, where the executioner strikes again and again at an unseverable neck, the night is part of the day, flooding it, I imagine, as an octopus’s ink runs into seawater.
Now I remember another dead man, another who lives as life-in-death: Tarkovsky’s Stalker, who, when he lies down in the Zone, is joined by an Anubian Alsation. The camera pans over water, and there we see items from Stalker’s nightstand encrusted with algae. How is those items have crossed over into the Zone? Or does it work the other way: how did those items cross from the Zone into the world? The camera pans. Is this Stalker’s dream? Is he dreaming? Or is it that the Zone dreams in him? Either way, I tell myself, he is dead. He has already died.
A final dead man, protagonist of Gene Wolfe’s Peace. Alden Dennis Weer: I should have kept the book here, in my childhood home. It was in this town I discovered it, the book with close type and yellow pages. The book with the uprooted tree on the cover. I took it with me when I met my friends at the pub. It was 1989; I was at the bottom of the world. The town was like the floor of a well. I read the book there. I reread it, and only gradually did I come to understand what it narrated.
And at that moment, I felt cheated, just as I did last night, upon rereading a childhood favourite: plot becomes all, plot becomes everything, plot sweeps up the whole story and the possiblity of narration. Is it any surprise that I came to prefer the horizontal lines of The Decay of the Angel? That I would discover books in which the plot was like a half-grown garden maze, whose hedges you could look over? I do not want to be lost in the labyrinth of a plot (with one exception: Kafka). I do not want to be led to the secret heart of the narrative, like the enchanted garden in Diana Wynne Jones’ Charmed Life.
Nostalgia for my first reading of Peace, for my second reading, when that book was as light and as open as Tarkovsky’s Mirror. Each episode was a tableau, each spread itself horizonally, moving across, with no forward rush of action. Still book, hovering book, book that suspended the world. Book like a low archipelago of islands from which one could leap from one tableau to another. Book like the jostling ice-blocks across which the child leaps in Pelle the Conquerer.
On my desk in my office, a few hundred miles to the North, is my book of Tarkovsky’s polaroids. Pressed between those pages, like a flower in a flower press, time reveals its juices, its sticky essence. The pages of The Sea of Fertility are sticky with blood.
Morning. The golden statue of Ganesh in front of the window. The pine trees behind the houses opposite. The brightness of the white garage doors, reflecting the sun. The spindly new plants planted along the garden border. What had you intended to write about?, asks the blog. To follow one dream after another, I said. To dream with books that dream inside me. The photographic negative: was that the thread that was to lead you through this labyrinth?, asks the blog. I dropped it; and besides I can see over the hedges. I want to get lost, not find the exit.
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