Suddenly, on the white rectangle of the page, the shadow of a bird, moving quickly. What happened? Did it happen? Behind me, large windows, a sunny courtyard. Then I remember Tarkovsky’s Solaris, and the interrogation of Berton. Suddenly, through a window in the cold, white room, a bird is seen to alight on a branch. And then, in Stalker, there is the bird that flies across a room filled with sand dunes, and disappears in mid air.
The incidental, in each case. They do not call attention to themselves, these birds (unlike the bird that alights on the cap of the boy in Mirror), but a part of the whole of a shot. Then I think of the Zone, with its strange laws, its secrets, all of which lie open and apparently ordinary in the light of day, or which, if they are enclosed, are only ordinarily so, in a space as ordinary as any other, even if, mysteriously, its rooms are full of sand, or of water.
The Zone, I tell myself, is only the incidental, but the incidental that presses forward to be noticed. It is the space of the fleeting, but where the fleeting is no longer fleeting, but essential, and the incidental happens imperiously, as though, as soon as it occurred, it always would have occurred thus, as though it had been planned in that way by the gods.
Who is Stalker himself, the guide to the Zone? The one who would abide in what cannot be understood. Who holds himself there. To abide – but does he abide? The items on his nightstand are also beneath the pools in the Zone. A phonecall reaches him there, in an abandoned room: is it that the Zone is only the place of the incidental, of what happened only in the corner of Stalker’s eye?
This is a dream, not a post. Or if it is a post, it is one that remains in the Zone, or a kind of zone, wherein everything incidental that has happened to me comes forward again. The other night, returning from Germany, I bought a book at the airport, which I began to read on the plane. Carried along by the reading, I dreamt of what I would like to write, and in the same strong style. I wanted to be carried forward by strong, calm prose. By that strong prose that would spread like a wave of surf over the sand.
I wanted to seize the incidental and make it essential, to live from what happened without reason. I wanted to write a prose that leapt from incident to incident, disclosing their hidden necessity (is that the word?). By that prose I would have willed everything that had happened. Willed it, demanded it: how could life have been lived otherwise?
Yes, everything seemed possible; I could write of everything, and plot my course through the incidental. I admit, I had felt lost for most part of a whole week. What was incidental and what was not? The word, adrift, had kept returning to me. Write with that word, I had thought to myself. But I was adrift only because I could separate the essential from the incidental: could not find that written path, that critique which would set the two apart.
Then to write – or to write after the example of the book – would be to be able to abide in the incidental, to hold oneself there. And then to be held by what gives a life its shape, and binds it to a style. I read, as the plane flew north above the clouds, and as I saw the whole city from high above the river’s mouth – the whole city in the sun, on both banks of the river. I read, but I fell from my reading-dream; the narrative, which had now encompassed the doings of so many characters, had fanned out too broadly: it seemed anything at all was in the novelist’s grasp – that the incidental had been mastered, rather than being allowed to live and giving life in turn.
There was too much plot, and the novelist insisted on introducing too many characters and too many themes; how I longed, after I finished the first fifty pages of the book, for the prose of Handke, or of Sebald: for a concentrated, single minded prose, for the narrative of a single life.
But the first fifty pages! Everything was there! The narrative demanded nothing; it fell open like a flower, what happened could only have happened; the tale followed what told itself in the world and in the opening of the world. And I, reading, thought I could speak of my life in that way, could speak fluently and without hesitation, and trace a path through all that had happened.
This afternoon, back in my office, I remembered the closing pages of ‘continuity shots’ of Duras’s The North China Lover. ‘A blue sky bursting with light’; ‘Naked sky’; ‘The dark river very close up. Its surface. Its skin. In the nakedness of a clear night (relative night)’: short paragraphs which could have been inserted at any point in the narrative. Paragraphs that are printed at the end of Duras’s book, one after another, each of which – as I am sure was the intention – could be inserted anywhere.
I thought, but what I suffer from are shots of discontinuity – that fragmentation that seems to tear life from itself, scattering it in a dozen directions. To be adrift – to live diffusely, and in every direction at once: it is only with a strong book with me that I can steer my life in a single direction, can fool myself that the opening of its prose is also my world as it opens, and in accordance with a single law.
And without such a book? Without a Stalker to guide me through the Zone? What does it mean to live adrift, lost in vagueness? I will take no decision, there where nothing can be decided. I will be lived, there where I do not live. Life will have happened to me – but what will that have meant?
Stalker lies down, and a dog passes behind him. Two children, whom we will not see again, greet one another in Solaris. Then there are the horses, that exit the shot to the left and reappear from the right. The children, the horses, the dogs: how to look at the world from the corner of my eye? How to learn to live so that the incidental greets me, and in that necessary vagueness that breaks all laws?
Dream of the telling that affirms the incidental – of that practice of recounting that saves the incidental. Saves it – but by sending the narrative off course, steering it, not by what collects the incident and lays it end to end (the strong narrative), but by attesting to the law that is broken each time. But what kind of telling is this?
Speak by indirection. Write and know that what is written is carried by the incidental, and the detour of the incidental. Nothing you report is essential – or what is told, its details is only an example of the way the incidental can might carry your telling away. An example – which means one incident weighs the same as any other. What is said does not matter; telling must follow a path, a particular path, but it must be affirmed that this path is one of many, and telling now stands apart from what is told.
We live diffusely, and in every direction at once. The strong book gathers the incidental into a narrative, that is its relief. But is there a weak book, a weak writing, that is gathered by the incidental each time, such that it can never bind narrative into linear continuity? The discontinuous, the fragmentary: speak of the diffuse, of the vague. Let speak the telling that is like the heat haze over a summer road.
All stories are here; I will speak of everything. I will tell, and tell everything – and first of all by telling what tells itself each time. Be gathered, do not gather. Wait; telling will reach you. Telling will speak of the incidental and affirm the incidental. This is a dream, not a post. Stand at the beginning place, where telling has barely given itself form. Stand where the aurora borealis flashes above the earth.
What flashes thus? The beginning of the story. No: what returns in the telling of the story, and in the telling of the incidental. ‘A blue sky bursting with light’; ‘Naked sky’; ‘The dark river very close up. Its surface. Its skin.’ Stalker is passing through the Zone. His passage changes it. He lies down; he dreams, and the items on the nightstand are strewn in a pool of water beside him. The Zone says: I will speak of your life. I will speak of everything. The Zone says: lie down, dream, and I will tell you everything.
The incidental never settles into an incident, I know that. Or it is that the incident is only the incidental that has become fixed and determined, a stone in a series of stepping stones. Write with a weak prose; write so that the incident is ready to shimmer into the incidental. The day is ordinary; the day is extraordinary; in its ordinary depth is already the Zone that shimmers in the corner of your eye.
Life will have happened to you. No: you are what life gave to itself; you are what is stretched along the incidental; you lie down, fall, as Otto the postman falls in The Sacrifice. I am at the beginning place, the incidental. Or what begins is what will never settle itself into an incident, or that burns around the incident, its fiery nimbus.
The incidental: is this why, for all its longeurs, I love My Year In No Man’s Bay? Is it why I love Vertigo? Books made of discontinuity. Books that burn around their edges, and in which – across which – telling obsesses itself with the incidental. What happened, what is happening? Why set down this detail, and not another? Why these accounts of a great passage through the world?
Because it is a passage, each time, that does not set its course in relation to the stars of incident, but is lost beneath the flashing of the incidental. Lost – and where this loss is the stake of what is told. Errant speech, speech of indirection: not the single flower that falls open, not the world as gives itself to the flower of narrative, but as hedge flowers are strewn along the path, each of which is a perspective on the whole.
Telling that does not bear, but sets adrift. I fell asleep; I fell asleep in the telling. Lie down. Stalker is lying down. The Zone shimmers around him.
What happened to you? What will have happened, there where the incidental fails to complete itself? Every path begins here; every path has already begun. Weak prose, fallen prose: decide nothing, determine nothing, there where the incidental greets you.
Lars Iyer's Blog 