Back, relieved, after the last conference of the season. The silver sheen of my sink, which I scrubbed clean before I left; the plants, still alive despite the heatwave, and my computer, with my new broadband connection, gateway to Youtube welcome me home. But the thread I’d been following here has broken. What had I been intending to write?
Luckily, I brought Vertigo home with me, having opened it to read only two or three pages in the last few days (the narrator is in Vienna; his dining companion shouts ‘See in you in Jerusalem’, first in Italian, then in German as he is borne away by on a gondola into the night – but that was all I had time to read.) A prayer to reading: make a bridge through these moments, make a bridge across through the night and into the morning. But why the second prayer: help me write the sentences that will continue even after I close the book?
To sleep within the book. And then to wake up as though I had been given by the book into the world. Given: is it reading that gives writing? Or is it writing that gives itself through the gift of reading? I read to write. No: writing calls for reading in order to return to itself. To return as gift, as giving. And the book burns. Vertigo burns itself down like a candle.
But that is not it either. Doesn’t writing want to consume my life, too? Doesn’t it ask for narratives, for events? To pause before writing this story is to prevent writing from fulfilling this desire. And not because I want to save my life in its simple immediacy (as if that were possible). How to indicate writing as writing – writing as the threshold where it reveals its desire to set fire to the world?
No autobiography. No narratives, through which the wick of writing would run. Above the threshold, lights burning in the sky. Writing, aurora borealis. Writing that has nothing to consume, and burns only itself. But that doesn’t have itself to burn.
Then think of it as not yet arrived, or as arriving from the future. Think of it as waiting to be given a body and to come toward you like a living thing. And all the while knowing it cannot be embodied, and, like the faces the father scientist steals for his disfigured daughter in Eyes Without A Face, it must seek fresh stories, even as it knows they must wither and die.
How then to tell of writing that is without a face, without itself? How to let narrative seize on its condition, on the story that will not tell itself? To say: writing, I would like you to face me. But then to see it’s face is yours become no one’s; void without stars.
And isn’t that why I love Vertigo? For its moving forward, for the strength that pushes each sentence forward, that lets the narrative travel as the author travels. But a strength that runs into nothing like a river into sand: for what is vertigo itself, that state into which Sebald’s narrator succumbs from time to time, but the withering of the strength to narrate?
Then the book trembles with what it cannot contain. Writing looks for a new face; writing loses its face. Eyes without a face: how to meet this faceless book? But it is already that it sees from our own eyes, there where we are blind.
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