‘I am quoting from memory’: Blanchot says this in his essay on Levinas, the tenderest of gestures, though doesn’t it also allow what is quoted to go amiss? How tenderly I got you wrong. How tenderly I forgot, though I was trying to remember. But what kind of tenderness does not look for accuracy?
I think there may be a writing that neglects, and is given over to the vagaries of memory. As though it were like the large glass of Duchamp’s artwork that would slow light down as it passed. To slow light, to slow sense, or the exchange of sense: I only half remember what you said. Remember it like light at the end of a summer’s day: fading, almost twilit, just before the bats come out. What did you say then? What did you want me to hear, or were you only talking to yourself?
You were ill and I took you to the old country to recover. It was winter, very cold, but I still pressed you for anecdotes: I wanted to know something of your private memories. And what did you say? Should I remember here?
Another memory instead, but still one of yours: the end of a summer’s day and you and a friend beneath a tree, the one with flashcards and the other guessing the shapes on those flashcards without seeing. ‘We were so tired. I think that’s why we were receptive.’ Wearily receptive, as the light failed, guessing the shapes right. But I am quoting from memory – when did you tell me that? twenty years ago – more? and when was that summer of which you spoke? – and no doubt I’ve got it wrong. I think you have to be tired, very tired, to write with the right amount of neglect, to let distance enter time and slow it.
Curious that memories like that can hollow out a space in you – that they ask to be kept, and that something of you is kept with them. But how to keep fidelity with a memory? How to remember, except by way of that forgetting that, like the Japanese aesthetic category of sabi lends the charm of a patina of age to that which is recalled?
As though it were a slightly damaged antique, or book pages that are sun-yellowed, or old yellowed photographs from the 70s, smaller than they are now, and with colours softer than they are now – that fading lets a distance speak; now it is time that is those pictures’ element. They bear the trace of the memories they would carry, but don’t they carry a trace of the neglect that they know will meet them? Who are those people? Who were they? Photographs remaining when all are dead and gone, when no one is alive.
We drove out to see you in your student halls, and walked out along one river that was a tributary to another. I have photos from that time – there, with the college behind us, and in the college cloisters themselves, and then with you standing on the semi-circle of bridge near to the houses where the boats are kept. And it was not long ago I stood on that same bridge, and a picture of me was taken there. That day, we quoted from Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy, laughingly, and of course inaccurately: what can such a poem mean to us now? what can poetry mean? No doubt it was the setting of the poem I recalled, for speaker, and choir and orchestra, and not the poem itself.
‘Now I will give my grief it’s hour’; ‘The festal light from Christchurch Hall’: poetry sings of what it was and is not now, or perhaps that was the way those old lines sounded as they were marked by my forgetting. Aged by our lives. Listened to, that setting, half a life ago and now as we spoke half-remembered lines with a patina that carried it beyond that half a life and spoke of the lovely fading of poetry, of the neglect that must meet it if it is to be alive.
And then you fell ill, and our families arranged that I took you to the old country, staying with my uncle in his cottage, a room each upstairs. How many photos did you take, film after film? The dog with snow in a little pyramid on his nose. The dog inside, lying on the underheated floor. The dog running out into the water. And then a picture of the ice on the water, like a crust, nearly breaking where the waves lapped up, but still all one, a single sheet.
I remember pressing you for anecdotes, remembering those stories recounted of the Greek philosophers by Diogenes Laertius in which the thought of a thinker was to reveal itself by an appropriate incident from their life. As though the whole of their thought were there, as the general shape of a tree is found in the angle between twig and branch. You told me something; but I will not tell of what you said. Two stories, I think, one of life and one of death.
And when I think of you, and of our lives and deaths, isn’t it with those stories first in mind: first of all, those anecdotes in which something came alive of which I did not know before. Your life, beyond mine, and different from it. I felt a pleasant neglect, I felt pushed back a little and this was happiness: to have been present when memories returned, and with great force. Yes, to have been there, then as they came to break the surface.
It is early now – or very late – and I cannot sleep. I wake up and come into this room, with the aim of picking up this thread, bearing with me my reading for the day: on the Stoics, on the notion of harmony, a little of Henry Green’s Nothing, and still the Jean Genet I remember from the other day: The Declared Enemy. And a more distant sense of mourning in advance, for when I saw that Robert Altman was dead, I thought of old Ingmar Bergman, and how that morning when you took a photograph of the frozen sea, we were told it was once possible to walk across the ice the five miles to Sweden.
It is on the other side of Sweden he lives still, Bergman, on his island, alone. Writing still – and he is the old man of Ullman’s Faithless, who assists when it comes to remembering the past. Not a narrator, but a kind of god who watches over narration, and blesses it. A god of neglect, and who comes to you by way of distance, bringing it.
How old he is, Bergman! And how late it is, as I take up writing this post again. As late as the night which seems never to end in Fanny and Alexander, and wouldn’t I like to speak as they were able to speak, the old woman and her friend the old Jew. Neglect carried their words, and she, in particular, let what she said be borne on that current which arrives from the past. Spoke, and let her speech be carried by that divine neglect that broke its words upon its surface, like funerary flowers carried apart on a river.
And now I remember, how nearly one year ago, the ashes of my father were carried into the Bay of Bengal and lowered there, in the city that used to be called Madras. Were their flowers? No place for a grave, but this is welcome. The sea to which all rivers are tributaries: that great river that runs through our lives, scattering what we say and what we remember.
Divine neglect: isn’t it of that, too I should remember, recalling little stories in which his memory comes alive? It is very late; it’s early. No dawn – not for a few hours. I hear the rushing of water from the kitchen – somewhere a pipe has broken. Somewhere it is leaking still, for all that the water company came out yesterday. I hear the heating coming on and then turning off again, and the crack of the water bottle from which I drank snapping back into shape.
I took a decongestant and a paracetamol: should I go to bed? But something is awake in me and I tell myself it is the god of neglect. But there is no god, only a river – the same one, I imagine that runs through the album by Smog, whose name is again free of parentheses.
And didn’t we (a different ‘we’, this time) watch Bill Callahan and Joanna Newsom performing ‘Rock Bottom Riser’ on Youtube, she sitting playing piano and he standing singing into a mic and say to each other, they’re really in love? We thought them both very handsome. We saw love when he turned to look at her, and love in her looking at him. We liked her dress, and his uprightness. We liked the piano that accompanied the song. A River Ain’t Too Much to Love: but what does that mean?
I am awake now, as only writing can awaken me. Who writes? The river seeks to find itself – to return flowing to flowing, breaking apart the funerary flowers, and carrying the ashes of the dead. To return to itself: as though writing wanted only to complete a circuit, to come back to itself by writing of a life, and of the ancedotes that speak of that life, the part of the whole. To return: as though writing had a nostalgia for what is lost to memory, for the distance that divides us from old photos and old memories.
Nostalgia – but not, now, of a lost place, of the homeland of memory, but of the river that runs through all places, returning, always returning, as the flower petals scatter. ‘I will give my grief it’s hour’. Grief – and joy – and death – and life. I am quoting from memory. No: memory is quoting me. No: memory quotes itself by way of neglect. How weary were you, that day, when you guessed the shapes, and thoughts seemed to pass from one weary head to another?
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