Comes a time in your life when you stand as out on a plateau, at some elevation, and with the sky spread about you and the wind buffeting you: there you are, exposed, seeing all around you, but also being seen, for isn’t the sky also an eye turned upon you? a blind eye, though, one that sees without seeing, and it is as though you see yourself with that eye, yourself, and also the whole of your life, what it has been and will be. Isn’t it that you are as though already dead? You’ve died, but died in life to life, but that has made you the god who can look at all with perfect equanimity: what will happen must happen, but you have seen all and know its law.
I am always on the lookout for such plateau moments in the books I read. Handke’s later work (I’ve no interest in anything before The Left Handed Woman) is almost all plateau, or struggles to let its narrator wander along the roof of the world. On A Dark Night I Left My Silent House: you left it after a blow to the head. You’d forgotten everything, and then where did you find yourself? On the roof of the world, on the plateau, wandering: how could it be otherwise? Yes, Handke’s books deliver us there, to where the plateau spreads and the sky swirls around you and you know your life as though you watched all from a still point in the swirling clouds.
And this marvellous scene from Debord:
I have even stayed in an inaccessible house surrounded by woods, far from any village, in an extremely barren, exhausted mountainous region…. The house seemed to open directly onto the Milky Way. At night, the stars, so close, would shine brilliantly one moment, and the next be extinguished by the passing mist. And so too our conversations and revels, our meetings and tenacious passions.
And then, a little further on:
I saw lightning strike near me outside: you could not even see where it had struck; the whole landscape was equally illuminated for one startling instant. Nothing in art has ever given me this impression of an irrevocable brilliance, except for the prose Lautreamont employed in the programmatic exposition he called Poesies. But nothing else: neither Mallarme’s blank page, nor Malevich’s white square on a white background …
Comes a time when, on the plateau, beneath the flashing stars you know absolute books from all the others, which separate themselves and lift themselves into the sky. On the plateau: in your youth, you might do anything; possibility was your milieu; your future was open. Then, later on, the time of accomplishment; you worked, you gave yourself body: what kind of person had you become? And then, later still, the time of falling, when you knew your work was nothing, and you had become nothing; when all excuses fell away.
Lear lost on the Moor. The desert which opens around Hamlet. The sacred space that is separation, the time of the nudity of the crime. Footage of the man who survived the suicide leap in which his son was killed. He is a murderer but also a survivor; he is drenched with guilt. But he is also a sacred man, a man apart. The blinded Oedipus wanders led by his niece, looking only for a place to die. What else is there to do on the plateau but wander?
But I should say Debord was not lost – or that if he was, he lost himself, happily stranded in obscurity as the world gradually caught up with his ideas. But then, too, on the plateau, those ideas do not matter, or what matters is only the great source to which they’re joined: to revolution and the regathering of revolution that is more than any one of us.
Then Debord’s voice, sovereign, is also triumphal: it spreads itself as the stars are spread above the wind. It sees all and knows all, even Debord’s own passing. And mustn’t he die so that revolution can be lifted back towards itself, as light to the source of light? There are many ways of being sacred, but to all of them belongs that solitude which knows the end is close.
Lars Iyer's Blog 