I think it’s another way to write, only permitted in our new medium, that can make an essay not a series of assertions, but a bundle of questions barely held together, like a raft afloat. The Japanese, I read, speak by indirection – or perhaps they’d call us, if they had our words, too direct, too quick to come to disagreement (or, perhaps, agreement: for isn’t it unbearable to be thought to agree?).
I have wondered whether they might not be nuptial arts, comparable to martial ones: arts of gentleness, but then remembered Mishima’s impatience with what he thought was the feminisation of Japanese culture: didn’t he work on his laugh to deepen it, just as he transformed his own body to give it the muscle and girth of his imagined St. Anthony?
But Mars is not strong in my birthchart, and nor do I seek to make up for its lack; once again, unlike Sinthome, I have a marked dislike of discussion, being suspicious always of what I take to be its frame. Insinuation, quieter movement, and in the end, a writing that does not seek to deal blows or to parry them, but that lets continue the movement of others, though in another way, because it is itself only motion, like a river into which tributaries pour. Only I imagine this river running backward, and the distributaries that join it are like a river’s delta. How can a river leap back to its origin?
To be touched – and sometimes touch, according to a choreography that our writing knows, I think, and before we know ourselves. There are spheres, of course, in which such an approach is unwelcome, and sometimes it is necessary for bloggers to relaunch, to begin again, because, as I would put it, their voice has become too harsh.
A nuptial art instead, then – but is this only an evasion, and an art of evasion? isn’t it necessary, sometimes, to write in your own name, to take responsibility? One response, which K-Punk makes, is to show how a nom de plume can have as much consistency as a real one, but isn’t there another? How to bear no name in particular?
In Japan (my imaginary Japan), it was possible, I read to take different names as would accrue to you as you crossed different thresholds in your life. As a child, one name, as a worker, another, and in my retirement, another still. Perhaps this was never true. But couldn’t you bear more than one name at a given time, or, perhaps, to bear a name and also the other of all names?
Spurious is the name of a blog, and Lars is its author: that is true. But mightn’t the former name that origin from which the latter can never quite be born? I think anonymity is too crude a name for what is needed. Pessoa divided himself into heteronyms, as I imagine a flock of birds might come apart in five directions in the air. Five new flocks, each different (was it five names under which he published? more?), and held apart in different ways. And there is Kierkegaard, whose case is yet more complex …
Spurious, adjective. 1. Not genuine, authentic, or true; not from the claimed, pretended or proper source; counterfeit. 2. Of illegitimate birth; bastard. Synonyms: false, sham, mock, feigned, phony. Antonyms: genuine.
I find it easy to know people when there is some gap of space or time that calls for writing. In this age of email, I am still disturbed by the near simultaneity of communication it permits – but not as disturbed as when the phone rings, and I find myself having to lend presence to what I would say by my voice. But perhaps that voice, too, speaks in its another way, and, it also lets time pass, and spaces open, such that it does not merely communicate across a distance, but lets distance speak.
As with the mellifluous, searching voice of the narrator who speaks to his mother in Mirror – what sweetness!: it, too is present, even as it is set back away from what I would want to say. And do not forget that scene in Lost Highway, where the Mystery Man speaks – laughs – both in person and then acousmatically on the phone. Let speech say itself again, and speak its condition. Let writing write all the way back to the origin.
I think there is an etiquette for writing of this kind, although I’m not sure what it might be. Some know it, I think, and others do not; or perhaps this only my fantasy, and I am drawn to those who, in some way, resemble me. Who are the blunderers, I ask myself, that find it easy to speak, and write? – and then I laugh at my intolerance, knowing it to be without significance.
Perhaps it is our fantasies which individuate us, and which allow us to find others, with similar fantasies, who are like us. I feel as though at the foot of some great, ruined edifice – that I’ve come too late, and something good and great has been lost. But then I know, too, that I could only come now, when it was ruined, and there is something of me that is a wrecker, and that in some way its ruination is my fault.
How, in my weakness, could I have broken the tower? But there are many like me, shameless wreckers, who ape a language they have not earned, and speak by way of what they caused to fragment. But this, too, is a fantasy: there was nothing safe, no monument, and the time in which there were men and women of taste is itself a fantasy.
It is as if a secret has been revealed: that my shame has revealed the shame of a great imposture, and that what was great was never so, and the booming voice of culture is revealed as the wizard behind the curtain. Not genuine, not authentic, not true; of illegitimate birth, or born too late; with what name dare I speak, who speak for all the shameless? Even Beckett, even Bernhard rested in what did not seem to them to be the wreckage of Old Europe. Schubert and Brahms: the sweet, great legacy of nineteenth century Germany. And in what do we rest? Who speaks?
Dream of an etiquette that allows distance to speak. An intimacy that passes by way of distance, letting those solitudes it links be what each of them also is: Aristotle’s god? his beast? Or the one who has not yet settled into a name, or one in whom the nameless looks to lose itself. I think it is the origin that speaks with us, trailing from our sentences. And the origin that summons speech, that it may be wrecked somewhere between us, so that it speaks, also, of what fails to speak, and lets non-speech continue in what is spoken, in what is written.
Perhaps a blog turns great sails to catch this wind, and to move with it. Or it is the like the chime whose noise gives body to the passing wind. The ancients thought the great movement of the sky found its correlate in practices on earth; as the bowl of heaven turned, so it gave momentum to what turned down here; the macrocosm reached the microcosm; all were united.
I think the ruined tower of my fantasy is the shattering of what unifies, and that behind the sky of stars, there is another sky, which opens beyond sidereal space. Let us speak according to this block, this break. Speak as it is neglect that passes through us like photons from blown out stars.
Lars Iyer's Blog 