For whom, I ask of an imaginary writer, do you write? For yourself? But you want to be published, too, don’t you? You want your writing to reach an audience. Except you also despise all audiences; you think you’re above them, or better than them, or that what you have written is too precious for them. They won’t understand you; they’ll get you wrong. How you loathe them! But you also depend upon them. You need them in order to make you a writer, to be published. Then dream instead of a posthumous fame; write for an audience that does not yet exist.
One day they’ll read you; one day, they’ll understand. Close your eyes and dream of that: of a reader to come, who is not here yet; of a reader who has set out to meet you from the farthest side of the universe. Close your eyes and dream of the reader who will read your work and know it, and understand it, and in knowing it know you. Dream of your posthumous reader who knows you only as it has become late, too late, and you have long died. Tears in your eyes at the poignancy of it all.
To be understood! To have been understood, just that! Is it so much to ask? You tried to do something with your life, didn’t you? You tried to make something, to give something to the world. And if it doesn’t want your gift now, then perhaps it will. Perhaps others will emerge, readers, only much later. Perhaps it will find them, much later, and you will have made contact with them, and fall weeping into their arms. And isn’t that why you need to get published? Isn’t that why you will need to enclose your writings within the covers of a book?
All this is dramatised in Bergman’s The Magician: the performer who loathes the audience upon which he depends. The wise-eyed performer who, in private, rips of his wig and complains how much he hates them, his poor audience! Isn’t he better than them! Isn’t he their superior? But only, in a sense, as he is much worse than them, only as he has gone much further, much farther ahead in despair.
He’s like the ‘wizard rat’ of Loerke in Women in Love, swimming ahead, discovering, but what he’s brought back no one will want. He’s gone too far; art, for him, has become mere pretense. But he depends on it, this pretense. He can do nothing else but to make himself up, kohl-eyed, wise-eyed, to appear as a kind of prophet for his audience.
Artist as discoverer, as wizard rat: but what if the ultimate discovery, the one beyond everything, is that there is nothing to be discovered, and no message to be brought back, and this much less than the lesson learnt in Preston Sturges’ film from which the Coen brothers took their title: less, then than everything Sullivan learned in his travels, which was that entertainment is more important than artistic pretension. Less than that, for it is not even in the desire to entertain that he will place his hope.
‘I don’t get your music’, Jandek is told by the journalist who tracks him down. ‘There’s nothing to get’, he says. And something similar in Blanchot, ‘Writing is not important’. How to write, but not even for yourself? How to write as you would shrug, to fill an hour, to do something in the morning? Indifferently, without really caring, and in one draft (but it is not a draft; it is). With the indifference of the branches that seem to roll in the wind.
It doesn’t matter. It simply doesn’t matter. To neglect writing into life. To give it life, but through neglect, caring as little for it as the day cares for you. Watching over it as the day watches over you – with no eyes. In blindness. In a perfect indifference. To say, am I writing? – is that what I’m doing? To say, just a few notes. Some scribbles, that’s all. To say, writing – no, I’m not writing. Some jottings. Scribbles, nothing more’.
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