Category: Journal

One of the avatars of Vishnu could not, it was said, be killed during the day or the night, either inside or outside. They killed him on the threshold of his house at dusk (or was it dawn?). In the last fortnight, I have become an insomniac – which is to be exiled doubly: from sleep’s repose, and from the waking world; I belong to neither. Then, remembering what Kafka wrote about the merciful surplus, I wonder whether what insomnia prevents it might also make possible: that there might be a writing of insomnia, born of an unexpected strength. But no – here, at the threshold, belonging neither to the day or night, I can’t write a line.

Too tired to work or read anything difficult, I spend the day in my office, reading books on painting and film. From Kitaj: Pictures and Conversations, in which the great artist converses with Julian Rios, I learn of Kitaj’s friendship with Avigdor Arhika. They speak every few days on the phone, and cheer one another up when it is needed. There is a marvellous drawing of Kitaj by Arhika, and then one of Arhika by Kitaj. And drawings of Anne Atik and Gabriel Josipovici. Sadly, the reproductions in this book are in black and white.

Then I read Kitaj in the Aura of Cezanne and Other Masters, a slim volume full of splendid colour reproductions, where the artist talks with Colin Wiggins. Open the cover, and there is a photograph with the title Sandra (and underneath that: ‘seven’). This is, I presume, Kitaj’s wife, who died, according to the foreword, a few years before. There is a picture of the older Kitaj with his sons and grandsons, too. This book has reproductions of paintings which inspired Kitaj, including several of the bathers sequence from Cezanne.

Then I read Being Naked Playing Dead: The Art of Peter Greenaway, which is an attractive and interesting volume with a long interview with the man himself. And again, a Kitaj connection – he is, apparently, a particular inspiration for Greenaway. I particularly liked the author’s description of Greenaway’s screenplays as a libretto for images.

Reading these books, enjoying them, you wonder what it would be like to be an established artist with a few works behind me, with a reputation. Truly then you would become one of the gods, painted by some and painting others, linked in friendship with the other gods, knowing the same circle of people. Where Arhika is, for example, Beckett is not far away. Then you remember the picture of Arhika and Giacometti (where did you see it?) from the 1950s. Always a community, always a group: nothing is possible alone.

Too tired and dazed to read or write (I have a book review to complete, lectures to prepare, but …), there’s nothing else but to find my way to writing here, if it is possible.

To find my way to writing: the great advantage of writing here is that I can write as it were with the surprise of being able to write – that surprise is the wind at my back. Only it is a feeble wind and does not blow me far. Already, five lines in, and I am becalmed.

In a sense, there are plenty of things to write – I have been reading about the Cynics, and could write a blog about Diogenes and the rest, inhabiting tubs and temple porticos and forming peculiar communities. And I’ve been reading about Heraclitus – I know I want to write about the image of the lyre in his fragments, I’ve always found it wonderful. And then, because of Heraclitus, I went back to reading Char …

Yes, I could write about all of this, but it has fallen away from me. I am like the man in one of my favourite paintings by Munch, ‘Between the Clock and the Bed’, his arms fallen by his sides, his hands limp. He gazes out of us and I am frightened by his gaze. I won’t look in the mirror tonight.

Rereading my last post, I wonder why I am content to write so vaguely and impressionistically about music? In my defence, I might say I don’t have the time – I am too busy to make space enough to listen to the albums of which I write. Too busy – which is to say, I don’t have the leisure: I can’t let myself be drawn into the space they open. But then, writing that, I wonder whether I would ever ‘have time’: isn’t the idea of busyness the attempt to avoid the encounter with the work? Then I know I am deluding myself: to write, here, is to sketch an experience I am frightened to have. Empty time, open time: I don’t want to be drawn into a space that resembles the space of unemployment.

Why write about it, then? Why write? I think of that child of whom Freud writes who, in the wake of his mother’s death, plays the game by which he expels something and then draws it back to himself, thereby controlling the experience of loss, of losing. The ‘busyness’ of Spurious: I write about dispersal, but nothing, here, is dispersed. Blogs are not fragments, if fragmentation would safeguard a ‘minor’ speech – a way of writing that resists the grand synthesising gesture. But how, then, to write in a way that would risk risk, answering to the risk in the work of which I would write?

Rather than answer that question – which cannot, perhaps, be answered (it is a matter of allowing the question to resound, to give it issue rather than answering it once and for all), I would prefer to wonder why commentary would be necessary for the critic. Remembering Freud’s story again, one might think it goes back to a trauma of some kind – a death, a bereavement. But who died?

Remember the story of the child who witnesses a night behind the day in Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster. Do not think that it is a ‘confession’ of some sort, as if this would give one insight into the origin of Blanchot’s strange vocation. It is not a question of an original trauma that is then repeated, but rather of a trauma that occurs as repetition – the fact that there was no origin, and there is only the return of an experience without meaning and without determination.

Busyness – the busyness of the employed, of the critic, of the philosopher: is it possible it is a defence against the recurrence of a kind of nothingness, of an experience which cannot be situated with respect to the present moment? In which the past and the future evacuate themselves of any specific content? A defence, yes, but one which manifests itself in the attempt to control the experience in question – to subordinate it to the general busyness of the day, throwing it out and drawing it back in like Freud’s child.

The critic survives where the artist does not. The artist who disappears into madness was unable to return. And the critic, who writes on Nietzsche, on Holderlin, on Nerval? Somewhere, far away, these writers laugh from out of the night into which the critic is too frightened to enter.

Loss. Think of a melancholy so profound you forget your name. Who am I?, you ask. ‘Who?’, the answer comes: your question returned. In your place, echoing, the empty space of the question: ‘Who?’, ‘Who?’, ‘Who?’ … the question mocks itself and laughs at the one who asks it.

The melancholic looks at everything with 100 year old eyes. I have seen it before, he says to himself, it is all the same. But the melancholic is drawn to the same because he wants to confirm in himself the dread that always prevented him from seeing the world as anything other than the correlate of his dread. The ultimate horror of the melancholic would be a world in which there is nothing to justify his melancholy. Fortunately this is not the case and never can be because this is the melancholic’s chance and his joy, since it is the state of the world which prevents his dread from devouring everything.

It is accurate to write of the black sun of depression, but it is a sun which reveals itself piecemeal, and not all at once. This is because melacholia is a form of attention and it is always possible to pick out something in the world to identify as a cause of that same melancholy. And even if one knows that to so choose risks falling under the category of Nietzsche’s ‘imaginary causes’ (a cause we invent for our own sake), it is still worthwhile, still righteous insofar as it is linked to the world’s plight, to the madness of the world. In these days, I have dreamt of an army of solitaries linked by their madness to the world’s madness, of the ones in whose blazing death might be discovered not the black sun of melancholia but a blazing world within this one, a utopia that can only be hatched from fire. Ah, but this is a melancholic’s dream.

An ecststic drunkenness sometimes captures me – the exuberance of the first or the second pint, the first half bottle of wine. Never think drunkenness is a matter of the removal of inhibitions – the ‘I’ is dispersed, the unfifying centre no longer holds; little remains ‘of’ me – above all, no self-consciousness divides me from what is said and done. This is ecstasy – sheer standing out of oneself, modifying no only the threshold between myself and the world, but all thresholds.

Are there other less joyful ecstasies? Today, hungover, the ugly phrase, lugubrious ecstasy appeals to me; I am thinking of a state in which an attention without subject roams unbidden across the world. True, there is a centre to these affects, but it is one that is born and reborn, ever remaking its thresholds, ever breaking and generating new limits and structures. Sometimes a hangover can be like grace.

Drunkards are so alike. Drink with other drinkers to the end of the night and there is a great camaraderie. Everyone else has left and a few remain. The jollity has gone, the exuberance. Drinking has become a serious business; you must match each other drink for drink. You are the last drinkers, barely coherent, no longer exuberant. Stoic. You have survived the evening. But this is not camaraderie. What do you share? Everything – you have drunk enough to become more or less interchangeable with the others. You are drunkards, all alike. But what you share is what dissipates each of you. You share a kind of dispersal. Tape your conversation and you would hear hesitancies, intermittiencies, inarticulate murmurings … it’s magnificent.

Perhaps the distinction between prohibition and transgression is misleading. Doesn’t transgression imply a boundary to be transgressed? But what if the boundary itself is remade in transgression? What if transgression reveals there never was a boundary – never an intact and self-identical kernel marked by a limit over which one would step. To step across the boundary is always to step too far; you cannot enter into the same river once and you cannot return to yourself after transgression. To where, then, do you return? In what direction do you ebb? Back to yourself? No: back to the habits that give you, for a time, the sense of remaining yourself. Or, again – back to a more reassuring rhythm, but one which is ready to dissolve at any moment into arrhythmia. How to think rhythm and arrhythmia together? They are not separate; rhythm is of arrhythmia and cannot separate itself from it. That is why prohibitions are required – but these are secondary formations, just as transgression is an inadequate name for the outbreak of chaos. Do not stabilise the threshold between rhythm and arrhythmia.

The proofs of my book have arrived and I know now my book is an ungainly thing. Some passages are, it is true, reasonable. They have a momentum, a direction, and the phrases are well turned. But others – especially the ones I hastily added when I came close to the deadline – are like great swamps in which all forward movement is lost. I think of the scene in Tarkovsky’s Mirror in which soliders trudge across a marsh. It is clearly a book which languished too long and, when I finally received a contract, was subjected to a rewrite which confused the original argument. Still, if the original book had been published as I had written it, it would have been terrible, an embarassment. This way, it is merely a false step.

I like to tell myself we are not capable of sincerity, of the simple lucidity of speech. That we are too late for innocence. But isn’t innocence always too late for itself? It is always tainted by the corruption from which it seeks to differentiate. But this means, too, that corruption is never entirely corrupt, that there is an innocence in corruption, too. Could I write same of sincerity, of unprotected speech? I admit I am disturbed by the lines I quoted from Van Velde, and even from Beckett. They are too naked, too simple. But their speakers won their way to simplicity! Still, I feel a kind of laughter breaking out in even amidst my great admiration for the lines I copied out. A laughter because such speech every rule of discourse. Who could speak like that? Who would dare? Isn’t it impossible, today, speak in that way? But look at the imposture of this word ‘today’ – as if there were ever a time or a place when one could speak with sincerity! As if, once again, it were not a matter of a struggle for speech, to be able to speak!

Work and rest – the same? I fear rest, empty hours, time without stucture. I work to consume rest, to use the day, the open, endless day, as fuel for the work. The dream: there is nothing left but work – or, better, work is the day aflame, with nothing to burn but itself. But the work would work me away, too, until it stood sufficient unto itself, the star, perfectly sufficient. But isn’t that to dream of another kind of repose? Of a kind of death, of a life sacrificed to the work that, in the end, does not need me?

Work is not the opposite of rest. Work and rest are not opposed if they follow one another, if they follow a secure rhythm. And when they don’t? Rest becomes worse than idleness. Nothing is possible because everything is possible; the horizon is open. In one sense, it is like being a child, insofar as the future is not determined. But you know you are no longer a child, that you are a certain kind of person, that although everything is possible it is not possible for you as an agent, that is to say, as one who acts in the first person. Yes, anything is possible – but this means you are victim of blind fate, of the god’s whims. And work? When you work too hard, the imposture upon which work is based reveals itself. You think you are the author of your actions, that your labours are under your control. But a kind of compulsion takes over – it mocks you, mocks you idea that it is you who are in control. In truth, once again, it is a question of fate, of compulsion, of the gods’ whim. Work and rest: the same.