Category: Others

I always thought of you under the sign of neglect. Who watched out for you? Who appreciated you? No one at all; and what could I do from a distance? I was always too far away. Still, I always wonder about distance. Is there a kind of attention which can only reach you from afar – that is necessarily distant?

I was always in the North, and you in the South. But wasn’t that same distance carried in the letters that used to criss-cross the country? Just as our friendship was never really a friendship, and our relationship never a relationship, I imagine the distance rising into a kind of plateau, a way that can only be crossed when you could lift yourself to that height. As, perhaps, we lifted one another.

Distance: we barely saw one another – did that matter? We barely spoke – did it matter? Perhaps there is a kind of speech that can reach you only by way of distance, by a kind of neglect.

I am with you, I am not with you. Or: I am with you, but also far away, living my own life. Or: with you, but something else is happening here, many things are happening, of which you will not know; with you – and despite what happens here, despite what happens from day to day, and isn’t this the testimony to my love? A neglectful love – but is it love? – that would reach you only because of distance, for the reason of distance.

There must be a threshold, a space. No instantaneous communication, no telephone – except very occasionally, and unexpectedly (the rule: keep each other’s numbers). None of the temptations that would allow a kind of camaradarie to our friendship. For isn’t the danger, despite the many joys sharing a day to day life might bring, that that distance would disappear which was always the third term in our friendship?

Distance – and in relation to which each of us could meditate upon the whole of our lives. The whole – wasn’t that at issue each time we wrote? Wasn’t it a question, each time, of meditating upon our lives and before the threshold, before distance? When we met – rarely then, and now almost never – it was always by way of what separated each of us from our daily lives.

It was a rare event, an exception. Did I want to see you sometimes, more than you me? And were you sometimes frustrated by a distance that always kept us apart? But over the years, it was the distance that kept us; we reached each other by way of its strangeness. Letters – emails – in which we would each report musingly on the whole of our lives.

Such relationships as these – where you meet very rarely, and writing only occasionally – amidst some crisis or another, perhaps, or simply because there gathers in you the need for distance, and to write, to speak, by way of that distance – are too rare. How often I think of friends with whom I am no longer in contact! Women, exclusively. Women – and I have no idea what has happened to them, nor how I can get in contact, nor, if I do, whether it will be welcome.

What does it matter now? I suppose I want to learn of the shape of a life, and to speak to others of the shape of mine. To write, to speak, by way of separation. I suppose I have a good memory, or that I spend too much time alone. The past is alive for me; I remember, I like to remember, not to press myself against the details of a vanished world, but to experience it by way of the temporal distance that separates me from it, diffusing event from event, insinuating itself into what happened then, even as it seems to suspend the order of completion.

Nothing will complete itself; we are still walking through the woods in the dark, as we used to do. Still meeting on occasion in the town centre on Sunday afternoon, you speaking of a new boyfriend. Do not keep memories – neglect them. Do not impose continuity on what has gone before, but neglect them, let events be incomplete, let sentences trail off into nothing.

Isn’t this the wonder of Tarkovsky’s Mirror? Neglected memories, events freed from themselves and rising into the air. ‘I can speak now’ says the cured stutterer at the beginning of the film. But isn’t it better to say, ‘I cannot speak’? I cannot speak; speech has neglected itself in me. Speech lies down. Writing lies out beneath the stars. ‘I cannot speak’: what neglects itself in me? What neglects itself as the past, in me?

This is the joy of being alone: never having to recount, for another, the order of the day, of a passage of weeks, of a life. And then letting the day return, and those weeks, and that life as if from afar. Letting them come, by neglecting them, as they neglect you. Freud said we had to kill His-Majesty-The-Baby in each of us: the imperious child who is the centre of the world. Kill him by neglect. A kind murder.

Neglect that lets the world turn away from you, and welcome you in its turning. That allows you to relate to others without seeking attention from them – to be one among many, a walker among walkers, conversation lightening itself of anything in particular. Happy neglect! Life without contour! What do you want? Nothing in particular. What do you require? No more than anyone else.  The tyranny of the question, How are you? The lightness of the answer, Not too bad.

I suppose this is how I understand my relationship to other bloggers, by way of their blogs. How is it I’ve come to know something of the lives of those whom I have barely met, if I’ve met them at all? And isn’t it the more beautiful when a blogger writes under a pseudonym that is rigorously enforced (as mine is not, alas): then anyone at all could have written the blog you read. And couldn’t you speak to anyone as though they were that writer (it could be him, or her – or him – or her -)?

Do I want to know who you are? Or do I prefer the gentle neglect of your anonymity, the way it falls peacefully around me like snow? Foolishly, stupidly, I wonder if the world of blogs isn’t that world Handke is said to open in a book forthcoming in translation next year (via This Space)?

… ‘a greater age’ in which contemplation, love, goodness, beauty and peace are not only construed as utopian possibilities, but can be generated and made viable propositions  by telling stories.

And isn’t that a reason  not to have comments on the blog? To neglect my readers (are there any?), and to ask for neglect in turn, which is to say, start your own blog (if you haven’t started one), or carry your comment to your own blog, and let it bloom there in solitude. A gorgeous, generous solitude that can give of itself only because of this solitude; that will reach me by way of its separation. I am close to you; I am not close to you. I can hear you breathing; I can hear nothing.

Do you know as it happens that a particular event is the last of its kind, that henceforward it will harden itself into a kind of icon of a relationship? Everything is there, if you think about it. Everything is concentrated there, and in the future that’s how it will sum itself up, in the event that becomes the last, even if it is not the last.

So the last day with X., even if it was not the last: the Bacon exhibition in a white roomed studio, then to the London Review of Books bookstore for how long? Did I persuade her not to buy the three volume Marothy? But she bought more Bernhard, I remember that. ‘I remember’: and isn’t it difficult to become a kind of archive, to contain more, in memory, than lives in the present?

It’s very early. I woke three times in the night. It’s the beer, I thought to myself. The bottle of Leffe from Londis. ‘A man who drinks becomes interplanetary’, writes Duras. Several times, she took the cure. Her liver was ruined. If she drank anymore, she’d -. But she still drank, she and Yann Andrea – her lover, her non-lover, then in the 1980s, after giving up filmmaking and retreating to write a series of books.

He met her at a book signing or somesuch; he wrote a few letters – and eventually, she replied. And then he visited her, a young gay man. They were lovers for a time – she was in her 70s now – but he would still go out to the hotels to find men. They drank together all night, all day. He soon caught up with her. They were both alcoholics, both wrecking their livers.

I think of them often, not, no doubt as they were, but as I imagine them to have been. Duras writing her journal of the year 1980; The Atlantic Man; The Slut of the Normany Coast; The Malady of Death: should I call them absolute books? And they drank, and walked on the beach, and she wrote, and he went out to pick up men.

They rowed – screamed at each other. Then, reconciliation. Departures and returns. She had to take the cure; she took it more than once. And she wrote, she continued to write, discovering a kind of absolute idiom, an absolute book. Only she could write it.

We have to write what only we can write, I tell W. sometimes. What can we do that no one else can? But who is this ‘we’ – he and I? Each of us, separately? Or more of us – more like us? ‘Develop your legitimate madness’: who wrote that? Nin? I took her books, along with Henry Miller’s, to Oxfam a long time ago.

Your legitimate madness: Sebald, to the last, considered himself a scholar first, a writer second. Austerlitz, of course, is a terrible book – self-consciously grand, inflated, grotesquely exaggerating the tropes that made his earlier books so wonderful: the narrator who wanders, who comes close to madness, the presence of ghosts, of great events … And the book is incessant, immodest; it rambles without cease.

Remember, instead, the story of Ambros in The Emigrants – remember as his journal writings release themselves from the narrator’s account of his life and mental collapse. The writings from his journal, that he wrote when still young, accompanying his master through the Middle East. Ah, lightness itself, and full of youth.

Lightness like Duras’s account of the year 1980, her published diary, that lifted itself into the air of Neauphle like a seabird. Will there have been one time in my life that lifted itself thus? A stream of diary entries, or letters, or posts?

Sometimes I think nothing has been left to chance in my life – there’s no drifting. When was the last time a friend, passing, knocked on my door? Not once over five years; and barely before then. Besides, I wouldn’t welcome it. I like to move undisturbed from one room to another.

Staying at Blah-feme’s during the renovations, I once woke and went out to the toilet, past a sleeping Norn, and found the front door open. It was late – or was it early? The front door was open. I thought: this is like a dream. And then: Blah-feme’s flat has entered my unconscious, and this is how I will remember it, and these days, when, rising early, we would sit at the table and drink capuccinos, before forming our little peloton to head to work.

It’s been a long time since I lived with others. Five years – and wasn’t it unbearable, then? Didn’t R. and I go out to the garage and stare back at our big house, thinking, why are we here?, why do we live here? R. still phones, always drunk. I bought a caller ID phone so I know not to answer him.

Drunk, he has great plans for us. We’re very funny, he says, we should write comedy together, he says. He might join the Foreign Legion, he tells me. This is his last year – you have to be under 40 to join. But it would sort him out, he says, and besides, he would learn French. They’d give you a new identity, too. R. could leave his debts behind. When he gets drunker still, R. tells me I haven’t lived, that he’s lived and I have not. I should write about his experiences, not mine, says R.

I moved into his room after he’d left in a hurry, being kicked out, and not for the first or last time, for drinking. I found a play he’d been writing. He admired the Beats; he left Kerouac’s books, too, in that room. We used to quote favourite lines from Burroughs at one another. Drinking, taking drugs – it was his Beat adventure. R. was an adventurer, he told me; he was truly alive. He addicted himself to crack so he could descend into the underworld. ‘It’s what Burroughs would have done’, he told me.

Meanwhile, Duras and Yann Andrea are drinking. She calls him Yann Andrea Steiner now – another Steiner, another character in her fiction. She writes – what is she writing? She collected some old photographs and decided to write a commentary. So The Lover was born. That’s how it came together – as a kind of commentary.

Once, in a student house, on a visit to the careers service of my old university, a friend of a friend quoted the whole first page of The Lover from memory. I remember two phrases: ‘one day, when I was already old’, and ‘ravaged’. That’s what he quoted, drinking tea in his dark room.

It’s not so early anymore. I should be writing my review. Should be doing anything else but writing here. But I need to wake up – to wake myself up, and there is a kind of writing that does that. Tilt your head back, says my brother-in-law. It’s good for you to look up at the sky. Tilt it up then; look up: is the dawn coming? Not yet; soon.

Sometimes I imagine my unconscious is full of rooms, like Doom, or like Quake. Pass from one to the other. That room opens onto that one, unexpectedly. Doesn’t the artist’s room in The Trial open unexpectedly on the court? And I remember Wolfe’s Peace, too – the ghost awoken in a vast house whose doors open into rooms of his past: the orange juice factory, the party at which he plays at Indians with his mother, the room beyond which he knows the Christmas tree is, burning by itself. Open the door, I tell myself. But it is already open, like Blah-feme’s front door, letting in the orange light from the streetlights.

Duras died in her Paris flat, I think. At least that’s where she used to receive her biographer. Monique Antelme is the last of them, the writers who used to gather at the rue Saint-Benoit. Blanchot had returned from the South; Mascolo and Antelme were already at work on le 14 Julliet, then came the drafting of the Manifesto of the 121 …

This morning I tell myself I stand at the end of a whole history, that the door has opened onto a final room. Everything’s been written; that world, the literary one, is finished. Pick over the remains, the memoirs. That there are some who can link you to the past: this is marvellous. That there are others, like you, who remember – this, too, is important, but in the end, your knowledge is for nothing, and you will die like one who is the last speaker of a language, with no one to understand you.

It was over, the literary dream drained away, when Duras moved back to her apartment to Paris and then – as I learnt from the only edition of Le Monde I ever bought – died. Back to the rue Saint-Benoit, no. 5, where Merleau-Ponty used to visit, and Lacan; where she would prepare ‘steak a la Blanchot’ for him to eat very slowly (he was always ill – that photograph of him as a young man, sitting with Levinas on the back of a car already has him with a cane). Duras, who would drink with the others every night.

Didn’t I see, in Paris, the last time I visited (many years ago), a Duras cookbook? How funny! Her son published it, I think – the one they nicknamed Outa, the mite., and whom she spoke about in the interview attached to the English edition of Destroy, She Said, as belonging to a new, blank generation who cared nothing for the future. She placed all her hopes in them, the new generation, but what happened?

Picture it: Duras, between Blanchot and Leiris, their arms joined, during the Events of May 1968. Later, Leiris would condemn Blanchot for playing revolution in his journals. How indiscreet! How disrespectful! But I have always admired Leiris for the pictures of himself he allowed to circulate. An uncalm man, a man disturbed: yes, I like him very much, this rich man, this Sunday writer (he only had one day a week, he said, on which he had time to write.)

I think the dawn is coming. Open the curtains: is that the dawn? Outside, the big box that contains a dishwasher delivered to me in error. Should I sell it on, or let it rot there, outside. I’d asked B and Q to pick it up, they’d send delivery men, they said, but I waited a whole Wednesday in vain, and in the end crossly pushed it outside, scratching my wooden floor as I did so. But staying in, didn’t I discovered the new joy of my flat, which I used to leave as early as I could in the morning, even at weekends, even on Sunday, to work, instead, in the office?

A whole life with X. finished in the summer. John Sandoe books, the London Review of Books bookshop – and World’s End bookshop at the bottom of the King’s Road. I think we saw Anthony and Cleopatra at the Globe the last time I was down – too much of a pantomime, played for laughs, X. and I standing stiff-legged among the groundlings.

Isn’t that where Corin Redgrave stood when he came to the Globe? Where else? Where else would he stand? Was it a year before that we went to the last night of his King Lear by chance? And I remember cycling across London Bridge in the rain to see Kevin Spacey as Richard III. But that life is over; the door is closed, althoughI think it stands slightly ajar in my dreams, like the door at Blah-feme’s house.

R. rang twice last night. Neither time did I answer. How loudly the phone rang! But it was his number that showed up on the caller ID. Doesn’t he understand that while he drinks, he belongs to the past. The door is closed; I’m pushing it against him.

‘In Paris’: and that, too, was another life. I remember looking for the bookshop, Des Femmes, to see Cixous books all lined up. It was closed, though we took a long time to find it. The bookshop by the Sorbonne, that was the best. But I didn’t belong in Paris, just as I didn’t belong in London.

Another life. Did I know it then? Did I know it was an episode? Your affairs are like novellas, David used to tell me. And I thought, no, like recits – events that never quite seemed to happen, to complete themselves. That turned around a moment that could never come into the present.

Affairs – that could never be lived in the present, leaving memories oddly stranded, without context. The Rodin museum. The Picasso museum; his glorious ceramics. The day out at Versailles; it was my birthday that day; I had turned 30, and I couldn’t accommodate the size of the gardens – were those dots people? How far, then, did the water stretch?

Later, we walked through the woods, and I thought of the House Absolute in Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun: a House whose rooms opened to the outside, a House so vast, so ancient, that huntsmen pursued their prey through its corridors. But did I know it was only an episode – that that day, like so many others, would set itself back in my memory, as though it were behind glass? But an episode that did not complete itself, and set out to look for writing, like a hunter searching for its prey.

Sometimes, apart for months, years, we corresponded. I wrote too much; you wrote very little, and what you said seemed to say nothing. Pure froth – but was it that? There was a letter; something was written – and wasn’t that enough, that you’d addressed me?

Occasionally, a more serious letter would come, and you would speak with great brevity. I have been very unhappy. I’ve decided to leave my job. Absolute letters. Decisive ones, in which a new turn was announced. Why did you need to tell me? Why that need, to join what was said to what could not be said, the written to the unwriteable? For it was also in order for speech to rest in silence that you wrote, and that I wrote to you. To rest, to be addressed – speech was lightened by that crossing, by the letters that were sent over the body of England.

Sometimes, alone, I imagine my words are addressed to you. My words – not mine, and you as the guardian of my speech, just as I am the guardian of yours. Peace: I wanted them to rest in your silence, to find peace there. And then it is as though we are still young, that this day joins itself to another, half our lives ago.

(I have often wondered what I have tried to name with the phrase ‘lightened speech’. Strange path of research that lets a phenomenon crystallise around such a name, without knowing yet its significance or what it means, but only that it works as an attractor, that it seems to push itself forward as something that will one day have to be thought as such: doesn’t it work according to the logic of the future anterior as Sinthome discusses it? – ‘It’s clear only now what I meant all along.’ – ‘Is it clear?’)

Lightened speech: ‘but we never said anything’, that’s what you said later. Yes: nothing was said, or rather, nothing was decided. A feature, perhaps, of adolescent romance, which does not yet know in what direction it reaches, or even that it reaches at all. Looking back, I can say: ‘I know what was happening.’ Or: ‘if only we’d spoken of what we felt!’ But a retrospective glance can unify what happened on the basis of what had not yet happened; what did not happen accompanied its happening, and by way of speech.

And that was the point: like Bergson’s sugar melting in the water, its duration was given in its unfolding, or rather, its unfolding could not be detached from it; to know what has happened today is to know nothing; the experience was made of our unknowing, that’s how it was lived and that was its delight. But I suppose there’s always a moment like this before any romantic relationship begins: to not-know, to speak without knowing what is said.

‘It was then I realised …’; ‘suddenly it came to me …’; not love at first sight, then, but love as it gathers itself from disparate, inchoate beginnings. That comes to harden itself into a decision, and then to that kind of contract that is made in a relationship. That remains, yet, part of indeterminate speech. (I always think of Donnie Darko: Donnie walking up the road with the new girl in school …)

There are relationships that never begin, or that teeter on the edge of the beginning, still drawing with them what does not begin, like that drowsiness that can seem to draw waking back into sleep. I’m half-asleep – nothing has quite begun, or the non-beginning is still returning in what seems to begin. This is what is lost once they have made a pact that allows each to rest in the awareness of the other’s regard.

Nothing is certain, even now, but there is at least a beginning place; a relationship has formed. And before the beginning? The relationship is not yet itself, or it is not sure of its terms. The other has not been engaged, not fully – or rather, that engagement has not been redoubled in the commitment that is the beginning of a relationship.

The suspense of not-quite-loving before it is commitment. The engagement, the call, that is only half-avowed. What, then, of a relationship that remains in suspense, or that retains, in its happening, what did not happen and could not happen? I think at once of Duras’s The Malady of Death: is it the male character’s homosexuality that keeps the lovers apart? Is it his masculinity (read Duras on men in Practicalities …)? And then I ask, not really sure what I’m asking, what would fidelity to the non-event might mean? Or a fidelity to what did not reveal itself according to the logic of the future anterior?

‘It did not happen.’ – ‘It keeps not happening.’ Non-happening happens, opening out the instant to what does not pass in time. Bergson’s sugar never melts – or is it that melting never melts, never completes itself?

I am the oldest of two, but you are the youngest of three. By that I account for the way you spoke as though citing, that words didn’t quite belong to you. Sometimes, it is true, you spoke with great seriousness; to claim words as your own was an enormous task, but for the most part, you repeated satirically the expressions I would use, or mimicked my speech, or the speech of others.

Speech, for you, was lightness, a kind of laughter. I imagined you laughing at your sisters in your mimickry. They were serious, and you were – an imp; it was visible in the photograph your parents hung in their lounge: there was the imp, between the two others.

For my part, speech was deliberate, it did what it was told. Was that why I liked to lose that certainty by speaking to you? Yes, I loved for speech to lighten, to lose its orientation, and to rise from the scraps of countryside across which we walked. But sometimes that lightness changed its polarity – speech fell out of phase with itself, as though it spoke by way of what it could not say; as though communication could not communicate.

Something serious was to be said, and by way of lightness. Seriousness – it is true you distrusted abstract conversation. You’d heard too much of that; you felt excluded. But there was another seriousness, one which bore our speech and, I would say, placed it at stake.

You could say we did not speak deeply. Afterwards, when I left you, I would think, we said nothing at all – and isn’t that what you said, much later: we didn’t say anything. True, nothing was said. But still there was seriousness – still it was the condition of speech into which what we said seemed to set itself back. The surprise of speech, and that we could speak by way of the space it opened between us.

Sometimes, apart for months, years, we corresponded. I wrote too much; you wrote very little, and what you said seemed to say nothing. Pure froth – but was it that? There was a letter; something was written – and wasn’t that enough, that you’d addressed me?

Occasionally, a more decisive letter would come, and you would speak with great brevity. I have been very unhappy. I’ve decided to leave my job. Absolute letters. Decisive ones, in which a new turn was announced. Why did you need to tell me? For the same reason, I think, as you sent the others. What mattered was the address; what mattered was speech, and the distance of speech.

You joined what was said to what could not be said, the written to the unwriteable. With you, communication went by way of what could not communicate, speech by way of silence, and writing by what erased every word. Was it was also in order for speech to rest in silence that you wrote, and that I wrote to you? To rest, to be addressed – speech was lightened by that crossing, by the letters that were sent over the body of England.

Today, writing alone, I imagine my words are addressed to you. My words – not mine, because you are the guardian of my speech, just as I am the guardian of yours. Peace: I wanted them to rest in the unwriteable, to find peace there. And then it is as though we are still young, that this day joins itself to another, half our lives ago.

Recurring dream as a child: the girl infinitely wise, and who could speak of everything. The girl who spoke with absolute certainty, though I sensed she did not know what she said. Spoke without knowing, and whose certainty had been sent on an infinite detour. And my listening wandered with her; I followed her. Was it by chance I usually saw her as blind, as though her sight was wandering somewhere behind her eyes?

Later, a letter from a friend written with the same sybilline certainty. I smoothed down the page with my hand. What had I touched? Absolute writing. Blind writing, behind which she wandered. How could I follow her?; I could not, though I waited for her letters every day.

I think I have always sought that measure of blindness in another. Desire within desire – for a kind of pause, a waiting place, that opening beneath a starless sky. It’s always still when we go out for our walks, you said. As though everything were suspended, you said. Out of town, by the path only I knew; you’d looked for it, you said, but you couldn’t find it. I knew the path across the park and over the railway bridge. I knew the way into the interval, although it was only you who could summon me there.

Desire within desire, desire unlimiting itself in desire – I wanted to hear you speak, and to speak in turn. Wanted to hear the errancy of speech, to let speech wander, scattering itself across the plain. Later, when I’d come home, I would try to write from that silence, from that speech. It’s true you had beauty, that I was attracted to you, but that is banal. It was that desire undid itself within desire, explicating itself, opening into a kind of waiting.

To wait – but what for? Desire suspended, desire lost in wandering: your beauty belonged to that suspense. It was nonchalant, unowned, like the speech we sent up into the air. I always thought you were careless of your beauty, that it was taken for granted. But in truth, it was nothing you asked for and nothing you wanted. You would like your face to be totally round, you told me, the face of anyone. You would like to be like anyone at all.

And then you laughed at the way I spoke. Mimicked me. And then laughed at us both: who do we think we are?

My name – you always liked to say it. To breathe it, because it is easy to breathe. One syllable.

‘Always liked’: what tense is that? Completed action in the past. That past completed, and broken from the present. That whole past drifting into the archive, to return in dreams, passing across the threshold of the morning and the threshold of the evening. Unguarded hours, when the past is stronger than the present.

But now that past is completed, rounded off. It will not change; it is all there. At the threshold, returning: the promise of my name, the past broken from my present.

Chance must be allowed to play because no one wants to force the issue; neither of us is to act or be acted upon. Chance: we may meet again; we may not; it will happen or will not. From what strange coincidences is our relationship made and unmade.

The field of chance is the day, the everyday. Will we meet there? Will we fail to meet? I know I cannot phone you; that would be too active, and too demanding. Do not force events. But it’s been eighteen months. How old am I? Twenty, twenty-one? It’s been too much of my life.

Then – one day – we met by chance. There you were, with your mother. And if we hadn’t met then? I wouldn’t know you now. And if I hadn’t ran into you in the stationers? For a long time, I would sit in town on a step by the street, waiting, or cycle through the park where we had once walked.

No appointment had been made. Was it that I believed you would appear because it was what I wanted? Rather, I think I liked that belief, that it grew around me like an arbour. Somewhere, in those eighteen months, I was being looked for. Somewhere, as from a far corner of the universe, chance had set out to find me.

How else to pass my summer, except by watching for your return? But you did not appear; and the whole world shaped itself around your absence. I think it was that when I knew the thickness of the everyday, its blindess, its indifference. Fate had no place here. The great rivers of history ran out here; everything was neutralised, and if this was the end, it was the endless end, when nothing was to happen.

But, I met you, didn’t I? Chance came to find me, and when I wasn’t expecting it. I had waited until I’d forgotten I was waiting. When I saw you I knew what my life had been. But it would have been more perfect still if you had failed to see me – failed to remember who I was, as the Abbess had forgotten Honda in the last book of The Sea of Fertility, or the grandmother her own grandson in Tarkovsky’s Mirror?

I would have been found, but by whom? You had forgotten me, and my life had become lighter by that forgetting.

I’m growing older, I know it, as day lies down upon day. Older, and the days that turn will one day do so without me. The earth turns into the sun as it will turn into darkness; this, the long afternoon of my life, will fan out to its evening, like a river that fans into a delta as it reaches the sea.

Sometimes I dream life is already over, and I am living backwards, not forwards, opening doors into rooms in which I’ve been before. Is there a way of watching your own traces disappear from the world, like footprints in snow? One day I will arrive at the point where I am not yet born. Perfection: the work of erasure done, it will be time to pass from my life.

No, there was no ‘teenage angst’, I do not remember that. The escape from the party, the walk to the lake at dawn in the frizzying rain: the world that had been closed opened to us like an opening hand. And we went across the open palm of the world, in the morning, that may as well have been the first morning of the world.

Of what did we speak? Of the others left behind, and, as all those do who are half infatuated, the chance of your meeting, its strangeness, and the kind of imperative it carries. With, not alone: we were always meant to pass here; the world was always meant to open. Now we are alone with the fact of our attraction; it is a fate held in common, and this first of all was the topic of our conversation.

But even this is wrong, for what conversation was there? Intervallic speech, speech that lightened itself in the opening between what is said: how was it that nothing seemed to say itself, or what we said was already undone, and there was the delight of letting those words float into the air and disappear?

What was said did not matter; that it said itself was everything, that, speaking, we were able to exchange the lightness of speech, able to lighten it: we were both smiling, I remember that. Smiling, and because we’d lent speech a kind of assistance. We had left the party; we made our way to the lake: you said you would always remember that.

So did I. But it stands, in my memory, as part a series of days, of nights we shared. A series marked by lightness, by the saying of nothing in particular, where what mattered was the lightness of speech, before what it was that speech bore. True, infatuation fell away, but wasn’t there retained a memory of that first infatuation, a sense of youth, of the morning, and the promise held in the open palm of the world?

Yes, that’s what lightness has always meant: it is youth, it is play of speech that lightens the world. Absolute youth. ‘We never said anything’, you said. Nothing was said, that’s true. But by that nothing was spoken the between of speaking, its its demand, which asked, over the years, to be maintained.

And that’s what held us together. Together? But who were we, speakers, in the exchange of the lightness of speech. No one in particular; no one, everyone, who gave up what they said to the sacrifice speech demands. A gentle sacrifice, a light burning, a flame in the drizzle of that first morning.

What joy there is to give, to be given! Joy of anonymity, of the open palm from which everything must rebegin. That’s what it means to be young, to be very young, and finally for youth to name what cannot be lived, but that streams all around us.

You will not step into the same morning twice. And not even once, for the step is a gift, a giving, that will plunge you into the streaming of youth. To speak is also to come apart.

And after you have spoken? After the morning passed? That morning became the brightness behind everything, a sky behind the sky, the backdrop of our lives, obscured sometimes, sometimes lost, but that burned like the flame in the rain, in the sacrifice to which we were given.

‘Write our story.’ – ‘There was no story.’ – ‘Write it.’

But it did not begin; it never stepped over the threshold. How can you speak of what does not belong to the continuity of time?’ The story: the attempt to reach a story. Or a story of the failure of stories – not, now, of the limit against which stories are wrecked, but of a detour so vast, you can never come to a place from which to begin. How to speak of what has no contour?

‘Speak. Tell me what happened.’ What happened? Do you think I could tell you? Is that what you want – to be told, to round off the event? But it did not end and it will not end. Who can speak of it? ‘But it speaks.’ It speaks, saying nothing, saying itself, thunder and silence. And who are we except the speakers it elected, the relays it called for, that speaking that speaks only by withholding itself in what is said? But what was it apart from us, this speech? What was it, apart from its speakers?

But I know that when it used us, when it spoke in our speech, it was only to lighten itself, to disperse itself, to make it that it did not weigh upon anyone. It was to be kept afloat – alive, and by passing from the one to the other: yes that’s what it wanted.

‘Tell me what happened.’ With what kind of telling? How to narrate a story that never reached a beginning? How, when that beginning will never be reached? It is deferral itself. It is detour. Why do you suppose that there’s anything to be reached, or that we would have the means to reach it?

‘We lacked the means.’ Yes, that’s true. But wasn’t that why we were selected? Wasn’t it our weakness that selected us? It was by our weakness that we found one another. And weakness that made us sink down, each beside the other.

To sink down – to rest: that’s when we heard it, the thunder, the silence. That’s when it was heard, in the background, withdrawing, and sounding in its withdrawal. ‘That’s what we exchanged, that speech.’ No: we were what allowed it to lighten itself, to be heard, to be lightened. It was what spoke by what was said. ‘What we said.’ What spoke itself between us.

What happened? You detain me, is that the word? Detained – but from what? What was I doing? Something failed to happen, that’s true. Or was it that what happened lost itself from the course of time? Detained – and how to reach the moment when something could happen? That it failed to do so is the way it continues to happen; it is its claim.

What does it want? To be past – to be let go – or is that what I want, to release the event into forgetting? It wants to belong to the future – yes, this is what it wants for itself -, but only by breaking the horizon of expectation, of bringing the future very close, so that it seems to burn between us.

But what burns? Nothing that could happen to us. Nothing possible. And yet that joins itself to what is humanly possible, and for us. Joins itself, unjoining the course of time. We are detained; we are held here, and we will always be held. This is the crossing, the crossing point. Which of us is here? Who am I for you, and you for me? What do we share?

Either way, there will be, for both of us, a way of feeling responsible for the event. As though it elected us, we who were not worthy of its demand. As though it called upon the ones who were least responsible, or least able to measure its demand. Why were we chosen, the weakest ones? Why when we will always be unequal to ourselves with respect to what occurred?

But it is by that weakness that we were chosen. Or weakness is its sign, that choosing. Henceforward, you will belong to the detour, that is what is said. You belong to what you cannot accomplish. It is by weakness that you will be responsible, even to the extent of wanting to repeat what happened – even in your weakness to want to re-enact it again, and as if for the first time.

‘Let it happen again, and this time so that I can master it. Let it happen, and be brought under my control. I will make it happen. I will bring it under control.’

But this desire is only a sign of your weakness, and of your failure to complete the event. How can it be brought back into the course of life? How can it be let go, neglected, so that it joins the other moments that pass so quickly? But it will not allow itself to be neglected. Or it is neglect itself – it is what turns its face away from us. This is what we suffer, and suffer together.

‘I can’t help it.’ – ‘We can’t help it.’ – ‘I’m too weak.’ – ‘We are each too weak.’

For years we corresponded. Sometimes many letters, one day a day, and at other times, none; weeks and months passed, years passed: nothing. But it would begin again all at once – suddenly, when a letter came which began, Dear X.

We wrote of this or that, mundane events, thoughts, hopes, desires. Of this or that, but isn’t that to say: of nothing? Then we wrote to greet each other by way of writing; wrote to greet the absent friend.

But that is not it. There is also the gift of writing, which speaks by saying nothing. Cold gift: gift that gives itself. Writing spoke, and it was no longer your address, or mine.

Dear X. … Dear X.: so did writing, the ‘there is’ of writing, come towards each of us. So did it come, in letters that grew shorter and more inconsequential, that writing which spoke only of itself, but which had no ‘itself’, and was always to come.

Writing came, drawing itself back from what was written. Drew it back, and let it speak in this withdrawal, interrupting us by letting our words sink back into themselves. Our words? But what did they matter, when they were bowed by writing like grass in the wind?

You were there before us, writing. You set yourself into that ‘before’ as soon as we wrote, as we began to write. You came forward when the words sank from us on the page. And now friendship changed. Friendship was drawn from itself. Who were we, you – then me? Who, each of us, joined, unjoined by what spoke between us?

Who spoke? Was it you, writing? But you never said anything. You never said a thing. Unless it is that you spoke by what we wrote, that your saying passed through our written words to unwrite them in turn.

Could we say we suffered you? We suffered; that was the content of our friendship. You gave yourself movement, passing from the one to the other, each time unilateral. But that was your weakness: you needed us, and you needed our writing.

Weakness: you could never remain in tautology. You, who could not act, needed someone else to act, and we were your proxies. You spoke, and we were the echo of your speech. We wrote, and you wrote by way of our writing. You gave writing to us, on condition that no one was there to receive it. And didn’t you give us friendship, too?

Dear X.: X. stands for that friendship as much as for the friend. Dear X.: call of a writing that stands, each time, outside each of us. Outside: as though each of us, writing, were only the passage of writing, what it is when it is nothing yet. Outside: but now our friendship, too, is outside, and who were we but the points of its turning?

You were silence, the placekeeper of silence. The placekeeper? But you had no place; we gave you a place to take, each time. ‘No one’: relata of our friendship. You – then me. Me – then you: each of us addressed, each of us was X., the addressed and then, in turn, X. who wrote, and was written.

Perhaps it was this which kept us writing long after we had forgotten one another. And wasn’t it, then, after this forgetting, that writing became easier? Me – then you. You – then me, and each of us X., named, unnamed by writing.

A path has been beaten diagonally across the field. Through the long grass – but who owns this field? who wants this grass? – the path. What year is it? Which summer is this? Always the path – and the passing diagonally across the field to the river. Across – but now it seems as though it takes forever, and that I am still there, on the path, crossing the field. How is it that the path turned itself into the enormity of all summers?

You were between relationships, you said. Tired of one relationship, and waiting for another: that’s when we could see one another. How was it my friendships began and ended in the time of suspense? Was I your confidante? But I do not believe what you said to me could not be said to another. You spoke lightly as you always spoke; you wanted to speak, of that I was sure, but speech was easy for you, and if it was not me to whom you spoke, there were others.

Yes, speech was lightness itself – you spoke, and I spoke because of the lightness of your speech; did it matter what was said? I think we said everything – I think we spoke until everything was said. And then? Begin again; start speaking again. But did I not sense, sometimes, a different kind of lightening? Was it not as though speech itself had worn thin, that it was stretched, now, as the sky was stretched, and it belonged to the path that unlimited itself and became the whole field and then the whole sky?

We spoke – we exchanged words, but what also declared itself by way of those words, that exchange? The currency of common language is worn out, said Mallarme. So will his poetry set itself against what is commonly exchanged; there will be a new standard, a greater one, which belongs to the Book that is always to come. So would his poetry be magnetised by that coming speech: by the gold standard of the Book. What magnetised our speech, in the field, on the path? Because it did seem to be drawn from itself – that what was exchanged belonged to no common measure. Incommensurable speech! Speech by way of the path’s dispersal! How was it that the blue sky spoke of itself in our words?

Soon after, you found the boyfriend of whom, for a while, you spoke about on the phone. I remember your excitement – already, you were trying for a child! After three days, and everything seemed so right, and you were trying for a child! You had stepped across the threshold, and who was I, who remained on the other side, hesitant in life, at the brink of life, but yet to step into the other world? The phonecalls stopped coming; that was just. You disappeared, I barely saw you – that too was just. And did I recognise you when we did meet in your new clothes and your makeup and your boyfriend on your arm?

The next summer, the same field, and the same path. I was speaking to someone else – did it matter? It was someone else to whom I was speaking – but what did that change? The conversation weighed the same and turned around the same. You (the new you) spoke lightly, and I, confident in speech because your confidence, also spoke that way. Our words stretched themselves across the sky: what could not be said on this summer’s day, this afternoon, on this path? You were between relationships, and I? I was to be the one who accompanied you to the threshold’s edge.

I knew it couldn’t last, and it couldn’t last. I knew it – how could it last, when it was so fragile? How is it we could come together, such a disparate group, and not fall apart straight away? We fell apart, that was true – but not for a while. There was a summer, and perhaps a little longer. A Spring and a Summer, before it fell apart and we left in different directions.

How was it I was always waiting to be included in a life – to be able to call on others as they would call on me, to be one of a crowd, but also one upon whom others would call. How was it we could come together then, for that short time? On my birthday, in the sun on the Ees, we picnicked. When the Eurovision came on, we watched it together. And didn’t I call in, every now and again, and sit with you on the roof in the sun? 

But I knew all around the city faded into nothing. This was an island, a reprieve; before and after, the usual anonymity. Behind this foreground, there was a background; the city retreated from us even as it seemed to press its way forward. Were we friends? What is a friendship that passes only by way of the moment? It was fragile, I knew it – such a disparate group! – but it seemed we turned in a kind of friendship. You came round to mine, and I to yours – were we friends? There was friendship, I would say that. Friendship – and we were friends by way of the spring, the summer and by sitting out on the rooftops, the city around us.

Deep time. Months would pass without event – years. And then, as though we breathed in those empty gaps in time, as though we took them into ourselves, did they seem to bloom – exhaled. They made sense, the days of waiting; they were heading in a direction. For a time you could call on others and they would call on you. And when it disappeared again, that chance? When it fell back into a time without event? Nihilism: nothing meant anything. Nothing kept its form.

Dispersal – why did we leave in every direction? Why wasn’t it strong enough, our friendship, to hold us together? But it was a friendship by way of the spring and the summer – by way of the floating pollen and the summer winds. How could it end but in dispersal?

But for a time, I remember walking along the streets – the usual walk, the usual streets – in the faith that something, today, would happen. It would begin today! It would continue today! Yesterday’s good fortune would continue tomorrow and so on from tomorrow to eternity. Continuity! Day after day would turn in friendship!

But then the grip on time would be loosened again; tomorrow was an empty as today; no meetings – no friendship, only the autumn streets and the winter streets, and everyone behind their doors. How could it be otherwise? Nihilism – what promise did the streets hold? Where did they lead? To spring, to summer – yes, but they were months away. And until then?

What if all you had in common was what would, in time, set you apart? What if that was all there was for you both – that prospect of being set apart, one from the other? Doesn’t it make you draw closer to one another? Isn’t it, now, that you come closer because you will soon be set apart? You are close to the end, you know that. But you are close, now, only by way of the end and it what is you know in one another. Might there be a way, in that knowing, of deferring the end? Isn’t the end deferred by that knowledge until it becomes the beginning, once again, of your relationship? Friendship born from its finitude, friendship as infinite contestation of finitude. 

Outside. Why did our encounter always take place via a movement out and away from others, from the school where we were taught and the houses where we lived? Was it by chance that the night we went to a party, we left at once for the woods? We moved side by side, two bodies in the darkness.

By what chance had we been stranded there, in the suburbs? But they were necessary, those streets, those houses, if we were to move against them – if, that is, they were to fall back as the backdrop of our movement, which allowed it to be escape. And wasn’t it our fortune that that a part of the world had not yet been completely developed – that there were still empty spaces owned by no one in particular upon which houses had not been built?

You were always surprised by them, the open spaces I was able to find. By the fields, and beyond them, the railway bridge, and beyond that the path that descended along a brook to a private road, along which were paddocks where horses were kept. Then the long path to the forestry plantation: I’d found all this by chance, it was my gift to you, and you always said you could not find it without me.

From time to time over the years – how many years have there been – we would meet and pass through the same open spaces. And wasn’t it by way of that passing – unexpectedly opening in suburbia, in the streets full of houses – that we knew one another? Exceptional days! Exceptional nights, on the path, on the private road, in the plantation!

We were the exception, and our friendship exceptional – and wasn’t it so by the distance that did not fail to hold us apart? Friendship by way of distance, the opening of distance. But it was time, too, that was opened thus. Yes, as though distance first had to be thought in terms of a disjunction in time.

The wind was always still when we met, you said. There’s never any wind, you said. Still, that was your word. Yes, always a gap in the weather – no wind, and stillness, and it was as though the day had gathered itself up, that it was paused at the brink of something massive, some vast event. Who knew it but us?

Do you remember, the night of some football victory or another, how they shouted at us when they passed in their cars? The windows rolled down, they shouted, victorious. We had won. And who were we, who had not seen the match? But we had seen other things; a brown moon above a clearing in the plantation, where the foresters had come. Everywhere, tree stumps fresh cut and the brown moon above. That night – I remember – we crossed a golf course. The sprinklers were turning and the path passed between green dunes of grass. Through to the road and the train station, where we’d catch the last train back to town. How did you know we’d get there in time?, you asked; I didn’t know; I gave the decision to fate. Did I think we were blessed?

The exception. What did we have in common? When we with were with the others, we knew we were different to them. Irony – we were among them! Us – among them! And when we were outside, away from then? Solemnity. Silence. We were already outside and away: that was a given. The old world had fallen away, but where was the new world?

We did not talk of the future. Always the threshold, always were we at the threshold. Had we found jobs? We’d work, yes, but these were not yet our jobs. Nothing had begun, not our real lives. What chance was there for us? We were exceptional only for ourselves. You were a dental technician, and what was I? A finder of lost boxes in the warehouse. I cycled one way to work and would pass you cycling the other.

Long gaps would pass – months, years. But this was not a test of friendship; those gaps were part of its movement. Some friends are on close orbit, some on more distant ones. Where are you now, friend, behind the sun? Never mind; time passes but it is unjoined by friendship. Time passes, but it does not touch us, we whom friendship gathers at the threshold.

Rooms

I have seen too few Daddy-Long-Legs this year, but here is one now. From Handke, I learnt that such creatures belong to the threshold. But over what do I cross? The world as threshold; this room – the flat – is exchangable with any other. The thudding of music upstairs, the sound of music next door the same as always, the same as last year and the year before.

I play music to drown out music; I speak on the phone so I will not hear them speak. This has always happened as it happens now: this is but one room in a sequence of rooms. They are all the same, and with the same disappointing view: a grotty backyard, pools of drain water, dying plants. Today and tomorrow, the same view.

Can you reach me here, friend? I imagine the Daddy Long Legs is your embodiment – that you have come to me in this form to witness me and allow me to witness myself. Then the Daddy-Long-Legs is an emblem of writing. Sign of incompletion, sign of not yet beginning, mobile threshold that makes this room a threshold.

The Threshold

Friend of the threshold – friend who brings me to the threshold, just as you told me I bring you to the threshold – in what body do I come to you? How does it reach you, the address from the threshold, which says, this room will be one of other rooms; you will move from here to there, and the world will be unloosened by your movement? How do I reach you as a sign of the threshold?

What did we speak of then, at that time? We never said anything, that’s what you said. Nothing said, everything unsaid. But as though that unsaid was the unsaying of the world, and there were no more lies and hypocrisy. Propitious silence, that was the world’s intake of breath, the taking of air to the bottom of its lungs. Silence in which the world drew back to its birth, and so was the morning through which we passed the first morning of the world.

Silence, unsaying. Silence – the unloosening of everything spoken. But there was a saying by this silence. Saying that unspeaks – saying that yet speaks the word that cannot be spoken. Incomplete word! Word that never begins! But to share speech thus – speech that passes from one to the other, speech that begins without completing itself – is to lighten the world.

Lightened Speech

Of what did we speak? Our world was too small, too confining. What were we going to do, we who were to leave school? Truancy: we wandered to the park in the schoolday. Who was there? No one; or perhaps a mother with a pram. We were there, but there was no one else there. Restlessness first of all, that’s what bore what we said. What was to happen? The old life was coming to an end – this was welcome, we were never satisfied with it, and the new one was beginning – but what was to begin?

Lightened speech. What was lightened was the past, and the burden of the past. Newness: not, now, the life we would pass in the suburbs, nor the life in the new companies that were appearing all over the Thames Valley, nor the life of our friends who were to disappear into those companies, but of what gave itself as we spoke of this life and of our friends. Newness: to speak of the world, of a past shared and a shared present, was already to lighten it.

Now our truancy was redoubled in the truancy of saying. The lies of the world were unsaid. Corruption became innocent; the world was born again and we passed in the first morning of the creation. The first morning: dawn, over the suburbs. And the first night: dusk, over the suburbs. We met at the threshold, the dawn and the dusk and by our speech, the world was lightened.

Daddy Long Legs

I haven’t seen for you for many years. How did you know to send me a Daddy Long Legs as your envoy? Through my window and drawn by the light, a foreleg twitching before it in the air as it flies, it is your emissary. But how do I reach you? What creatures are for you a sign of speech?

When did we meet, on what day? And when will it come again, that day when we met for the first time, at the brink of adulthood? The first time: but did we meet, then? Who met? I’m not sure we met, I’m not sure it happened, but perhaps that non-happening is also our friendship. Perhaps it was the incompletion of what happened then, its failure to come to term, that is the life of our friendship. Or perhaps that is what deprived our friendship of itself, making you less than a friend and our friendship less than friendship.

With you, apart from you, I no longer know what the word friendship meant. Or perhaps I learnt of another sense of that word as friendship seemed to attenuate itself between us, to wear itself to nothing. Perhaps I learnt of what friendship must be, if it is to be anything at all.

But this is not right; I had other friends, and with you, I thought, it was different. Ours was an exceptional friendship, a friendship with the exceptional. But how many times I was disappointed because it was not friendship enough! Perhaps it was the same for you. Then for us both the word friendship echoed in a direction it could not reach. Unless one can learn of friendship by experiencing what it is not and it is when friendship breaks down that it reveals what it is.

What did we share? I remember, then, we disliked the same things, that our retreat pushed us together. I found you outside the house where the party was. No: you found me there. Outside – as I would find you again, on other occasions. In fact, I think whenever we met, by chance or design, it was outside. We were driven outside, each for our own reasons, and that was where we met, and continued to meet.

But now we have made our way in the world; we are settled in our lives, albeit in different parts of the country. I can remember today because I am so far inside – because, now, the life outside has become a spectacle; I remember because I am safe, and will not find myself exiled. And you, what do you remember? You turned to me – a letter would arrive, or the phone would ring – when you were exiled from an affair. Why, with a kind of ceremonialness did I feel I had to seek your blessing when I began a new affair of my own?

Perhaps it is that we need witnesses to our lives, and this is what we are to one another. Witnesses, distant now, but watching still. Distant, but watching with a great and benevolent love. I am here today, tomorrow and the day after that. Constancy: the whole sky – the great night with its stars and contellations, in its great, slow movement. So you to me – so your life moves slowly and vastly like the whole sky. So is your life to me even as it watches me and is turned to me, in its own way. And what is my life to you? A similar sky? A similar turning-as-a-whole, the sky that turns in its entirety?

What is it to live life watched! What it is to have elected a watcher, as I was elected your watcher! But I wonder, still, if this is not too much. It is not that I am watched or that I watch you. What is your life, after all, to me? What do I know of your days and nights, and what do you know of mine? Is it, rather, that your life must be exemplary to me, as one who came in from the outside. That we met when, outside, we had not found a place in the world. That we met so that this same outside would always be between us; that what we shared was just what what we could not share with others. We met outside, and we turn now to the other when we find ourselves close again to the outside.

What is it we share? Each is a sign to the other of the condition that was once their own. And the other to be called forward as witness to that first exclusion, the one that set us apart at adolescence, at the threshold of life. To be called forward by a letter or a phonecall, witness to the bare life that was once ours. But who is called forward as the witness? Not one who lives in the world, who is comfortable there, but the adolescent at the threshold. The outside calls you. Bare life calls to bare life.  I heard your voice on the phone, but what did I hear? I heard myself speak, but who spoke?

When when will it come again, that day when we met for the first time, at the brink of adulthood? On the last day which is also the youngest day, when the ordinary becomes the extraordinary. On that day to come which is also today, the day that does not complete itself today and whose non-completion is our life, our living.

At That Time, in That Place

Hesitant speech, speech yet unsure of itself, speech that does not know the decorum of speech, of what might be said and the way it should be spoken: I remember how we spoke, then, as adolescents. I remember a speaking at the brink of itself, a searching-speech which was never resolved, a speech tentative and half-formed, as though it were looking too quickly to clothe its nudity. A speech in which what mattered was not the content of what was said, but the fact of speaking, in which speech, all of speech, spoke of itself.

It was not a matter of personal confession, of anecdote or intimacy. True, there were confidences, that’s how it began; I learnt about you and you about me, we spoke of ourselves in trust and sincerity. But such speech is magnetised by what it would convey; it was not yet indifferent, it did had not come to speak of itself and only of speaking, the fact of speaking; it was not full with the wonder of speech where each word is strange because it is addressed to another, where each word is wondrous because it is unsure as to where it is travelling, and to where it will bear speech and its speakers.

How quickly we wore speech away! Almost at once, there was nothing to say and speech was worn down like a pebble. But that was the condition of speech. It was then, wasn’t it, that speech spoke and we were dispersed even as it seemed we were brought together? It was at that moment, wasn’t it, that speech interceded on its own behalf?

Perhaps this is to idealise what might have been, after all, only fumbling and idiocy. How could we speak, we who were so young? What had we to say, adolescents on the outside, at the brink of life? But what happened, I maintain, did so because of inexperience; inexperience was its condition.

‘But We Never Said Anything’

We never said anything, that’s what you said later. Then, it was though we were present only to accompany speech, to let speech remember itself and lighten itself by passing between us. Yes, it was as though our presence allowed speech to lighten itself, to offer speech a new direction. Curious that we seemed to come to ourselves after everything had been said, that we were always too late.

But what, after all, had been said? We never said anything. That was true; you always seemed comfortable with that silence, though later you told me you were never comfortable. I was always uncomfortable, I tried to say too much, as if ashamed at the nudity of speech. But in a sense, everything had been said, and silence was the speech of what remained.

Sometimes we drank, we took bottles of Thunderbird into the woods. We drank and we were warm by drinking though the woods were full of ice and snow. We drank and it seemed necessary to drink, as if drinking was another way to assist speech. Then there were silences – many times, we walked home in the night without a word spoken between us. Silence – but that was speech; speech happened by our silence.

We never said anything, yes that’s true, nothing was said, speech was worn down, and it was as though everything we’d said and heard had been the river that wears pebbles into roundness. Nothing was said, we never began, because it was as though we came too late and there was nothing left for us to say.

Truancy

Dusk: I would meet you at the roundabout. Dawn: you’d pretend to be staying overnight with a friend and we would go into the wood and through the fields to see the sun rise. And we were together in the day, too, when we bunked off school and went to the woods and drink beer and skim stones across the lake.

What did we seek? Escape – from school first of all, but then from everyone, everyone else. To face one another? No, never that – we walked one alongside the other, we passed through derelict land and the new golf courses, we passed through the new estates and the land reserved to build more estates, we passed through the last woods and the last fields. We went, truants, and bore between us the truancy of speech, speech as truancy, that demanded we pass and always pass.

Later, when we had learned to speak of many of things, we sought to reckon with what we said and did not say then, so many years before. Later we decided to speak of that we had omitted to address then, in the dusk and the dawn and in the days truant from school. We never said anything, you said, but we knew, didn’t we, that speech had happened, even though nothing had been said. We never said anything, you said on the phone.

Lightened Speech

Then, we had used phones then only to convey the minimum of information: let’s meet at X., see you at Y. We had always written, that is true, but only to seek a writing loose enough to let speech speak. How seriously we wrote! But it was not a pretend-seriousness, there was a lightness to speech, we gave speech lightness by giving it another direction. Speech spoke of its lightness by our seriousness. Speech, between us, playing between us, became light even in the seriousness of our words.

I waited for letters from you, and sometimes they would come. I wrote to you, and sometimes you wrote to me, sometimes letters would reach me. But we never phoned, we distrusted phones, for years I never heard your voice, and that was right. We distrusted phones; my voice was too heavy and yours too light, I was too quick to speak and you preferred silence. Letters came, a flurry of correspondence and then nothing. Years passed, but their passing was marked by letters or by the absence of letters.

Later, we decided to reckon with speech, to speak and to meet. Later, when we had learnt a great deal, we thought we’d chase speech down, to track it all the way to the source. I phoned you – or did you phone me? – we spoke, we arranged to meet. Much later, when we were already old, speech laughed and disappeared – how could we expect speech to be punctual? We lost speech by searching for it. We lost what came of itself and by itself, like the deer that crossed the fields before us in the dawn.

We never said anything, you said, but now we said too much and spoke as adults. We never said anything, but that was because we had not learnt to speak, not then, we had not asserted our rights over speech. And today, what is left for us to say? Too much; everything – but now to ‘catch up’ is no longer truancy, no longer our passing from the world.

1.

There is a space in what is not yet a relationship when you are as yet unsure whom she is (let’s say it is a she), the one who walks beside you, just as she does not know who you are (think of Donnie and Gretchen in Donnie Darko). In the same space, there is a kind of security – something, each thinks, is at work between them, but what?

It doesn’t matter. Trust that ‘something’; trust the to and fro of an exchange that has, as its basis, something like luck. Luck that you two were brought together here; luck that there is an attraction at work between you and that it is reciprocated; luck that there is time for conversation itself as conversation spreads out into the night (think of Jeffrey and Sandy’s first walk in Blue Velvet).

Yes, there is trust and this is beautiful. Who does not remember such a conversation with such and such a person on such and such a night? It is a memory of youth – or rather, the youth of memory, that freshness that returns when you are brought into a space of possibility, in which words speak that search ahead in the night (let’s say it is a night).

Searching words – but what are they looking for? For that moment when silence wells in from that space space in which speaking occurs. For that enveloping moment when you face her and she faces you. Yes, when you are face to face, and it is time to stop talking, when it is as though all the night had gathered itself to the threshold where you stand.

2.

But what if that threshold goes uncrossed? What if the course of the night was as though interrupted? Then you and she have unfinished business; you await another night, and another time with her and you live now in the open hand of that waiting. But what if that theshold will forever go uncrossed; what if you and she will never bring to an end what seem to begin, then, long ago?

Then that uncertainty – the first – is redoubled; if you see her again, uncertainty remains. First it will be experienced as benediction – there is something shared, you speak in a shared space and are intimate no matter who else is around you. But then, gradually, it becomes the obstacle to your relationships with others; it is an unpleasant constriction, the obsession of an event that withdrew almost as soon as it happened. What happened? Luck? But is it luck any longer? Finally it will become what you must now address rather than talk around. You must speak of luck. But how is this possible?

3.

It is true that new lovers speak of their love, of the fact of their loving. What effect will this have, you say to your lover, on X. and Y.? What will Z. think? Lovers have love to talk about: the surprise of their affair for others, but first of all for themselves. They experience love as benediction; it arrives as a gift. The lovers become tiresome for others when they assume that they have found the path to happiness – ‘if only you had what we have’: this is the smugness that has made good on luck.

But in interrupted love, what is spoken of is without benediction. What speaks? If I say the outside it is to refer to what is lived by smug lovers as their privilege, their special benediction and by those whom love has interrupted as enigma. For the latter, luck is not privilege or good fortune, and you would not wish it upon anyone else. For those who must speak of it, it is the fate of a relationship that cannot come to term. A luck no longer shared as between two terms (Lover and Beloved) and which does not allow you to play the game of lovers.

Both know they will have to have done with what binds them without binding them; that it has become intolerable. Do they flee one another or come closer to try at last to drive out what inhabits them, to have done with luck once and for all? How to speak? How to address what retreats from you both, what gave itself once without giving you a future? How to be released back into an ordinary life and to the hope for a relationship that will be mercifully ordinary?

4.

No doubt a great deal is announced in interrupted love. Failure punctures a hole in the lie that smug lovers tell themselves: that the luck that turned each towards the other was theirs, and in their possession. That they were not possessed by love as by an outside they do not control. And that those first moments of infatuation were destined to lead them to the comfort of romance. Exposed is the lie that love is personal and lets its course be steered – and the lie of that smugness that would make good on luck.

Divorce, break-up, leaves each without trust and without luck (think of the quarelling couple in Mirror). It is as though a joint was bent without cartilage – bone grinds on bone. The pain is raw and direct. That is when you know what love was and that you can never lean on love.

And for those who could never lean on it? Those whose relationship was already an experience of the impossibility of loving which was never just love’s absence? They too know what love is not, but they know also of the enigma of luck which ran them together, the ones who are joined in their relationship to the other as to the outside.

5.

What has the impossibility-of-loving taught you? What have you become, you for whom that impossibility is fate? You are the one who loved what he could never enclose and who loved another to whom he was joined by luck. Consolation: for all your absence of love, you will have known luck better than anyone else. But is that a consolation?

Lovers like to feel themselves similar to one another, to have shared parallel histories, to have led lives which let their encounter become fateful. But in the end, what do they share? Perhaps only the strangeness of love itself: it is as though love has no content, or if its content were solely the affirmation of love as love, in its surprise, its novelty.

Is love an egoïsme à deux? There is a kind of lover’s narcissism: love traps one with the other, nothing matters except the beloved. Is there a relationship which does not draw the lovers together but turns each apart from the other? This is also what love is: the chance of an encounter that does not enclose each lover in his or her love or enclose the other, the beloved, as the one who is known and who is understood.

Is this what it would mean to claim that love is also a relation to the outside? Perhaps. But this is a precarious relationship. It disappears; it is lost in the onrush of that living through of that affirmation that love is: telling one’s friends of new love, introducing one’s beloved to others, all the while being surprised at love’s bounty, at the depth of the gift that loving is.

But something disappears. This is because the gift of loving, love’s giving, usurps another kind of gift. When Duras will allow love to come close to hatred, when love for her comes close to a madness which turns each of us from the world. Somewhat foolishly, I will link one experience of love (love’s plenitude) to a D.H. Lawrentian vitalism: the living universe, everything alive, everything there in the presence of the beloved. Certainty. Nothing from the depth of passion can be wrong, all that.

And the other experience (love’s nudity)? Not plenitude but horror. The tearing apart of the world. Not a possible love, not the opening of a world, but impossibility. The impossibility of loving. The impossibility of a world, of a world’s coherency. That is Duras, and all of Duras, from beginning to end.

Even the late books, which I like to imagine are not so highly regarded because the idea of protecting books – of books which need protection – is close to me. Build an ark, put the books in, carry them about as you would your own heart… These late texts are important for the nudity of the story they contain.

I want to write with the word nudeness – yes the nudeness of those stories which bear so nakedly on the impossibility of loving. The story of her brother in The Lover from North China, the one whom young Duras (is it her?) and the servant Thanh (he did not appear in the early versions of the same story, including The Lover) wanted to preserve as a kind of miracle.

And what of Hélène Lagonelle (a fellow pupil of the young narrator with whom she has an affair)? There is the objection (I’ve never heard it, but I want to imagine it in order to draw these books closer) that Duras becomes la Duras, a brand, a style, a way of writing akin to a way of dressing (and remember that la Duras also named a way of dressing).

The Lover from North China, Yann Andrèa Steiner (have I put the accent in the right place?): these books, written close to her death (like the other naked book, Writing) come close not to the Duras whose wrinkled face looks out of us from the backs of her books and from books of photographs, but from the other Duras, Duras’s other: the companion whom, ‘in’ her, stepped forward to encounter the one she was able to love.

She loved Yann Andrea , a young man, a homosexual (read The Slut of the Normandy Coast, read L’Ête 80) the relationship with whom, perhaps, allowed her to write The Malady of Death (others claim that is a rewrite of The Man Who Sat Down in the Corridor). She loved him from the other who loved inside her, her companion. The one whom she could draw upon to write, with whom she wrote. The other who wrote with her, inside her, and across her.

Write so as though to have no face. Is there a way of loving, too, which would allow your face to be torn from itself?