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Has it really come to this?, W. wonders. It has. Is it going to get any worse? Much worse. This is only the beginning. He feels like a Marie Antoinette being lead out to the chopping-block, he says. He feels like Joan of Arc being bound to the stake.

When's the blow going to come? When are the flames going to leap up and surround him? It'll be a relief after everything that's happened, W. says. The horror of not-knowing will come to an end. For that's all he's experienced since he took up with me, W. says. The horror of not knowing where the next step will lead, for example, he says. The horror of the uncertainty of his destination.

For where's he been heading all this time? Downwards, that much is obvious. Down – and out – that, too is obvious. We've long since left all friendly terrain. We've long since left the last human house. We're in the wilderness now, W. says, mapless and unsure.

It's all gone wrong!, I tell W. It's falling apart! W. feels he has to pull me back from the brink. It's not that bad, he says. I tell him we should stab ourselves in the throat – now, immediately! I over-react to everything, says W. It's my dramatic nature. I'm an hysteric.

W., by contrast, takes the long view. He's more grandly apocalyptic than I am. 'You have to see it all in terms of the apocalypse', he says. I do have my apocalyptic moments, W. concedes, but I do not have the sobriety and broadness of view required by apocalypticism. 'You see it's not just you or I', he says, it's everyone'. I'm calmed by his words. The disaster is everywhere.

Our first leader was always an example to W. and I. I'm not very interesting, he always insisted, but my thoughts are interesting. My thoughts! As if he had nothing to do with them!, W. exclaims. As though they had him and not the other way round! He felt a duty to his thoughts, we remember. It was as though his life was only a receptable for something infinitely more important.

He was completely serious, W. remembers, not like us. Completely serious! And there was a kind of lightness in that seriousness, he remembers, as though thinking were a kind of beatittude. What will we ever know of the infinite lightness of thought? W. wonders. Of thought's laughter, which laughs in the eyes of the thinker touched with thought?

W. and I reminisce about our second leader. He had an absolute lucidity when he spoke of his everyday life, we agree. It was like looking into the clearest of rivers, W. said. We agree: how frankly and absolutely he spoke of himself, and to anyone who asked. Frankly and absolutely, as though life was something to look through, and not to live. Or that life was lived at another level, where thinking was possible. A level of which we have no idea, W. says.

He was completely serious as well, says W. of our second leader, not like us. We're the apes of thought, W. says, but he was completely serious. Everything was serious for our second leader. Nothing mattered but thought, the life of thought!

W. and I reminisce about our third leader. Everyone knows to keep quiet when she speaks, W. says. She speaks very quietly herself, and is immensely modest, but everyone knows it: here is a thinker, here is thought in person. She lives in a different way to everyone else, that much is clear. She lives a different life, and her quietness is a sign of her elevation.

It's what everyone in the room knows when she speaks: she's better than the rest of us, cleverer, she occupies the stratosphere of pure thought. Thought is here, and we are touched by a cold and fiery hand by what it would be impossible for us to think. To have a thought that would burn our lives away like dross! To have the whole of our lives become clear and still like pools of water in Northern forests!

We lean in, listening. She speaks so quietly, and we must be more quiet than we can be to listen. For a moment, we forget we are apes, and listen with the whole of our being.

We should hang ourselves immediately, I tell W., it's the only honorable course of action. We are compromised, utterly compromised. W. feels he has to pull me back from the brink. It's not that bad, he says. We should stab ourselves in the throat, I tell him. I over-react to everything, says W., it's my dramatic nature. I'm an hysteric. He, by contrast, takes the long view. He's more grandly apocalyptic than I am. You have to see it all in terms of the apocalypse, says W. I do have my great apocalyptic moments, W. concedes, but I do not have the sobriety and longness of view required by apocalypticism.

Writing delights me. That’s nothing new. That’s the only thing that still supports me, that will also come to an end. That’s how it is. One does not live forever. But as long as I live I live writing. That’s how I exist. There are months or years when I cannot write. Then it comes back. Such rhythm is both brutal and at the same time a great thing, something others don’t experience.

Thomas Bernhard

Remember that strange fragment from Kafka: 'A cage went in search of a bird'. A cage – empty – looks for what might fill it. And now I think of Bernhard, after reading his early novellas: a style looks for its subject matter; a way of writing for a content to fill it.

Didn't his style precede his rage and his despair? Wasn't the Austria of his Extinction only an attempt to find a topic commensurable with the demands of his style? Fortunate for him he had the Nazis to write about! Fortunate the dead weight of offical culture!

Bernhard's style finds its subject matter; a cage finds its bird. But now imagine a cage that still aches in its absence – that searches without finding an appropriate content. A cage bereft, a style wholly grotesque, wholly gratuitous. 

But now imagine a style that seeks to lose the content it finds, to burn it up: style that lives madly on the fuel of content. The cage has become a bird and content a cage, and writing doubles Joyce's chaosmos that burns in all things.

Conventions of blogging: begin from a time, a place. A post is dated, after all. Very well then: a warm day, a bright day after days of clouds and rain. A warm day, this day, in the middle of the year. And I've broken the surface of ordinary life to draw a breath upon – what? What is it that I would like to invite writing to say that could not be said in another way?

Ordinary life: even that expression is wrong. As though the extra-ordinary – writing, the capacity to write – would be higher or loftier, as though to write would be to ascend to a point where everything, all of life lies open and distant before you! As though it were not the other way round – that writing was infinitely less than life, infinitely lower, and with no importance, with the least importance of all.

Nothing extraordinary about writing. Nothing that does not make it utterly negligible, and the perspective it affords – its non-perspective – entirely spurious. From the perspective of life, writing is of no importance. But from the perspective of writing? Life seems merely a gap in writing: an interruption. Life down below, life lived elsewhere than on the plateau. And from the perspective of life, the whole sweep of life? Writing is a part of life lost from the whole, in a separate eddy. And it is as such, in my fantasy, that it must be made to rejoin the river.

Through what Cultural Revolution might writers be made to live again, in the world? The dreadful phrase 'my work'. Horror of the words 'creative writing'. The privatisation of consciousness, the opposite of that kind of collective from which life lives.

Nothing worse than writers burrowing into the night. Nothing worse than all the books written by burrowing into the night. Times of revolution demand the impossibility of private life. All life is public, the street runs through your living room. Writing, if there is to be writing, is collective: tracts, posters, bulletins, graffiti on the walls. Writing is of all and for all, with no permanence.

The walls of the Sorbonne will be scrubbed: good. The graffiti will not last: better still. Writing has joined with life; it has no separate existence. There must be no art, above all that. No private consciousness. Nothing kept from what streams in the streets. Every word must be everyone's word, everyone must write, even if they do not write …

Kafka wrote, ‘A cage went in search of a bird’. What does this aphorism mean?[….] All the bird’s movements, all the freedom it knows, are seen from another perspective as only flighty divagations from impending capture. The bird belongs to another’s project: it is the cage that is determining.

Corngold, Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form

Many readers of ReadySteadyBook are also readers of Stephen Mitchelmore’s peerless This Space. You will have noticed, no doubt, that an uncharacteristic quiet has settled over Steve’s blog of late. Sadly, this is because he was involved in a serious road accident on Saturday 19th January. (via)

Best wishes to Steve, whose blogging has been an inspiration to me for several years, for a full and speedy recovery. Some of Steve’s writings are archived at The Gaping Void.

The insufficient exposition of the beginning is what constitutes it as the place of the muses, as inspiration.

Explanations are, in fact, only a moment in the tradition of the inexplicable: they are the moment, to be more precise, which keeps watch over it by leaving it unexplained.

Giorgio Agamben

We feel an affinity with a certain thinker because we agree with him; or because he shows us what we were already thinking; or because he shows us in a more articulate form what we were already thinking; or because he shows us what we were on the point of thinking; or what we would sooner or later have thought; or what we would have thought much later if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have been likely to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have liked to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now.

Lydia Davies

Milan Kundera musing on Don Quixote:

Poor Alonzo Quijada meant to elevate himself into the legendary figure of a knight-errant. Instead, for all of literary history, Cervantes succeeded in doing just the opposite: he cast a legendary figure down: into the world of prose. ‘Prose’: the word signifies not only a nonversified language; it also signifies the concrete, everyday, corporeal nature of life. So to say that the novel is the art of prose is not to state the obvious; the word defines the deep sense of that art.

A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote jounreying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.

Once again I want to call up the figure of Alfonzo Quijada; see him mount his Rosinante and set off in search of great battles. He is prepared to sacrifice his life for a noble cause, but tragedy doesn’t want him. For, since its birth, the novel is suspicious of traegedy: of its cult of gandeur; of its threatrical origins; of its blindness to the prose of life. Poor Alonzo Quijada. In the vicinity of his mournful countenance, everything turns into comedy.

… novelistic thinking, as Broch and Musil brought it into the aesthetic of the modern novel, has nothing to do with the thinking of a scientist or a philosopher; I would even say it is purposely a-philosophic, even anti-philosophic, that is to say fiercy independent of any system of preconceived ideas; it does not judged; it does not proclaim truths; it questions, it marvels, it plumbs; its form is highly diverse: metaphoric, ironic, hypothetic, hyperbolic, aphoristic, droll, provocative, fanciful; and mainly it never leaves the magic circle of its characters’ lives; those lives feed and justify it.

Very busy. Quotes only until mid-January.

Excellent 8 minute radio piece on Jandek.

I’ve worked well, I can be pleased with what I’ve done. I’ve put down the pen, because it’s evening. Twilight imaginings. My wife and kids are in the next room, full of life. I have good health and enough money. God, I’m unhappy!

But what am I saying? I’m not unhappy, I haven’t put down the pen, I don’t have a wife and kids, or a next room, I don’t have enough money, it isn’t evening.

from Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co

Light posting through early Dec.

Painting is an eye, a blinded eye that continues to see, and sees what blinds it.

All the paintings I have made, I was compelled to make. You must never force yourself. They make you and you have no say in it.

Yes, I abandoned everything. Painting required it. It was all or nothing.

Painting is being alive. Through my painting, I beat back this world that stops us living and where we are in constant danger of being destroyed.

I paint the impossibility of painting.

In this world that destroys me, the only thing I can do is to live my weakness. That weakness is my only strength.

No country, no family, no ties. I didn’t exist anymore. I just had to press on.

All these exhibitions…. People put out their hands to you, and when you try to take them, there’s nobody there.

I do not see this world. But my hands are tied, and that’s why it frightens me.

Dead days are more numerous than live ones.

An artist’s life is all very fine and moving. But only in retrospect. In books.

I am on the side of weakness.

The artist has no role. He is absent.

Most people’s lives are governed by will-power. An artist is someone who has no will.

Painting doesn’t interest me.

What I paint is beyond painting.

I am powerless, helpless. Each time, it’s a leap in the dark. A deliberate encounter with the unknown.

When I look back at a recent painting, I can hardly bear the suffering in it.

I never try to know.

Everything I’ve painted is the revelation of a truth. And therefore inexhaustible.

I never know where I’m going.

The hardest thing is to work blind.

In the normal way, nothing is possible. But the artist creates possibilities where almost none exist.

It’s because artists are defenceless that they have such power.

Yes, he agrees, he is tending to lose all individuality.

Painting lives only through the slide towards the unknown in oneself.

My pictures are also an annihilation.

I am a watered down being.

I am a walker. When I’m not working, I have to walk. I walk so I can go on working.

Van Gogh? … He was a beacon. Not like me. I just feel my way in the dark. But I am good at feeling my way.

What is so wonderful is that all that [painting, an oeuvre, the role of the artist …] is so pointless and yet so necessary.

[On Picasso] Admittedly he was exceptionally creative and inventive. But he was a stranger to doubt [….]

Painting has to struggle to beat back this world, which cannot but assassinate the invisible.

The painter is also blind, but he needs to see.

Discouragement is an integral part of the adventure.

I am a man without a tongue.

The amazing thing is that, by keeping low, I have been able to go my own way.

Always this poverty… But I never rebelled against it. I have always known that that was my place. And anyway, I had my work.

Even failure isn’t something you can seek.

[…] I never really liked French painting. It’s often too disciplined, too elegant. It is not genuine enough. It’s as if art has got the upper hand.

I did what I did in order to be able to breathe. There is no merit in that.

When life appears, it is the unknown. But to be able to welcome the unknown, you have to be unencumbered.

So many painters and writers never stop producing, because they are afraid of not-doing.

You have to let non-working do its work.

I am held prisoner by my eyes.

Source: Juliet.

From an interview Beckett granted to a French newspaper:

– I never read philosophy.
– Why not?
– I don’t understand it.
[…]
– Why did you write your books?
– I don’t know. I’m not an intellectual. I just feel things. I invented Molloy and the rest on the day I understood how stupid I’d been. I began then to write down the things I feel.

Kafka says to Brod he will be content on his deathbed, providing the pain is not too great, and adds, ‘the best of what I have written is based on this capacity to die content.’ Which I interpret, remembering the bloody scenes of execution in ‘The Penal Colony’ and the banal death of The Trial, as pointing to a kind of relaxed happiness in the murder of his characters.

Their discontent mirrors his contentedness; they are his proxies, Kafka, who among all authors understands the demand of writing draws him through and beyond any tale he could tell. Let them take his place; let them die in his place – he is still alive, he lives and he suffers, but somewhere, too, he is dead; he has also brought his death to term.

In the end, of course, Kafka died a painful death. But remember the conversation slips he wrote to communicate with his friends when, towards the end, he could no longer speak.

That cannot be, that a dying man drinks.

Do you have a moment? Then lightly spray the peonies.

Mineral water – once for fun I could

Fear again and again.

A bird was in the room.

Put your hand on my forehead for a moment to give me strength.

My fantasy: now death is coming to Kafka, but slowly, so that it seems to become eternal. Did it seem, discontent, that death was as far away from him as ever? Now perhaps, it is the turn of the characters to die in his place. Wasn’t it the proofs of The Hunger Artist he was correcting on his deathbed? Perhaps death by starvation was already preferable to a dying that had lost its limit.

Now I imagine the conversation slip was written by Kafka to his characters, the ones who had always died for him.

Put your hand on my forehead for a moment to give me strength.

Die and give me strength by your death. Die and give me the limit of death. I imagine they all stand around him, his characters, woken by the coming end of their creator to assume his suffering. And then that it is what does not pass of Kafka’s passing that returns as I reread him.

I do not die content as they are brought to their deaths. Death wakes up in me; dying opens its eyes: it is as though Kafka knew he would suffer in advance: that he wrote from the discontent of dying, letting it mark itself in those stories that never came to an end. Is that why The Castle is important to me?

But what does not end in The Castle is also what fails to complete itself even in Kafka’s finished tales – this is what I tell myself, although without proof, without argument. But who will die for me? Who will put his hand on my forehead?

Gillian Rose is dying. Her cancer has spread beyond control. She has months to live, not years. Only palliative care is open to her. There will be no cure.

Love’s Work is a memoir-collage, to be categorised, according to the back of the book, as Autobiography/Philosophy. In its several chapters, this brief book recounts incidents from a life lived as a struggle to love. It is also a book about dying and those to whom death is close.

There is her friend Edna, who was diagnosed with cancer eighty years ago. At ninety six, with a prosthetic nose and a prosthetic jaw from cancer of the face, Edna still lives. There is her friend Yvette, the one with whom she was going to travel to Jerusalem, who dies in a hospice in Sussex. Cancer of the breast. There is her friend Jim, who dies of AIDS in his apartment, and his lover Lance, who also dies of AIDS. This is a book about dying, about death.

Gillian Rose is dying. But she is also writing. Love’s Work is the book she wrote as she died. That, and parts, if not the whole of Mourning Becomes Law and Paradisio. These are books, each of them, of ferocious beauty.

She is dying, but she is also loving. Love’s Work is a book, first of all, about love. About the inevitable failure of love and about the comedy of that failure. Writing, for Gillian Rose, falls infinitely short of loving. There is the erotic love which draws lovers to one another. That which allows each to recognise herself, himself, as a Lover. That which will also see a distribution of Lover and Beloved, Master and Pupil, which both become in turn.

Then there is the love of agape, of the everyday, of that shared life that erotic love can become. That love which commences in the hours the lovers spend sleeping with one another. Sleeping and then waking into a world shared. To sleep is to journey, each apart – two selves – and together. A subtle negotiation begins. Love is the third term that interrupts love’s folie a deux. Agapic love is not shared egotism, but shared adventure. The everyday is its milieu.

Love is at work; love is working. The world, the fourth term in the love affair, lies beyond. failed love affairs: Gillian Rose claims to be an expert in the failure of love. She has had two affairs with philosophers, she recalls. One lasted for ten years, one for five. In both, she was predominantly the Lover and the other the Beloved. He, the youth, the Beloved became the beautiful soul. He withdraws, depressed. She, the Lover worries she blocks his way to the world. She ends the relationship, though not the friendship. The ephebe is set free. Only now, knowing them as friends, she understands them still to be beautiful souls. She was wrong to have left them, but she left them. Did she fail love’s work?

She recounts one failed love affair in detail. It will stand in for all the others, she writes. It was with a Priest, a fellow academic. She sees him at a meeting. She doesn’t know his name, but his presence is intense, sensually knowing. He is a priest. They go one evening to his rooms attached to a church. They speak of Liberation Theology and eat oysters and turbot. She tells him to read more Hegel to bolster his Marxism; she introduces him to Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. Later, she will accompany him as he officiates in church; she joins him on his parish rounds. Later still he withdraws from her. She becomes the anxious Beloved; he the withdrawing Lover, rubbing his eyes with thumb and index finger. He cannot give her what she wants.

‘Loss’ means the original gift and salvation of love have been degraded: love’s arrow poisoned and sent swiftly back into the heart.

In the past, she says, she would have pulled out the arrow, and test the wound. This time, she says, she wants to do it differently. She does not ring her sisters in order to draw upon their ‘inventive love’. She steels herself to love again. And, true, she will love again. And fail again.

At the time of writing, Gillian Rose is still loving. We know him as Steve, the one with whom she went walking in Wales before the operation that was supposed to remove her colostomy. But he, too, is withdrawing. That week of intimacy is also the last week of their love. She will woo again. She will learn again and fail again; she will grieve and she will trust. This is love’s work.

There is the love of friendship. She stays with Jim in New York after her disappointing studies as an undergraduate. It is 1970. She learns German and reads Adorno. She discovers the abstract expressionists and the second Viennese School; she learns of pop music and of homosexuality. She discovers Jim, her great friend, who we meet in chapter when he is dying of what we will discover is AIDS. Jim, tall and erudite, possessor of books of philosophy in their original languages, Jim who nevertheless is no philosopher, who cannot experience it as a stage on life’s way and who is made to leave the college where he taught without a Ph.D. Jim through whom in 1991, when he is forty-seven and dying, Gillian Rose meets the irrepressible Edna, one alive, still alive after eighty years with cancer.

Her mother, who refuses to acknowledge that she loved the two husbands she divorced, who denies the suffering of her own mother, who lost over fifty relatives to the Nazis (‘children bayoneted in front of their parents), is substituted by sixty-five year old Yvette, who speaks of her five great lost loves. Sensual Yvette with a tallboy full of pornography and three concurrent lovers, who teaches Gillian Rose ancient and modern Hebrew. Sensual, dowdy Yvette who counsels all on loving, and on not confusing the Beloved with the object of terror.

Her mother and stepfather told the young Gillian Rose of their intention to commit suicide. She develops agoraphobia. She sobs in her cold rooms at Oxford University. Her lecturers – all except one – tell her how much clever than her are the philosophers she studies. Her earlier, joyous discovery of Plato and Pascal saves her from throwing away philosophy altogether. One which reawakens in New York with Jim. And now – in 1995, writing Love’s Work – her conviction that postmodern philosophy falls short of love’s work – this is another form of love of this book. That it turns, disappointed, from what it takes to be the deficiencies of reason. Philosophy which mourns what it takes to be the end of philosophy, the end of itself. Which can speak only of ashes and the disaster. For what does Gillian Rose call in her last books? For love’s work, for the work of love. For what Hegel calls comedy:

The comical as such implies an infinite lightheartedness and confidence felt by someone raised altogether above his own inner contradiction and not bitter or miserable in it at all; this is the bliss and ease of a man who, being sure of himself, can bear the frustrations of his aims and achievements.

Rose:

No human being possesses sureness of self: this can only mean being bounded and unbounded, selved and unselved, ‘sure’ only of this untiring exercise.

The mismatch between aim and achievement elicits laughter, the laughter of the comic and the holy, not of cynicism or demonism. Laughter of the work of love, ‘to laugh bitterly, purgatively, purgatorially, and then to be quiet’.

Gillian Rose is writing in the face of death. Not tragically and not stoically, but comically. She does not laugh at death, but at the coming of what makes failures of all our works. Only to work is inevitably to fail; it is our condition. Then there is nothing about death’s coming which compromises love’s work or reveals its truth. Why write this book?

However satisfying writing is – that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control – it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and the agony of loving.

Why write and not love – unless writing is another kind of loving? Jim, dying, is fetched Herzen’s autobiography. This passage from that book is what soothes his ‘problem of self-representation’:

Every life is interesting; if not the personality, then the environment, the country are interesting, the life itself is interesting. Man likes to enter into another existence, he likes to touch the subtlest fibres of another’s heart, and to listen to its beating … he compares, he checks it by his own, he seeks for himself confirmation, sympathy, justification …

Philosophers should all be made to write autobiographies as well as all those dry pages.

Why write and not love? Gillian Rose writes Love’s Work to remind herself of the work of love. To let it abide in her. To give herself faith. But to give us faith, too. She is the Master of faith and the Master of loving, she who has experienced the failure of loving so many times. She who has been reborn from love. She who surrounded by books of alternative medicine which advocate ‘edgelessness’, yielding to the world-soul, to emptiness and to the no-self, would prefer the edginess and the struggle of love.

Now I understand. I am the Beloved and Love’s Work is the Lover. Gillian Rose’s book loves me as she could not. Despair yesterday when I could not get past page 88. A kind of laughter as I finished the book and knew comedy would be the cradle in which this book would hold me.

The Merciful Surplus of Strength

Like so many words in his theoretical lexicon (or at least that lexicon he takes over from ordinary words), Blanchot doubles up the word writing, letting it name a state in which the self finds itself unable to gather its forces together as well as the activity of putting words on the page. Is this why he writes so often of exhaustion and affliction – of those states which likewise set the self back into its incapacity, bringing it face to face with what it cannot do? There are also, it is true, more positive moods (‘we should know the disaster by joyful names’) – joys, lightnesses – which are also the topic of the récits and the criticism, but these likewise are never simply undergone in the first person.

Each time, the act of writing depends upon what Kafka has called ‘a merciful surplus of strength’ that returns the writer to the ‘I can’ that opens the world according to what is possible for a human being. Each time, strength lifts the writer from the quagmire, from those swamplike moods in which the self is not yet gathered together. Moods which, if not uncommon – the everyday itself, says Blanchot, can also be doubled up, giving itself to be experienced as a drifting and vacancy, as that boredom which suspends the relation of the self to itself – are too quickly forgotten, like the night mists that vanish with morning.

These moods, one might think, are also forgotten by the writer who attempts to commit them to narrative; if to write is to draw on the ‘merciful surplus of strength’ that returns to the writer the capacity to write, then that same ability to be able separates itself from the mood in which nothing is possible, not even memory. Unless that same experience – understood, now, as a test or a trial (but who is tested? who is on trial?) – leaves its mark within memory, one upon which the writer might draw so as to take it up in narration.

Here, of course, the writer will not be aware of what he is doing. The act of writing banishes the exhaustion that relents for a moment to allow him to write – but there is still a way that it might carry with it a cloud of non-action, that it fails in an important way to achieve itself, and marks this non-achievement in the finished work of prose. For a time, for the writer, writing seems activity itself – it is only activity; Kafka writes ‘The Judgement’ all in one go, in one night, his legs sore from being cramped up beneath his desk; but there is then a falling away; the burst of writing soon ends, leaving the writer as before, waiting for the ‘merciful surplus of strength’ to catch him on its rising wave.

Then the drama of writing has little to do with personal initiative. Unless initiative – the freedom to write, to create a finished book – is given, not taken; unless it is understood to depend upon a kind of passivity with respect to the task at hand.

The Test of Inspiration

It is in this sense that writing always implies something like a trial or a test. That is, the attunement Blanchot seems to feel is important to the author is already a trial, breaking the writer from the linearity of time. Writing is always set back into this trial, drawing deep upon it even as it seems to leap forward as activity. Certainly, inspiration is that gathering of strength before a creative act; but isn’t it also that wandering exile, the banishment from the time of production – of time as a medium of production, and from the self-relation that would allow the self to assume its agency? 

It is in this way that Blanchot recasts the experience of inspiration, which has always involved, in its traditional formulations, elements of passivity and activity. Unique in Blanchot, however, is the way in which the relation between those elements is understood. No one, I think, has set them apart so radically, and no one attempted to think what has been separated thus as part of the unitary movement of writing.

The experience of inspiration has always been concealed by the figure of the Muse, of the god; it was understood as a gift from afar, by which the Poet was called. With Blanchot, it is just such a gift, but one, now, deprived of the assurances of its origin. The modern writer (but this is not Blanchot’s term) is not sure what to write, or how; he is not sure that what he has begun is a true beginning, and must entrust himself, instead, to the bare act of writing – an act which also involves non-action as it emerges from the test of inspiration.

Martrydom, Witnessing

In a sense, nothing other is at issue when Homer invokes the Muses than in the passage Kafka writes on the ‘merciful surplus of strength’.

What did Homer suppose himself to be doing when he wrote (when he sang)? According to an interesting book by Finkelkraut, which I paraphrase here, he takes himself to be reporting the truth. No, Homer did not see what happened – he was not present at Troy, and many even say he was blind, but the Muses saw everything; they were eyewitnesses to the events. Even though Homer knows what occurred in broad outline, he calls upon the Muses to help him when his expertise fails. There is a point when he sings:

Tell me now, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus -you are gods, and attend all things and know all things, but we hear only the report and have no knowledge -tell me who were the leaders of the Danaans and their rulers.

True enough, the Muses supply him with details he had no means of knowing.

With Kafka, it is no longer a matter of calling on otherworldly assistance. Inspiration, now, draws upon the hidden, unexpected assistance of writing – the way in which suffering can be doubled up as it is experienced, then written. Only to write is also a relief from suffering – it is the merciful surplus that propels writing, that gives it strength, until there is the risk of writing in bad faith, where the figure of the Author usurps the more humble figure of the writer, part of whom is always lost before the act of writing can begin.

This loss gives nothing that the writer can know. If, as is certainly the case, the trial of writing is also a kind of witnessing, a vigilance – what is seen, what is experienced, never belongs to the order of knowledge and not simply because the trial is only undergone by a single individual, affording only a single, limited experience of what happened. Rather, the witness is in lieu of himself; vigilance happens in the absence of self-relation, as an exposure that has not closed itself into an experience. It happens in an event which is without determinacy, without limit, that happens, if it can be said to happen, in the suspension of time understood as a medium of production.

Nothing then is known – at least not directly. There is no Muse to reveal what the writer cannot see. Then the writer, like Homer, is blind; he must be. Blind and without the prospect of seeing what lies ahead of him. Then writing, the act of writing, is a leap in the dark. A leap of a kind of faith, and which keeps memory of that solitary passion, that martyrdom of witnessing that happens upstream of action.

Darkness and Forgetting

Helen in the Iliad and Alcinous in the Odyssey both say the same thing: it was the desire of the gods to grant material for a song that led to the terror of the Trojan wars. Helen first of all (she is speaking of Paris, also, knowing that they were the cause of the war to come): ‘On us two Zeus has set a doom of misery, so that in time to come we can be themes of song for men of future generations.’ Alcinous claims the gods destroyed Troy and the Acheans ‘that there might be a song in the ears of men yet unborn’.

The gods set the Trojan wars in motion to await the poet who would call upon the Muses to retell the events. But why did the gods, who saw everything, want to hear them told again? And what of the Muses, gods among the gods – why, if they were the ones who would give the poet the gift of song would they want to bring about the wars? Divine caprice? Or was it to hear the changes wrought by the poet, to experience the surprise of the events happening anew in the song?

Whatever the answer, we also find the equivalent in Blanchot’s fictions. Claudia says in When The Time Comes, ‘No one here wants to belong to a récit [a narrative]’; this phrase is repeated in Waiting for Oblivion. The conclusion (is it a conclusion?) of The Madness of the Day: ‘No more récits, never again.’ Helen and Alcinous suspect that what has befell them did so for the benefit of the singers in the greater halls – for Homer himself. Blanchot’s characters want only to disentangle themselves from linear narration, letting the word récit, like the word writing, double itself up, naming at once a literary genre, and narration in general, and the non-narratable: the event that does not belong to the order of knowable, recountable experience.

No more récits – but why? Because there are no more gods. The Muses were said to be daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. Some asked how, if this were the case, the poet could call upon the Muses as eyewitnesses of what happened before the birth of Zeus. Inventive poets gave another genealogy for the Muses, claiming they were born from Uranos and Gaia, gods from an earlier stage in the theogony. The Muses would have to come first of all, else how could a singer like Hesiod compose his epic? But then the theogony can only reach back to the Muses, recounting their birth and their progeny. Before them, darkness, the forgotten.

When there are no gods, it is this darkness that rolls forward in the writer, which bears him. It is the forgotten that, retreating from knowledge, from the measure of knowledge, knows itself in the words of the writer whom it has chosen. Why, once again, did the gods want to give material to Homer’s epics?

I think it was this: the gods, all-powerful, receive something over which they can exert no power. They learn once again of the wars of Troy and, with Hesiod’s Theogony, of their own birth. What else do they learn? That there is something in the song which escapes and threatens to destroy the gods themselves. In one sense, Homer and Hesiod give way to a generation of philosophers who agree that the epic poets have already made the gods all too human. But in another – although this is an experience that will become increasingly closed to philosophy – it is darkness, the forgotten that returns in place of the many gods of Hesiod and the Olympus of Homer.  

Are you stalled? Trapped? A last chance remains to you. Begin a fiction; send the spool of writing ahead of you and let it return. Fiction: the writer’s fort-da. Characters who live and act, mirrors of the living and dying of others in the world.

Tolstoy only knew his mother by a preserved silhouette; he made Nathalia in the image of the this absence of image. He loved her, and we love her, too. Dick’s dead sister becomes the dark haired girl. Travel very far, write a great deal, but like Kelvin in Solaris, it is your father you will embrace, there on the surface of a faraway planet.

But what happens when you know it is not your father whom you hold but some ghost of writing? Not your suicided son, but the undead one who supplants the living and will supplant everyone?

Now the truth of all characters, of all characterisation returns, like another version of Hamlet’s father, to prophesise the dying of the author who created him. Or to say to him: I am your dying gone bad, the corpse of Lazarus with his winding sheets and stench. Even your mother, Tolstoy, is death given life, and she will come apart, dust lost in the wind.

Write not to preserve something from death, but to give yourself more thoroughly to it. Write to die not once, but over and again. Writer, prophet: isn’t it the experience of language you touch as you dream of the farthest future? A dream that is the cause of your writing as it belongs to what is always to come?

Then what you have made by your novel is a ghost-ship; the Marie Celeste that everyone has deserted. What you have written, but also what gave you to think you have made it yourself, is part of the fort-da of writing; it is writing’s game that lives with you and lets itself die again with your death. It is writing that gave you life, and will withdraw it. Given and taken, and through everything you write and have written.

But then you, too are a character, the persona writing gives itself into order to send itself out into the world. Proxy, your substance is borrowed; the author is in search of his authority even before the characters come looking. And what would they find if they found you? Another character, not an author, and one already engaged on his own quest: to stand face to face with what called him, and to call it to account.

In truth, writing only writes of itself. Why does it need you? To give itself substance. To let you rise like an avatar, and live a life in the world. But then to fall back, with your death, into its own deathlessness.

Could you pity it, then, language, for this desire to give itself flesh, to go out into the world, in order to return? Might you pity it for its dependency, its love of the first creation it immediately overlays with destruction? More terrifying: there is no one to pity. Writing is not itself, or its ‘not’ is also what it is.

Language’s experience – living, dying, and unfolding the game of life and death in its own recurrence. Sense given and taken, fictions made and unmade, but everything pointing to what is still to come, not because it will save and redeem what has gone before, not because it will complete it, but because it is from there it will come again, the necessity of writing’s fort-da, the freedom it gives by way of its return.

I am never young enough, say that. I have never been young enough, say that. But doesn’t youth dream of itself in you? Doesn’t it call itself to itself, and spread the shore before you, in its spreading simplicity? And then you are young again. Then, and for the first time: young, when youth burned ardently inside you, and resolve was pure, adamantine.

But this is a youth that has to be won. The origin is difficult to reach; how to leap upstream? How to struggle your way back? I would like to speak, say that. Now, for the first time, I know what it is to speak, say that. Youth – at last. Youth – at the end of life, not the beginning.

How to train yourself to write at a stroke, at a single stroke, like a Zen calligrapher? How to live and die in the purity of an act that gathers all of you up, all your life, all experience, and sets it aflame by the light caught on the sword that flashes out in the dawn. Aflame – as if all that you lived was fuel for the fire by which you will burn.

The period of asceticism, in India, follows a life as a householder: you must have lived, married and had children before you can wander out as a sanyasin. Shiva, the ascetic god, was accused by the other gods of never having lived in the world. In an eyeblink, Shiva caused himself to be born; he lived, married, brought up his children and then died. He opened his eyes to the gods who bowed and asked for his blessing.

And writing, too, can only die to a life already lived. Isn’t this the meaning of writing from experience? You must have lived, but must, too, be ready to sacrifice that life by writing, must heap it up on the funerary pyre and leap into it as it burns.

Perhaps. But there is also the substantiality of that life, and of the living relationships that bind you to others. Did I really think, when I was young, I could sacrifice what I had not yet gathered – that there was a shortcut to the life of the sanyasin? In truth, I was not yet sufficiently young – or I did not know as youth what could only be achieved if I lived in the world among others.

Perhaps it is necessary to think the sanyasin alongside the householder: that both lives might be entwined together, and need one another. For of course, nothing is sacrificed by writing, not really. And isn’t it the greatest of joys to meet one’s friends, to eat with them, as I did last night? And wasn’t that why this dark morning was so much the more alive for me, when, in lieu of writing – as I am always without writing – I could at least know and write of what is impossible?

Sometimes I wonder if it was only writing that Yukio Mishima sought by his coup, his seppuku. Writing, or youth – those young men he loved (he would receive prostitutes dressed in the uniform of the Peers’ School that he attended) – could be given only by death (seppuku was also a sexual fantasy, for him, performed each night, and driving his lovers to leave him).

Three times, in The Sea of Fertility, a young man is reborn. Three times, youth is to come to youth. The fourth volume of the tetralogy is sent to the publishers on the day of Mishima’s death. The fourth, The Decay of the Angel, where the youth did not die, but lives on, aging, in blindness. Unbearable! So Mishima, in whom, he said, words fell like rain, Mishima who barely needed to revise his prose, had to give himself death in order to find youth.

What does the West mean for Mishima? Substantial life, his house furnished in a European style. And the East? Death, just that, and the vanished life of action (the sword, and not the chrysantheum). But perhaps there is no action – not even writing – that does not rest upon substantial life. No flashing swordstroke whose sense is given immanently in action.

Sometimes I don’t feel worthy of listening, of being able to listen. That I fall below listening in some way, and cannot measure up to it. As though listening were a task, a knd of discipline. And yet when I put on The Ruins of Adventure by Jandek, it is also as though the music gives me that discipline, that it commands me in some way. To pay attention. To sit still at the edge of myself, ears pricked up like a dog.

Commands me – and this is its law. But a strange, giving law that also opens within me the ears to hear and the capacity to listen. ‘I can hear now’ – a version of what the boy says at the beginning of Tarkovsky’s Mirror: ‘I can speak now.’ I can hear, and this can forced into itself, deepening. The ‘can’ hollowed out and welcoming into my chest the music that made a place for itself in me. That made a listening place.

Listening disciplined – that, but more. Listening given the capacity to listen, or have that capacity deepened. As the music becomes in some way essential. As if forces listening to be deeper than itself, but not to find itself. To lose listening in listening. To have no knowledge of its locus, of the place from which one listens.

To say this is a visceral music is a I think to say exactly that. Visceral: a music of the guts and entrails. This album is a singer and a fretless bass guitar, that’s all. And the bass, without pulse, searching thickly along itself, with its own thick consistency, reaches me at the centre of my body, there where the soul is, where the soul, listening awakens.

Called into being by the thick brown mess of the bass. Called – the music having made a place in me to hear itself. To return to itself in me, and thereby almost ignoring me, turning me aside. Which is also what I want in music, that: to be turned somehow aside. To not know in some sense. To forget in some sense. And to be led along that forgetting, unable to pull together what opens before me and opens me.

And so with the bass, with the singing: the form is elusive. There’s not even a blues form here. A voice, subdued, nearly defeated, sings in phrases, without verse, without chorus, and the bass – follows, but does it – follow? And in brown waves it reaches me, the music, the singing. In dull brown waves reaching me like dull blows. I don’t know where it’s leading, where the song’s going. Don’t know how long it will be. There are no clues here.

Am I too dull to listen today? Am I not quite up to it? But then that dullness comes from the music, arrives from there. And beats me about the head with great muffled blows. Until I’m not sure who listens and what to. And I can’t assemble what’s being sung – tentatively, adventuringly. Can’t follow the runs up and down the guitar neck, for there are sudden runs of high notes, unexpected.

I feel dazed. No: this dazedness is the swamp that loses the ‘I’ in me. When I am more than the point of attention that can follow a song as it unfolds in time. My God where is this music going to? And how can it go on, this music? Someone club it to death. Someone finish clubbing it to death. It’s like some roadside animal you’ve half run over. Something broken spined that still looks up at you and lives.

Even like this, half dead, it’s living. Living, though it can hardly last from moment to moment. Nearly dead in that lag that dips between the moments. A dazed music. A music concussed. Beaten in a terrible injury that will claim your life only later. Beaten, and you’re told you should visit hospital, but it’s nothing you tell yourself, dazed, though the next morning they’ll find you dead. And meanwhile this dead non-blues. Meanwhile the blues concussed, echoes of the blows rained upon the head.

Ah, the song is so – long. How much longer? And so – hesitant. As if it did not have the strength to tie moment to moment. As though it were about to spill from itself and all moments like an oil spill. Time become a thick, dark swamp. Time pouring from itself, wounded. It is the lag that’s terrible. The sense of a – lag – that unjoins moment from moment. That decouples them like passenger carriages. That attenuates time, nearly wears it out. And the suspense of the music is given in its very capacity to survive, to hold itself together despite the attenuation.

The attenuated blues. The blues attenuated, spun out long past life and living. Blues of the dead, the undead. Blues of the half-killed dead, the not-enough-killed dead, blues of the not-yet-put-to-rest. Of the survivor who does not live, but in whom death lives. The survivor who lives dying in life, and lets dying bleed into life.

Do you remember that Alfred Bester novel, The Demolished Man? And what happened at the end, when the man was demolished? Bester doesn’t spell it out. He leaves us to guess. This album is the demolition. This is the album of a demolished man …

Lumbering. Staggering along. You have to turn it up, this album, to let the singing uncouple itself from the bass throb. It demands attention. Forces itself forward. Disgustingly. Drawlingly. As if asked to be stamped out. Ruin me, it says. A wordless crying now. A cry without energy, wandering. And the bass plodding beneath, without rhythm. It’s played higher, the thick notes reaching up. And then ends, the second song ends.

A pause, and the third song lurches forward. Thick and bubbly like the voice from below in the Burroughs routine, ‘The Man Who Taught His Asshole to Talk’. Thick, dark words from the bass. But plodding, unlike Burroughs’ arsehole. Half-conscious, dazed. And the other voice can sing too, it is not frosted over, mute. Sings – drawls. Reaches out of itself like some worm, worming about. Like the dream of the maggot’s birth in The Fly. Something disgusting has been born. Something wrong. Death in life. Death wandering dazedly into life. And singing-speaking. Drawling. As everything in me, the listener, says: this voice is wrong.

The fourth song. ‘I can focus all my thoughts like a lazer – beam’. The voice gathered to itself, stronger. Ruminating – and now you can follow what is sung. ‘I’ll have to be a mental – dynamo/ And weeave a – spell/ on myseelf’. It can be followed, this song. ‘I can join the circles and triangles …’

The fifth song. The fifth demolished song. This a disgusting music. That muses from disgust, a golem of disgust. Bataille’s base matter come to life. Thick bubbles rising brownly – bursting. Grey-brown geyser bubbles from an unknown source in the earth. From which everything in you says keep away, stand away. Rising disgustingly from some unknown source.

Something wrong has happened here. Some vile spell cast. Some curse. The bubbles rise like prophecy. ‘It’s toooooo bleak’ – ‘to’ howled. ‘The ruins of adventure/ smoking in a burnt out city …’ Macbeth‘s witches. ‘Embraace the greeey of reality …’ Something is wrong. Something alive that should not live. ‘Why should I live at all …’ Something in pain. ‘I feel so sick of days / minutes or hours/ time, times oppressive/ Go awaay time/ Leave me at once/ I don’t want – to know you/ I’ll take the sun/ I’ll take the blaaack night/ I’ll walk through per-cep-tion/ But it’s so hard to waiiiiiiiit/ I want to go nowwwww …’

Music of the waiting for the end. ‘I want to leave through the back door/ I want to disappeaar completely and never be found/ I want to cease to exist as far as I know …’ sung more firmly now. More resolvedly, slightly. ‘I could always go drinking/ and neeeeeeeever come back/ I could go travelling in search of nothing …’ As though the music, the singing – Jandek – had reached some level of self-awareness, some ability to speak of itself. The song of disgust, and disgust at disgust. The song that sings of putting an end to itself. But that sings and there is no end.

What questions do we ask into an oeuvre? What is allowed to echo there? Two boys lost their ball in deep grass on a French hillside. Following it, they discovered it had fallen into an entrance of a cave. Inside, carrying torches, they discovered great ochre coloured beasts on the walls in the flickering light: this was Lascaux where, thereafter, various theorist-adventurers would find there what they wanted, asking their question into the cave’s echo and receiving their echoing question which they took for an answer.

And so with the writer in her criticism: is it not some clue to herself that she seeks when she writes about a body of work? As though the authors upon whom she writes were other versions of her, ahead of her. As though they had advanced further on a journey she was only beginning.

So can a writer find their courage in that pantheon of writers that stands all about them. Courage by their example, by the signatures they left just ahead of you, as the adventures in Journey to the Centre of the Earth followed the marks of a previous explorer.

Courage is important, and also the sense of being accompanied. The critic can also call from a dead body of words something like a ghost of their author – the name Bataille, say, but as it refers to more than the writer who lived and died. Then criticism is also a kind of seance; it lets that shadow flicker on the cave walls that is a ghost of the writer – a way of communing with the dead as they are buried in words, and not under earth.

What kind of life did the author lead? Where did they live? Who loved them? These are questions the ghost cannot answer. But the critic’s question, the first, is what drew her to the oeuvre in the darkness. That led her downwards into that echo chamber where questions return in the guise of answers.

Some writers know to get out of the way of the work, to let it live. Know that the work belongs to darkness, that the ochre beasts should be discovered by the uncertain light of a reader’s torch, and that there should no general illumination, no way of seeing the whole, and all at once.

So Blanchot, who wrote to a director who proposed a film version of Thomas that his desires did not matter with respect to this project; he voices a doubt in his letter – part of his general suspicion of the visible – but then says: treat me as though I were dead. A posthumous existence he’d already claimed for himself in the author’s note at the end of The Infinite Conversation.

Dead, and away from the work. Dead, and retreating into darkness, to let the work be. To let it shine by the reader’s torch and not according to light of his own pronouncements. Discretion, then; withdrawal – impressive to maintain, in the face of the media, a kind of negative celebrity, a void in place of a man. There is the work in the darkness that belongs to it. And the man about whom for a long time we knew nothing.

And as with words, so music. And as with Blanchot, with Jandek, too: for his retreat in the face of his work is as absolute. What discipline does it take to perform live, and yet to maintain his discretion, not to put on a show, to address the audience, and to insist on there being an exit that leads out of the venue by a secret route, where the audience cannot find him?

And what effort to resist replying in depth to the queries that he is sent, limiting himself to a few cryptic, fortune-cookie words written in his familiar hand on a Corwood catalogue? The better, though, to allow the work to speak. To draw listeners to it by their own light – by their listening. And let them bring to it their own questions, which they hear, in the echoing darkness as answers.

Yes, this is admirable. But it does not hold quite all the way. For has there not been, in recent years, a new candour in the lyrics – a directness, a non-obliqueness, that provides the listener with a clue to the whole oeuvre, to a real sense of what it was always about? Depression, of course. For his whole life, says the singer on Manhattan Tuesday. And doesn’t he promise his audience in Newcastle to bring them a little of that – depression?

With this frankness, something new happens; a light flashes out, and the whole cave becomes visible – everything, the whole oeuvre, and at once. And we see that the man who recorded and released his work for many years did so from depression, and out of depression. That was the mood that attuned everything. Depression was the secret.

And yet the point, obvious enough, but worth repeating, that his depression was never complete enough that it did not lend itself as a topic for lyrics. That it did not close over its head so he could not rise gasping to sing of it. Then it was never complete, never absolute, it allowed respite, and that respite was the work, and the condition for that work.

Depression doubled up – depression joyful enough to sing of itself: this is relief, respite – and isn’t that borne also by the work. Isn’t that its hope, that it was possible, that the grey clouds parted, the black sun gave way to the brightness of the real one? Wasn’t that the miracle, the returning miracle of the faith implicit in the work, in the recording of music and its release?

An obvious point; and besides, it is to be remembered that depression wasn’t always his theme, and it was never simple. The light that spreads from Manhattan Tuesday, from the lyrics in recent years is only a flash; everything is seen and at once, to be sure, but this is a fake, an eidolon; it brings one Jandek forward only to push another aside, and the oeuvre is more than what is illuminated now.

‘There’s nothing to get’, said Sterling Smith in response to a question of what the music was about. Nothing: and that is the darkness in which an oeuvre gathers us to itself, and speaks to us in a secret autobiography – not Smith’s, this time, but ours, who listen and seek to find ourselves in listening. But to lose ourselves too, this is true – to become, to get away from ourselves. To move in a new direction.

But isn’t that what is also told in the story of a life? That if we seek to become what are, that becoming also means an escape, and even a kind of death – a dying to what we were, just as the Tarot dealer reassures us that death – the skeleton with a scythe – only means change. And that life will have to fall to what it does not know in order to find not itself – fixed, determinate – but what it might be.

Does this mean we might identify with the music, discovering it as an account of our moods, our melancholy? Or is it – fake alternative – also difference that alters them, our moods and our temperament, that attunes them differently, letting them resonate with what they do not quite know?

But all of this is too simple, as if it wasn’t the play of these alternatives that fascinates – the eternal fort–da of the search for meaning and its defeat. For isn’t it the very ordinariness of the man on the record sleeves that is the source of mystery? The ordinary – a young man in a check shirt, smiling at someone – as it is framed and presented to us as the record sleeve of a music that sets the blues adrift?

And isn’t it what survives of these blues forms that makes this music offensive to those (Chusid) familiar with, say, free jazz and the contemporary art music avant-garde? It is the way Jandek is close to blues forms and far, the way the Representative is presented as a man just like us but who is also withdrawn from us, who does not acknowledge his audience.

Close and far. Living and dying. Or a kind of dying – endless change come close, meaning sliding away. It is not just that Jandek is an enigma, and Smith, but that we are likewise enigmas, and it is this that echoes back when we ask our questions into the dark.

Let me ask my question: Why Blanchot, whom I read for the first time in 1993, and now Jandek, heard for the first time only recently (a matter of months)? Why this pair, heard and listened to before I knew the legend that surrounds either of their names?

1. Where is the room in which the protagonist of Josipovici’s novel finds himself? When is it? Minimal description (but then the whole narrative is written minimally): greyness and silence, broken only by the sound of his feet echoing on the bare boards. Then, sometimes, the cries of children in the playground below, and the hum of city traffic, far away. But for the most part, greyness and silence, and the protagonist, Felix, looking out of the window.

We might mistake the room for a real room – as one his son can enter, and his daughter, both concerned about their divorced and now widowed father (are you a widower when you were divorced from the woman who died?). A room in which a telephone can ring and his son can say ‘Fuck you’, upset by his father’s seeming indifference to his surroundings. Why won’t he get the cracked window fixed? Sometimes his daughter comes to clear up. He hears her moving the vacuum cleaner upstairs, and waits for her to leave. What does he do in the greyness and the silence?

Perhaps it is there that memories come to him. He has found the room after everything that has happened. He’s moved there, to a kind of promontory in which he can be alone. Alone – but it is there the memories come, as they do to the recumbent narrator of Beckett’s Company. Felix remembers conversations, encounters. His son, when young. Proposing to his wife, even as he discourses on Shakespeare and Rabelais (Felix is a writer).

Then his wife leaving him for a younger man whom he has been advising. Felix, in these reported conversations, talks too much. He is too voluble. His wife, Sally, leaves him for Brian, the writer. Felix had said Brian’s work was disappointing him. What promise Brian had! But Sally doesn’t see why Felix should what he sees as Basil’s failure as a personal affront. She’s tired of Felix. And then she leaves him.

Conversations with Lotte, who Felix knew as an adolescent. Then, he desired her – but now, after Sally leaves him, she will give him what she seemed to promise. They walk through an art gallery in Munich. She resembles a woman in one of the paintings. He remembers how she seemed to flirt with him when they were young.

Then there is Felix’s friend, George. His confidante. George is worried about his friend. Hasn’t he recently had a heart attack? Didn’t he have to be revived, having died for a while. Felix, for his part, remembers being dead. When he tells George about it, we recognise the description: greyness, silence, his face at the window, the hum of distant traffic, the cries of children, sometimes, from below: that room again, and now we understand.

Where was the room? When was it? Is it real? Is it imaginary, or somewhere between the two? Is Felix dead, or dying? Is he about to leave the room by way of the door, he says, is open? Again and again a description of the room breaks into the narrative. In fact it is there at the beginning, breaking open the narrative (and what an opening! – as Steve says, ‘There are some books whose first lines, whose opening lines, are enough’):

A room.

He stands at the window.

And a voice says: Everything passes. The good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow. Everything passes.

Whose voice is this? What has passed? A whole life? Everything – the good, the bad; joy and sorrow? Everything passes: the title of the novel: is this a consolation? But who is there to be consoled? Who speaks, and to whom?

The next paragraph of the novel:

A room.

He stands at the window.

Silence.

He stands.

Silence.

2. Felix is a writer. We learn from his conversations that he does not write often. Only when inspired, not like the prolific Brian. When inspired – and he describes a great movement of inspiration to George. He had woken in the night, filled with dread. But then, in the morning, the dread had passed. Euphoria: he began to write. Bent over the paper. Covering line after line, on the white paper, writing without pause.

A few pages pass before we return to this part of the narrative. Felix wrote till he was exhausted. He closed his eyes, triumphant. And then, opening them, sees the page was black. Nothing but black marks overlaying one another. He hadn’t turned the page. ‘All the while I was writing. I hadn’t turned the page.’ And then, ‘That’s how it had began.’ How what began? What? Was it now the heart attack came, and the room opened? I think so. It was then.

3. Writing overlaid by writing: that’s the image on the cover of this beautifully designed novel.

Everything passes: whose voice is speaking – and to whom? Perhaps the room is that place where such certainties can be heard. It may seem, then, that Felix is indifferent, that he neglects himself. In truth, he has heard a voice say: everything passes. The joy, the sorrow. The good, the bad. Everything passes, and isn’t the room also a kind of passageway? A place to which he can now return, just as this narrative circles around it?

A place of passing – a way of leaving behind the world, or knowing the world as passage. Perhaps that is it: the world, in the room, is affirmed as passage, as what passes. Everything passes – the world is a great passage, where there will be joy, and then sorrow; the good, and the bad. Then who speaks? The voice hardens in the air. Speaks from the empty air in the room, reaching him from the silence. Him – but who is he? He’s silent now. He’s not talking about Rabelais, about Shakespeare. Silent, and nameless. For he is never named, when he’s in the room. Who is he, the one who hears the voice say: everything passes?

Paul Schrader says a whole sequence of his films are about men in rooms. Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, Light Sleeper – each time, a man, a room, as though everything had been reduced to the essential. A man, a room – and isn’t the protagonist of Light Sleeper a journal keeper? Doesn’t he keep notes for himself?

That’s what a man does, alone in a room. Notes – to reflect upon what has been and on what is happening. On what is passing. Because everything is passing. But I suppose in each case these men are in rooms only for an interval. They are there for a period of waiting, a period of assessment, letting the capacity to act gather inside them. Soon, they will act – but for now? A man, a room.

But for Josipovici’s man, alone in his room, nothing is gathering. The opposite, in fact: neglect, indifference – or that is, at least, what his son and daughter see. He rests in silence; he is a writer – but we do not hear of him writing in his room. He’s silent, just that. He does not write, just that. Inaction, inability – it is to let the time of action pass, to give the ability to be to its passing that he is in the room. Let the world go. Let it let itself go. Meanwhile, the room. Between death and life. Where he is neither dead, nor alive.

4. The book contains almost as much space, as silence, as language, says Mark. ‘It’s almost auto-contemplative’. A book that contemplates itself – not, now like the fulfilled soul of book 10 of Aristotle’s Ethics, in whom thought thinks itself. Not the one whose contemplation turns, still, around the capacity to think.

Thinking, rather, that happens, like fate. That thinks the very absence of a thinker at its centre. I am reminded straightaway of Blanchot’s récit (and that is what Everything Passes also is: a récit), Thomas the Obscure, where it is said, I think, therefore I am not. A thinking, a contemplation with no one at its centre. That begins with a room, a space, between life and death, but belonging neither to life nor death.

The narrative, then, is as though set back behind itself. It belongs to a time before its own origin, as though death, Felix’s death, had occurred before he had ever lived. Only it is no longer Felix’s death at all, and the room, the empty room, is writing’s remove, the space of writing.

Thought thinks itself; writing writes itself, but without a writer. Or the writer is given to himself in an act of writing that sets itself back from him. This is what is marked in this novel; it is what Josipovici is able to mark by his discretion, by his silences: the photographic negative of Felix’s writing overlaid by writing.

Why then do I wish as I read and read Everything Passes, for more silence? Why do I wish the novel were yet more compacted, as though it could be drawn into itself like a black hole, collapsing everything but the room at its centre?

1. You envy him, don’t you?

To find an idea for which he could live and die – this is what Kierkegaard says he hopes for in an early entry in his journal. No surprise, then, his impassioned experience of God, a few years later. He has found what he sought – or was it the idea that sought him, waited for him and then trapped him? Now his torment had a name; the idea was clothed, and he could sacrifice his life as he always wanted to it to be sacrificed.

He was the kind of young man who wanted his life to blaze into the air, who wanted to lively keenly, wholly, and for his life to be consumed. What drama! What magnificent struggle! A career spread before him; writing could bear him through hundreds of pages, opening out, in his last works, to a great attack on Christendom. Righteousness! Indignation! Kierkegaard, no longer young, was still aflame.

Was he ever certain of God? There was that first, burning experience – but then? Only the certainty of what had burned. Only the great task of writing – for now he had something to write, and that was what mattered, first of all. Something to write, something to carry him through his days and nights; a task to which to sacrifice himself, and by way of writing.

No – he was never certain, never certain enough of God, but there was writing, which compensated in some way. Writing in which he could throw himself up in the darkness as a wave bears up a ship. On what stormy waters was he tossed! What secret dramas raged within him! And Copenhagen thought of him only as that gloomy wanderer, Magister Kierkegaard, with his bent back and his walking stick.

How thrilling to be engaged, inside, by a burning idea! And then, in his last years, having thrown himself to the satires of the Corsair, there was the relief of martyrdom, for he was the kind of man who wanted to become Aristotle’s god, Aristotle’s beast: a man alone, a man all alone and cut off from life. How solemnly could Kierkegaard write of himself in his journals (‘I am a lonely fir tree’)!

You shake with laughter: I am a lonely fir tree. But you envy that solemnity. You envy his certainty.

2. To be possessed by an idea: but what when it is the uncertainty of the idea that bears you? What, further still, if it is scarcely an idea but only an open space, exposed on all sides to uncertainty? Then there is nowhere for you to rest; nothing against which to fall back – no chance of righteousness and of indignation; no rallying point to which to draw others, who, like you, are drawn to rail against the world.

To be dispossessed, then, and lacking an idea. No stars above the desert, no path among the dunes: what test is this? Forty days pass, and then another forty: you are not even being tested; no one watches for you. Lost – but are you even lost? The desert is not even a desert, but a room like any other, a room with a desk and a window.

Deleuze writes somewhere every would-be thinker (and who is yet a thinker?) should spend, as he did, eight years writing nothing in particular. Eight years, and eight times eight years – and eight times that: the desert has opened to include all space, and time is the interval of wandering.

But it is not even that you’ll write nothing at all, that you’ll stop staining silence and finally give up. Stalled writing, essays half-finished, notes towards what will never begin: why have you never known that shame which says you, and you above all, do not deserve to write? Why has the angel never stood before you with a fiery sword and said: bow your head?

Pascal (another writer): all the evil of the world begins because you cannot sit quietly in an empty room. Can you imagine it, an empty room, without a cone of light and a notebook? Can you imagine an absence that you did not defile, silence in which you did not cry out – a perfect night, closed in darkness?

Kierkegaard dreamed of the judgement – he waited for it, even as you dreamed of the book you would write against death, that great, fiery volume that would fill half the sky. It was because he was waiting that his book could draw silence around them in the night. Yes, that’s what I have decided: you write against death and Kierkegaard wrote in order to die.

3. There is another Kierkegaard, the writer who writes indirectly and not just because all writing, all language is indirect and you cannot point, as he wanted to, at the glory of God that he could not see. Wasn’t God’s glory waiting for him on the other side of writing? Waiting, but only as death – death as the end of writing.

Wasn’t he, Kierkegaard, to die at the age of 34? Hadn’t it been fated thus? Write, then; write up to the limit of death. Write of God – but indirectly. Write of the God his readers can only reach through indirection. Of God – or is of the cessation of writing that he dreams? Of God – or only the respite from writing, the completion of his authorship?

Death: it is of that which he dreams. To die – to fall into the arms of God. To finish writing, to die – but meanwhile there is the great forward-streaming of a writing that is never simply a means. To write: isn’t this what he meant by the sickness unto death? Isn’t this what is meant by anxiety? Writing itself; writing lost in itself; writing that doubles itself up, congeals, and expels its writer into the desert.

It is there you will meet him, the one who is not Kierkegaard, there where the darkness becomes a desert and both of you wander without an idea in your head. No, not that one, writer of his books, but the other one, the wanderer, the double who was lost as soon as there was writing. The ‘other’ Kierkegaard for whom God was never God and Regine never real.

4. Perhaps it is of Kafka I am writing, not Kierkegaard. From the journals: I want to die in my books, whilst my characters live. And Basho’s last haiku – dying in the field, my dreams wander on. Perhaps it is only the silhouette of a writer who dies in our place. A silhouette: not you and not me – the one who opens each of us lie a door to let the darkness open out.

What are you writing, with the darkness pulled around you like a cape? What are you writing in that cone of light? Whisper it; say, I am dead. Say it again: I am a dead man. For it must begin with death, writing. You must have already died. You must have seen the world with death’s eyes and wanted the angel with the sword to come again.

Who was God, and who was Regine? What was that city – Copenhagen? You never lived; you never wrote. I see a cone of darkness within a cone of light. I see the notebook shut and the pencil falling from your hands.

To give, to be given: do I envy what Gorchakov would have protected when he held a lit candle in cupped palms and went across the drained pool? Twice the flame was snuffed out by the wind; twice it was relit, until, on his third crossing, he fulfilled the promise he made to the madman: he was across, he had crossed. Then, a groan, off camera. The sound of a fall. Gorchakov has fallen; has he died?

Then I remember the letters Blanchot wrote to inquirers, ‘Although I might like to meet, the circumstances of my work make it impossible …’; ‘Henceforward I live in such retirement that …’ He no longer saw even his closest friends, he told one inquirer, and Jabes, in an interview, said his communication with Blanchot consisted only of those short letters, written in an exquisite hand, such as all his correspondents received.

Then, as he approached his tenth decade, his hand became unsteady, and those epistolatory exchanges, often marked by long breaks, began to cease altogether. What was he protecting, what did he need to protect, so that he could meet no one, and that what he called friendship passed only by way of the exchange of letters?

‘His life is entirely dedicated to literature and the silence that belongs to it’. The silence of literature, that is one name, but it says very little. Silence? Rather a kind of murmuring, an indetermination that makes the most decisive speech tremble. Did he need to be alone to let that experience be kept? Or was it that his whole life had been lived so it could best experience that indetermination, so he could let it claim him as one who could not help but write?

Do I envy that retirement, that separation from the world? Do I envy the sense that it was only possible to speak in one’s own terms, or better, in the terms of that writing, that speech, that the course of thought, of a whole life was an attempt to honour? Light the candle; walk across the drained pool. Now I understand: to write here is also to protect writing. And to write of speech, of speaking, is, every day to attempt to cross again that pool.

Of what would you write? Or what, by writing, would you keep of speech? What you write must respond to what comes from afar, and unexpectedly. With, not alone – but with whom? Alongside whom? First of all, alongside oneself, which asks for that separation between one who writes here and the other who lives, who acts. To live alongside, to live that separation that holds the lit candle as between closed palms.

Do I envy him, the one around whom my palms are closed? But he is not here yet, as he will never come. Hope: I have cleared my life for his arrival. And what I have written is only that clearing. But there are others who also know that opening. Writers, readers: friends as they, too travel alongside themselves.

A writer faces eternity or the lack of it every day: is that the quote? Eternity, then would be a passage of writing – to take that, at least from the day. And the lack of it? No writing; nothing done. What misery! But here I remember a passage often quoted at Red Thread(s); it’s from Duras:

There should be a writing of non-writing. Someday it will come. A brief writing, without grammar, a writing of words alone. Words without supporting grammar. Lost. Written, there. And immediately left behind.

Of words alone? As though there were a word for each thing, for everything. And to place words a certain way would be as to paint a still life. Those words – there; perfectly placed, perfectly connected to one another, like Cezanne’s apples.

But then of course there cannot be a word for everything – or rather, what names everything is what denies the indefinite multiplicity of everything, the great sprawl of the singular. To write a still life must be to make a poem that would avoid, in its operation, the idealisation of the world it would lay before us. Can the poem become itself a thing; can it thicken itself into a still life of words, ideal words, it is true, but composed so that they have, in their arrangement, the semblance of singularity?

So would language be reborn; so would it give birth to itself and as though for the first time: words, now, like things, and arranged into a thing; language roves in the world as anything roves; it speaks like a fallen branch or a leafy stump; it speaks like a rockpool or the spreading surf: how did it make the leap out of abstraction?

A writing of non-writing, a language of non-language, that will come, beaching words without grammar. Words, just words – arranged, placed like sea shells on the sand at dusk. Sea shells placed, unplaced by the sea. Lost – and then left behind.

By what divine neglect would such a poem be born! Words lost as the items in a Zen garden – lost, placed, unplaced – by what skill to aspire to a divine neglect – to that indifference that lets a word be lost? It is a god who writes, or the poet is a god. The words placed themselves thus. The words asked to be placed thus; they stranded themselves here; they asked to be lost here.

Or: it was language that asked. Language weary from signifying; language tired of transporting sense. That said: I would like to lie down. I would like to lay down in words that lay down. Eternity – or the lack of it, each day: but doesn’t this still bind the author too strongly to what falls away from the divine? Doesn’t it make writing a matter of will, of the deliberate placing of words?

Only a god can neglect. Only a god can turn away from you as she faces you. I think that’s what the ancients knew in their sacred groves. I think that was what was known when names were invented for the gods of the earth and the sea and the sky. What was named thus – what gave itself to name a god – were words unplaced – lost words, words content to lose themselves, and asked to be lost.

Eternity, the lack of it: there is a writing, a non-writing that dissolves this alternative. Words lost, and left to be found in their loss: eternal and uneternal, ordinary words that seem to call out to the farthest parts of the universe.

A writing of non-writing, a non-writing writing: the fragment gathers of words to be neglected. Often, they are dated as in a diary (the same is true of Red Thread(s)); but doesn’t the date only recall the unlimiting of the day, its blossoming?