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A Book of Revelations: was that what I was going to write? A new Book of Revelations, a new Apocalypse: is that why I journeyed out to that Greek island? It's the funniest thing of all, W. says, the thought of me heading out on the ferry from Piraeus with my divine mission in mind. How hilarious! What did I intend to do? What did I think would happen?

Of course Piraeus is disgusting now, everyone knows that. Was it really where I was going to begin my mystical journey? I must have been disappointed, W. says. I was, wasn't I? Athens was bad enough, that's what I told him, but Piraeus! Piraeus was an abomination. But I was borne along in a dream. I had my dream. I drifted along, a young idiot.

'And what did you have in your rucksack?', W. asks. 'What was in there?' He knows, he says. He knows full well. It's a detail I shouldn't omit. Your typewriter!, exclaims W. Your typewriter … It was some time ago, W. says. Before laptops, at any rate. Well, before they became cheap. And a pen and paper wouldn't do, would it? Not for taking dictation with regard to the apocalypse. A typewriter! A typewriter was essential!

'There you were', says W., 'on the ferry with your rucksack and your typewriter. What books did you bring? Did you take anything to read? Oh I forgot, didn't I?', W. says. 'You were going to give up reading. You were going to let it go. Books were going to drop out of your hand. What were you going to do instead? Act? Step into the world? Hilarious', W. says. 'The temerity!', he says. 'Write? Yes, that was it, wasn't it?', he says. 'You were going to write. To write as a man acts. And write a new Book of Revelations.

'Of course, you never got to your island, did you?' It'd gone wrong at Piraeus. I'd asked for the wrong island, or they misheard me, or they wanted to misdirect me. But I was heading for Paros, not Patmos. Paros, and by mistake – the party island, what an idiot! That was my mystical journey, W. says, to a party island.

'What did you think as the ferry docked? Patmos has become very commercial – is that what you thought? It's very noisy here – is that what you thought? People don't wear much on Patmos – was that it?

'Still, you made good. You slept on a rock and woke in the sun. It was Sunday. Old ladies gave you collaver. And then, rucksack on your back, up you went to the monastery, the deserted monastery. You had one of your pantheistic little ecstasies, didn't you?

'Imagine it: a Hindu in a Greek Orthodox monastery, completely deserted. A Hindu ready to write a new Book of Revelations. Paros, not Patmos'. W. still finds it funny. 'An idiot with a typewriter, on the wrong island. An idiot on his mystical journey, and no books to read, on the wrong island …'

Alfonso Reyes, the great Mexican writer, said to me: We publish in order not to go on emending rough drafts. And I know he was right. We publish to be rid of a book, to forget it.

Borges in conversation, from Borges at Eighty

Like Chekhov, [Joseph] Roth took his beginnings in sketches, humouresques, satire, and, like Chekhov, he never seems to have abandoned his belief that the human character is basically flat. Trotta in The Radetzky March, Tunda in Flight Without End, Taittinger in The String of Pearls, are basically all one and the same: dutiful, helpless, out of their depth. The view propounded in his books that though the world and our lives are complicated, we are simple, seems to me to have much to be said for it.

[Roth's] men – not even hollow men, but flat men, cardboard models, clothes-horses – are the perfect servants of, ultimately, a hollow empire; able to swell a throng or progress, to look good on parade – effectively, their last hurrah – but not to fight a war. Their separateness, their anonymity, irrelated and irrelevant little statelets into which they will ignorantly or viciously disappear.

from Michael Hofmann's introduction to The Radetzky March

What will happen the next day – the day after we destroy ourselves?, W. asks. A holy silence. Birds singing. A great sigh will go up from the whole of creation. Have I ever felt, as he has, that the world is waiting for us to disappear? That the knot will be untied, the damage undone? Meanwhile, our lives. In the meantime, our friendship, which is really the destruction of friendship.

Something has gone very badly wrong, W. can't avoid that conclusion. And in some important way, it's all our fault. W. holds us responsible, he's sure not sure why. But what would I know of this? How could I understand the depths of the disaster? It's my idiocy that protects me, W. says. It burns above me like a halo.

'If you knew, if you really knew' … but I don't know, says W. I have intimations of it, to be sure. I have a sense of the disaster, but no more than that. Only he knows, W. says. Only he, of the pair of us, knows what will happen.

The chicken won't stop, we won't stop. It's disgusting. Disgusting, but time moves us on. On, on, and what's it got to do with us? Death is everywhere. Death is falling from the heavens like manna.

And who are we, wandering in the desert, two members of a lost tribe? The desert is our lives – is that it? The wasteland of our lives. And manna? The axe blade that would fall down to us from on high. The blazing axe to cauterise all wounds …

It's not enough to die. All trace of us would have to disappear. The wound of our lives. The scars …

Waggish brilliantly perceptive on 2666 - I'd missed entirely Bolano's subversion of the Bildungsroman. Archimboldi's introspection is dissolved; the writer disappears/ emerges into history. It happens so many times in Bolano's fiction, I would want to say (and would have to substantiate). It's the key, the central movement.

From the study into history … is that what disperses the poet-heroes of The Savage Detectives? The slaughterbench of history: is that what we see – taste – in The Part About the Killings. 2666 (the date) is only a name for the slaughterbench, for an apocalypse without God, when the absence of God reveals the absence of plan. Chaos. Scattering. The Sonora Desert …

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.