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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?

Begin to write – really write – and you can’t stop. Begin – but to write what? Perhaps only to evoke the taste of madeleine on your tongue that first awoke your desire to write. But does that taste exist anymore outside the writing itself? Does it stand above writing in some vital way, as a mountain emerges rocky and snow-capped from the jungle?

The time before I wrote, you could say. The time before I disappeared into writing. Dim memory, but a memory now owed to writing; the mountain top the jungle has enclosed. Look back and you see a sea of words through which there runs a path of churning water – your story, the story you want to tell. But a story that is only a perturbation of the surface of the sea; a path of glistening light that will come to disappear. A path that you’re not sure is even a path, so transient is its appearance -light rocking on the waves.

Isn’t as if you’d written nothing before? As if, like Honda at the end of The Sea of Fertility, nothing that you remembered ever happened. A dry sea, a sea of dust on the surface of the moon – the story you told was nothing but that. And now it’s blowing away, one particle after another. Were you ever here? Did the events of which you wanted to write ever happen? The story wanted you; telling wanted you; but only to disturb the surface of language. Only to let a disturbance pass across the waves like a rumour

And then I think this kind of book comes after something, or before – that it is the dispersing of the path that a ship runs behind it in the water. The dispersal of literature, of everything that literature has been, of all ‘universal classics.’ In some way, writing has attained itself through literature. Has come to itself, but blindly and unknowing, forgetting everything and dispersing it all like the sower of Van Gogh’s great paintings.

All that was told will be untold, and the groove literature left in language will be smoothed over. Language will again be the shining sea across which no path passes. And now I think of Zarathustra’s last men, who have discovered happiness and blink. And of the way they reappear in Kojeve and Fukuyama: last men, capable of everything and of nothing in particular. Whose life is the life of termites and not human beings …

The deeds of the world are slowly disappearing. The suburbs will spread everywhere, and all writing henceforward will concern the ordinary, the everyday. There will be nothing of which to write but that. And language, meanwhile, will turn over like a sleeper. And all of literature will have been part of its dream. And everything we’ve done, likewise. And when it awakens, it will face us without a face and look at us with no eyes and speak in long words that will be our words unravelled.

The young Mishima felt words falling within him; he wrote. At sixteen, he was admitted into an elite literary club. His friend Kawabata – who eviscerated himself only a few months after Mishima (though he was Mishima’s senior, his advisor, and, unlike him, a Nobel laureate) – knew that such a writer only appeared every two hundred years.

No doubt – but Mishima also felt those falling words a sickness and sought to hone his body in the sun in recompense. No doubt he was right to fear those falling words, that made themselves, with him, into stories, essays, plays of all kinds, in but a single draft, knowing that as they were given to him, they were also turned away.

Opaque pebbles. Markers on what gameboard? He didn’t understand. They played him. They fell, indifferently, into the abyss they’d opened in his heart. No stalagmite in him could reach up to touch the source of their instreaming. For a long time, he bent his neck and words fell hard like rain across him. Then he raised his face, his eyes, and looked up through the words. High above, at the cave’s summit, the sun. And it was the sun that he would reach to him.

I think it was the dream of his death that allowed his words to flash. Death, that would join him to a sun above writing. A dream, for certain. There is no silence, only murmuring. Pythagoras was right: the universe is noisy. The planets turn in their gyres and a great roaring is heard. It is that we must stop hearing to hear. To speak with silence, and not words, if only to hear what will not be silenced.

What did Mishima hear as he died in the characters he let die by evisceration? The roaring of the sun, heard from within the sun. What did he see? Light, as it’s seen within the source of light. He knew what would come to befall him. It was the object of his erotic fantasies, and he staged his death over and again in his stories. He rehearsed for death – but death had already reached him. He wanted to silence the words, to make his body all surface without depth. There would be no dark, interior space within which words would fall, only brightness, as rain falls flashing in the sun.

But what does this mean? That it is my some kind of break that writing might be allowed to echo the ceaseless streaming of language. Some break, some block, as though there had to be a rack upon which the author is stretched. White sheets of agony – yes. But imagine an agony that is owned by no one and a rack upon which no one is stretched. Is it the body of the night that is pulled apart? Is it light that is torn into jagged flecks? Now I imagine it is all of language that turns there like a Chinese dragon. Turns, and is turned against us. Language seeks to attain itself. Molten language, words and sentences still, but running. Isn’t that what flashes in Mishima’s words?

What are their characters? Wicker men and women to be sacrificed. What are their stories? Offerings to be burned. What unfolds in the time of their narratives? The setting fire of time; the sacrifice that must always happen again.

How can we speak, when speech is worn down in our mouths? What words are ours, we who lack even an experience of ourselves? Besides, we have nothing to say – what is there to say, for us? – of what can we speak when we live outside time, and even our pasts do not sink into history?

Nothing has happened to us – or if it has happened, it is already forgotten. Or is it that everything has happened, that we’ve exhausted time, and live on in some afterworld? Is this paradise? Is it hell? But we are being neither exalted nor punished, and if the Messiah appeared amongst our number, we would not know him.

For in truth, we do not know that we are here, or that each of us is the one he is, or the one she is. We are all the same; our faces do not matter. Each the same, the one then the other, we form no group, no society. There may be many of us, or few: we do not know. There are no friendships – associations, perhaps, and even a kind of dim recognition (you were beside me earlier; I remember your voice – but not what you said), but nothing else. There are no relationships between us, no kith, no kin: we have worn them out, as we have worn out everything.

Still, we are not alone. We can say, ‘we’: this is a consolation. There is that: our sense of collectivity. The third person plural: we have that; it is ours: but is it ours? It is less firm than the first person, which we never use. Who would dare speak in their own name? To speak of me is only to speak of you; we are all in each other’s places, and who we are, singly, individually, does not matter. I am you – and you: aren’t you also where I am? Who of us has ever minded being no one in particular?

We are not sad. We are placid, simple; ours is a sweet dullness; I think we are smiling, I think we always smile. And sometimes we speak, just to try out speech, just to hear our voices. We could say anything – everything; there’s everything to be said, but without history, without a past – without even a present, let alone a future, there is nothing to relate.

Nothing has happened to us – that, or everything; it does not matter. Nothing – everything: is it that we live where nothing becomes everything, and the other way round. Nothing – everything: that is our threshold, the turning point of the world. We do not rest, but nor are still. We are not even silent, though our murmuring is hardly a sound, and rarely forms itself into a word.

Days pass, we know that. And nights. The passing of the day, the passing of night: soon forgotten. But what is there to remember? Who knows how many days, how many nights there have been? There are no chroniclers amongst us. No prophets. We do not detain time, but let it turn in place.

Time! We only know the incessant, the interminable. What need have we for this instant, or for that? In truth, there is only the return – we live for it – by which what fails to happen happens again. Or is it that we fail it, the event, by being too unprepared, too indifferent? Perhaps it is tired of waiting for us to act, or is our tiredness, our placidity, a sign of its approach?

There are no philosophers amongst us; we do not think, unless thinking is what happens in that same return, which breaks over us each time like the first day. Sweet evasion: is there a kind of thinking that does not ask for a thinker? An evasive thought that is evasion in each of us, our failure to be ourselves? We have always failed; we do not mind. But what would it mean to succeed?

Everything has happened – no doubt. Nothing has happened – without doubt. History has ended, having never begun. And what is time but its disjunctive return, the tearing of each instant from itself, that substitutes for the event the incessance of what does not happen. Do we live? I would say we are alive, but I would also say we are unable to be, just as we are unable not to be. We have no part in duration; time is what we do not endure. Or it is that same non-endurance; it is the unlivable, it is what life becomes when it is absolutely indifferent to itself.

Are we alive? We are not here, I would like to insist on that. Not here – or each of us lives in another’s place. I speak for all of us, and for none of us. No one is speaking in each of us and for all of us. No one speaks; everything that is said is superfluous. Speak to us, and you will here superfluity eroding every word we say.

That is why we smile. We can do nothing; we do not suffer, none of us is sad; we have no words of our own. Were we born too early or too late? I do not know if we are old or young. Did we resign ourselves, long ago, to the incessant, or were we born of that same incessance, as though we were its way of knowing itself? I am not sure, and besides, there is no one here to know.

Unless that ‘no one’ is the locus of another knowledge, and incessance knows itself in our place as each is substituted for another. Still, nothing is kept; knowledge does not settle into itself. Sometimes I think we stand at the beginning of everything, sometimes, at the end. How is it that everything seems possible and impossible, both at once?

We never were: I would like to say that. And we never will be. And in this divided instant, the return of the disjunction of time: we are not here, either. We do not suffer from time; in truth, we do not occupy it, and our vacancy is our liberation. But for what are we free? There is nothing we want; desire is alien to us, or it belongs to no one.

Freedom: sometimes I imagine it as a wind that tousles our hair. But does it know that freedom, for us, is only the wind that bows the heads of corn: it happens, yes, but it does not concern us. Freedom: we can move, there are degrees of movement; each of us, from time to time, stands, or moves about, or lies down: we are not automatons. But it matters not to us, that standing up, that moving about. There is no need for rest where there is no need for movement. Do we live at the end or at the beginning?

But I have said nothing at all. Or by writing, I have tried to tie the incessant to a story. We are outside all stories as we live untouched by time. What has happened? What has ever happened? Our chance is that words sink back into the page, saying nothing. Or that words, lightening themselves, form and disperse like great clouds.

No one suffers here. Time is kind to us. Our lives are sweet and placid. We are calm and languid. There are no words invented that could let us speak. We cannot be apprehended by thought. There is thinking – we know that (but what do we know?). We are with you when the wind from the impossible tousles your hair. With you – but that is not the expression. Unless I could write, with you and without you, or speak of what is outside, always outside, even as it is also our separate bodies.

Persistence without point. Sweet monotony. We interest no one, not even ourselves. We have withdrawn, and first of all from ourselves. Are we asleep? Awake? I do not know if we dream. We are fragments – but of what? From what have we been broken?

Hamsun’s hunger artist dreams of writing a three volume work that would be greater philosophical monument than Kant’s Critiques, but who can finish nothing but articles that the newspaper editor turns down. Ragged, emaciated, he refuses the loan the editor would offer him, and when a tramp, pitying him, refuses his charity, he becomes angry, just as he is angry at all those whom he passes in Kristiania, imagining that they were all recipients of his own charity. He is a man of potential who has achieved nothing so far; but he also lives from the sense that his achievements are already real; that this writer without works (but does that make him a writer?) is in awe of what he might be.

In his dreams, he is already an author, having substantialised himself as the author of mighty works, having already revealed that greatness as yet unknown to those who pass him in the street. One day, it will all have made sense; one day, his hunger and poverty will have been revealed as the royal road that led to his triumph; from the heights of his authorship, he will survey the difficult path that led him towards where he is now, and the still greater peaks before him rising in the distance.

But isn’t there a sense, too, that he will never seize upon the work of which he dreams; that they will flee ahead of him, known only to him in its fleeing, leading him on what is never quite a quest? Perhaps this is why he willfully denies himself the opportunities offered him. He knows that it remains what it is only as it flees – that the unfinishable and incompletable work rises far higher that the peaks across which he might imagine himself crossing. And his life will never be retrospectively justified; it must remain as it is: a failure.

But then, too, in its jerks and hesitancies, this would-be writer’s soul is still made of its relation to the work, to the impossible dream of a finished book? It is as if all his inadequacy has been pulled along in a single direction; that he is at least orientated towards what he lacks, as it is has taken the form of the book which would retrospectively make sense to others of everything he had suffered.

One day I will show you: this is what the adolescent says. One day – when I’m truly an adult – or, in this case of this hunger artist, an author. And then the plan will have been revealed; then the biographers will come swarming and the scholars will pore over my notebooks. One day: but only when I die; only when I die among those who must now admit that they knew nothing of what I was. This will be my charity, which is always in retrospect: mine was always the condition of one who lived ahead of his times.

And doesn’t he reveal, Hamsun’s narrator, the condition of the modern writer, who writes without criteria and even without authority? Who has emerged from the shelter of the church and the state, who runs up anew against the impossibility of writing? Which is only to say, that he can now confront writing in its impossibility, measured against the work to which it might give body?

But the work will not be made flesh; the sought after Word will not be spoken. What does this new kind of martyrdom witness? A dying for nothing – nothing, pure nihilism. But perhaps also another experience of the notion, and of nihilism. For by incarnating the experience of the impossibility of writing, of finding a place to begin the work, Hamsun lets us experience writing as impossibility – as a kind of test, a trial.

Why does the narrator starve? Because he cannot do otherwise; because he cannot find anything he wants to eat: so Kafka’s hunger artist. Hamsun’s narrator bites down on the stone he keeps in his mouth to satiate hunger. Bites down – such is his delusion. And likewise the narrative bites down upon another imaginary stone that would make substance where there can be none; that lets a book appear only where the work is not.

Hamsun finishes his book, even as the narrator does not finish his. He finishes the book – but what of the relation to the impossible work that takes his narrator as its subject? Impossible. And this is the comedy of Hunger. This is why its narrator is a self-deluding fool, biting down on what can give him no satiety. Upon what has Hamsun bitten?

To a correspondent he says, Hunger ‘is not a novel about marriages and coutnry picnics and dances up at the big house. I cannot go along with that kind of thing. What interests me is the infinite susceptibility of my soul, what little I have of it, the strange and peculiar life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a starving body.’ (via)

Hamsun’s narrative incarnates a new kind of mortification. A discipline that attempts to give itself rules. Strange bloom of a narrative that tells only of the impossibility of satiation. How to give flesh to the work? By showing what it is not, and that it runs ahead of everything. By giving flesh to this nothing, to the starvation that comes forward in our place when writing no longer has a model. 

Can the modern writer appear to be anything but stubborn, perverse and self-deluding? Can he fail to swell with an unearned pride? Sometimes his task will appear great, sometimes inconsequential. Sometimes he would like to turn back to the sunlight of the world. How foolish he was to sequester himself! How idiotic to turn from all human nourishment! But then he knows, too, that he has no choice: that, like Kafka’s hunger artist, he could find nothing to eat.

His stubbornness is all he has, and so he becomes proud of that. Tenacity, but without project: so he becomes proud of that, too. Discipline, but with nothing to which to devote itself: more pride. What do the others around him know? What have they sought for? What have they achieved. He closes his eyes. A great mountain range rises before him. One day he will ascend. One day, he will look back and down at them all, and they will look up at him, without comprehending. He lives on the mountain peaks, and they far below in the valleys.

Or is that he lives below everyone, far below? Is it that he is incapable of the simplest utterance, that he lives far below the surface of life, deprived of all that would make life simple. They put a panther in place of the hunger artist. The sister stretches her young body when the insect dies in Metamorphosis. Life is simple – surely that. Life is simple, for anyone but him.

The modern writer has a stone in his mouth. A stone that will give him no nourishment when he bites. But he bites. 

Pessoa’s heteronym, Alvaro Coehlo de Athayde, the 20th Baron of Tieve takes his life, leaving a manuscript in a desk drawer.

These pages are not my confession; they’re my definition. And I feel, as I began to write it, that I can write with some semblance of truth.

And who is the Baron more than what is defined, enacted by the text Pessoa has him write? A text that is, with respect to the Baron, posthumous – the remnant of that literary ambition burned up when he threw his other fragmentary manuscripts onto the fire.

In the past the loss of my manuscripts – of my life’s fragmentary but carefully wrought oeuvre – would have driven me mad, but now I viewed the prospect as a casual incident of my fate, not as a fatal blow that would annihilate my personality by annihilating its manifestations.

But the he still needs, does he not, the manifestation of The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive, as Pessoa subtitles it …? Burning up literature, he is still dependent upon it – upon its remnants, upon what still attests to its demand.

To think that I considered this incoherent leap of half written scraps a literary work! To think, in this decisive moment, that I believed myself capable of organising all these pieces into a finished, visible whole!

So now the Baron throws it all into the fire. Honour and silence, he says, are left to him; this is what his reason confirms, this ‘millimetric’ thinker. A thinker who also says that it is by thinking that he remains like Buridan’s ass ‘at the mathematical midpoint between the water of emotion and the hay of action’; and that ‘temperament is a philosophy’. Then thinking cannot think past temperament; the Baron’s character is his fate; what remains is the Stoic amor fati, that acceptance of the order of the world as it measures out our destinies. Whence, I suppose, the title The Education of a Stoic Pessoa gives these pages.

Amor fati? Was it the Baron’s fate to burn his manuscripts and take his own life? Or was his suicide a fatal leap towards action, his last chance, his rebellion? Ah, The Impossibility of Producing Superior Art (another of Pessoa’s subtitles) …! but it is impossible only for one who prefers, he says, to suffer alone ‘without metaphysics or sociology’ what led Leopardi, de Vigny and de Quental – ‘three great pessimistic poets’ to make ‘universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes’. Perhaps it is only the Baron’s discretion, his sense of honour that leads him to the impossibility of realising his works and – short step – to suicide.

Richard Zenith, editor of the volume, quotes an excerpt from another text by a Pessoa heteronym, Bernardo Soares:

I weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them, they will be more touched by my weeping than by any perfection I might have achieved, since perfection would have kept me from weeping and, therefore, from writing. Perfection never materialises.

Soares weeps, but the Baron does not. No consolation for him in readers who were touched sufficiently to forget the imperfection of his work. And yet there’s this book, The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive … How are we supposed to read it? We are not to be touched. It is a monument to the absence of weeping, to the Baron’s honour. He saved us, he says in these pages, from an oeuvre born of a sublimated suffering.

Compare Soares, author of The Book of Disquiet happy with his tears and happy to write of his suffering. Soares who produced a manuscript far larger than that left by the Baron of Teive. Neither author produced a book that was published in Pessoa’s lifetime. And yet I wonder whether The Education of the Stoic was a way of short circuiting Soares’ sprawling The Book of Disquiet – of delimiting that impulse that led Pessoa to produce so many fragments. To die honourably, discretely; to die like an aristocrat: was this what Pessoa wanted in the Baron of Teive? As, meanwhile, the bookkeeper Soares, prolix and weeping survived in him, and The Book of Disquiet grew longer and less manageable still …

I have a fierce, stupid love for Jean Genet; it’s always been there, even as I’ve given his books away, or bought them again. But is it Genet I love, I ask myself, reading Sinthome’s post – is it really Genet who interests me? Or his work, his life, a kind of rorschach – blots of ink that give themselves to be interpreted in various ways?

Or perhaps it is more than a matter of interpetation, and I find myself wanting, without having the book to hand, to ask myself what fascinates about the superhero Rorschach in Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Of course he is not quite a superhero – fierce and strong, yes, but he has no real powers.

Once, we get to see his ruddy, ordinary face. Only once, perhaps (I haven’t read the book for many years) – and it is indignant, even embarrassing. We prefer the smooth surface, the mask with changing blots of ink, and the detective’s jacket. He is a man alone, only uncertainly allied to the other superheroes (but are they heroes? – only one of them, perhaps, and what was his name, his skin coloured blue like a Hindu divinity?), and I admit I’ve always like to read of such solitary men, alone just as Jean Genet was alone, never keeping a permanent address and carrying with him only a nightcase with five books – poetry by Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Villon … and a couple of changes of clothes. Genet who says there is only truth when he is alone, and is writing: only then – and not in the interviews where he is half a person, or too much of one.

Solitude – and then to become – who? But now remember that Genet stopped writing when there appeared Sartre’s huge book that read his work and life together: Genet was now anointed: he was a saint. But who had canonised him thus? The philosopher who drew out the juice of his work: Sartre the master-writer, Sartre the canoniser – how was he, Genet, to write now?

Compare, decades later, a book written on him by another philosopher, whose multicolumned form recalls Genet’s own essay on Rembrandt: was Genet allowed to live in Derrida’s vast, risky text with its priestholes? Ah but Genet had forgotten writing by that time (1974); he was moving round the world, allying himself with the Black Panthers and then the Palestinians; it would be another decade before he drew together the manuscript of The Prisoner of Love, whose author has, it is clear, attained insubstantiality, letting himself be drawn into a form – as birds into a flock, as fish into a shoal – only as he is called by a cause greater than him.

But the young Genet, confronted by Saint Genet was a different person. He stopped writing. He was written out, he suggests, because he’d escaped prison, once and for all. Hadn’t he been facing a life sentence? Wasn’t it Cocteau and others who made a case for him as the great writer of a generation? But Genet wasn’t fooled. He repudiated Cocteau, too. He turned away from Sartre.

Later, he would declare Giacometti the most admirable man he’d met, and Greece his favourite country; I forget why. Genet was always escaping, and escaping himself. The books lay behind him. Blocked 5 years, he did not mourn. He lay back and let there come to him those idea-germs from which his work would be born again. He travelled, with his night case. He reread Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, and Villon, although he knew every line. He fell in love a hundred times.

Yes, this is the Genet of my delirium, a little like my delirious Godard – the one whose work sets me, too, to dreaming. And is it of myself I dream? Or rather, the one I might have been, who, in my dream, was latent in the 20 year old who first read Genet, Saint Genet; who first saw Godard. And shouldn’t I mention Mishima, too, the patron saint of 20 year olds?

Solitude. Fold open the bureau in your university room, I tell myself. Read those books again. But what do you read, would-be escaper? What do you promise yourself, you whose later travels would end in farce? You’d never go anywhere, would you, or you’d already travelled with Genet as far as you would go?

In Greece, having run out of books, you bought with your remaining money a ticket to leave today, thus ending your bid to escape into another life. Is it Genet I love? His voice? Or the idea that it is possible to speak thus, that the Law might part and you might be given the right to speech?

You – solitary, you – alone. ‘Alone as Franz Kafka’: didn’t Kafka write that? But isn’t it also to solicit the Law that you would write, to seduce its attention even as you are told off – what bliss! – even as it seems forbidden to write as you would allow yourself to write.

As alone as Jean Genet, telling truth. Alone, but not with the writer of those first 5 novels. Genet after Saint Genet; Genet after Sartre – not writing, but, I imagine, whispering into his lovers’ ears. Genet moving, travelling with his night bag: escaper who, with The Thief’s Journal let his name tremble with the name of those blue, wild flowers that flower along the border and, in my dream, all borders.

He crossed then in literature, in the pages of a book, but now, in my dream, he crosses for real, as he trains Abdullah to walk the tight-rope, as he passes through that country where I chose to live and from which I returned after less than a week, the sun being too bright, the sky too darkly blue.

Jean Genet, Bowie’s Jean Genie, I am folding open my bureau table fifteen years ago and today, and there is the black and white framed picture by Ernst I cut out from a book. Escaper, it was called. Did I escape? Did you? In Morocco I see you turning in your bed. You will not write today. Nor tomorrow. Because you have Abdullah to train. Abdullah for whom you hold a training tightrope five inches above the ground.

I wanted to escape, and reading and writing. Leave them behind; be translated into another life. In Greece, by the busstop I finished A Boy’s Own Story. Eight hours passed; the bus was late, so late, and then wound up through the bay: what beauty! In the town where we stopped, an old woman filled my cupped hands with pomegranate seeds. It was Sunday; strangers were to be fed. Then, later, the bus came down on the other side of the mountains, to another bay. Where to sail next? Anywhere, everywhere but what was I to read? A volume of Mandelstam, and that was all. And after that? Life, apparently. Real living – but what was that?

In his essay on Giacometti, Genet remembers sitting opposite a dirty old man in a train compartment. He wants to read, to avoid conversation. The man is ugly and mean. And then? ‘His gaze crossed mine … I suddenly knew the painful feeling that any man was exactly ‘worth’ any other man. ‘Anyone at all’, I told myself, ‘can be loved beyond his ugliness, his stupidity, his meanness.’ And then, ‘Giacometti’s gaze saw that a long time ago, and he restores it to us.’

To see thus, to be seen thus. In that town, in that bay, I drank ouzo with another traveller, a civil servant who came to the islands once a year, for the whole summer. We drank together, my spirits lifted. Where would we go? But suddenly I wanted to be alone. Just then, I wanted solitude, and I left him behind somewhere on the ferry. We came to our destination the next morning. I thought: but this is not where I want to be, either. To travel, I had thought, was to be worn down like a stone in a river. No more edges, no distinctness, and we would all be alike, us travellers.

In an Athens garden, I read from Mandelstam. It was over, I knew that, as I travelled 6 hours early to the airport to wait for my flight. No escape, no adventure; I was too much myself, or only lost what I was when reading. To be a stone on a river floor, a stone among stones, worth no more than anyone else: how to be worn down by escape? How to live like anyone else, and everyone else? Wasn’t that the question I asked into Genet as I read, and to Godard as I watched? Wasn’t it the question Mishima drew from me (it was the opposite of being stung. The sting – that I did not know was there – was drawn out by my reading)?

I went home; I studied, I read nothing but philosophy for 10 years. 10 years blocked. 2 times 5 years without another kind of reading. Perhaps I had written a kind of Saint Genet. Perhaps I had cursed my reading, my writing. I was no longer alone; others whispered in my ear. Was this life, was I now alive? How was it there seemed no escape, without those texts that moved like ink-blots? Write then, draw the mask over your head. Read and let others be masked. How to give everything away and travel, too, but without leaving your room?

Derrida writes in Glas of the dredgers he can see at work along the Seine and of what is lost by them as they scoop. For my part, from my window, there is my yard, and the scars along the wall, and new plants in new pots. Back in my student hall there was a cat like a remnant, who lived for a time with us for no particular reason. One night I drew her into my room and she transformed that space as she wandered, tail up, sniffing, curious.

What is there around me that is not being renovated, completely transformed? What falls? The leak which rotted the joists between my flat and the flat above; the second leak beneath the kitchen floor which makes the wall still wet. Then the mildew that grows in the new cupboards, and the stains left by rusting metal tins.

Remnants, fragments, that should be remembered as they fall, like the rustbelts that are still found in our New Europe. The cat disappeared, taken home by one of the cleaners. The water company is coming out to look at the leak, the builders to mend the soaked-through ceiling. What remains?

I am on the side of the remnant, I tell myself; I see myself from there, on the other side of the glass. The long scars along the wall; the cat; the rotting joists, the gaze of Giacometti’s statues: each time, a remnant of the past, and as what remains as the past. What returns? what is being sought here? and what will you find, reader for whom this cannot be interesting, and which interests you only because of that?

There are those whose presence changes the space around them, whose presence is a kind of command, or that it bears of itself a kind of commandment: to think. And this by way of their gestures, the tone of their voice or the length of their silences, the way they look or do not look at you. By way of them – not as though they were not important, but that they are as traces, as signs of an experience that is at one with thought.

Blanchot remembers Bataille’s long silences when he spoke in public. Long, intense silences. And there was the seriousness of his tone, which others recalled. But he was not solemn – or rather, it was thought that was solemn – it was thinking that commanded of him a kind of solemnity. Bataille was a thinker; he thought, he struggled with thought. No, better: thought struggled with him, thought kept him; this was his seriousness – but a kind of lightness, too, for doesn’t Blanchot remember what he calls the play of thought that was at stake between them?

The play of thought: this does not make thought trivial. It lightens them, the heaviest thoughts, by letting them be spoken and shared. Spoken – or written. Didn’t Blanchot write of Bataille’s friendship for thought? A friendship which, moreover, meant Bataille had to do without friends? Bataille, in the years of Inner Experience and the other books of The Atheological Summa was indeed insolated; he felt abandoned by allies who once joined him in his communal experiments. They turned from him, he felt, even as he began to write a section of Guilty entitled Friendship.

Friendship – could this be the name of a relation to thought, to thinking? The name of a relation – and one, now, that lays claim, in some, to the whole of a life: to the same gestures, voice tones and silences, to a way of taking up space or not taking it up. This laying claim would be the presence of thought in the thinker: the way thought keeps a life, even as the thinker supposes that it is thought that must be kept safe.

Thinking of them again – not as friends, but as those who are friends of thought – what communicates itself to me is not the content of a thought – not this, or that idea, but the ‘that there is’ of thinking, and in another such as him, another such as her. Thought: in person. But there only as a multiplicity of gestures, of tones and silences, as a way of moving or keeping still.

Thought, then as choreography; thinking as what demands all of life – and more than the life of any individual. For isn’t it that ‘more’ that reveals itself in multiplicity? Isn’t it that the thinker lives more than the life of an individual – or rather, such individuality is only a way thought has of folding itself up? The thinker lives a life – any life in particular. The thinker’s life is any life, and all life – or it is the ‘more’ of that ‘all’, and thought is what gives itself differently, each time.

Think. No: be thought, be the keeper of thought. Let thought claim you, and down to the most intimate details of your life. The thinker never stops thinking. The body thinks – the whole body in its movements and its stillnesses. Thought is there – in person. Thought relates itself to itself by passing through the body of the thinker.

A kind of tranquility is said to come to those afflicted with total paralysis; they who can only move their eyes are claimed to lack the input from their paralysed body that would disturb them. If they weep, this is not because of their mute isolation (they can only move their eyelids), but because of the sweetness of their solitude.

‘I, too, dreamed of you’. A greeting, at the beginning of Autumn from one stream of writing to another. A greeting, but only as the autumn sun flashes across our backs. Is it my sun? yours? Who flashes a signal, and to whom?

The sun glitters along the water. Today and tomorrow are the same. But from one channel to another, flashing, autumn speaks of itself.

My Visitor does not have a high opinion of Jandek; I heard her wince just now from the kitchen, where she’s waiting for rye bread to rise in the oven. Early on in her visit, we had the Jandek conversation. It’s about microtones, I told her. A non-tempered scale. A guitar detuned from Western tonality. And a voice that, if it seems gloomy, is in fact stretched and supple and explores an idiom, a mood, rather like a raag. And the lyrics, too, are interesting, I said. Oblique – fragmentary: don’t they belong alongside – say, late Scott Walker?

That’s what I said, and then I put on the music and she looked – horrified. But in the spirit of generosity, as she bakes she said to put it on again – she wouldn’t notice. But I heard her wince in the kitchen. The CDs are lined up on the shelf, her copy of Clarissa on top of them. Clarissa trumps Jandek, she says.

‘What music would you normally put on when you come home from work?’, she asked just now. ‘You don’t have to ask’, I said, and especially today. ‘Put some on then. I won’t notice’. I put some on. She winced. ‘It’s the reptile brain’, says W. – ‘it knows there’s something deeply wrong with this music. It protests’. And he reminded me of our passed out friend, dead to the world and our entreaties. We threw things at him; he hardly stirred. And then – my idea – Jandek. We played it and then his arm rose into the air. He wasn’t conscious, but – his arm. It’s his reptile brain, said W. His reptile brain protesting.

For his part, W. admires Jandek. He plays the CDs, but he can’t be in the same room as them. I either go up, or down, he says. Up to the bedroom and study, or down to the kitchen. It’s involuntary, says W. It’s his reptile brain, he says.

Congratulations to my good friends for putting together the inaugural edition of Radical Musicology, a web based journal with a comments facility after each paper.

The Ship of Death

A dream, rather than an argument.

Malte looks back to the death of his grandfather, surrounded by family and servants at the family home, and laments the fact that we are, today, too insubstantial to die … But for Malte, who lived in the substantiality of the literary past – of the unity of a culture – it was still possible to write and to as though gather the whole of your life into that writing. Sincerity – is that the word?: I think sincerity was possible then, as it is not now. As if it was the substantiality of culture, its omnipresence, that made a literary sincerity possible.

It is by now a commonplace: Rilke, like Heidegger, supposes that we have lost death – our relation to death. And I think of D.H. Lawrence, building with his last poems a ship of death … Something has been lost. Ours is an age of mass death; death is everywhere – but nowhere, for no one dies in the first person. Who can rise to their death when death – the power to die – has fallen away from us? Death is nothing; to die is insignificance itself. But that means storytelling is dead too, says Benjamin. Flies circle an empty room until they die, but the next year, it is the same flies that circle, mortal, but immortal, every one the same.

The Simulacrum

But what of writing, the relation of writing? I wonder whether that, too, is not also lost. As though the power of expression were likewise taken from us. As if no one were strong enough to say a word. As if no one could speak deeply enough, or impassionedly enough. As though there were no authority to speak and no one who might become an author through writing. Or that authority had already been usurped – that the speaker, the writer is always a simulacrum.

Then the writer is no longer a membrane that quivers between the past and the present, or like the spread sail full of the collected wisdom of the past. Tradition does not rise behind us like a plateau. The past has broken from us in some crucial sense; ours is an age that does not know itself as adrift, that lives in the eternal present with the last world war (repository of all nostalgia) a cut off point between history and the boom that seems in our ignorance and amnesia to have lasted forever …

A Voice From Elsewhere

But perhaps there is another side to all of this. That authority speaks in another voice; that sincerity is alive in a new way. It has become impersonal. It has retreated from authority, from authenticity. That it has fled as though to the back of speech, not to the throat or the chest; it is not a matter of a throat-voice or a chest-voice, but of what is there nevertheless in all voices. Something weak, something not quite personal. Something upon which we cannot make good.

Signs circulate. The roundplay of signifiers. Is it to indicate another order altogether … or rather to attend to the fact that there are currents in this drifting, and vectors: that something is moving, communicating, from one to the other. That speech is not simply a matter of pouring your utterances into the great sea of signs which slop indifferently against a thousand shores.

There is too much communication, says Deleuze. How to break the circuit of speech? How to interrupt speech? Another, similar question: how to reveal that communication is already something; that there is a thickness to speech, and more than that, that speech is directed; that one of us speaks to another, or writes to one, whence the optimism of the most pessimistic book as it places faith in the possibility of speaking, telling.

Flies circling, every one the same. But how to experience the same, and the same of the same? How to experience the everyday, the ordinary? What doubles up that same everyday, that same ordinariness is not the uncanny, which remains bound to an outmoded dramatics, to the ghosts of M.R. James, to adepts at a seance …

Nor, too, the horror film. Romeo’s films offer themselves too readily to allegory. And the zombies are never ordinary enough. Imagine for a zombie to look exactly like us – in the same way as Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym says the Knight of Faith resembles an ordinary individual in his Sunday best, only he dances rather than walks and sings instead of speaks (his walk, like any other’s is a dance; his speech, like any other’s is a song).

But this the Knight is too virtuosic; it is not a question of an expansion of power, but of power’s dimunition (the existentialist reverses Aristotle’s formulation: higher than possibility is actuality, until possibility is the highest of all). Isn’t it that same sense of possibility names Heidegger’s notion of the uncanny, of the self haunted by the indefiniteness of the future – or Sartre’s vertigo of freedom?

No, instead of this, think an impossibility that is lived and endured. An impossibility of possibility lived as the present; a choiceless action; the cry of an animal caught in a trap. This cry – absolute pain, the ‘to cry’ separating itself from any particular cry – shows how the moment itself is a trap, that being is disclosed (is that the word?) here, and not (as for the existentialist) in the future (in the relation to the future).

Power’s dimunition: why is unemployment included by Levinas among the list of horrors of the twentieth century? Because it is here the everyday seems to grant a mysterious density, a thickening of the air. Not a calamity, but the serenity of an afternoon that has absorbed everything into itself; that is actionless, purposeless; a dough that can be kneaded into nothing.

The Muted Voice

Then how to reach the everyday? Perhaps only by a kind of lightness, or neglect … Perhaps similar that to non-actors employed by directors so as not to distract by way of their star quality. I am not thinking of the ‘models’ of Bresson, who are so unactorly they also act, the ordinary escaping them, too (although it is close to them, very close). Perhaps Tarr’s drunkards come closest of all, The Werkmeister Harmornies opening on a scene in which people have lived. No one is more alive than Tarr’s ‘actors’ – they are his friends, he insists – and why do I think here of what Tarkovsky’s Stalker calls the writer and the scientist with whom he has journeyed through his films? They are, once again, his friends.

Here I would insert what has been recently called hauntology and all of dub. It is not a question of letting sound a lag in time – extraordinary effects, I’ve no question of that, but these are still special effects; unless your voice – my voice speaking now – were already to be understood a voice in dub, that is, deprived of itself, and subject to the most cavernous reverb.

Listening to The Drift, it is still that Walker’s voice is too dramatic, too trained (Whether or not it has, in fact, been trained). Listening to Sinatra’s Watertown – another favourite – I always think: his voice is not ordinary enough. Here, an interesting excursus on the late voice, a topic beloved of my friend R., where the voice, towards the end, becomes muted; unless this voice seemed to vanish to become something like a rock or a leaf: completely ordinary, a voice like any other.

Dub is not sufficient to set a lag into time, doubling one event upon another, as though the creation happened before the creation, and what we know now is only its echo …

The Most Ordinary

I am thinking of the ordinary, the most ordinary. Not a voice that is trained; but nor as it is roughly untrained.

What does it take to see a voice? I think of Bacon’s violent faces that allowed us to see a face. To return the face to the dramaturgy of painting, which reveals abstraction to have been a dreary escapism. And now, rather than a voice, a song – a song carried by a voice, or a voice carrying a song.

What kind of song is this? Once again, I wonder if something has occurred with the song. That folk music does not speak of a folk – although this is not to say the idiom of folk cannot be renewed (who can doubt that, said R. of Alisdair Roberts on his recent tour), but that renewal belongs to what is only an idiom – a language to learn and speak alongside other languages, and idioms of languages.

What, then, is the most ordinary song? I can’t answer this question. What is an ordinary voice? That, too, I think is impossible to answer. But here, as usual, I think Kafka was ahead of us. We remember the Josephine of his story, whose voice was the most ordinary of all. Nothing set her apart from the other mice, except for her voice. Except for what, then? For the doubling of her voice in her voice, the ordinary in the ordinary. The Same, as Heidegger would say, capitalising the word, so it can no longer be udnerstood in terms of identity – that is given each time. The Same: As it allows itself to be discovered as the ordinary.

The Ordinary Voice

I think I am drifting close to the thematics of the everyday in Lefebvre, or Certeau – or that I am remembering, more distantly, the investigations of the Surrealists or the new field discovered by Heidegger and Lukacs that lent to the everyday its consistency. Then it is not a question of the revolution of everyday life. For there is nothing upon which we might seize, or it is that the most ordinary seizes us …

It is a question of a voice, or of what a voice also is. What are its characteristics? It is indiscernable. It lets itself be known by a particular trait – by a quality of the voice, an accident, as philosophers would say. That is to say, it is not reached through another kind of experience, like the sound the planets and stars make for the Pythagoreans. All the same, no particular quality is essential to it …

We hear it in singing along with us, or in a song played in the radio on the other side of the house. We hear it – do we hear it? is it only ever half heard? – on the edges of our awareness, heard whenever we do not strain to hear it, when we neglect it just enough for it to make itself present …

It is not a lullaby; it does not lull us to sleep or into a kind of reverie like the sounds of the 40s we hear in the recreated rooms of Marlowe’s memory in The Singing Detective. No, rather, it awakens a kind of attention, keeping awake for us, keeping our place in some way not as this or that individual, but to pass the voice along and to be part of this passing …

Is it, then, like the singing that binds together family life in The Long Day Closes? Perhaps only like the wordless opening of the second movement of Vaughan Williams’ 3rd symphony, which Davies lets sound over black water, rippling with light. A wordless lament – for the dead of the first world war, as the symphonist intended? But also for the violences in the film itself. The drunken father breaking a window with his fists …

As I say: a dream, and not an argument.

Back Mid April. Buy this CD (UK, USA).

I am listening to Jandek and drinking Cava. So must you.

How is it that our idiocy still surprises us?, I ask W. Isn’t that we still harbour the hope of overcoming our idiocy? Above all, I tell W., we are not complacent idiots. In fact, we are very active. The tragedy is that our activity is what confirms us in our idiocy, since it attests to the fact that we struggle with all our might not to be idiots.

I say tragedy, I tell W., but I mean farce, because it is the great farce of our lives that it has not been sufficient that we’ve run up against the brick wall of our idiocy not once but countless times, and that we’re about to run up it again today just as we will do so tomorrow, and it will always be thus.

The idiot, I tell W., does not want to be an idiot. But isn’t that precisely his idiocy? Oliver Hardy is very serious; Vladimir and Estragon have their moments of pathos; Bouvard and Pecuchet have their great project: the idiot has the ambition of becoming something other than an idiot.

In our case, I tell W., although we know we’re idiots, that knowledge does not prevent our idiocy; in fact it encourages it, insofar as we act in order to overcome our idiocy. If only we could remain still, in our idiocy. If only we could pause … but then we would no longer be idiots.

The essence of idiocy is activity; the idiot is the one who runs up and down, endlessly, who is able to tolerate anything but his own idiocy, when in fact his idiocy was the fact that preceded him and that he can only confirm.

It is rather like the film Memento, I tell W., except that the protagonist, instead of forgetting everything that happens each day, remembers it, but still does nothing to dissuade him of undertaking the most idiotic course of action given his circumstances – he kills those who would help him, and falls willingly into the hands of what, for him, will entail the very worst.

Farce , I tell W., and not tragedy, for we can never be said to run up magnificently against our limits. We have no dignity; it is not the limits of fate that we test – the great confrontation with our finitude, but only the limitlessness of idle chatter, that great spinning of puns and innuendo that anyone at all could accomplish.

Heidegger was right, I tell W., the philosopher must avoid the fall into such chatter: what is worse than gossip and idle curiosity? But nor is the idiot ever entirely ignorant: isn’t it precisely the way he is caught between knowledge and ignorance that makes his life farcical?

But there are different ways of living this ‘between’: like Plato’s Eros, the idiot is a wanderer, the son of Poverty and Plentiude. Unlike, Eros, however, he has drunk himself into a stupor with Aristophanes and the others over whom Socrates steps in order to make his way back into the marketplace.

And isn’t he unlike, above all, Marx’s proletariat who alone can repeat and retake the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century into order to become the true subject of history? The idiot is lumpen, I tell W., no question of that. But still, I get the impression the lumpenproletariat enjoy themselves in the moment, there and then – the idiot must always defer gratification. Isn’t he too busy dressing up as a philosopher in order to know he is only trying on ideas that will never fit him?

At first, our role is to amuse others, but soon we will only bore them, and worse, they will resent us for wasting their time and the time allotted to us. In the end, I tell W., idiots come in pairs because only their double will be left, eventually, to amuse. An amusement that depends upon one idiot thinking himself slightly less idiotic than the other: which of us is really as modest as we pretend? And besides, our modesty is belied by our activity, which is always frenetic.   

You tell me I am happiest when I’m making plans, I tell W., but I could say the same of you. The idiot is always young for that he gives to the future the chance that he will not always be an idiot; possibility, he thinks, is his milieu. But in fact, the possible is so for everyone but him. How many brick walls will we run up against before we learn? But we are always too young to learn, awakening each morning into our idiocy.

Doesn’t Homer Simpson always have a madcap scheme? Aren’t Bouvard and Pecuchet perpetually beginning yet again to explore another branch of knowledge? It is always dawn for the idiot, who is too busy to notice the radiance of the morning, I tell W. Perhaps this is what tempted Dostoevsky to create a holy idiot, I continue, but Prince Mishkin is a solitary, and hence not a genuine idiot.

Brad Pitt’s character asks the serial killer at the end of Seven whether he knows he’s insane. I think it’s immaterial whether the idiot knows what he is or not; knowledge, for the idiot, has been dissevered from action: he knows what he is, but does it anyway, not with the resignation of a hero towards his fate, but in the eternal hope of one for whom the future remains open.

In Blanchot’s essay ‘The Experience of Proust’, says Steve at This Space, literary criticism and great art become simultaneous. Doesn’t something similar happen in Steve’s essay on Richard Ford, now up at Ready Steady Book?

Comes a time in your life when you stand as out on a plateau, at some elevation, and with the sky spread about you and the wind buffeting you: there you are, exposed, seeing all around you, but also being seen, for isn’t the sky also an eye turned upon you? a blind eye, though, one that sees without seeing, and it is as though you see yourself with that eye, yourself, and also the whole of your life, what it has been and will be. Isn’t it that you are as though already dead? You’ve died, but died in life to life, but that has made you the god who can look at all with perfect equanimity: what will happen must happen, but you have seen all and know its law.

I am always on the lookout for such plateau moments in the books I read. Handke’s later work (I’ve no interest in anything before The Left Handed Woman) is almost all plateau, or struggles to let its narrator wander along the roof of the world. On A Dark Night I Left My Silent House: you left it after a blow to the head. You’d forgotten everything, and then where did you find yourself? On the roof of the world, on the plateau, wandering: how could it be otherwise? Yes, Handke’s books deliver us there, to where the plateau spreads and the sky swirls around you and you know your life as though you watched all from a still point in the swirling clouds.

And this marvellous scene from Debord:

I have even stayed in an inaccessible house surrounded by woods, far from any village, in an extremely barren, exhausted mountainous region…. The house seemed to open directly onto the Milky Way. At night, the stars, so close, would shine brilliantly one moment, and the next be extinguished by the passing mist. And so too our conversations and revels, our meetings and tenacious passions.

And then, a little further on:

I saw lightning strike near me outside: you could not even see where it had struck; the whole landscape was equally illuminated for one startling instant. Nothing in art has ever given me this impression of an irrevocable brilliance, except for the prose Lautreamont employed in the programmatic exposition he called Poesies. But nothing else: neither Mallarme’s blank page, nor Malevich’s white square on a white background …

Comes a time when, on the plateau, beneath the flashing stars you know absolute books from all the others, which separate themselves and lift themselves into the sky. On the plateau: in your youth, you might do anything; possibility was your milieu; your future was open. Then, later on, the time of accomplishment; you worked, you gave yourself body: what kind of person had you become? And then, later still, the time of falling, when you knew your work was nothing, and you had become nothing; when all excuses fell away.

Lear lost on the Moor. The desert which opens around Hamlet. The sacred space that is separation, the time of the nudity of the crime. Footage of the man who survived the suicide leap in which his son was killed. He is a murderer but also a survivor; he is drenched with guilt. But he is also a sacred man, a man apart. The blinded Oedipus wanders led by his niece, looking only for a place to die. What else is there to do on the plateau but wander?

But I should say Debord was not lost – or that if he was, he lost himself, happily stranded in obscurity as the world gradually caught up with his ideas. But then, too, on the plateau, those ideas do not matter, or what matters is only the great source to which they’re joined: to revolution and the regathering of revolution that is more than any one of us.

Then Debord’s voice, sovereign, is also triumphal: it spreads itself as the stars are spread above the wind. It sees all and knows all, even Debord’s own passing. And mustn’t he die so that revolution can be lifted back towards itself, as light to the source of light? There are many ways of being sacred, but to all of them belongs that solitude which knows the end is close.

With sovereign neglect, knowing the time for action is already passed – or that it must be given to others to act, to follow his example, Debord, the old revolutionary sets the following quotation at the beginning of his book:

Why ask me of my lineage? Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees. Those of autumn the wind sheds upon the ground, but when the season of spring returns the forest buds forth with fresh vines. Even so is it with the generations of humankind, the new spring up as the old are passing away.

That from the Iliad, book VI. And above it, from a dictionary:

Panegyric expresses more than eulogy. Eulogy no doubt includes praise of the person, but it does not exclude a certain criticism, a certain blame. Panegyric entails neither blame nor criticism.

So Panegyric, the book. With what sovereign neglect is it written! How close to death, pressed up against it! A serene book – a neglectful one, sovereignly seizing upon this or that detail to let speak the whole. Why that detail, that episode? Why write of that? But with it the whole shines forward. As though the book were riding forward and we readers looked out ahead over the open sea. Open: a book that looks back as it looks forward. From volume 2, part 2, this unattributed quotation:

All revolutions run into history, yet history is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers of revolution come, thither they return again.

But I should say, reading both volumes, that there are barely even episodes, barely details – only a general telling, a great swelling of the narrative voice, even if what is told is done so briefly, swiftly, as in an ancient epic.

Among the small number of things that I have liked and known how to do well, what I have assuredly known how to do best is drink. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk a lot more. I have written much less than most people who write, but I have drunk much more than most people who drink.

I would like to quote the whole of this famous chapter, but it will suffice to note here that it was perhaps drinking that carried Debord forward, that held him out ahead of the others, over the open sea. The drinker becomes interplanetary, writes Duras somewhere. Drink until neglect claims you, and you are a God. Drink until you sovereignly stand ahead of your time, at its prow. Doesn’t Debord say elsewhere that his ideas did not have to catch up with time, but that time had to catch up with them? In Panegyric, he is ahead of us still. Ahead – but also at the head of all waters, there where revolution gathers itself, regathers itself.

Debord’s scripts. In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consummur Igni: We Turn In The Night Consumed By Fire. I like these texts that are made after a life lived, that are retrospective, looking back, even as they know, with great serenity, that there is only looking back. The future has come; it is already here, and it is one without Debord:

Here was the abode of the ancient king of Wu. Grass now grows peacefully on its ruins. There, the vast palace of the Tsin, once so splendid and so dreaded. All this is gone forever – events, people, everything constantly slips away, like the ceaseless waves of the Yangtze that vanish into the sea.

And so he writes from the perspective of one at the end, or from after the end. Has he died? How else has he managed to write from a time in which he has disappeared and his memory been forgotten? How beautiful to write from that time! How beautiful to write when you’ve already vanished, a wave in the sea.

What is writing? The guardian of history…. What is man? A slave of death, a passing traveller, a guest on earth….

Beautiful, beautiful. But still, something hard, adamantine, in Debord remembers (and this is his own voice):

Considering the overpowering forces of habit and the law, which continually pressured us to disperse, none of us could be sure we would still be there at the end of the week. Yet everything we would ever love was there. Time burned more intensely than elsewhere, and would soon run out.

And I want to remember one last paragraph, the thought of which, remembered from my first reading of these scripts, but when was that?:

The sensation of the passing of time has always been vivid for me, and I have been attracted by it just as others are allured by dizzying heights or by water. In this sense I have loved my era, which has seen the end of all existing security and the dissolution of everything that was socially ordained. These are pleasures that the practice of the greatest art would not have given me.

Passing time: I imagine Debord writes after his death, surviving in some way, still alive, and knowing now only the purity of time’s passing. ‘… passing through all those years as if with a knife in my hand’ – but now, there is no knife. He writes; writing neglects itself in his writing. Lies down and looks upward, to say: it’s all done, finished; the page has already turned.

Pinget writes of the pain of being between novels: how to find a voice? He thrashes about – first this voice, then that, but where is the one that will impose itself upon him like a destiny? When will it come, the voice-seed of a new novel, that will lead him forward by itself through sentences and paragraps, and through page after page?

But when you have no novel, and have no intention of writing one? When you’ve fallen from all projects, all schemes of writing, and there is just the trying out of voices, first one and then another, but absent the voice that will give you your destiny as a writer? Only chance, and a swerving each time, and without pattern. No progress, no moving forward, but only the melee of voices, as they inhabit you, as they turn you from yourself and show that what you are is only this turning?

to Agata Lenczewska-Madsen for the image above, which she, told me in correspondence, she titled after Handke’s The Left-Handed Woman. See her website at www.inthecities.net.

A relationship ends, and what interwove your lives no longer interweaves them; what was held together is held apart, and this is the discipline: to keep the decision enforced, to let the past be the past and to put it behind you. I suppose the degree of upset depends upon who instigated the breakup; that is obvious enough – for one, perhaps, there was closure, whereas for the other, an irruption from nowhere.

Sovereign is the one who can decide the state of exception; sovereign, too, is the one who breaks up with the other – who is outside the law of the relationship. (But there are other possible perturbations of sovereignty here: how would you read from this perspective, the relationship of Cordelia and Johannes in Either/Or?)

Best of all, of course, is a mutual breakup: closure for both, and you both knew it was coming. The End, then. Let the past fall away – you are both sovereign, and the state of exception is that open space which precedes the beginning of new relationships.

And now that past is separated from the forward-streaming of your life like an ox-bow lake from a river’s meander. The water does not move, and slowly it will silt up, and more slowly still, will close up, and close up the scar that evidenced its presence. A closed-up past like a closed-up house: who lived there? who shared jokes, and friends, and ways of speaking? Closed up – and from you who lived there, for you cannot discover alone the life that made sense only as it was shared.

Now, for you, a different life, and the chance of a different set of singularities that will be caught in the memory of a relationship. But now wonder about a relationship that never began such that it could end, that teetered on the edge of a beginning into which it never fell, mourning in advance what it never was. No End – because there was no beginning.

How to date the beginning of a relationship? Perhaps only the future anterior that allows what happened to make sense only retrospectively; before then, there was only a kind of speech before speech.

And for you who have only what failed to complete itself? You are not the lovers who rejoice in the fact of their love, and can recount its story: ‘that was when we met’; ‘that was when I caught your eye.’ What, then do you have? Perhaps the dream that one day you can speak of it together, and what did not happen can be called to account. ‘Why didn’t we speak about it before?’: now ‘it’ has a consistency, a substance: it has come together like love’s future anterior. The non-event is at last born as an event.

It happened – not then, but now, and can be called a failure by the measure of loving. ‘It couldn’t have worked out for us’; ‘it could never have begun, not then’. Imagined scene: the two of your talking, at last, about what did not happen. Together, at last, and talking about it, and happy in their speech.

To thicken the past into an event: isn’t this to exert a retrospective control of an event that would have otherwise fallen into obscurity. Time is ours, the past ours, and now we will affirm it so that it may truly pass. Now it can pass, as all time passes, and it will fade away like an ox-bow lake fades into nothing.

But imagine this, instead (the novels of Sarraute): the non-event that remains non-event, that refuses the measure of love, and what is called a relationship. Now it is a relationship without relationship, one whose terms are not symmetrical, and in which neither will ever have been a lover.

Who am I, then? – and who are you? Who were we, then – and who now? I imagine a succession of ‘whos’ sounding out without answer. The ‘who’ that returns as your heart, that speaks there. How to be loyal to what you are quite sure might have happened? For what kind of fidelity does it call, the non-event?

Non-sovereign is the one who cannot decide. Non-sovereign is the anteriority that is never joined to the future.

1. Higher than actuality stands possibility: the argument depends on a philosophy of action that allows the tasks and projects of the human being to make sense of its present. Today leans forward into a succession of days; this week falls into the next one. Time is an arrow that was shot from the past; your present makes sense as ecstasis; the future is the leap your plans and projects have taken ahead of you.

Tasks, projects – these must be understood against the backdrop of projection itself, the forward leap that is human temporalisation, and projection in terms of the ability to be, a freedom no one possesses, but that possesses each of us. An ability to be – this is what opens the milieu of possibility, in terms of which impossibility is to be understood. I may be said to be possessed by my freedom to which I am summoned by being – this imperative that, in advance, elects each of us to our mineness (Jemeinigkeit). Being becomes my own – I am obligated to be; in this way I am free.

From the first, Levinas questions the priority of the givenness of the self, seeing the ego as coalescing out of a prior field. Being gives way to a being; existence in general to an existent: against Heidegger, Levinas implies that being can be thought without the human being; that the latter coalesces or hypostatises from the prior field of the former. Or is this only, as I suspect, a way of speaking?

If, like Heidegger, Levinas allows the self a minimal ipseity, a minimal self-relation, it is one interwoven with a relation to a past in which the self has not yet come to itself. Isn’t Levinas trying to indicate another way of thinking the genesis of the self, such that it does not come to itself all at once – that something hangs back even as it might return in the manner of the deferred action, Nachtraglichkeit, of which Freud writes – unbidden, and awakening a disturbing sense of what has gone before. An unassimilable experience that has never quite begin – the repetition of an event that never seems to have rounded itself off.

This is what returns, Levinas argues, in an experience as simple as ordinary pain. Slam your finger in the cupboard door and you have undergone an experience from which you cannot flee into the future. True, you can try to distract yourself from the pain, but the pain is still there, drawing you back to itself. The instant thickens, the present congeals in such a way that it draws you back from the leap into the future as it is premissed on the ability to be that defines human existence, according to Heidegger.

Even the slightest degree of suffering vouchsafes what he calls dying, according to Levinas. Possibility, premised on the ability to be, falls into impossibility, the withdrawal of this measure. Dying is given in the impossibility of possibility, the inability to be able. Rather than a limit that can be situated in the future, to which the human being can relate so as to retrieve itself from its fallen existence as for Heidegger, dying is now, it is already here; the limit has congealed.

Then it is not the ability to be that is the measure of human existence. Like Moses, it stutters, it stammers interrupting itself so as to fold the past of existence in general into the present. The ego is always threatened with dissolution; the impossibility of possibility, like Freud’s death drive, threatens to tear the human being from its relations to the world.

2. Then this is nihilism; there’s no act by which death can be assumed and life can be made whole. But might there be a way of affirming the death drive, the eternal return of dying?

Hegel’s account of the ‘spiritual animal kingdom’ takes aim at those individual creators who are not content to self-effacingly serve the interests of Truth (like the scholar) or Justice (like the civil servant), but insist on creating something for themselves. In the ‘bourgeois zoo’, as one commentator nicknames this form of life, each is set apart from the others, attempting to create what will confirm them once and for all as creators. The trouble is, the ‘task at hand’ with which each is obsessed collapses as soon as something is made. The writer is never content with realising this book; in order to remain a writer, she will have to begin another, ad nauseum. What bad faith!

And yet something interesting reveals itself in Hegel’s analysis. For is it not by dint of her failure, her perpetual attempt to complete the ‘task at hand’ that the artist is able to affirm a relationship to the materiality of the artwork and, thereby, the eternal return of suffering? Does the repetition of her failure coincide with the eternal return of the past and ultimately allow it to be affirmed, changing its apparent polarity?

Continue reading “The World Unjoined”

The following are a set of rules for the giving of academic papers in philosophy (especially continental philosophy). The rules recall those of the Danish film movement, Dogme 95, or even Oulipo. A primary aim is to break with the veneration of master thinkers not because it isn’t worthwhile studying a philosopher in great depth and over a number of years, but that this, by itself, is not philosophy.

1. Dogma is relevant. Your paper must be written for the occasion in which you are presenting it. It must not be part of an ongoing project or a larger work. It must stand on two feet, or, if it is written in collaboration, which Dogma encourages, it must stand alongside the work of the other paper giver on your panel. If you collaborate, your work must  stand or fall together, and your work must be genuinely co-written, being born from friendship.

2. Dogma is clear. Your paper must be written to read out, to be comprehensible to an audience of ordinary intelligence. It must carry them along from point to point.

3. Dogma is spartan. Only one proper name. No quotations. Problems, not names – and above all no names. (And I know how difficult this distinction is to make in continental philosophy: problems/ names. But who hasn’t had enough of names?)

4. Dogma is impassioned. You must stand behind every sentence you write. It must be clear to the audience that the issues you are exploring is of the utmost importance to you.

5. Dogma is personal. You must use personal anecdotes, as many as you like. Everything in the paper must bear upon what is of significance to you. Use the word ‘I’; anecdotalise; speak of your life and its intersection with your thought. Speak of your friends. Speak of your passions and your misfortunes.

6. Dogma borrows. You can plagiarise any part of your paper from any source. But no names, remember. No names at all.

7. Dogma is reticent. You must never try to publish a Dogma paper. What is spoken is not for reading an vice versa.

8. Dogma is studious. You must work very hard indeed on your paper. Nothing last minute, nothing slapdash.

9. Dogma is full of pathos. Weep, and let your audience weep.

10. Dogma is elective. Do not tell your audience the constraints you have accepted. If you are asked, afterwards, about your presentation, you may speak of it then.

W. and I formulated the rules of Dogma one frustrated night at a conference in April 2005. Flusser’s Writings were a major inspiration.

I’ve given several Dogma papers with W. We’ve spoken on our favourite literature and our favourite music; this year, we also spoke on friendship as a condition for thinking. Each time, we spent about a month working on our papers, constantly discussing our work. Our friend L. gave a ‘Lady Dogma’ paper this year, after hearing about Dogma from W. and I. It should be emphasised that collaboration – friendship – really is the heart of Dogma. An of course that no one at all owns Dogma, least of all us.

Of course, Dogma rules can be varied from subject to subject. What is urgent, say, in continental philosophy, that is, the grip of the proper name, the imitation of the master etc. is less so in other fields. Note, too, that not everyone has the luxury of following Dogma: the postgraduate student looking for work is in a very different position to a full-time employee.

W. and I often supplement our rules. Here are some additions to the main rules of Dogma:

11. Dogma is apocalyptic. Dogma accepts that these are the last days. Catastrophe is impending. Bear this in mind as you write. Write only on what matters most.

12. Dogma is forgiving. Dogma is an ideal; it may be your paper is only partially dogmatic. This is at least something. You can also take the ultra-Dogmatic route, and mention no names at all.

13. Dogma is a friend to religion. We underwent a spiritual turn earlier this year; we speak of such matters without embarassment.

14. Dogma is on the side of the suffering. Bela Tarr films are an important reminder of the omnipresence of suffering, of ontological shit and cosmological shit.

15. Dogma is communal. Respond, in your writing, to the work of a friend. Mention, in discussion, the inspiration that your friends are for you.

16. Dogma is peripheral. It avoids famous names; it is shy of fashionable topics.

17. Dogma is affirmative. Do not engage those with whom you disagree. Dogma is advocative: speak of those of whom others should hear.

W. wrote to me to suggest that I add the following: ‘Dogma is experimental. More rules can be added, but only through the experience of Dogma.’ And doesn’t this add something wonderful: the experience of Dogma: as if it began, first of all, in complete dissatisfaction, but gave way to an excited liberation?