Saint Charles Crumb

My nightmares, when I have them, are of unemployment, empty time and the endless, endless suburbs. Miles from anywhere, unable to drive, rent and house prices wildly high, there’s no room for life. How can you live? What will you live on? No chance. You’ve got no chance.

A new category: Saints, short for saints of the everyday. Those who never moved out of the family home, who got lost in their own rooms and never left them again. Lost – in inner space. Lost in the ruin of the life they might have had: what horror! What glory, too – and I imagine a Genet whose prison is the suburbs, and whose heroes (heroines) worthy of beatification are the ones who hide themselves amid the other men and women. Shakespeare was like every other man and woman, says Borges, except that he was like every man and woman. So too with the Saint (the everyday Saint), who is like what we are, or rather what we are when we are not quite ourselves.

The first saint: Charles Crumb, of Zwigoff’s great documentary. He never moved out. In the end, he barely left his room. He read; piles of books everywhere. He hadn’t read Hegel and Kant, he says in the film, but he might do. Meanwhile he’s rereading books he read twenty years ago. He is around fifty years old; he has a year before his suicide. Gentle and withdrawn, bullies tormented him at school. Hutch – that was the name of one of them. That was his name. Hutch and his cronies. Hutch would beat him in the school hall until he fell to the ground. There he was, Hutch, the cronies and everyone looking at him on the ground.

And when he got home, Charles had his father to contend with. A big, bullying man, who thought his sons failures. Hadn’t he written a book on managing people: How to Manage People, with his strong American mug on the inside cover. How to Manage People – and here he is with three worthless sons. Charles goes out to work. How long does he last? A few years. He never moves out of home. His father dies. Charles leaves his job. He lives with his mother, whom he calls ‘mother’. Sometimes his famous brother visits – once or so a year. He loses his teeth, and never wears his false set. What would be the use of that? He never goes out. He doesn’t see anyone. Why should he wear his false teeth? He wasn’t even going to be in the film, for godssakes.

On screen, he chews a toothpick. He’s sardonic. He’s wry. But crumpled somehow. Withdrawn – and into himself, and so far he’s not there anymore. Withdrawn – having found some vast dimension of inner space, greater than the world, where he is lost. His face has crumbled. He’s chubby. His speech is marked with a lisp because he doesn’t wear his dentures. He laughs, but it is a sardonic laugh. Who is laughing, and at whom? There’s no one there. No one left.

Years have passed. He’s fifty – how did that happen? Fifty, and surrounded by piles and piles of books. When he was young, Robert Crumb remembers, it was his brother who got him into comics, into drawing. And it is brother whose approval he still wants somewhere when he finishes a strip. His brother! Charles gave up writing and drawing years ago. We see his last illustrations, where the speech bubbles become fuller and fuller. Soon he no longer illustrates his strips at all. Writing, just that, very neat, all in a line, covering the notebook. Lines and lines. And then the writing turns into marks, just marks, saying nothing, only looking like writing. For pages and pages. He’s compelled. Pages and pages and whole notebooks. Charles, what happened to you? What went wrong? What were you looking for across all the pages and the books?

He’s been on anti-depressants and tranquilisers for twenty years. But he’d given up writing and drawing long before that. Charles is calm now, much calmer than before. It’s age, he thinks. When he was young, all he thought about was sex. Sex and comics, and drawing, and writing. And now? Fifty, he has no sexual desire any more. Probably a good thing. Fifty and surrounded by books, which he plans to reread. What else is there to do? He kills himself a year after the onscreen interviews. The film isn’t out yet. Charles hasn’t been discovered as an outsider artist. Would it have mattered for him? Would it have made any difference? Maybe everything was too late for Charles. Maybe he was beyond anything that could happen.

He is a saint. Solitude – but a solitude that has turned him aside (there’s no one there to be solitary) – burns in his place. His mother calls up to him. ‘Charles, are you okay up there?’ He reassures her. He’s okay. Soon the filmcrew will leave him back in his room on his own. His room – is it his room? Who inhabits it? Who’s there? Kant and Hegel, he’d like to read them. He hasn’t yet, though he’s read a lot. Books in piles around him. He read them all twenty years ago and now it’s time to read them again. What else has he to do?

Robert Crumb remembers how Charles told him he was in love with the boy from the film of Long John Silver. The boy! Robert wonders. How hard it must have been for Charles! In love with this boy, drawing him over and over again. Was that why he wrote and drew? Was it the boy for whom he was looking, by way of writing and drawing? Writing, drawing were a kind of ceremony. He was conjuring someone up: a boy, the boy from the film. He loved him, the boy. It must have been hard for Charles, muses his brother. He never had sex. The girls at school weren’t interested in him, says Robert, or in Charles. They were interested in Hutch, though. Hutch and his cronies – all the mean, big boys. But Charles was more gentle, Robert muses.

You get the sense Robert is speaking of himself, too. He was too gentle. But it is Charles who is the Saint, not Robert. Charles, who has his own small page on Wikipedia. Someone should send me Charles’ notebooks, I think to myself, because only I would want them. Someone should send me what only I deserve, I think to myself. From one afternoon to another, I think to myself. From his afternoon, Charles’, thirty years ago (he gave up drawing and writing thirty years ago now) to mine, where I write (I do not draw, though I would to illustrate every post in my new category, Saints), or I try to write (lately it’s been hard – no time, no time …). But this is the effect Charles has on you: he makes you think he’s singled you out. That something special in you has been called forward by Charles. Only I understand, I think to myself. Only I can really understand.

Bright Books of Life

It is not very companionable to read – for a couple to be reading separate books side by side on the sofa, say, or lying on the bed. I read Gombrowicz’s A Kind of Testimony – at first engaging, with a marvellous voice – a voice that I would have thought has been selected from a slew of voices; a voice – this voice – that is fitted to the task of the laughing defiance of the opening chapters; but becoming drearily self-same, displacing the other voices the book might have called for, until it becomes reedy and narcissistic.

But how can I pay it attention, really – how to listen out for those other, occluded voices as I lie side by side with my Beloved, or sitting alongside her? There’s nothing worse than reading couples, I tell myself. A reading couple – what an absurdity! Ignoring each other – to read! Or pretending to ignore each other, and not being able really to ignore each other! It’s the worst of images: the reading couple, or worse, the scholarly couple, a couple who each have a separate study, who study alongside one another in separate rooms – what horror! The scholarly couple who agree to do a couple of hours’ work on a Saturday morning and then meet for lunch in the living room!

Perhaps reading requires for more solitude than that, and to read must be to read alone, drawing the night around you turning pages in a cone of light before the drawn curtains. You would read as Kafka said he would write: in a room underground, far below the earth and the everyday to which he might be occasionally brought meals, but in which he was alone, essentially alone. To read – really to read! But it would be as impossible as what Kafka called writing. In the end, reading is always on the way to Reading, whether sitting alongside another or reading alone (and at the end, didn’t Kafka write in the same room as Dora Diamant, alongside her? Only at the end – what cruelty!). Reading – impossible; but still there is reading, and if there is another alongside whom you can read – all the better …

Perhaps this all seems absurd. Why read? Who reads, and who, really, looks for Reading in reading? Perhaps Reading is never about the books themselves, but of what it means to read when no one reads, when reading is losing importance, and a vast world of culture is slowly retreating from our reach.

Laughter. Is that it – the sense of a vanishing culture, of an Old Europe or an Old America? The sense that to keep reading is to protect it, to watch over it, carrying it along like the holy of holies, as it would watch over you? The great names of Europe! The great poets! The arch novelists! To carry it all on your back, like Nietzsche’s camel! – poor you! …

What a sham! As though you had any essential relation to Proust, whom you only read in translation! Or Musil – or Broch! Or Woolf, say, or Green – or Conrad! You came to late for any of them, you tell yourself. Too late – and these are already late books, books of the end. The last of a wave that broke upon old Europe – no, that was old Europe, or what we imagine Europe, from our distance, might have been. Those names now shaken free of their contemporaries, separate from the others, detached from their constellations and shining like remote, solitary stars, each seemingly sufficient unto themselves … what have they to do with you? What connection do they have to you, who were born long after their writers died?

Old Europe – isn’t this the most laughable of fantasies? Perhaps this is why I liked Montano’s Malady, a book written after the end of the end, when literature – absurd word – became a kind of sickness, a sickness of literature, a fantasy sickness of a world that seems to have withdrawn but that never held the unity of a world, and never belonged to Old Europe.

Too many books. You should give them away, neglect them. Bag them up and leave them in an old cupboard. Leave them for someone else to find – as I found, once, a novel by Lawrence, not knowing who he was or what he wrote. A novel by Lawrence, read when I’d finished all my other novels (McIntyre’s Dreamsnake, Kiteworld by Keith Roberts), read before I knew who he was. Was it the ‘bright book of life’? Something like that. And I remember reading The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man my back against the warmed wood at Winnerish Triangle station, just after I’d finished the Mammoth Book of Fantasy. And The Magic Mountain, ordered after I saw a section dramatised by Malcolm Bradbury on TV – The Modern World, was that it? – The Magic Mountain, pompous and overblown, and yet, and yet …

They’d found their way to me, these books – is that it? The classics selected me and called me forward? I think almost any of those bright books of Life would have done back then. Any book – anything of modernism, any questioning book that questioned style and itself and wrote in a new way and asked for writing in a new way. As though you could continue the experiment on the pages of your own life. As though art could cross over to life – no wonder there was a great politics mingled with the great gesture of writing. And wasn’t it that that I sought and that that I wanted? A new life, or a life counterposed to the company where I worked and to the hi-tech computer park to which I commuted every day?

Soon, I’d discovered the Surrealists, the Situationists … and it would be Life itself that I dreamed of – Life as it lay in the depths of Reading. Wasn’t it there like a fish – Another Life, Another Way of Living? And isn’t this why I like to like reading still – in memory of the Life that flashed at the bottom of reading – a Life that I could have reared myself up to want back then, when I was young? Life as the opposite of the everyday of the company and the hi tech park?

There is always something egoistic about couples – a withdrawal, a separation from the business of life but also for the hope of a great politics and a great overturning. The egoism of two – how is a reading possible that lets Life quiver at its base? It is enclosed by domesticity, by the happy familiarity of a way of living insulated from jobs and companies. Reading is another way of inhabiting a home, of enclosing what lives outside and flashes with the hope of another life, another way of living.

A page has been turned – or is it the last page that has turned. The last one – already turned, then when you didn’t know it was the last, when it became the least important page of all. As in that Abba song, ‘The Day Before You Came’ that lists the last, insignificant actions before the Beloved arrives. The day before – old Europe. Or the last modernist Europe that you know only by its withdrawal, when the great conjoining of Life and Art has vanished into the air.

My Beloved is reading Nina Simone’s autobiography. I read it too, on the train going South. Of the Civil Rights movement, and of a life Simone recalls that was lived in common, that had no room for privacy. A Life that tolerated no domestic enclosure – that threw wide every house, every dinner party. That’s what Duras’s house on the rue Saint Benoit became too, in the campaign against French colonialism in Algeria. Where Blanchot and others drafted the ‘Manifesto of the 121’; where Schuster and Mascolo put together the periodical le 14 Julliet.

Has reading – but I’m not reading much – become a retreat? Has reading lost Reading by losing Life, and the dancing promise of another world? But I wonder from my new domesticity whether I can encounter books as what they only ever were: books, fictions and non-fictions and poems. Books to be boxed up and given away – just books, books and only books, and no longer part of the great dream, of a great politics? As they only ever were …

Now I think of Smog’s ‘Held’, used for an advert for one car or another. ‘Held’ and Bob Dylan driving along. Why did Dylan do the advert? Why did Bill Callahan sell the song? Because a song is only a song … is that it? A song is just a song, and he’s a jobbing song writer, and Dylan a jobbing icon who needs to make a buck? A car driving along needs a song, and why not this one, which nestles next to ‘River Guard’ on Knock Knock? And didn’t Dylan long sell ‘The Times They Are a-Changing’ for the adverts for some accountancy firm?

As they only ever were … but literature, old Europe could never be anything other than a promise, another life. A promise … for whom? For us – but who were we? The few who read, and for whom reading was – what? A colleague read Genet: wasn’t that something? I lent him Breton: wasn’t that something? Breton in the corridors of Digital Electronics? Genet in the open plan offices of Hewlett Packard? Who were we? The few who read, and for whom Reading was always more than reading (and weren’t there Listeners, too – and Seers? but we were Seers and Listeners too).

A page is turning – or it has already turned. Turned and the book is closed, the book that was never open. There was no old Europe. Reading looked for what it could not find. Life was never but what it was here, in the open plan offices, in the carparks of Winnersh Triangle – is that it? Life was never elsewhere, but here, and nowhere else but here – is that it?

How Are We to Disappear?

I never liked hoarders of books: old men and women who would never lend or give me, when I was young, what I wanted from their bookshelves. Hoarders, collectors, saving books – from what? for what? – and hence depriving them from me. How unreasonable I was (and am), but now I must turn my prejudice on myself. Have I not replaced old editions of my books with new, hardbacked ones? Am I not able to afford 3 or 4 pounds to buy a book out of curiosity? Have I not a row of unread books and that I might not read for many years – editions of Gaddis, Canetti, Milosz, Perec; and even Lydia Davis’ Swann’s Way, in the American edition? How deplorable!

I wonder whether I buy these books, and replace order ones in order to satisfy the victim of literary deprivation I once thought I was – and whether I’ve missed out on that kind of reading where a book can really be everything. But this, too, is absurd: how foolish to look for a Reading behind reading, and to think it lay there when I was young. I was as foolish a reader then as I am today – as distracted, as frivolous: then and now I felt I never really read a book, but only grazed its surface: that beneath, say, the printed pages of The Sleepwalkers, in that old, handsome Quartet Encounters edition, there was an experience of reading that I’d missed, as though the real book lurked there like a kraken.

I read it again, The Sleepwalkers – or almost all of it, and felt I’d missed it yet, and that I’d always missed my appointment with this, and other books. Maybe there was a time when reading was possible, I told myself, when my readerly ancestors in an older Europe were able to give such books the total attention they deserved. A Europe in which books were rarer, perhaps; a stiller Europe, without television and films and computer games. The Europe, perhaps, of the old Chamberlain who dies in Rilke’s Malte Lauridds Brigge, and from whom the narrator of that poem-novel feels himself to be cut off.

And then reassurance: perhaps the books that I treasure because I want to treasure something – because I want to protect, if only my dream of a reading that was once and might be again possible – are those deprived of that unitary culture in which they might have been read. The books are on my side, and old Europe is on another, and both of us dream of the reading they might have welcomed, had they been written by those who lived more deeply in the nineteenth century and the centuries before them. But I think this, too is a dream, and Cervantes’ was already a book written in the wake of a disappearance: this time of a world of heroes, of knights and quests and grails.

There is a tradition that says art, the creative is a sign of what is missing from our lives, and that we might fight to find it again, that old unity where life and creation are one. But when was that time, and how might it be refound? I think of the Greeks for the Romantic Germans. And I think of Hoelderlin dreaming of throwing down his pen to fight for some cause or another. Life is always on the other side of art. That’s so for Kafka too – for him above all, with his dreams of Palestine, of becoming a manual labourer and forgetting the world of books. Art is only counter-life, its shadow … but that, too is a myth.

Just as reading was never Reading, so life was never Life. All readings only graze the surface of their books. Every reading is a tangent, a way of touching. And every reading is complete, adequate to itself. There is nothing beneath the surface of the text … Is this why there is something disgusting about the collector, the one who is surrounded by the substantiality of a library? Reading is light. It is inconsequential. What is less important than fiction, and especially that fiction that wants to be more than fiction, or that wants to speak fictionally of something greater, but of what it can only touch as fiction?

I would like to brush the books from my table. Or to put them outside, neglect them, until, water-damaged, sun-faded, they assume the modesty of rocks and lichen. Or I would like to lose each one of my books, as I left one behind on a plane the other day, in the pocket in front of me, along with a notebook and some in-flight magazines and entertainment guides. I had Swann’s Way with me on that flight, but I watched Juno instead, and then No Country For Old Men. It was too dark to read, I told myself, and my neighbour didn’t want to be awakened.

Hadn’t I spent an hour in Barbara’s bookshop at Chicago O’Hear, looking for a book? An hour … there was Bataille, Accursed Share vols. 2 and 3 and The Tears of Eros in the Inspiration section. There was popular science, books of history. Novels … including the newly translated Bolano, in a big, American edition. But I wanted a book written in the first person, I told myself. A book I imagined speaking softly to itself between its covers. I wanted to surprise, by reading, a kind of intimacy, a relation the book had to itself and that it would keep, like a secret.

Was it speaking, there in the pocket in front of me, between the safety card and the sickbag? Could I hear it beneath Juno and the Coen Brothers’ film? Swann’s Way now sits on the window sill in my living room, its pages being slowly beached by the sun. Swann’s Way, with its floral spine, puce, and its fake cut pages. Haven’t I read it before? The train from Guildford to … where? And when? I was training as a teacher – wasn’t it then?

I had the Moncrieff translation, amended by someone or another. I still have it, a pale green Penguin Modern Classic, now twisted out of shape. It’s in the cupboard, back there. In the darkness, half forgotten. I should throw it away. There’s something disgusting about it, like a half-crushed insect. I read it, I loved long passages of it, I put it aside, let its spine become twisted – when? how? – but I know, too, that I failed the book as I’ve failed every book. As I will fail the new Swann’s Way on my sill, a book that will keep its secret as its surface, the fake cut pages I may never turn.

In my living room, I let my Beloved’s books mingle with mine carelessly on the bookshelf she bought. There’s no order on the shelves – only books I’ve read or will read soon; books on the Blues, books of philosophy and commentaries on philosophy. Novels – by V. S. Naipaul (my own edition of The Enigma of Arrival, I having only read the first third of the library edition), Janet Frame’s Scented Gardens For The Blind (two pounds in our new secondhand shop. A Women’s Press edition, an ironing board on the spine) … my hardback The Last Man by Blanchot … a few more.

My Beloved has her Austens and Trollopes in tiny, close printed editions – what, the whole of the Last Chronicle of Barset in there? – the little Dickens Christmas books … I’ve an Everyman hardback of Rabelais, too – like my hardback Sentimental Journey I keep in the office (I’ll never line them up, these Everymans, I promise myself that). Expensive enough (four pounds each) to demand I read them. Substantial enough to mock me for not having read them, and I feel the ghost of these books, and all the books I have read or wanted to read.

And now I imagine it is I who am too substantial, too real, and that, like Blanchot’s narrator, their margins will widen when I disappear. Aren’t they waiting for my body to become sun-bleached and broken-spined? – foxed as they say on secondhand book websites … Foxed, what a word, a handsome edition, what a phrase, a reading copy, what horror! And now I want every line in my books to be part of an exorcism. How are we to disappear?, says Blanchot in the quotation that begins Montano’s Malady. How indeed? How are we to allow our books to dazzle all along their surfaces, to join up into a great sphere like a planet of ice? How to let reading read only itself, turning in itself, obscure star?

Good Friday, afternoon. Weather changeable. I’ve written a long, stupid post. Instead of what? And for what? To find new words to same the same, and the Same of the same. What am I missing on the other side of writing? Life? Is that it? And what is lived if I press on with writing (but I’ll finish this post soon; I’m running out of wind)? What do I want, and by way of reading, of writing? To give up reading, to give up writing, but only by way of reading, of writing.

Our Trip to Nashville

Day 1. Flew into Nashville airport. There are rocking chairs in the arrivals lounge. Our taxi driver detours to pick up his checkers board. He and the other taxi drivers play checkers together when it’s quiet. One, from Somalia, is a checkers champion. Sometimes he wins 10 times in a row. This antagonises the Nigerian taxi drivers, who generally dislike the Somalians.

Day 2. A driving tour of the city. Our Canadian hosts are relieved when we tell them we dislike Nashville. The weird zoning that places a rubbish tip next to a pedestrian bridge next to a football stadium! Vast deserted car parks as the only public space! Mega churches deposited one after another in long strips!


It’s a car city, our host tells us. You’re nothing without a car. When they’d first arrived in America, they tried to do without a car, he says. They walked and rode the bus everywhere. The buses are great here, he says. You can have great conversations. Everyone talks, he says. But it takes hours to get anywhere, he says. They took up cycling. Everyone thinks you’re crazy if you cycle here, he says. People yell at you. But he cycles to work nonetheless, he says.


In the evening, our hosts drive us out to La Hacienda for dinner. We are delighted by the warmth of the waitreseses and the excellence of the food. The only thing for them is to become Mexican, we tell our hosts. Learn Spanish. Learn to Salsa.


Day 3. Downtown Nashville consists largely of car parks. Odd bits of metal stick out of the ground at shin height. This is not a town for pedestrians. The honky tonks distress us with their noise and clamour. A fully outfitted cowboy walks down the street. ‘Must be German’, says W.


Later that day, lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant. It is delightful to tip a side plate of herbs into my ramen, and then to squeeze lime jouice over it. You’ll have to become Vietnamese, we tell our hosts. It’s the only way you’ll survive here.


The size of the car park outside the restaurant distresses us. Madly, our hosts drives his car round and round in circles. I can’t get over the amount of space here!, he says. It’s madness!


We visit the full size concrete replica of the Parthenon. It sits vast and unapologetic in the sun. Why is it here? Why here, rather than anywhere else? These questions bewilder us. We are Old Europeans and this is the New World. People here are very proud of the Nashville Parthenon, says our host.


In the evening, he tells us about his project to photograph the old parts of Nashville before they are demolished. There’s virtually nothing left of it, he says. It keeps him sane, he says, cycling around old ruins and finding a way to break in and take pictures of what he finds. That night he shows us a slide show of photographs on his laptop and trembles with melancholy. Where did it all go wrong?


Day 4. A trip by Greyhound bus to Memphis. An armed policeman behind the counter in the bus station watches us menacingly. On the way to the station, our taxi driver, a Somalian, tells us the USA is a third world country. That’s what we were thinking, we tell him. He tells us about the lack of healthcare and the low wages. People kill themselves all the time, he says. They come to America for a better life, and they end up killing themselves, he says. They want to go to college for a better life and they’re working three jobs. And then they kill themselves, he says. 


On the bus, we’re sitting by the toilet, which was a terrible mistake. Something terrible happened inside. Passengers gasp when they open the door. One brings a portable air freshener, spraying it around her in the sign of the cross. We hold orange skins to our noses. What a smell! It’s terrible!


Memphis, unexpectedly, is cold. The tax driver in Memphis tells us the weather doesn’t know what it’s doing. After lunch, we go to Gap to buy warm clothes. It was the last place we wanted to go, but here we are. The clothes are too cheap! Who made them? In what mess of exploitation are we caught?


Day 5.  We’re heading to Graceland. Hearing Sal is from Nottingham, our taxi driver says he grew up on Robin Hood. he says he always asks his passengers from Nottingham whether there was a real Robin Hood. It’s amalgamates several myths, says W., expertly. The taxi driver’s brother rings. I have passengers from Nottingham, says the taxi driver. ‘You remember: Robin Hood, his Merry Men and all that’. He and his brother grew up watching the adventures of Robin Hood on the TV, he recalls.


We learn from our taxi driver that Beale Street was almost entirely rebuilt in the 1980s. Back in ’68, when Dr King was assassinated, he explains, there were no riots in Memphis, no trouble, but the city authorities took the opportunity to demolish Beale Street, home of the blues, and surrounding areas. At the Civil Rights Museum, sited next to the hotel where Dr King was shot, one woman has kept a 25 year protest against the demolition of black businesses. It’s not what Dr King would have wanted, says our taxi driver.


We are quietly moved by Graceland, and wish we’d paid for the VIP tour, which includes the Elvis After Dark exhibit, full access to the aeroplanes and the jumpsuit museum. Sal buys 200 dollars worth of tat, but cannot find the Elvis tie she promised her dad. Discussion of the difference between tat and tack.


Our bus back to Nashville has been delayed for many hours. No one tells us. The lady in front of us was heading to a funeral; she won’t make it now. I sit down with W. and tell him Hindu stories. Sal offers Gummi Bears to everyone in the queue. No one wants Gummi Bears. On the bus, which arrives 4 hours late at midnight, one passenger watches The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Fitful sleep haunted by screams.


Day 6. In a bar at the Five Points, W. berates the bartender about the poor choice of gin. Bombay Gin is terrible, he tells her. Tanqueray isn’t bad, especially with tonic but Bombay Gin is a marketing gimmick. She says her customers like it. W. tells her to get Plymouth Gin. You can buy it in America, he says. Our bartender looks irked. She’ll continue to buy what her customers like, she says.


Later, we sit out on our hosts’ porch drinking Plymouth Gin. How have they ended up in America, wonders our host. It’s a terrible country, he says. The guns! The churches! The poverty! In the evening, we listen to Barbecue Bob and Memphis Minnie (trading licks with Kansas Joe McCoy) and Big Joe Williams (with his nine string guitar) and sip bourbon. Our host makes us listen to the funk guitar style of the Mississippi Sheiks. He points out their sophisticated melodies (it’s their microphone technique, he says).


In the string bands, you can find the ultimate blend of melody and rhythm, says our host. He’s really an enemy of melody, he says. W. thinks he’s gone too far. Fuck melody!, our host says. He hates dead syncopations, he says. He hates drums. Everything goes wrong when drums are brought in, he says. I’m swept up by his argument. Fuck melody!, I shout. Fuck drums!


Our host makes us listen to early John Lee Hooker. He plays electric guitar rhythmically, he says. Rhythm is everything, he says. He puts on Bukka White. The guitar produces the rhythm, says our host. 


Day 7. Through Sevier Country to a cabin in the Smokies, listening to rural blues and gospel. Route 441 takes us through the so-called Redneck Riviera –Pigeon Forge. Our host shouts and cries as we pass the mini golf courses, go-carts, water rides, laser games, motels, adverts for The Miracle Theatre and The Comedy Barn and then, finally, The Miracle Theatre which presents a show that includes an aerial battle of angels and a re-enactment of the crucifixion and the Comedy Barn, which presents an award winning family variety show for all the family one after another, one lined up after another. The buildings have been deposited here without sense or order. They are linded up in an endless strip. Kroger’s. The Old Time Country Shop. Mini-malls. Huge crosses that loom out over nowhere. Is there no end? We’re crushed. There’s no room for him, says our host. This is auto-satire. It satirises itself. There’s no perspective left from which to laugh. He cries and wails with pain.


Earlier, as we drove, our host and hostess tell us of the Yukon. Of the endless stretches of pristine forests, of deserted lakes where you could pitch your teepee and be undisturbed. Of the close harmony singing that would ring out in the Canadian night. How had they ended up here?


Night falls and we are lost in the mountains. Where’s our cabin? Precipitous falls to the left and the right. Our host, the driver is edgy. We get out and walk – the road’s too steep for the car. What are we going to do? Then we see it: the cabin. It’s almost too late for our host. He’s raving. What’s he doing here? How did he end up here? He can’t drive anymore, he, a non-driver! Not another mile! Later, he collapses on the balcony, still wet from the hot tub: the dying swan, half wrapped in a towel.


Only turnip greens can save us, he decides. He cooks a whole pan of them. Turnip greens!, he says. Plymouth Gin! Rural blues! Barbecue Bob! The Golden Gate Singers! These are the talismans that allow him to survive in the USA.


Day 8. Snow. W. is reading and writing in his notebook. Is he having any thoughts?, I ask him. The others have gone out. W. says his mind is a perfect blank.


That night we drink ourselves into oblivion. Our host’s complaints rise to the same magnificent level as our Somalian taxi driver’s. It’s a third world country!, he says. It’s gone mad!, he says. When they first arrived in America, he says, he saw two 12 year old kids held face down by an armed security guard. He was pointing the gun at their heads, he says. Our host went home and didn’t come out for days. This country is insane, he says.


Back in Nashville, our host, our driver, falls out of his car. I can’t drive anymore! We talk softly to him, and sit out on the porch with Plymouth Gin cut with water. This is yuppie hour, says our host, slowly recovering, when joggers and dog walkers fill the streets. He shows us his tattoo: workers of the world unite, it says.


Day 9. Our host talks movingly of the early blues players. They led such short lives! But life is short! There’s not much time! He and our hostess reminisce about Canada. How have they ended up here? I think at night our open-hearted hosts dream of the endless stretches of the Yukon.


Day 10. Our last taxi driver, who is taking us back to the airport, is apocalyptic. In America, your teeth rot in your mouth, he says, because you can’t afford healthcare. There’s the rich and there’s the poor, he says, and the poor have nothing and never will have anything but nothing. We drive through the Projects. There’s no minimum wage here, he says. People are paid five – six dollars an hour, that’s all.

Queues

The new world! We didn’t think we’d make it, but here we are, dirty
and dishevelled in the airport. We can’t find an exit. Up the stairs
and down the stairs. We sit in the rocking chairs and ask Sal to find
the way out.

There’s a lot of queuing in the new world, we decide. First of all,
the security lines at the airport, which go on forever, and which
everyone endures with great patience. Americans are a patient people, we decide. For his part, W. copes badly with queuing. He’s visibly vexed. Sal is worse. She wants to punch someone, she says. W. notes that I don’t seem to mind queuing. It’s because you’re a Hindu, he says. Hindus are a stoical people, he says.

In the Greyhound bus station, our bus is delayed for many hours. No one tells us over the tannoy. We’re left to find this out for ourselves. Our fellow passengers don’t care. They’ve seen it all. Nothing surprises them. They’ve always been treated like shit and it’s likely they’ll go on being treated like shit. A policeman with a gun in his holster stands behind a counter watching us all. Meanwhile a TV on Weather Channel blares out a documentary on plane crashes.

Sal offers everyone Gummi Bears. W. and I sit on the floor and eat barbeque flavour popcorn and he asks for Hindu stories. I tell him about Sati and Shiva, and how her father came back to life with the head of a goat. Then I tell him about Ganesha, and how it came about that he had the head of an elephant. The queue isn’t moving. Nothing’s happening. We Hindus are used to such things, I tell W.

The artist doesn’t think, if by ‘thinking’ we mean the elaboration of a chain of concepts. In him thought is born from contact with the matter which it forms, like something auxilary, like the demands of matter itself, like the requirement of a form in the process of being born. Truth is less important to the artist than that his work should succeed, that it should come to life. My ‘thoughts’ were formed together with my work, they gnawed their way perversely and tenaciously into a world which gradually revealed itself.

Witold Gombrowicz

Ozu’s most endearing characteristic, for me, is what Sato calls his "pillow shots." The term comes from the "pillow words" used in Japanese poetry – words that may not advance or even refer to the subject, but are used for their own sake and beauty, as a sort of punctuation. In Ozu, a sequence will end and then, before the next begins, there will be a shot of a tree, or a cloud, or a smokestack, or a passing train, or a teapot, or a street corner. It is simply a way of looking away, and regaining composure before looking back again. (via)

Ozu’s use of "pillow shots," which unobtrusively break up the action and give the viewer a moment to contemplate or rest. The "pillow shots" consist of flowers or banners or whatnot … (via)

Much has been made of Ozu’s visual devices: the camera pitched to the eye level of an ideal spectator watching from the comfort of a tatami mat; the compositions that emphasize the geometric qualities of the Japanese interior, with its clean lines, right angles and frames within frames; the "pillow shots," as Ozu called them, of wind-rustled trees, passing trains, empty side streets, that provide buffers of silence and reflection between dramatic scenes. (via)

Ozu also developed a curious form of transition, which various critics have labeled "pillow shots" or "curtain shots." Between scenes, he would always place carefully framed shots of the surroundings to signal changes in setting, as well as for less obvious reasons. Basically a hybrid of the cutaway and placing shots, these transitions were considered unusual for extended length; they sometimes seem motivated more by graphic composition and pacing than by the demands of the narrative. (via)

Materialism of the Other

In enjoyment, Levinas explains, and as I attempted to unfold previously, the ego is produced as the result of an involution of the cosmic womb of the elements. Living from the various media or milieus of the elemental – on light, air, water and food – the ego is able to maintain itself over time, although it is always exposed to the uncertainty implicit in its dependency on what lies outside of it. The fruit may wither on the vine, the river dry up – the ego can never be sure of its future. Fortunately, there opens the phenomenon that Levinas calls dwelling – through the setting up of an ‘extraterritoriality’ set back from the immediacy of elemental life. The ego continues to join what it receives from the element, but is now able to deepen a movement of interiorisation, consolidating its independent identity. Such a movement comes together, in dwelling, with a movement of labour and acquisition, Levinas argues; dwelling is the node wherein the ego sets itself back from the world in a home, even as it maintains an opening to the element. But dwelling cannot be reduced to the phenomenon of the possession of a home – it expresses, rather, that position which allows the capacity to possess. A capacity that, Levinas argues in some obscure and troubling pages, is dependent on an act of welcoming.

The ego can come to dwell in the home because it is made welcome there, says Levinas, by a feminine other – to ‘the gentleness or the warmth of intimacy’. Like the goddess Hestia, who remains in the hearth, the feminine extends an invitation to the ego into the privacy of dwelling, in the interior space that will become a home and permit of inhabitation. Compared to the ‘timeless and carefree’ paradise of enjoyment (although always menaced by the ‘concern for the morrow’), we find instead ‘a perpetual postponement of the expiration in which life risks foundering’. Levinas argues the ‘very dimension of time’ opens in dwelling, through that act of welcoming that separates the ego from the immediacy of the element. The welcome of the feminine permits a collection and consolidation of egoic existence. The dimension of labour, which in turn allows the ego to possess the items it brings into the home, is dependent upon the initial invitation the femininely coded space of intimacy extends to the ego.

Levinas tells us such intimacy is not to be confused with the actual physical presence of a woman. Femininity would simply provide an appropriate metaphor for a private space. Nevertheless, this is not an innocent metaphor, but confirms a whole history of thought wherein the feminine is made to stand for a ground that absents itself in order to allow the existence of a self which is always coded as masculine. Levinas, to be sure, wants to break with ideas of a nourishing, maternal sense of the earth, of the primordial matrix at the source of the world in pagan cosmogonies. The cosmic womb of the element that Levinas seems to reference in his account of enjoyment can easily become opaque and unnourishing matter. Levinas’s feminine is, by contrast, discreet, belonging to a hidden fold in the earth – but this merely perpetuates the cliche of a benign and self-abnegating maternal presence, enabling others without wanting anything for itself.

But what does it enable? The welcome of intimacy grants the possibility of having time – of a deferral of the ‘concern for the morrow’ which threatened the hedonism of enjoyment. It permits labour to transform the element, letting the hand (for Levinas, the organ of work) grope towards what it can then apprehend as things. I am able to begin what he calls the ‘Odyssean journey … where the adventure pursued in the world is but an accident of a return’: what matters is the movement that consolidates the identity of the ego.

The pages on dwelling, dense and troubling are difficult enough. But no sooner than he has articulated its structure, Levinas imposes another on top of it. The ego, he argues, is exposed to the alterity of the Other [Autrui] – to that relation that is experience as the good, as responsibility at the same moment it has come to dwell. I will not rehearse Levinas’s well known account of the opening of the ethical here. But this opening – a welcoming of the Other – occurs simultaneously with the welcome that feminine intimacy bestows. From the first, the dwelling is not securely possessed by the ego, but turned towards the Other to whom the ego is engaged in responsibility. This is why Levinas can write, ‘The chosen home is the very opposite of a root. It indicates a disengagement, a wandering [errance] which has made it possible, which is not a less with respect to installation, but the surplus of the relationship with the Other, metaphysics’.

The home, then, is not the basis of subjective identity – the root it sends down into the earth – even though feminine intimacy is said to grant the possibility of an increased independence from the element. For that independence is, seemingly simultaneously, turned over to the Other who, it must be understood, cannot be identified with the intimacy with the feminine. The Other is not encountered in the home, but as coming from outside of it – the alterity of the Other is in no way the indefiniteness of the element, but the infinity of a relation that contests any attempt on the part of the ego to close itself up. Dwelling, says Levinas, is the node that joins the movement of interiorisation to the movement of labour and possession; I am able to commence an Odyssean journey. But this journey is subject to a detour from the first – I am never allowed, it seems, to journey back to myself, since the Other before me – anyone at all – disengages me from my identity and deracinates my home (I wander from my home in my home, the interior having been unfolded and exposed to the outside. In it and outside of it, the home, now, is entirely exposed, entirely open …)

‘No human or interhuman relationship can be enacted outside of an economy; no face can be approached with empty hands and closed home’. The circulation which seems to be permitted by a domestic space (Levinas calls this economy) is broken by the relation to the Other. The space into which I am welcomed becomes immediately a space of hospitality. Note that hospitality bears upon what my dwelling has allowed me to make into a possession – it is a giving of what I have wrested from the element. Hospitality has a material content. As Blanchot writes in another context, reflecting, no doubt, upon his reading of Levinas:

Materialism: ‘my own’ would perhaps be of little account, since it is appropriation or egoism; but the materialism of others – their hunger, their thirst, their desire – is the truth of materialism, its importance.

I am never allowed to tend complacently to my own hunger, my own thirst; my desires are, from this point no longer my own, since they come from without. Although I may indeed decide to follow only those desires I take to be mine, this is a movement of reaction. Appropriation and egoism have already been challenged; the hunger of the Other – his thirst, his desire – has already laid claim to me in dwelling.

Great is hungering – this phrase, which Blanchot quotes from Levinas, and which I quoted in a previous post finds another significance: great is the hungering of the Other …

Blanchot again:

If I cannot welcome the Other by answering the summons which his approach exerts to the point of exhausting me utterly, it is surely through awkward weakness alone (through the wretched ‘after all, despite everything’, and through my portion of derision and folly) that I am called upon to enter into this separate, this other relation. I am called to enter it with my selfhood gangrened and eaten away, altogether alienated (thus it is among lepers and beggars beneath the Roman ramparts that the Jews of the first centuries expected to discover the Messiah.)

The relation to the Other implicates me as I exposed in a new sense – not, now, to the uncertainty of the element, but to the infinity of a relation that separates me from the root that my home might otherwise become. It is not that my home is open to the Messiah for Blanchot (explaining Levinas), as though it were sufficient to leave a place within my dwelling for him that he might come. I myself am the Messiah who would welcome the Other in my home. I myself – and only as my egoity, my selfhood is eaten away to nearly nothing. Must I become hungry in order to feed the Other in turn? But hunger, now has a new significance. My hunger is no longer mine, it is not my first concern …

When one commentator says, The Messiah is perhaps I, he is not exalting himself. Anyone might be the Messiah – must be he, is not he. For it would be wrong to speak of the Messiah in Hegelian language – ‘the absolute intimacy of absolute exteriority’ – all the more so because the coming of the Messiah does not yet signify the end of history, the suspension of time.

It announces a time more future, as the following mysterious text conveys, than any prophesy could ever foretell: "All prophets – there is no exception – have prophesised only for the messianic time [l’epokhe?]. As for future time, what eye has seen it except Yours, Lord, who will act for him who is faithful to you and keeps waiting". (Levinas and Scholem)

The coming of the Messiah – the opening of my dwelling to the Other – belongs to the time prophesised by the prophets, Blanchot suggests (following Levinas, following Scholem): what matters is not the time I have, but that which I can now give to the Other. But this formulation gets things the wrong way round: it is the Other who brings the gift of time as it arrives from outside the closed economy of the ego. Or rather, it is the Other who gives sense to the time that dwelling has allowed me, orienting it in a particular direction.

With the Other, Levinas explains comes the condition of language, of reason – of the ability to grasp cognitively what the hand only groped towards (I do not have the space to discuss these topics here). Labour, says Levinas, is only able to shape the indefiniteness of matter, it is not able to make it renounce its anonymity. But my address to the Other, acknowledging his identity (the Other is a he, for Levinas), opens the dimension of language that allows for such a grasping. I no longer feel my way into the future, groping uncertainly; to think is to change the quality of the time that I have. But of course, my time is no longer mine; it belongs, Levinas says, to the Other – just as it must be judged according to another relation that opens in the relation to the Other.

He points here to the relation to other Others – to those alongside to the Other to whom we open our home. From the exclusivity of the ethical relation, we pass to the domain of politics, of judgement: we must now measure up carefully what we are to do and to whom we should give our time (even as, according to Levinas, time is given to us by the Other). The Messiah gives way in us to the judge who lives in a world of competing claims. I must decide what to do with the time that has been given me. And the moment I am brought before this decision – which is to say immediately, all at once – I am no longer the Messiah – or the Messiah is not the only one I am. Who am I to feed – this Other? this person standing before me? But what about the other Others – what about the ones who are genuinely starving? How am I to weigh up their demands upon me?

Great is the hungering of others in the world around me! Great is the whole burden of human suffering as it implicates me!

The demand of justice for always greater justice: in me, outside of me and in justice itself, thus also in the knowledge and exercise of justice. All of which presupposes what may be called the tragic imbroglio of the other and others; whence the intervention of the social and the political, under guarantee of the law, in the service of all that is far (first of all) and of all that is near – whence perhaps the repetition of the word peace, that this last word may be enriched by this echoing of itself in an incomparable repetition.

The long road of justice is a hard one. Like the journeying of Abraham, who departed alone, travelling towards all – from particularity to universality – under threat from the night and with all the hopes of the day.

I quote from a newly translated essay by Blanchot, ‘Peace, peace to the far and to the near’, without justifying here why his words can stand in for those of Levinas. The Messiah (who Blanchot evoked in a previous paragraph) gives way to the wanderer Abraham, perpetually en route from the ethical to the social and the political – from the particularity of the relation to the Other to the universality of the relation to the other Others. The latter, since there will always be hunger, and I can never do enough, belongs to a tragic imbroglio – a word that belongs to the other people Blanchot mentions in this essay – to the Greeks who have passed down to us ‘the logos, philosophy, beauty, and a certain idea of democracy’. Tragic because there are all too many … but hopeful, too, since there is always a surplus over the universal, over our inheritance from the Greeks: a particularity that, says Levinas, says Blanchot, lays claim to us as the ethical.

Great is Hungering

The account of the birth of the ego in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity resembles a cosmogony. It is said to originate through a relationship with a series of media or milieus – in the plenitude of a cosmic womb that bears distinct elements within it: the earth and the sea, light and warmth, but also the familiar expanses of the city. The ego, from the first, is immersed in these elements, bathing in light and warmth, and nourishing itself in a movement that sustains and consolidates its existence.

This dependency on the non-self does not belie the independence of the ego, its happiness. Need – Levinas’s term for the relation to the other, to the things which nourish the ego or bathe it in light and warmth – is not first of all a lack. ‘Enjoyment is made’, writes Levinas, ‘of the memory of its thirst; it is a quenching’; certainly, enjoyment contains a memory of privation, but this is only as a dissatisfaction that has already been answered. The ego remembers a withdrawal from sustenance such that its plenitude can be experienced; lack appears only in the realisation of its appeasement, and it is inferred rather than experienced.

It is in this act of remembering – this enjoyment of enjoyment, which has always fulfilled a need – that the ego comes to itself in its independence. To live on or from the series of elemental media – to relish the taste of fruit, the coolness of the river, the familiar vistas of the street – ‘delineates independence itself, the independence of enjoyment and happiness’. For Levinas, the ego is given in a ‘contraction of sensation, the pole of a spiral in which the trajectory of turns and involutions is inscribed in joy’ that is itself enjoyed.

With this claim – and his whole account of enjoyment – Levinas seeks to break from what he sees as the intellectualist bias of phenomenology. The ego is given in its ipseity through a contraction of sensation – no ideal self needs to be understood as the basis of this involution. And likewise, Levinas insists, we do not first of all represent what we enjoy to ourselves, ascribing value to something already represented, but conversely; it is upon the non-objectifying acts of breathing, eating and drinking that we live from, and whose value is no way separable from the immediacy in which they are given. Intentional consciousness, understood to constitute its objects, rests upon a prior act of positing – of the achievement of an embodiment that serves as the basis for consciousness.

Just such an autoaffective positing takes place within the sights, sounds and sensations – qualities apparently without support (the ego is not concerned from whence they come, but only that they come) – in which we bathe. For Levinas, the ego emerges from the not-I, the other, but this is not accomplished once and for all. Certainly, the ego is singularised and autonomous before the appearance of consciousness, but this happy self-sufficiency has to be constantly reachieved; it depends on a movement of becoming that is the basis of the life of the ego. It depends upon the movement for which alimentation, says Levinas, expresses the essence: that which passes from the other to the same.

As such, intentional consciousness depends upon a prior, bodily intentionality – upon a series of elements whose form it cannot constitute in advance – the immediacy of light and warmth as they gratify me all at once, as well as the indeterminate milieu from which they emerge. In this way, enjoyment breaks from the subordination of the things we encounter to a ‘technical finality’ such as, he suggests, we find in Heidegger. ‘As material or gear the objects of everyday use are subordinate to enjoyment – the lighter to the cigarette one smokes, the fork to the food, the cup to the lips. Things refer to my enjoyment’. In place of a single finality, then – the for-the-sake-of-which of human existence that gives sense to the things we encounter – we find a series of finalities that are autonomous with respect to one another. Here, Levinas waxes positively Batailliean: to enjoy something is to do so ‘without utility, in pure loss, gratuitously, without referring to anything else, in pure expenditure’. Happiness is the suspension of a single finality; it belongs to ‘the disinterested joy of play’.

But what happens when food cannot be found, and the sun sinks beneath the horizon? what, when the river has dried up and the fruit on the vine withered? For the most part, the absence of immediate gratification is still to be understood as a mode of enjoyment: our distress and trouble are merely part of that movement of alimentation that provides invigoration, continued life. Sensibility is passive compared to the activity of thought – I am the mercy of the elements that provide me with light, warmth and food, but I am still confident in my ability to consume the other, transmuting it into the same. I still hold myself separate from the world, looking to absorb what I encounter into a higher unity; perhaps we find here a doubling of the constitutive activity of consciousness in the way the ego, in enjoyment, partially and provisionally constitutes the habitat which sustains it.

Pain and trouble, for the most part, belong to the rhythm of enjoyment – the uncertainty of finding nourishment does not belie the confidence that there will something, once more, to eat. In enjoyment, sensibility is given in an egoism – a monadic separation – whose essence is this confidence. Yet enjoyment is precarious; there is the threat that confidence will not be enough, and the element, far from affording sustenance and invigoration, becomes indifferent matter. Water, water everywhere and nor a drop to drink … Coleridge’s becalmed mariner knows the element only as what Levinas calls ‘an opaque density without origin, the bad infinite, or the indefinite, the aperion’.

Suffering, says Levinas, is not a state more basic than enjoyment; it is, he argues, an inversion of joy – a vulnerability to matter that is no longer an immersed, oblivious participation. One can never take for granted what is expressed by Levinas in the infinitive – to eat, to drink, to sleep, to warm oneself – since each can be prolonged into the indefinite reserve that resists the egoic movement from the other to the same. What, then, does hunger become when it is no longer part of the rhythm through which the other is measured by the same?

Remembering Antelme’s The Human Race, which relates its author’s experience in the camps, Blanchot writes,

We must meditate (but is it possible?) upon this: in the camp (as Robert Antelme said while enduring it) need sustains everything, maintaining an infinite relation to life even if it be in the most abject manner (but here it is no longer a matter of high or low) – if need consecrates life through an egoism without ego – there is also the point at which need no longer helps one to live, but is an aggression against the entire person: a torment which denudes, an obsession of the whole being whereby the being is utterly destroyed.

Blanchot goes on to evoke that ‘egoism without ego’ which reveals itself in a need for nourishment that is no longer part of the structure Levinas calls enjoyment. Need, now, has displaced itself from the ipseity of the ego, which thrives on the contents of what it ingests. In lieu of itself, enduring only as an empty craving, the ego absents itself from the autoaffection in which it was born. Or this auto-affection seems to outlive it, need become impulse, ipseity voiding itself in the mechanism of existence.

Enjoyment, now, reaches its limit. If for the most part, we are steeped in an instinctive hedonism by which life is first of all a ‘love of life’, and whose worth is given in terms of its contents as they are ‘more dear than my being’, Antelme shows us what happens when need destroys the ipseity it formerly sustained.

We live, says Levinas, from "good soup", air, light, spectacles, work, sleep etc.’ – but our dependency brings with it what we cannot possess. If I am grounded by the relation to things as they are given to me in enjoyment, I might also be uprooted by their absence. And if the carnal ego – Levinas’s rebuttal to what he sees as the separation of mind and body in phenomenology – is not yet the formal identity from which consciousness constitutes the world, it is vulnerable when the elements become indefinite, bad infinities, and lack all determination.

Sensibility, which seems to grant the life of the separated ego, may also threaten this separation. Hunger is not only a pause, a momentary rest that has the certainty of sustenance before it, but menaces the very ipseity of the I. In enjoyment, the elements withdraw as they allow individual things – this piece of fruit, this cleared patch of woodland – to be absorbed into the same. But enjoyment also vouchsafes that uncertainty Levinas calls the ‘concern for the morrow’. It describes, on the one hand, the movement from the other to the same, that maintains the ego in its independence within dependence, but on the other, threatens to let the other become indigestible and thereby undo the ipsiety of what it sustained.

Even as enjoyment is exaltation (the enjoyment of enjoyment, its doubling up in joy and gratification) it is also inhabited by uncertainty. One cannot by certain of having time to enjoy. What else is the experience of pain and suffering, for Levinas, but the absence of the prospect that seems to open to the ego in enjoyment – an immediacy that is given as the return of what detaches the present moment from any kind of future?

Blanchot again:

Dull, extinguished eyes burn suddenly with a savage gleam for a shred of bread ‘even if one is perfectly aware that death is a few minutes away’ and that there is no longer any point in nourishment.

This gleam, this brilliance does not illuminate anything living. However, with this gaze which is a last gaze, bread is given us bread. This gift, outside all reason, and at the point where all the values have been exterminated – in nihilist desolation and when all objective order has been given up – maintains life’s fragile chance by the sanctification of hunger – nothing ‘sacred’, let us understand, if something which is given without being broken or shared by him who is dying of it (‘Great is hungering’, Levinas says, recalling a Jewish saying).

But at the same time the fascination of the dying gaze, where the space of life congeals, does not leave intact the need’s demand, not even in a primitive form, for it no longer allows hunger (it no longer allows bread) to be related in any way to nourishment.

In this ultimate moment when dying is exchanged for the life of bread, not any longer, in order to satisfy a need and still less in order to make bread desirable, need – in need – also dies as simple need. And it exalts, it glorifies – by making it into something inhuman (withdrawn from all satisfaction) – the need of bread which has become an empty absolute where henceforth we can all only ever lose ourselves.

Beyond the awareness that death is close, there is the impersonal need for bread that has come too late for sustenance. Food is the parody of food. Bread appears as what it is – but only as it is no longer a content that nourishes life. It appears as what it is – but only when enjoyment has collapsed into bare existence, and need has become an empty absolute detached from any particular existence.

Here, we might remember that for Hegel, the absolute names the conceptual system contained by the phenomenal world as it develops, granting itself to human knowledge. For Blanchot, the absolute is lost in the negative absolute, which is in no way to be understood as its dialectisable correlate. The absolute, for Hegel, must be thought in its relation to the world, as well as the knowledge the human being has of this relation, but for Blanchot, hunger withdraws the ego from the relation in question and from the measure of knowledge. Ego and world – the ego and the elements – intermingle in an experience of brute existing that no longer permits of particular existents.

Great is hungering – great indeed, as it turns the ego inside out, revealing it to have been only ever a knot tied in the continuity of being. The experience Antelme describes, and that Blanchot recalls is, to be sure, exceptional. But it also indicates in what the uncertainty that inhabits enjoyment consists: the ‘concern for the morrow’ is a concern that life will become impersonal, its contents no longer more dear to it than its existing. The body, dependent in its independence, is exposed on all sides to the threat of a sensibility that no longer sustains its separation.

Great is hungering – and all the way up to the ‘there is’ in terms of which Levinas presents the empty absolute, the collapse of the world into the aperion. If the ego, as Levinas will recount, seeks to make a dwelling in the uncertainty of the element, setting up its home, it is in order to leave behind the threat of a future in which the ‘there is’ cannot be held at bay. But the home, like the digestive system, cannot maintain a simple dichotomy between inside and outside, as it allows the movement that converts the other into the same. 

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

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

The Hunger Artist: Jandek in Performance

Kafka’s hunger artist starves because he can find nothing he wants to eat. He starves and that starvation is his art – crowds come to watch him in his age, standing guard to make sure he doesn’t cheat. Of course, the music of Jandek is the result of a choice: when it comes to live performances, there’s the question of who is going to comprise the group, joining Sterling Smith (or, as he is known to concert bookers, the Representative from Corwood, that being his record label, which releases Jandek recordings) – or whether, indeed, anyone will join him at all; the length, duration and style of the songs (decided on the day of the performance, with a runthrough of the set with participating musicians, all of whom are given a considerable say in the direction of the music) and the venue itself (Corwood is very specific with its requests). And of course, with respect to the studio albums, there are choices of instrumentation, recording techniques, lyrics and so on, even as there is also a large element of improvisation in the performances. But in another sense, there seems to be no choice at all: follow the lyrics – especially those on the thematically linked albums that have appeared since the turn of the millennium, which trace, among other things, the ups and downs of a love affair, and the song-suites that have comprised some recent live performances – and it is clear, I think, that they have at their heart, a man in extremity, a man who performs because he falls short of the ordinary happiness most of us take for granted. He searches, for the most part in vain, for something to eat, but finds nothing. Nothing, that is, except perhaps performance itself, and the hope that I think is implicit to finding and addressing an audience.

Performing live, Smith’s face (the Representative’s) is almost always blank. It’s not a mask, but the absence of masks; a space onto which you can project anything at all, but only because there’s nothing to there; because, with rare lapses, it remains disarmingly still, subtracted from expression. Yet, for all that, he is an intensely physical player. We can watch him shuffle and dip as he plays his guitar – we can watch his careful enunciation of his lyrics as he leans into the microphone, stretching his words, moaning them, or letting them rise into a despondent wail, but the face, half hidden by a fedora, is without expression and his thin, ageless body is always hidden in black. We can expect no stage banter – no ‘thank you’ for applause; when his guitar string breaks onstage during his performance at Newcastle, he waits, head down and silent for three long minutes until another guitar is brought to him from backstage. Indeed, he never even glances out into the audience or acknowledges its presence. He might as well, notes the observer of a solo piano and vocal performance in Hasselt, Belgium, be playing in an empty bar.

And yet, for all that, he will sometimes reference the live situation in his lyrics. ‘I made a mistake coming here today’, he sings in London at the beginning of a solo guitar/vocal gig. And he sings, ‘I wore a scarf in Denmark/ just like I said I would’, at a performance in Aarhus, Denmark, and refers to ‘the ticket that exploded’ at a gig that was part of a festival celebrating the work of William Burroughs in Amsterdam. It works another way too – as Barry Esson, Jandek’s erstwhile promoter and MC, announced at a gig rescheduled in Brooklyn after Hurricane Katrina prevented a performance, ‘the emotion behind this event is in tribute to New Orleans’. Lyrics are written to reflect the location and the occasion of the gig, even if, at the same time, as was clear to audiences at Camber Sands and Bristol in his UK dates in late 2005, he would flip almost randomly the pages of the book he brought with him on tour (resting, at the first of these gigs, on an improvised keyboard stand and a kitchen tray) to pick out phrases to sing.

There are moments when the stage persona, for a moment, breaks – when, for example, someone calls out between songs in Chicago, in 2006, ‘Where have you been man?’, eliciting a rare, quickly suppressed smile from the Representative, or, on another occasion, he asks into his microphone, ‘is this thing on?’ But almost all accounts of seeing Jandek live emphasise the ghostly intangibility of the performer (he’s called a ‘cowboy ghost’ according to a review of the Aarhus gig), and the way the Representative seems to drift on and off the stage (even, on one occasion, emerging with his band from a trap door in the floor). The distance from his audience that Smith carefully maintains is not part of the cultivation of mystique; I think it is an attempt to honour, rather, the music itself – to preserve it in its distance and its mystery.

Even Jandek’s disparagers honour this distance, intentionally or otherwise. For all his horror at the music, Irwin Chusid‘s first response to Jandek’s debut Ready for the House, passed to him by a radio station colleague in 1980, was to wonder at the fact that someone had gone to the effort of releasing it at all. On an interview included as an extra on the Jandek on Corwood DVD, he remembers being stunned by the ‘amusicality’ of the album, by its ‘sheer emptiness’; ‘I’d never heard anything that was so naked’ – but what really mystifies him is the effort its maker had gone to to record material, get it pressed and then distributed. Why bother at all? ‘It could be worst record ever released[….] It could also be the greatest record ever released. I can’t figure it out …’, wrote Chusid to the artist in 1980. He decides, of course, in favour of the former – which fails, for him, to fall into the category of ‘so bad, it’s good’ that he celebrates in his rag-bag of a book Songs in the Key of X. It is really only the myth of Jandek – recycled, clichéd accounts of an instrumentally incompetent recluse concerned for unfathomable reasons to move some of the albums he has had pressed – that concerns him.

The lure of such a myth is undeniable. For many years, all that was known of the man behind Jandek was the record sleeves, many of which (as we can now be sure) depict Smith himself, the Representative, at various ages in a variety of situations, sometimes making use of image-altering software. For Richard Unterberger, the album cover photographs show ‘all the attention to framing and focus of the do-it-yourself stalls at Woolworth’s’ – but their artlessness is their merit, being inseparable from the recordings they sleeve. There is nothing affected about them, nothing ironical or distancing – they simply are, and uncannily so. The blank, defiant face of Six and Six matches perfectly this hard, anaesthetised recording – but if the smiling man in a cardigan in front of a country barn seems the very contrary of the despairing intoner of Worthless Recluse (an acapella recording notable for the particular extremity it reaches on some of the pieces), this doesn’t matter. Is it a holiday snap? A record of a visit to a relative in the countryside? Its incongruity seems exactly the point: an ordinary man created these songs – a man with a past like anyone else. What are we to make of Smith apparently becoming a Sufi on the covers of Raining Down Diamonds and Khartoum? Is it an oblique religious or political commentary, following 9/11 (the albums were released in 2005, but were perhaps recorded earlier …) … the sign, perhaps, that all religions are one, and that Smith is encouraging us to reach a hand to the Islamic world in fidelity and friendship? Perhaps the cover photographs mean nothing at all; perhaps they mean everything. ‘Explanations are, in fact, only a moment in the tradition of the inexplicable’, writes Agamben, ‘they are the moment, to be precise, which keeps watch over it by leaving it unexplained’.

More recently, the sleeves have not always pictured Smith – they are what appear to be holiday snaps from Cork, the Dingle penninsula in Ireland and Chester, in Northwest England, and, most recently, a series of rural scenes. What are to read into all this? Everything – since the space is blank and will admit of an infinite variety of transferences – and nothing, since it is blank and remains so. Perhaps, as Smith said to Katy Vine about his music and his relation to Jandek, ‘there’s nothing to get’; perhaps this ‘nothing’ is the correlate of the man who sings and plays at the heart of Jandek: it is Smith himself, or rather it is a hungry absence in the space of Smith, who can find nothing he wants to eat.

The outsider artist, as Chusid and Unterberger use this term, is unwitting: he does not know what makes his work interesting, but merely gets on with it; it issues from him with perfect ingenuousness. He simply does it – and it is what makes him what he is; the outsider works by instinct, perhaps in a manner more direct and naive than others, and can be admired (or mocked) for this reason. Like the man who builds a palace from tin cans in his backyard, his work would be the monument to a magnificent eccentricity; the wonder is that it exists at all. It can be admired (he does everything on his own terms), or reviled (no one else would release his music) – what matters is that dogged directness that is so naive, so simplistic, so untrained it’s significant as a phenomenon.

Perhaps this rather patronising category does capture something important about Jandek’s oeuvre – its tenacity, its seeming perversity (quote) bespeak a musical vision that can seem a simple incompetence. Yet at its best, on albums like I Threw You Away from the recent run of studio albums, or the early Chair Beside a Window, or a difficult album like Put My Dream On This Planet, this music can be said to belong to the outside only in the sense that it maintains an extremity almost unparalleled within the singer/songwriter idiom. This is what commentators like Chusid even as they disparage the music: holding itself at its distance and its reserve, it is entirely apart.

Heidegger writes that the origin of the work of art is to be considered apart from both artist and artwork. It is a spring – an Ursprung – that wells up in what he calls the working of the work of art, the way it struggles into existence. The moment of inspiration is blind in some vital sense; it belongs outside the artist. Indeed, in the philosophy of art, it was always thus – Plato fears the poet for precisely this reason: he or she may be divinely inspired, but inspiration is a form of possession or madness (see the Apology, the Ion and the Meno). In the Phaedrus, we find a more nuanced account of the dangers of lyric poetry as it glorifies the deeds of ancient times for the instruction of posterity. ‘[I]f any man comes to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill (techne) alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brough to nought by the poetry of madness, and behold, their place is nowhere to be found’. Skill, technique is not sufficient; one has to be inspired in order to be a good poet. But when inspiration is absent? The poet is a mere imitator, concerned with mimesis alone.

In the case of Jandek, technique – the received account of technique – is precisely what is wagered in the experience of inspiration. Why do musicians suppose he cannot play or sing? Because they are in thrall to a music of imitation, of tonality, of conventional song structures and playing styles. One has to listen to Jandek with another ear – or rather, listening to the music co-creates the ear of the one who listens. Here is something new; a new kind of playing, a new kind of singing, even as it borrows from established forms, even as Smith remains a kind of singer-songwriter: it is an inspired art insofar as overruns mere technical proficiency. But to listen with this new ear – to be exposed to the dangerous extremity of divine madness – isn’t this precisely the danger? Plato would have expelled all the poets from his ideal city, except for those lyric poets whose work had been appropriately purified, bearing only on the relationship between gods and human beings, performed in a standardised rhythm and mode. More admirable than those who dismiss Jandek for incompetence – for a perceived lack of instrumental and vocal prowess, or (in a more recent turn) for the apparent shortcomings in his improvisational competency – are those who are afraid for themselves in the face of such music – who meets its hunger with an unassuaged hunger of their own.

On The Ruins of Adventure (as I write, the most recent studio album) – lumbering, staggering along, this is a dazed music, a music concussed – the fretless bass accompanies aimlessly a part-sung, part-spoken vocalising marked by despondency and abyssal despair. ‘It’s toooooo bleak’ – the ‘to’ howled and stretched. ‘Embrace the greeey of reality …’ The song does not fall from the Muses, but is a thickening of the earth – a fetid swamp, or the earth moving, swarming with mosquitoes, in solifluction. Without melody or regular rhythm – without the pulse of a musical groove, it is sludgy and inert – yet it moves nonetheless; it surges forward. But what moves? What lurches lifelessly from track to track?

Heidegger calls earth that materiality foregrounded in the work of art – in this case, lumpen bass picking and a vocalising thick with despair that wanders without settling on particular pitches. This is his name, too, for the reserve that looms around us in our relation to the world (the world become useless, things as they obtrude from the purposes by which we understand them). The Ursprung of the artwork, its origin, says Heidegger, shows how earth is in perpetual struggle with the ‘world’ of intelligibility and meaning. Explanations cannot exhaust the inexplicable: perhaps there is a way of speaking of Jandek’s art that keeps watch over it by leaving it unexplained – that allows earth to resound in the torpor of his voice or the sludgy waddling of the bass. A way, then of speaking its inspired necessity as it remains outside mere technical proficiency and the imitation of existing forms.

It is Smith’s peculiar vocation to dramatise the struggle between a despair too overwhelming to permit of a beginning, of its doubling into song, and the strength, precisely to sing, to perform. Jandek remains in the neither-nor, the neutrality of this perpetually thwarted commencement. It is necessary to sing, to play – but it is just as necessary to interrupt them, to mark the performance with its own impossibility. ‘I made a mistake coming here today’ – to begin at all is a mistake; the mistake is the art, or what blossoms into art. But the flower fades straightaway; the song empties and becomes a husk. What else is performance but a sham?

The hunger artist fasts because he can find nothing to eat. Could Smith sing or play otherwise? Perhaps something changes with live performance, in which he seems to be able to take a greater distance with respect to this impossibility than previously. Manhattan Tuesday, The Afternoon of Insensitivity, which sees the Representative playing keyboards with an organ setting, accompanied by, among others, Loren Connors, constructs a sombre sound-world that is of a piece with Miles Davis’s ‘He Loved Him Madly’, not only participates in despair, performing it, trudging through it, but muses explicitly on its source in the performer’s own life. ‘It seems I’ve been depressed all my life …’

On Glasgow Monday, The Cell, Smith sings his way – wispily, breathily, in a speech-song entirely new in his work – to a kind of resolution; it seems enough to ask questions (‘What do I have?’), to let them resound. What matters is that this questioning is shared – that the audience, asked by Barry Esson to reserve their applause to the end of the song suite, shelters the inexplicable along with him. Does he find a kind of consolation thereby, a lightening of despair, when it is shared, addressed to others? I think here of the song ‘I Love You’ from Brooklyn Wednesday – does this song give despair (Smith’s, and that unleashed by Hurricane Katrina) a direction, thereby lifting it from itself, transmuting its substance? Perhaps this lightening was always present in Jandek’s music – perhaps it was there from the first, and this as why, to answer Chusid’s question, Smith went to the trouble of recording, pressing and trying to distribute 1000 copies of Ready for the House.

Listening to the small portion of the live performances that have been released by Corwood, and dreaming of releases to come, one might wonder whether the hunger artist has found something to eat. In both East and West, the ghost is often thought of as having unfinished business, whether it is a desire for revenge or for justice. Buddhist traditions call the ghost ‘hungry’ since it is still attached to the world. Has the Representative from Corwood, who looks, as so many have commented, exactly like a ghost, found something to attach him? But I think of another hunger artist – the starving novelist-to-be of Hamsun’s novel, who keeps a stone in his mouth to satiate his hunger. Driven to extremity, one day he bits down on that stone as though it were a piece of bread. And I wonder whether Jandek itself is Smith’s way to bite down on the stone he’s been turning for decades in his mouth, false succour. False, but also true, for how else to keep fidelity with the extremity in which he lives?

It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was on my way to the station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realised it was much later than I thought and that I had to hurry; the shock of this discovery made me feel uncertain of the way, I wasn’t very well acquainted with the town as yet; fortunately, there was a policeman at hand, I ran to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: ‘You asking me the way?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘since I can’t find it myself’. ‘Give it up! Give it up!’, said he, and turned with a sudden jerk, like someone who wants to be alone with his laughter.

Kafka

I ordered my horse to be brought from the stables. The servant did not understand my orders. So I went to the stables myself, saddled my horse, and mounted. In the distance, I heard the sound of a trumpet, and I asked the servant what it meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. At the gate he stopped me and asked: ‘Where is the master going?’ ‘I don’t know’, I said, ‘just out of here, just out of here. Out of here, nothing else, it’s the only way I can reach my goal.’ ‘So you know your goal?’ he asked. ‘Yes’, I replied, ‘I’ve just told you. Out of here – that’s my goal’.

Kafka

Jacques Derrida, asked to narrate something of his life in an interview:

I wish that a narration were possible. For the moment it is not possible. I dream of managing one day not to recount this legacy, this past experience, this history, but at least to give a narration of it among other possible narrations. But in order to get there, I would have to undertake a kind of work, I would have to set out on an adventure that up till now I have not been capable of. To invent, to invent a language, to invent modes of anamnesis … For me, it is this adventure that interests me the most in a certain way, but which still today seems practically inaccessible.

So having said that, am I going to take the risk here, while improvising, of telling you things that would resemble a narration? No! … I don’t feel capable of giving myself over to … variations on my memory, my inheritance. All the more so in that this inheritance – if it is one – is multiple, not very homogeneous, full of all kinds of grafts.

… I see the journey of my brief existence as a journey in view of determining and naming the place from which I will have had the experience of exteriority. And the anamnesis we were talking about at the outset, this anamnesis would be in view of identifying, of naming it – not effacing the exteriority, I don’t think it can be effacted – but of naming it, identifying it, and thinking it a little better.

… a récit is not simply a memory reconstituting a past; a récit is also a promise, it is also something that makes a commitment toward the future. What I dream of is not only the narration of a past that is inaccessible to me, but a narration that would also be a future, that would determine a future.

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

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

Giorgio Agamben

Can we find an analogue of matter in the order of thought itself? Is there a matter of thought, a nuance, a grain which makes an event for thought and unsettles it, analogously with what I have described in the sensory order? Perhaps here we have to invoke words. Perhaps words themselves, in the most secret place of thought, are its matter, its timbre, its nuance, i.e. what it cannot manage to think.

Words ‘say’ sound, touch, always ‘before’ touch, always ‘before’ thought. And they always ‘say’ something other than what thought signifies, and what it wants to signify by putting them into form.

Words want nothing. They ae the ‘un-will’, the ‘non-sense’ of thought, its mass. They are innumerable[….] They are always older than thought. They can be semiologised, philologised, just as nuances are chromatised and timbres gradualised. But like timbres and nuances, they are always being born.

Lyotard, from The Inhuman

Idiomatic: property that one cannot appropriate; it signs you without belonging to you; it only appears to the other and it never comes back to you except in flashes of madness that bring together life and death, that bring you together dead and alive at the same time. You dream, it’s unavoidable, about the invention of a language or a song that would be yours, not the attributes of a ‘self’, rather the accentuated paraph, that is, the musical signature, of your most unreadable history. I’m not talking about a style but an intersection of singularities, habitat, voices, graphims, that moves with you and your body never leaves.

In my memory, what I write resembles a dotted line drawing that would be circling around a book to be written in which I call for myself the ‘old new language’, the most archaic and the most novel, therefore unheard-of, unreadable at present. This book would be something completely other from the path that it nevertheless still resembles. In any case, an interminable anamnesis whose form is being sought: not only my history, but culture, languages, families … the accumulation of dreams, projects, or notes no doubt weighs on what is written in the present.

One day, some piece of the book may fall out like a stone that keeps the memory of the hallucinatory architecture to which it might have belonged. The stone still resonates and vibrates, it emits a painful and indecipherable bliss, one no longer knows whose and for whom …

Jacques Derrida, from an interview

Above

There are necessary writers, closer to you in some way than yourself. That you confront them in your solitude, there where only you should be. And that you cannot speak of, not ordinarily. You lack the means. How can you speak of what allows you to speak? How to separate their rhythm from your own – their style from what passes as your own (your own and what is least your own. Nietzsche knew this when he signed his work Dionysos, or the Crucified. Because to write, to speak, is to do so with a million voices.)

Style – and that is the word. Style, stylus – written across you. Within you, so that what you find in your solitude belongs outside of you. Written within the writing that you are. There, on the bookshelf – there in that author, or that one. Or in that book which you bought – when?; which was given to you … by whom? Here is Tsvetayeva: ‘It is always the same me that does not come toward the same self that is waiting for it, always’. Marina Tsvetayeva: one of the necessary writers for me.

Laughter: but you can’t read Russian. Laughter: you only have her work as it’s quoted by others. And it is her letters – scraps of letters, quoted – that you love, and not her poems. Isn’t it? Isn’t it? It is as if I want first of all the evidence of writing in a life. A writing that evidences writing, that testifies to what it has meant, to its risks, its dangers.

Tsvetayeva abandoned herself to writing, I want to write that. In some way, she abandoned herself to it. And now I remember the anecdote from quotation Mandelstam about M.T.’s rudeness … she was a tyrant, wasn’t she? She was half-mad, wasn’t she? M.T.: but when I abbreviate her name thus there’s something else I discover: that she is also more than the one Nadezhda Mandelstam met. More and other, beyond. As though, to remember the quotation again, one only meets her above, looking upward …

I do not like meetings in real life. Foreheads knocking together. Two walls. You just cannot penetrate. A meeting should be an arch. Then the meeting is above. Foreheads tilted back!

A Meeting of Styles

Tsvetayeva, the great letter writer, from her correspondence with Pasternak:

I do not like meetings in real life. Foreheads knocking together. Two walls. You just cannot penetrate. A meeting should be an arch. Then the meeting is above. Foreheads tilted back!

I have been delighted to meet many bloggers. But a meeting in writing – I think it is what I always dreamed of. A meeting of writing, and of styles, remembering what Barthes wrote:

Thus under the name of style a self-sufficient language is evolved which has its roots only in the depths of the author’s personal and secret mythology, that subnature of expression where the first coition of words and things take place, where once and for all the great verbal themes of his existence come to be installed.

An investigation of style … wasn’t that what I replied when I was asked what my contribution was to be, were I to look back on everything I had written  (not here, but elsewhere)? A stupid answer. An embarassing one. But nevertheless, the word style is enough to move me tremendously. Style … and a meeting of styles – to cite another across blogs, obviously or secretly … yes, the meeting is, as Tsvetayeva said, above …

Hope

I disapprove of Cioran, and when I ask myself why, I find the answer, he is too satisfied with the forms his writing takes – with the essay, the aphorism, and perhaps with himself, too. Oversatisfied in being himself, he is not claimed, by the indecency of writing from the ‘I’, relying on the ‘I’, leaning upon it, upon what he takes to be himself, it’s as if writing – the experience of writing – never touched him. Of course, he writes,

My books, my work: the grotesquerie of such possessives. Everything was spoiled once literature stopped being anonymous. Decadence dates from the first author.

But look how he writes – in an isolated aphorism set alongside others … why do I suspect him of bad taste? Why do I think he wrote in bad taste, as if it mattered – as if my opinion mattered? He is complacent, I think to myself. He is obdurately himself, despite everything, despite writing, despite everything he’s written.

Perhaps I cannot bear him because I once admired him … I read him at that time when books formed a magic circle around me. I wanted to be protected, I think that was it. I was looking for something – what? – at the heart of the circle? I even recommended Cioran to others … I find that, too unbearable; I want to wash my hands.

Admiration for those for whom writing, the experience of writing, is itself something. For whom something is at stake, and for whom writing is hope – a ‘merciful surplus of strength’, a last strength at the bottom of weakness. And even the only hope … How melodramatic! How necessary!

This, from an old post from This Space:

There is one reason that keeps me writing: hope. The hope that I might be able to write what I need to say because it could not be said in any other way.

That said, I am not writing.

There is also the hope of reading, which is much the same: to find, at last, the narrative that allows me to breathe and to step forward actually; not vicariously through a character or the author’s experience, but actually to step forward. The metaphor is the only means.

That said, I am not reading either.

‘A Blog Goes On’

When so many blogs – 3 year projects, 5 year ones (how I dislike the word ‘project’!) have finished, I would like to remember a wonderfully unreasonable post from This Space:

Since a certain point at the weekend, I’ve been wondering what on earth I might write about here to break the silence. I feel that the silence must be broken, if only to displace the increasing desperation of the most recent entry. Also, whenever I see a blog whose latest entry is somewhat previous to the present date, I wonder: what on earth has the blogger been doing instead? From this glorious vantage point, it looks like bugger all. It looks like haughty neglect. I am offended. I take it as an affront. To what, I’m not sure.

I particularly dislike posts informing the loyal reader that the blogger is ‘taking a break’. They always announce that they’re taking a break ‘for a while’. I want to know, taking a break from what? When I write my blog, it feels like the break itself. A break like a fag break at work. Like a break gazing out of the window at the passing world. Like the breaking moments after some bad news. Like the gap between switching the TV off and getting up to go to bed. Like the time after writing. A blog goes on.

Still, I quite like the obscurity of the reason for the offence I take and the bitterness I harbour. Perhaps it makes it appear more profound; the truth is so deep and so tangled that should it ever emerge it must surely provide a revelation about this new medium; a truth glistening like a whatever emerges glistening from the unseeable depths. A big fish from a river perhaps. A screaming baby from a womb. A stream of water from a tap (such as when the sun shines through it). And, I have to say, I also quite enjoy cultivating grudges. Apart from very mild grudges against regular posters who announce that they’re ‘taking a break’ (‘for a while’), I also hold many strong grudges. Most of them are political. Many more sporting (or rather, unsporting). Some are literary. All too numerous to mention. But I’ve mentioned the latter regularly throughout this blog. They constitute this blog. Apart, that is, from the enthusiasms. Here’s an example: a review of Geoff Dyer’s new book about photography The Ongoing Moment written for the estimable Ready Steady Book.

The Creative

I set out on a journey of a thousand leagues, packing no provisions …

Why does Basho travel? To spread word of his style, his aesthetic and his own reputation – he needed disciples as a poet master. Then there is the desire to visit beautiful scenes – Mount Yoshino, Sarashina and the islands of Matsushima which had, of course, been written about by other poets. Nature and culture thus come together as one, as David Barnhill notes in his introduction to his indispensible edition of Basho’s writings which I am paraphrasing here; the Japanese have a word – utamakura – for those places that have associations with literature.

Basho – an ancient to us – also sought to bring himself into contact with the ancients. But then, more than literary, Basho’s journeys were religious, and his poetry was part of his religious life. To travel means to leave behind attachments, and to cultivate that desirelessness that is the goal of Buddhism. Wasn’t life itself a journey? And each day? After a sleepless night, Basho writes in a travel journal, as Barnhill quotes,

My distant journey remained, I was anxious about my illness, and yet this was a pilgrimage to far places, a resignation to self-abandonment and impernanence. Death might come by the roadside but that is heaven’s will.

A journey then, is a way of experiencing life in its transience, to welcome the uncertainty of fate, of heaven’s will.

Barnhill reminds us of the East Asian view of nature with great elegance.

What is natural is what exists according to its true nature. It is an ‘adverbial’ sense of natural, since it refers to a way of being. Humans are fully a part of nature: essentially we are natural. However, we have the distinctive ability to act contrary to our nature: existentially we usually live unnaturally.

Basho’s asceticism, then, the desire to cultivate and discipline himself through journeying is an attempt to rejoin nature. To create poetry is to partake of the greater creation that is nature; one must not strive to write poems, acting according to the desires of the self, but let them arise. Culture and nature are not be thought in opposition in Basho’s poetic practice. Just as the notion of utamakura joins a place of natural beauty celebrated in literary history, his poems and travel journals are both part of a long literary tradition and its reawakening in the face of a fresh encounter with the natural world.

Barnhill teaches us another word – zōka, the Creative as a term ‘for the world’s unceasing and spontaneous disposition to give rise to beautiful and skillful transformations throughout the natural world. True art is a participation in nature’s own creativity’. We should note, too, that Basho took his name (how wonderful, the idea a poet should take a name – or was he given it? was it what he received from nature’s zōka?) from the banana or plantain tree ‘precisely because it was so vulnerable to nature elements and "useless"’.

A secret: I enjoy reading of a poet’s literary philosophy as much (more than?) as reading the poems themselves (if there is such a thing: the poems themselves). Basho was a great master of haibun, haikai prose, which usually include a hokku poem, but can be considered as a form of prose poetry. Can’t commentary on poetry, on another’s poems become a similar form of poetry, partaking of the same creative act – or is it upon the Creative itself, zōka that they would both draw?

‘Hope: the following page. Do not close the book.’

‘I have turned all the pages of the book without finding hope.’

‘Perhaps hope is the book.’

Edmund Jabès (link)

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

Lydia Davies

As I started to write The Book of Questions, I got the impression that the culture I had relied on so far was violently cracking up. At any rate, I felt that it was no longer able to channel the anxieties I was harbouring. I no longer belonged – and foresaw that I would have to ground my writing in this not-belonging. Ragged phrases, shards of dialogues slowly surfaced – but as if from an anterior memory. Without knowing it, I was listening to a book rejecting all books and which I obviously did not master. I was interrogating this book even as I was writing it, expecting that it would create itself through the interrogation itself. But was it one book or were there innumerable books inside the book, from which its form, its ruptures, come? In a way I had to track the book beyond its ruptures, to where it has no longer any belonging or place or resemblance, where therefore it escapes all categories and traditions.

Edmund Jabès (link), translated by Pierre Joris.

The obligation to express is omnipresent in Beckett’s work[….] To my knowledge, Beckett has always refrained from speaking about the source of or the reason for this obligation.

Asja Szafraniec

[T]o begin to love life, to know birth. Including my own…. A new rule of life: to breathe without writing, from now on, to breathe beyond writing…. [W]ithout writing, without phrase, without murder…. Beyond the instinct of death, beyond the instinct of power and mastery. Writing without writing. Another writing, the other of writing, the altered writing, the one that has always traversed mine in silence.

Derrida, La Veilleuse, via.

The novel [Jabès] explains […] is the very opposite of the book. While the novelist exercises control over the writing, while he or she turns the space of the text into the space of the story to be retold, the writer of the book allows the writing to dominate. The book ‘recounts’ or, more precisely, activates not a story but the movement of writing.

The novelist masters his or her writing in order to put it at the service of the characters. By imposing on the novel a word that is manifestly exterior to the writing, the novelist assassinates the book. Ignorant of the rhythm and respiration puncturing the book’s circular and enigmatic writing, the novelist is word-deaf. He or she does not know, as does the writer of the book, how to listen to the page and to the reverberations of its whiteness and silence.

The true writer, who is not a creator but a listener, is sensitive to the book’s orality, to its freedom as uninterrupted language, to the void and silence that hide within it, to its rejection of closure, and, above all, to the invisible, forgotten, absent, always virtual book it shelters.

Richard Stamelman

Extreme fatigue goes quite as far as ecstasy, except that with fatigue you descend toward the extremities of knowledge.

It takes an enormous humility to die. The strange thing is that everyone turns out to have it.

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

E.M. Cioran