Lars Iyer's Blog

The Merciful Surplus of Strength

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

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

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

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

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

The Test of Inspiration

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

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

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

Martrydom, Witnessing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darkness and Forgetting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A room.

He stands at the window.

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

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

The next paragraph of the novel:

A room.

He stands at the window.

Silence.

He stands.

Silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. You envy him, don’t you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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