Pillow Shots

Late afternoon. The windows show smears when the light catches them, and the mirror. Once it was wiped in round circles – but by whom? And the windows – who wiped them?

Late afternoon, and the whole world gives itself like one of Ozu’s ‘pillow shots’: as a pause between scenes; between events and themselves. Nothing happens – and that’s what happens. Like a cat licking its paw in the sun: nothing at all. Like the droop of a washing line, plastic clothes pegs, green and white beaded with rain: nothing.

Why is it important, this non-importance? Why do you seek to keep it, to write it down? Because it is a condition I would like for writing. A writing like any other, just like a day is like any other. Common, ordinary, and more than that. The ordinary deepening in the ordinary; the droop of the day discovering itself in the droop of writing.

(Pillow shots: what happens when writing is not yet writing? When it is seen only from the corner of your eye? Someone is writing, there in the other room. Someone, far away from you, behind the smeared mirror.)

Opacity

What is a day? A span of time. But what is it, what is a day?

A lifetime; I often think that. As though I was born upon waking, lived my adolescence in the morning and my middle age in the long afternoon.

And what am I now? An old man writes; an old man remembers and writes. And if I live my life as I have done today, what then? There will be nothing to remember, for nothing happened. I was born; I lived – and now, close to midnight? close to death?

Nothing happened today. A blank page in the journal. A day that did not catch fire. A lost day, that I will not remember. What happened today? I rose; I worked; I went to the office and then to town. I came home; I cooked a late lunch. That was my middle age. And then … and then …?

Close to death (is that what is coming – death?) memories thicken themselves into nothing. What is a day? What was it? An opacity; the white lens of corrective glasses. Light thickened until it is no longer a medium. I can’t see – I’m lost. The day disappeared into itself. The day contracted, light into light.

What happened? What happened today?

Oblivion

All men, says Socrates in the Symposium, want a kind of immortality. To leave a child, a work – to let your name resound from one generation to another, and then down all the ages: this is the dream; this is what drives desire.

But then, with Christianity, a new kind of desire, already known in the East: to be forgotten in the future; to lose your name. A monk takes the name of a dead monk, known for his deeds – Cyprian, say, after Cyprian the devout, who fasted in a cave. And now this new Cyprian will also fast – fast in the name of his predecessor, and whose name is his.

The second name unravels in the first; it dissipates, like night mists in the morning. How beautiful to desire oblivion. To live and die as the shadow of another, as his echo.

I would like to call myself Duras, and live and die under her name. I would like to call myself Green. Laughter … For the monks strengthen their names, hardening them into history. That is how saints are made, I imagine: as the new Cyprian lives up to his predecessor; as newer Cyprians will come, each of whom will fast, and for longer and longer periods.

And I, what will I do? Write? Not write, rather, and know writing by its absence, by the fact I am not Duras, I am not Green.

Evidence

Say the same, the usual. Register it. Make a mark here to show – what? that you were here?

Over opposite, on the first floor, the bamboo sphere of a lampshade, half hidden by a curtain. Write it down, write that detail down. By witnessing it you witness yourself, your capacity to see, to know. But first of all your capacity to write, as it grants you the power of seeing, of knowing.

Write it down – how else to give yourself substance? How to let the world double itself here? But in the end it is nothing. An empty doubling. Of what does it provide evidence? That you would like to be here. That you would have liked to have been here.

Is a single detail enough? What more should there be? Evidence. That’s what you want. To have left a mark. But for whom? For others? For yourself? Or is it for the archive no one reads; that great waterfall of prose that scrolls down every page on the internet?

Prose for no one: that, then. Prose for indifference, for neglect. Say the same, the usual. Provide evidence – but for whom? For yourself? But you’ll never read these words. By tomorrow, you’ll have forgotten them. For others, then? But who reads, and why?

But somewhere else, from another angle, the archive is reading. Somewhere else, reading, not reading; not looking down at me as the couple in the room do not look down. But the sphere of the lampshade nevertheless. The half-drawn curtain nonetheless. Evidence.

Trust

Dusk, the yard. The kitchen window open at a right angle to me slanting out. Blue light. The washing line; the empty bird feeder. And now my own image in the window with the dusk showing through. A kind of boredom. What to write, what to do? But I am already writing this; that’s something.

But what is it? A kind of reliance on the voice. As though, in one of the trust exercises they make drama students do, I fell back into the arms of the voice. Only it was not I who fell back; or I knew myself only after I’d fallen and was caught, the voice also being the condition of my speaking of myself in the first person.

Blue light and the tree, still with its leaves, moving as reeds in water do – sinuating along each branch. Shaking very slowly. It’s windy tonight, and there’ll be rain. And in this room, as it seems to fall through space?

What’s the opposite of a spotlight? I feel that it’s shining on me, and doing the opposite of picking me out. A beam of darkness to be lost in.And I begin to fall from that capacity that let me write here.

There are those who know no gaps in their fluency; I’ve spoken with them, or I’ve listened to them speak without interruption. I feel comfortable thus – to say nothing; to listen. In truth, I envy them. To be able to speak. To write – and with no gaps, no drifting, as I am able to listen.

Dusk, turning to night. To long for an action to gather me up, all of me: what does that mean? And to long here, on the page – on this virtual page, and in public? An event like writing that would take place in the world, outside here, outside this room.

What time is it? I look. Late enough. The evening is a threshold; what will happen tonight is not decided. And in this indecision – this gap? My image on the window, with dusk showing through it. A room falling through space. And trust, trust in writing.

Common Presence: Blanchot at 100

I think reading Blanchot is elective; it matters that you are claimed by his work and that it becomes necessary to read further. But claimed by what? Blanchot’s literary critical and philosophical writings are secondary, in his own estimation, to his fiction with respect to the central movement of his thought. How do we read the fiction, lacking as it does conventional plotting or characterisation? How do we understand that peculiarly tenseless time upon which it seems to give, and that is also brought forward in Blanchot’s theoretical writings as it is claimed to occur in the fiction, the philosophy of others – and eventually, as happening in the very relation to the human Other as it is the condition of our experience of the world?

Fiction and reflection assume, with Blanchot, a peculiar unity, but one whose sense cannot be given outside their textual performance, as Kierkegaard supposes he can provide his own work when he writes The Point of View of My Work as an Author. There is a sense that the divide between fiction and theory does not count for Blanchot, and in which everything he has written is by way of narrating an experience whose theoretical elaboration must always be tentative, insofar as it must pass through language (a point that may well hold for Kierkegaard too, placing the meaning of his work outside the retrospective claims he made for the aims of his authorship), and language gives itself to be experience in the manner Blanchot seeks to answer in the general endeavour (a movement of thought, of research) to which his fiction and his theoretical writings belong.

But an experience of what sort? Blanchot’s concern with language as the ‘outside’ remembers an experience of language over which the ‘I’ has no power. Sometimes, Blanchot presents it as a kind of silence, but this should not be understood too quickly: gaps in language are readily assimilable by the common order of sense. Silence stands in for an interruption of language as it is experience in the absence of the form of the subject. This may seem absurd, since the position of the ‘I’, the subject, is presupposed in all speech and writing. But the Blanchotian subject is unstable; it does not come to itself once and for all, but can break down, its power scattering like sand, like J.’s pulse in Death Sentence. And so with the experience of the outside, where what is reached is the hither side of language, language unsubordinated to the intentions of anyone.

This is not mysticism. The experience of language as the outside is perfectly ordinary, says Blanchot; it is the way we live the everyday and the idle chatter that fill it. Heidegger has a horror of Das Man, the anyone in particular whose willingness to talk about everything endlessly distracts it from struggling to lay claim to its own existence. But to pass the word along, gossiping about this and that is to experience language as it is disowns any particular existence, in a manner exactly analogous to those elected to undergo reading and writing in the way Blanchot describes.

How is the outside given in literature? Summarising in a late essay some of his famous arguments about writing, Blanchot takes up Hegel’s general claim that doing takes precedence over being. Consciousness, for Hegel, is the act of relating to oneself, from which the world outside the ‘I’ cannot stand apart. Consciousness and world interpenetrate; the talents, strengths and abilities of the individual unfold through his actions. For Hegel, it is through the transformation of the world through negation that we might learn who we are, which means we can only know what we were working on as the exercise comes to an end.

Hegel can write the preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit only once the owl of Minerva has spread her wings, making sense of his project as a whole – and the project that the whole of human history has been. Hegel can only know the project by what has already been done – as a re-ject, as Sinthome once wrote, playing on the etymology of this word. Hegel’s philosophy is lived, his thought is experiential and experimental; but still, Hegel himself had faith it might be brought to an end. He writes a preface, which as everyone knows, makes sense after you’ve read the Phenomenology, and rounds off the book, and with it, the whole of human history.

The Blanchotian writer, however, is engaged by what can never promise to round itself off, nor even, properly speaking, to begin. He experiences language, the claim of language, as it refuses to provide the support from the presentation of particular theses, nor indeed for the subject who would articulate them. Literature, for Blanchot, bears upon a fascination with the literary act itself, insofar as it brings the writer into contact with an experience of language as the outside, as it is turned from its usual role of referring to things in the world, of facilitating communication. True, one can never turn language altogether from this role. But by way of the capacity to refer, by way of communication, Blanchot shows us how a different sense of communication, even a kind of community is shared between the writer and the readers of a book.

What, now, is important, is the way language, in respect of its capacity to refer, is experienced in its retreat. Blanchot argues that the writer senses this retreat in his or her awareness of the fascination of what he calls the work that lies beyond any particular book. The work is Blanchot’s name for the experience of the murmuring anonymity of a language that permits of neither subjects nor substantives – of the fact of language, whose impersonal streaming he allows to run close to the surface of his own fiction, and detects in the fiction and poetry of writers he admires.

The literary writer will discover what he has achieved in a finished book even as a re-ject, since he cannot present what he has done thetically, as a theoretical position or argument that can be stated unequivocally. His own work is like a riddle he cannot solve, but to which his life as a writer is bound. Who is he? An answer cannot be found to this question, since if, like Hegel, one believes one is what one does, then the writer can be said to be perpetually in lieu of what he sought to achieve. The work rides ahead of him, without him; but it also stretches back behind him, beyond him such that he was only ever a latecomer to the creative process he set in motion. As unseizable Eurydice, as the Sirens’ song, the work never lets itself be grasped as a project that unfolded through the writer’s life.

Is it even his project? In a sense, it is: he initiated the course of writing, and saw it through to the end, such that a book could be published. And yet in another, the origin of writing lies back beyond the writer; the work names what engaged the writer from the first, or even before the first as it sets itself back from the beginning he made and outlasts the end of the project (whether it was one book or an oeuvre). As such, it is as though the writer were only the completed circuit through which the current of language could pass, seeking only to relate to itself in writing – in the act of writing, the literary act, the power to achieve it that writing only lends to a writer. Then any literary book – and perhaps some philosophical ones too – tremble with what they cannot say; with the work, with the experience of language as it interrupts human initiative.

Death, famously, is Blanchot’s name for the relation of the writer to the work that is experienced as the withering of subjective power. Death, as it cannot be annulled and elevated by the work of Hegelian negation, invades and weakens it from the first and from before the first. Before the work, the writer is nothing yet, but after it, still nothing, since it is not linked together with his labour.

As such, the author is a mere actor, given over to an ‘intermittent becoming’ that leaves him, with respect to the experience to which he belongs, none the wiser. Certainly, the writer can take on the airs of a creative genius, laying claim to the work of art as it reflects the triumph of his sovereign will, but this is bad faith itself with respect to the work and its origin. For the author never quite coincides with himself; there is always a double who shadows his labour. A second Orpheus has disappeared into the underworld; a second Ulysses lies drowned in his wrecked ship on the seabed.

To exist is to act; to be is to do – but how can you take responsibility for your literary work when it implies your dissolution? What is specific to literary responsibility as it also includes the double who is also you? Invited in 1975 to submit work to the journal Gramma which was concerned with his work, Blanchot declined with these words, ‘My absence [from this issue] is a necessary step rather than any decision on my part. I would like nobody to be surprised nor disappointed by it. Publishing is always more difficult. Publishing on the basis of the name is impossible’ (anecdote via).

Blanchot’s absence from the journal parallels the absence he was so scrupulous to maintain, refusing to meet scholars, to attend events celebrating his work, and refusing to be photographed by his publishers, or, except on one occasion, to be interviewed. What effort did it cost him not to see visiting scholars, or to accede to the demands of the great machines of publicity? Perhaps a great deal; perhaps very little. Either way, it is completely continuous with his work. Blanchot’s refusal to appear is bound up with the demand of writing, which lets itself be experienced in its retreat.

But if it is as a writer that Blanchot disappeared in the postwar years, following his own political disaster, it is also as a writer that he reappeared, lending his support to the efforts of those determined to resist the claim to Algerian independence. As he says in his only interview, granted to clarify the aims of the so-called ‘Manifesto of the 121’, he is an essentially apolitical writer. But let us not misunderstand this to suggest political quietude. It was as a writer, too, that Blanchot sought to join his voice to others in the failed collaborative project of the Revue Internationale, which occupied him and others in the early 1960s. And it is as a writer that he takes part in the Events of May 1968, again working collaboratively. Blanchot grants that what he calls ‘literary responsibility’ is different to ‘political responsibility’; but he also says both kinds of responsibility ‘engage […] us absolutely as in a sense does the disparity between them’. This engagement (so different from what Sartre meant by that term) reveals itself in Blanchot’s commitment to what he will allow himself to call communism, in both the foreword to The Infinite Conversation (1969), and the anonymous writings he allowed to circulate during the Events.

Communism and friendship are words Blanchot will often use in proximity to one another. Reviewing a book by his friend Dionys Mascolo in 1953, Blanchot argues that there is an alternative to the account of need and value as it is found in Marxism. Friendship, for Blanchot, suggests a way in which we might look to a future world that is not comprised of human beings who have become little more than things. We must live two lives, says Blanchot – one in which we struggle against the values that conceal the truth of our condition from us, and another wherein we live according to what we share, which Blanchot, from the late 1950s onward, will call speech.

A concern with speech, and its implication in relations of power, is of vital importance in the earliest of Blanchot’s fictions, as is a marginal reflection on friendship and community. It is in dialogue with Bataille and Levinas that Blanchot will develop a philosophy of speaking, where the relation to the human Other is understood to suspend our familiar relations with the world. Unlike Levinas, Blanchot will not locate the origin of speech in the extralinguistic presence of the Other. If the Other can be said to be ‘higher’ than me, for Blanchot, it is only because of the thundering silence to which the Other gives issue, which I, as an interlocutor, am always struggling to determine. Friendship is an experience of this thunder, this silence.

With the word friendship, Blanchot would preserve the sense that what matters is not simply what is said between us, but that it is said. Levinas will capture this distinction in his later contrast between saying, the address of the Other, which all language, whether spoken or written, is claimed to bear witness, and the said, which is to say, language in its ordinary acceptation as it facilitates communication concerning a shared world. Blanchot borrows Levinas’s formulation to make a contrast between ordinary language, as it conforms to the course of the time of the subject, and the language of the outside, as it escapes the subject, even as it fascinates it. Just as Blanchot will say that fiction represents nothing, witnessing the fascination with the work by way of its details, its narrative incidents, what he calls speech is concerned only with itself, with the fact that it happens in the relation to the Other. Speech, now, is thought not in terms of what I say to the Other who silently exceeds language, but with the experience of language as it belongs to the outside, and hence also to the future.

Communism and friendship name, among other things, practices with which Blanchot was always engaged, and in company. Bident’s biography movingly reminds us of Blanchot’s friendship and alliances with Levinas, Bataille, Char and Antelme, but also with Mascolo, Schuster and Duras. Derrida was in regular contact with Blanchot, driving him, I’ve been told, to his last visit to Levinas, who died in 1995.

But communism and friendship also describe the relationship that reaches to those of us who are claimed, elected by his writings. How to carry forward what Foucault called in his tribute from 1966, ‘the thought from outside’? Perhaps we can begin by recalling the play of the Other Blanchot also was in his fictions, his criticism, and in the great narrative that was his oeuvre. And is it not, if we are elected by his writing, this double who also steps forward in us as we read it? Language helps us speak of a world we have in common, certainly. But what we also have in common is another sense of the world that reveals itself only rarely.

Common presence: these words translate the title of a poem and an anthology by René Char, and that Blanchot evokes in passing in The Unavowable Community. But they might also remind us of Heraclitus, important to both Char and Blanchot, for whom the logos is said to be common. Common presence: does this refer to Char’s version of the logos which maintains itself beyond what we take to be opposites, but which Heraclitus tells us in his fragments are always in struggle and interchange? Blanchot’s too, perhaps, as he doubles Heraclitus’s fragmentary attempt to think that struggling discord the Greek called harmonia. Blanchot’s favoured word neuter expresses the neither … nor he himself put in place of the certainties of philosophy (of a certain kind of philosophy), in his own kind of fragmentation. The phrase common presence, recalling Char, recalling Heraclitus, was used by Blanchot in the context of his account of ‘the people of Paris’ who assembled spontaneously and marched silently in memory of the protestors crushed to death in the Metro station of Charonne. ‘Common presence’: ‘the people of Paris’. What kind of presence do we have, as readers of Blanchot? What do we bear in common?

The Thought From Outside

(More paraphrastic notes on Deleuze’s Foucault, following this post and that one. My general aim is to explore Deleuze’s relationship to the linguistic turn and to understand his account of literature.)


Power and Force


The chapter, ‘Strategies or the Non-stratified: the Thought of the Outside (Power)’ begins with a simple question, ‘What is Power?’

Foucault’s great theses on power […] develop under three headings: power is not essentially repressive (since it ‘incites, it induces, it seduces’); it is practised before it is possessed (since it is possessed only in a determinable form, that of class, and a determined form, that of State); it passes through the hands of the mastered no less than through the hands of the masters (since it passes through every related force). A profound Nietzscheanism.

What is power?, Deleuze asks, and gives us an answer that recalls his own study of Nietzsche: it is a relation between forces, ‘or rather every relation between forces is a “power relation”‘. Forces are always found in the plural, Deleuze says; each force exists in relation to other forces.


Here, we must distinguish force from violence, which acts on specific bodies whose form it destroys or changes. Force, by contrast, takes as its ‘object’ only other forces, and does not exist apart from the relation. As Foucault puts it, force is ‘an action upon an action, on existing actions, or on those which may arise in the present or future’; it is ‘a set of actions upon other actions’. The relation between forces can be expressed, Deleuze suggests, by infinitives such as to incite, to induce, to seduce, to make easy or difficult, to enlarge or limit, to make more or less probable, and so on. In each case, it is a power relation that is at issue, as it names the effect of actions upon actions.


Power has to be understood, Deleuze says, in terms of affectivity. Force is to be understood in terms of its power to affect other forces to which it is related, and to be affected by other forces in turn. Inciting, provoking, producing etc. are examples of active affects; a reactive affect is given in terms of the capacity to be incited or provoked, or in being induced to produce.


This does not mean, Deleuze emphasises, that reactive affects are merely the passive side of active forces; they are to be understood in terms of an encounter between active and reactive forces that cannot be reduced to a simple dichotomy. Nevertheless, Deleuze does allow that spontaneity and receptivity, those Kantian terms he drew upon in his previous chapter, can be used to understand how every field of forces distributes those forces in terms of their relations, respectively to affect and to be affected.


For Deleuze, ‘the power to be affected is like a matter of force, and the power to affect is like a function of force’. This function is not formalised, and can be described as ‘pure’ insofar as it remains independent of the particular forms into which it is organised, as well as the aims it might be made to serve or the means upon which it would draw.


The Diagram


How should we understand the distribution of the power to affect and to be affected within a particular context?


This is best understood by way of an example. Deleuze explains that the role of the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish exists as a ‘pure function’, that of ‘imposing a particular taste or conduct on a multiplicity of particular individuals, provided simply that the multiplicity is small in number and the space limited and confined’.


Foucault is not focused upon the forms that determine the ends and means of this function, e.g. education, care, punishment, production. Nor is he interested in particular by the formed substances who are acted upon by the function, e.g, schoolchildren, the sick, prisoners, workers. Rather, Foucault points to the way in which the Panopticon ‘traverses all these forms and is applied to all these substances: it is this sense that a category of power exists, as a pure, disciplinary function’.


Foucault calls this the diagram – a function that must be understood in terms of its specific use, and as it is exercised over a specified substance. The diagram names the distribution of the power to affect and the power to be affected, understood as the function of force as it is found ‘beneath’, so to speak, a particular historical formation. It concerns the pure or abstract physics of action that operates in the context of a disciplinary function as it mixes with the ‘unformed pure matter’ that it acts upon. In each case, purity must be understood as a determination unique to a particular diagram (in this case, the panopticon) and the medium in which it operates.


Strategies


What is the relationship between knowledge and power as we find it in Foucault?, Deleuze asks. Power concerns forces, and knowledge forms – those formed matters (substances) and formalised functions that are given in terms of the more general formal functions of seeing and speaking. Power is given in a diagram as it mixes pure functions and pure matter; it is flexible. Knowledge is stratified and allows itself to be fixed in an archive; it is given a rigid segmentarity.


Power can be understood to pass though particular forces – as Deleuze presents it, through the particular points which on each occasion mark the application of a force, the action or reaction of a force in relation to others. As such, the diagram can therefore be understood to transmit or distribute particular features; power relations move from one point to another rather than emanating from a single central point.


These relations are always local, even if they are not localisable at a given moment; they are always mobile, shifting from point to point, darting suddenly within a complex field of forces. Marking inflections and resistances, power relations twist and turn without reference to a unitary sovereignty.


It is as such, for Deleuze, they can be understood in terms of what he calls a strategy (an anonymous cluster of strategies). Since power differs from knowledge as outlined, strategies must be understood to differ from stratifications, evading the stabilised forms of the seeable and the sayable; they are not known.


Then the practice of power cannot be reduced to knowledge. Power relations involve a different type of relations, to which we can attend only by that microphysics that can explore them in their irreducibility. Here, the prefix ‘micro-‘ must be understood as it refers to this specific domain – to what Deleuze calls ‘mobile and nonlocalisable connections’, rather than to a microscopic view of seeable and sayable forms.


At the same time, power and knowledge are not simply external to one another; they are also co-implicated in relations of presuppostion and capture. The human sciences are inseparable, as Foucault has shown on many occasions, from the power relations that are their condition of possiblity; the form of knowledge they propose depend upon a diagram of forces. In the case of prison in a disciplinary society, what matters is the diagram of the Panopticon that reveals itself in the prison, as it does in other institutions.


Institutions and Integration


As such, we must not understand power monolithically. The features in question are not integrated in a single seamless whole; there is, Deleuze writes, ‘a multiplicity of local and partial integrations’, each of which must be understood in terms of its ‘affinity’ with relations or points. Institutions themselves – Deleuze gives as examples the State, but also the Family, Religion, Production, the Marketplace – and even, Art and Morality each depend upon integrating factors, upon ‘agents of stratification’.


Lacking essence or interiority, institutions are practices that locally ‘fix’ power, presupposing its relations. As such, the source of power does not lie in the State or in Morality; power merely lends itself to a local and specific determination, which may reproduce itself across the social field. As Deleuze succinctly puts it, ‘There is no State, only state control, and the same holds for all other cases’. Granted, there are State-forms in particular historical formations that have captured power relations, but this is only because something analogous to ‘continual state control’ was already produced in the realms of education, law, the economy, the family and in sexual domains.


The State, in this case, implies the power relations whose source it appears it is. The function of governmentality precedes the State, so long as government is understood as ‘the power to affect in all its aspects’ – the govenment of children, criminals, the sick, families, etc. Molecular or microphysical relations precede and give rise to particular molar agencies – the sovereign or the law; the father; money, gold or the dollar; God; sex and so on.


Thus in The History of Sexuality, Foucault explores Law and Sex, showing how desire is normalised by the hystericisation of sexuality. But beneath these molar agencies, there is that molecular sexuality, those thousand tiny sexes that precede and outstrip the integration of particular sexes. Forms of knowledge [savoir] are found at the level of molar agencies, e.g., the ‘scientia sexualis‘ Foucault details. 


How, though, does an institution effect integration?


Foucault claims an institution has two poles or elements – apparatuses and rules. Deleuze paraphrases this remark by reintroducing his distinction between seeing and saying – an institution, he says, organises visibilities and systems of statements. The integration effected by a system operates by actualising these elements in their divergency.


It operates as, in his words, ‘a system of formal differentiation’, distributing a form of receptivity that constitutes the visible element, and a form of spontaneity that constitutes the articulable element. The forms in question are derived from the two basic aspects of affect or force – the receptivity of the ability to be affected and the spontaneity of power’s ability to affect, but do not coincide with them.


The power relation, says Deleuze,

establishes contact between unformed matter (receptivity) and unformalised functions (spontaneity). On the other hand relations of knowledge, on each side, deal with formed substances and formalised functions by using the receptive kind of visible element, or the spontaneous kind of articulable element.

This recalls discussion in the previous chapter. Visibilities reveal formed substances, and the statement reveals formalised or finalised functions. This is why we can distinguish the affective categories of power – inciting, provoking, etc. from the formal categories of knowledge – educating, punishing, etc. Formal categories pass through saying and speaking in order to actualise affective categories; knowledge actualises particular constellations of power.


In this way, a particular institution can integrate power-relations as it constitutes particular forms of knowledge. Each time, the power relations are actualised, modified and redistributed as part of the production (or reproduction, considered from the perspective of the social field) of visibilities and statements that allow them to appear as political, legalistic, economic, educational etc.


The mechanism of integration and actualisation must be understood precisely. In The Archeaology of Knowledge, Foucault discusses the ‘regularity’ of a statement as a curve that joins, as on a graph, individual points, producing a rule. These points were produced by particular relations between forces; the curve that connects them is different to them, since the points were outside the statement. Granted, the statement may resemble them – the statement QWERTY resembles the keys on the typewriter, but there is a vital difference between them.


In the case of visibilities, however, there is a difference – they are external to the statement, but are not its outside. Visibilities do have a relationship to the outside which they actualise, but they do so in a different way to statements.


Statements, then integrate into language the intensity of affects, understood as the relations between forces. As curves, they organise particular features of power, potentiailities. Visibilities organise the same features, the same differential relations between forces, into light. Visiblities fix relations between forces, regularising particular points, and, to use a favourite term of Foucault, constitute scenes that, Deleuze explains, ‘are to the visible element what a statement is to the sayable or readable’.


In summary, the scene (or the description-scene, as Deleuze will call it) is the regulation that belongs to visibilities, and the statement that which belongs to sayabilities. The diagram of forces gives itself in description scenes and in statement-curves. The seeable and the sayable are thus thoroughly intertwined. Visibilities entail statements and vice versa, even as they cannot be confused with one another.


An Aside on Literature


This is what reveals itself, Deleuze says, in literature. ‘[S]trictly literary analysis, even as its very heart, is likely to rediscover the difference between scenes and curves: descriptions may be verbal, but they are none the less different from statements’. He then writes a brief, dazzling passage on Faulkner, describing the ‘fantastic curves’ statements trace in his work as they pass through ‘discursive objects’ and ‘mobile subject-positions’; at the same time, says Deleuze, these descriptions

conjure up a host of scenes which create reflections, flashes, shimmerings, visibilities varying according to the time and the season, which distribute the descriptions in a light-being, a reunion of all the light to which Faulkner holds the secret (Faulkner, literature’s greatest ‘luminist’).

How should we understand these lines? It is best to look elsewhere in Deleuze’s oeuvre, to his collection Critique and Clinic, where Deleuze raises the question of the outside of language. Here, he refers to the limit of language, the outside, in a useful analogy from Bogue, being analogous to the outer surface of a sphere.


The outside is in contact with the non-linguistic, allowing them to communicate along the sphere’s surface. As such, the limit can be considered as a kind of membrane, as a ‘permeable limit common to inside and outside’. In Deleuze’s own writings on literature, notably his essays on T.E. Lawrence and Beckett, the limit of language is presented in terms of nonlinguistic visions and auditions, which are rendered possible through language. I will return to this account in much more detail on another occasion.


The Outside, the Emergence of Forces


What is the relationship between the seeable and the sayable, between scenes and curves?


The seeable and the sayable constitute two forms of knowledge that are then integrated and thereby enter into an indirect relation with one another. There remains a divide between them that is analogous to the Kantian schematism – spontaneity and receptivity remain forms irreducible to one another with respect to the forces they organise. Deleuze expresses this by borrowing from Blanchot the idea of a relation without relation – a ‘non-relation’ that exists between statements and visibilities, curves and scenes.


(Note that the ‘relation without relation’, which Blanchot develops in conversation with Levinas, is put to an entirely different use by Deleuze.)


The two forms, the visible and the articulable, as strata or historical formations, are different to the microphysics of power, which operates outside of strata. Note, however, this is not a transcendence or a beyond of the strata – Foucault is not pointing us to what lies outside strata, transcending their sphere so to speak, but to what forms the outside of strata, the permeable surface of the sphere, as it brings into contact inside and outside. As such, relations between forces remain historical; their aprioricity does not place them outside history, but as the outside of history. Each historical formation refers back to the temporary set of relations of the diagram of forces that is its outside.


Diagrams are in a perpetual state of turbulence even as must also be considered as a priori elements. Famously, Foucault will attempt to lay bare the diagrams that underlie particular historical forms of society through the account of the operation of particular categories of power as they are marshalled to produce particular effects – controlling the body, say, or the population in our time. Older, sovereign socieities saw those categories working in a different sense – as bestowing life or death, rather than administering it, and applying levying in actions and products.


But diagrams are less stable than this suggest; they can also be understood as communicating above, below or between particular strata. Deleuze gives the example of a Napoleonic diagram between sovereign society and disciplinary society. Doubling history – the official account of history – Deleuze says, ‘there is an emergence of forces’. Fixed and stabilised by a stratified formation, the diagram is nevertheless outside of the strata, and therefore grants the chance of mutation.


The Thought From Outside


The outside, as it is temporarily localised in a diagram, and then fixed in particular strata, directly concerns force. As Deleuze writes, ‘It is always from the outside that a force confers on others or receives from others the variable position to be found only a particular distance or in a particular relation’. Distinct from the history of forms is the emergence of forces as they operate as the outside.


Here, Deleuze takes us back to the theme of Foucault’s essay on Blanchot. Seeing and speaking are forms of exteriority, for Foucault, says Deleuze, and can be said to constitute forms of thinking. However, they are to be distinguished from the thought of or from the outside, which occurs in the interstice between them, in the disjunction, the ‘non-relation’ between seeing and speaking.


Thought pertains to the set of relations of forces that is the diagram. It is an attempt to reach that outside which comprises a diagram, and hence the possibility of mutation. Thinking in this way is difficult, since it is not merely the exercise of an innate faculty. Rather, thinking must become thought as it attends to the intrusion of the outside into the interval between the visible and the articulable.


What does it mean to think the outside? Take Foucault’s famous claim that man is a face drawn in the sand between two tides. Deleuze explains this claim as follows: the human being is a composition, a compound, that appears with the collapse of the classical past, and the future, already here, in which what has been called man enters into new compositions – perhaps with information technology, with silicon-based man-machine systems.


But the thought from outside has repercussions which are not simply theoretical. It also brings with it the possibility of resistance, to the extent that it is in contact with what is always broader in possibilities that the strata in which the human being is caught. It is in these terms that we might, Deleuze suggests, understand Foucault’s own political activism.


As such, the thought from outside bears witness to Spinoza’s famous claim that there is no telling what a human being might become. At the end of the chapter, Deleuze invokes Nietzsche’s superman, commenting that it is no more than the affirmation that ‘it is in man himself that we must liberate life, since man himself is a form of imprisonment for man’.

None of the Names in History

Not to have written. Not a line. And this by way of writing, by means of it. Not silence, but a kind of murmuring. That says: everything you have written has been written before. Everything you write will be written again.

To be no one at all. The opposite of all the names in history (Nietzsche). To have been no one; to be no one once again.

Writing’s Judgement

Do you guard writing, is that it? Do you watch over it? Only as it guards and watches over me. Only as it stands over me, the angel behind the angel with the sword.

I don’t want to be judged. Or it is another kind of judgement I want. Writing’s non-sword. The peace of writing.

Amongst Writing

Amongst writing: write that. Amongst writing, with it, as you would wade through a cornfield. To be with writing, on its side, wading through it, with it. To say, this is where I live, out here. This is where I live, out here with writing. 

Exposed Writing

To leave a trace, is that it? To mark where you’ve been? Rather to unmark that place, to expose it. To open the trace to the wind, the air. To say, I don’t want to have been here. I wasn’t here. To say, no one wrote here, and least of all me.

I don’t want to be known for what I’ve written. Or I want to be unknown by it, all that I have written.

What might it mean to keep by gathering? What does it mean to lose?

Exposed writing. Writing to the elements. Let them read, with their neglectful reading. Let them read and not-read, both at once.

The Archives

Imagine them, the archives. Imagine a waterfall so high, its waters blow away before they reach the ground. Imagine clouds melting into the air (Gide, in Fruits of the Earth). An archive of wood, of trees. Let the trees read. Let the wind turn the pages and light fall on them, and the rain.

Imagine it: the archives that lose everything, that keeps nothing. That is the place where things are lost. ‘You’ll never see them again, all the things you’ve written’. – ‘I know’. – ‘Never read them’. – ‘I know’.

Say to yourself, I’m lost with them. I want to lose myself with them.

Neglected Writing

‘Don’t read it’. – ‘Why not?’ – ‘Because by not doing so you give it back to the neglect from which it would have liked it to come.


‘Don’t read, not a line.’ – ‘Why?’ – Because as you do not do so you give writing to read itself’. – ‘But writing can’t read’. – ‘But by not reading, it reads. By not being read, it gives itself to be read by neglect, the non-power of neglect’.

A Million Words

Writing says: I want to read myself. To scroll through my own archives. Writing says: I want no readers. ‘Off the scroll’ it says at the bottom of wood s lot‘s page. Post links disappear into the archive.

But now imagine writing bent over itself, reading itself. Writing whispering to itself as it reads. And now dream of writing reading your own archives (its own archives).

A million words, written for whom? For what? Can you remember what you wrote? But writing remembers. What do you remember? Writing remembers for me. But what does it keep?

Is there a way of keeping that is also a releasing? A way writing sets itself free? Imagine this: a reading as marvellously neglectful as the sun on the receipt on the car park tarmac. A reading that benignly forgets, that lets disperse what is read, and frees it.

That’s the kind of reading I wait for. That’s what they wait for, these words, written to be forgotten.

Writing Reading

Now imagine this: a writing that reads itself. That closes the lid of its own eye like a blind to read, then, in private. A writing that reads aloud, whispering to itself, staying up late, too late.

Writing that archives itself. That reads and whispers, turning over pages. Letting pages turn themselves. In the wind. In fate.

A writing that, like fate, travels across its own pages. That reads itself as it writes and lets itself withdraw into a secret archive, the lid closed over the eye.

Asleep? No, under the lid I am reading. I, writing am reading.

Red Light

Evening. The day took a strange turn, I tell myself. I came home early, I shouldn’t have done that. Too early – I surprised my own absence. I shouldn’t have been here. Should have let my absence thicken in the half darkness. Should have let it thicken, my absence, where the red blind, closed against light but letting it through, makes the whole room red.

But I came home early, and caught the day making its turn. Had it meant me to? Was that what it wanted? To be caught – surprised? For the day to have led me all the way into itself? It led nowhere, in one way. In one way – nowhere, the day was a dead end. But in another that dead end made way, and I pass along its ending, its eternal detour.

What happened here? What did I surprise? Red light, through the blind. The quiet flat, with no tenants above. Quiet, the wooden floors exposed and the room very big. Bigger than usual, I thought. It would take time to cross this room, I thought. To cross it would take and expand time, I thought.

The day took a strange turn. Into itself. All the way into itself. As though it were a labyrinth. As though a single straight line, a passage, was also a labyrinth. I don’t like the day; I feel wary of it. I dislike the malaise of time, the way it leaves me aside.

Nothing happens here – nothing, but it thickens, nevertheless. Thickens, not ripens. A wrong growth, an aberrant one. Error leading into itself. The day took a strange turn, and took me with it.

I didn’t want to go. I’d been somewhere already. I’d come home, and found – it was not home. The day had taken a strange turn here. The day had concentrated itself into itself here. Thickened. Grown – and wrongly. What had gone wrong? Should I leave? Should I go back to the office?

I opened a bottle of wine. I thought, that’s it: a bottle of wine. To do combat against the day. To match its vagueness with my own. Wine! Is that enough? To meet the day’s opacity with my own? To forget as the day forgets; to make a mirror for its nothingness?

The day took a strange turn, and so did I. It took a turn and I came here to write, a bottle of wine beside me. I’ll meet it, I thought. I’ll meet the day on its own terms, I thought. Match vagueness with vagueness, I thought. Sound the muffled bell, I thought. Write in ambush for whatever comes.

What?

Five posts, I tell myself. Squeeze them out. Write about … what? The pigeons that visited the yard – two of them, and finding what? Pecking – at what? About the empty bird feed holder hanging from the washing line (empty because the seed I bought held insects that hatched and when the bag was opened flew out and I threw it away). About … what? As though I could crack the egg of the day. As though I could tap it and crack it open to release – what?

I was reading just now in the other room. Reading, on the bed without covers, without sheets, on the fur of the electric blanket, about – what? Too long ago. ‘Just now’ is too far away. Enough the thought of ‘the other room’. On the other side of the glass. The other side of the bevelled glass window someone put between living room and bedroom. Another room … is there really another?

To cross a room, that’s already enough. To have remembered it, crossing a room. Wasn’t that the miracle: a completed action: to cross a room? I’ve forgotten the other room, and what I was doing. The fur of the electric blanket. The abandoned book. This room is all there is. This room and crossing it, to write about crossing the room.

And even that is too much. Here – at the desk, level with the yard outside. Here – what happened before getting here? Before the arrival? How did I get here? Until I reach the moment just before writing. Having forgotten everything else, the other moments separated from my life, sliced from it. Everything but … what?

But the desire to write. To write – what? The question, what? The question that prompts writing, and that something is kept by writing. Squeeze them out, some posts, I tell myself. 5 posts, that’s what the day deserved. 5 – to remember – what?

The desire to write, 5 times. The desire to come from that room into this. To cross the room. To pull up a chair. To begin – what? To write? Was that it?

Bubbles Popping

The day decays. Like bubbles popping on the beach after a wave has passed, I tell myself. The waves stroke the beach and leave it. Foam and seaweed, and the bubbles popping: that’s how it is. That’s the decay of the day.

What shall I do now?, I ask myself. No Visitor with whom to cross the Moor. No rats to chase away, the black box where they lived smashed up and in pieces (I should clear it up …) A half drunk bottle of wine. Beyond the backs of the houses opposite a tree turns in the wind. The whole tree, which still has leaves.

Didn’t my Visitor and I find the lane beyond that tree? Didn’t we find our way to the boarded-up hospital from which this part of town began (the hospital in Spital, this finger of land, outside the city, the Tounges)? And the retirement village, oddly still, no cars – we learnt that we were not supposed to be there …

Summer moves away, all of it, like some great animal. The whole of summer turning away and departing. This is the new season …

The day’s run out, winded. There’s nothing of it left. Bubbles popping on the beach. A beach of stones, as at Brighton beach. It wasn’t long ago that we sat there, on the beach. Summer pops with the popping bubbles. Half a bottle of wine …

The Inward Ray

The evening is a staircase you have to ascend. No: it is like those tiered gardens you see in the East – whose steps are long and broad, but that take you upward nevertheless. And at the pinnacle – or, better, the plateau? At that point where it spreads out without cease and with no more steps? Then and only then can you give yourself to listening.

Ask yourself, am I ready for Jandek tonight? Ready – is that the word? A state of preparedness, a kind of calm concentration – why is it at concerts that I never feel I achieve it, never feel right for what is about to unfold? For a long time, I avoided them because I never felt ready to listen. And now? Up the stairway of the evening. Nine o’clock; the plateau. I’m ready to listen now. But to what?

In Northern India, raags are written for a time of day, a season. That’s the preparedness: the time, the season. You are brought to the point when a raag might be heard, and by no more than the earth’s elliptical orbit. Brought to it so that the raag might deepen it – might hollow out the season in the season; might discover time within time, unfolding it, opening out its flower.

And Jandek? In the recordings I regard as essential – most of the studio recordings from I Threw You Away onwards, which is to say, those made in the last 5 or 6 years – there is a kind of desolation that must reach you. As though everything were dimmed and reduced to itself. As though the world had contracted, hardened, and was falling in an inward collapse. The rays of the sun burn outwards; but what of an inward ray – what of a ray sent inward, a sun collapsing upon itself? What of darkness falling into darkness and all the way to that terrible void that would draw everything across its horizon?

How terribly concentrated the recordings are! How focused! Sometimes, in the course of a song, a relaxation, a breathing. These are sometimes short, panicked breaths – an animal in a trap; an animal by the side of the road and breathing quickly. Dying, but still breathing, and too fast. Or they can be long breaths, the patient without air, the patient who would gasp air into his lungs, but finds none; or that air is not air enough, that there is never air enough, that breathing cannot find what would sustain it. Long breaths, last ones.

Either way, the songs are sung around death, in its orbit. Around it, close to it, but never close enough for annihilation; there’s never an end. This is a dying-singing. A singing of pain, of absolute pain. That hollows itself from pain, in pain. That quarries pain, adventures in it. Pain learns of itself. Pain learns and sings of itself.

How is it possible to be still alive? How to be alive in pain, still alive? This is the surprise with which Jandek begins on the essential recordings. And what of the less essential ones? Why is Brooklyn Wednesday a little further from me? Why, though I’ve played it 20 times through, all 4 CDs does it remain over there, away from me?

Because when I listen to Jandek – when I’m able to listen, ready for it, I want only the despair, and the variations on despair. Only despair, suffering and pain, and their variations. Only the infinite gradations of pain in pain, the infinitely subtle quest for suffering in suffering, as pain turns in pain, as it awakens and falls to sleep in pain and lives it, as pain is lived and is given life, a body. As pain gives itself a singer to sing of itself. As pain sings of itself, a half-crushed animal by the side of the road.

Am I ready for Jandek, and tonight? Ready to follow the course of an album? Khartoum. The Humility of Pain. The Gone Wait. The Ruins of Adventure. Raining Down Diamonds. I’ve climbed the stairway of the evening. Climbed and at the plateau, nine o’clock, nine bells. To what should I listen?

The Difficulty of Language

Why write about writing? Why that – the pause, the hesitation in a step that does not allow writing to complete itself as writing? I think of James Wood’s impatient aside in his appreciation of The Waves: the book, he says ‘is too often tediously involved in its own procedures (almost every character has something to say about the difficulty of language)’.

An aside and nothing more – but why does it come to me that The Waves is a book where the notion of character wears wonderfully thin, that beneath each supposed narrator there is another kind of narration, a narrative voice that seems to expose itself only in its final pages, in the great hymn that ends in ‘O death!’, and that that is the point: character has worn too thin as character, and each in turn is a way language, streaming without centre, has folded itself in order to speak (to write) with a human voice?

Forgetting Narrative

Something new happens, James Wood says, with Chekhov and his characters; he bestows them a freedom – ‘they act like free consciousnesses, and not as owned literary characters’. Chekhov discovers what would come to be called the stream of consciousness, which allows, says Wood, for a kind of forgetfulness to enter fiction.

A stream of consciousness? Perhaps a river instead, and downstream when it rolls along, braiding, meandering, and perhaps isolating itself in those still pools whose stagnancy recalls that stultifying rural Russia Chekhov evokes so well. Chekhov’s ‘beautifully accidental style, his mimicking of the stream of the mind, is that it allows forgetfulness into fiction’.

A forgetting, a braiding of thoughts, a meandering away from intention, from purpose – and this is what Chekhov allows: the characters, while not forgetting to be themselves ‘They forget to act as purposeful fictional characters. They mislay their scripts’.

Woolf follows Chekhov and perfects the art. Forgetting, with Woolf, becomes a kind of absentmindedness:

A character is allowed to drift out of relevance, to wander into a randomness which may be at odds with the structure of the novel as a whole. What does it mean for a character to become irrelevant to a novel? It frees characters from the fiction which grips them; it lets character forget, as it were, that they are thickened in a novel.

Characters freed, then, from the iron collar of narrative. Characters set free to wander, but to do more than run away with their author, surprising him by their vividness, by the life they seem to want to live. To do more – for they’ve forgotten they’re in a narrative at all; the book falls away in irrelevance.

So with Mrs Ramsay, who forgets for 20 pages she’s to be at the centre of Lily Briscoe’s painting in To the Lighthouse. Forgets, and bears the reader along with her for those 20 pages. We travel with her; we experience forgetting with her, Wood says; ‘and in this way out of her’. Out of her? Of Mrs Ramsay? Is it still Mrs Ramsay’s stream of consciousness that rolls through those pages?

It is as if the novel forgets itself, forgets that Mrs Ramsay is a character. She has been at the centre of the novel all along and we have hardly notced it, because we have inhabited her own invisibility.

Into what are we drawn as readers? Into the self-forgetting of the novel, that sets free its central characters and all of its characters, that sets free its plot and lets wander; and finally sets free its narrative voice, that speaks only in the invisibility Mrs Ramsay has been allowed to inhabit. As though her thoughts had turned her inside out like a glove. As though there was a kind of streaming that is more than consciousness – a current that has drawn us drowning beneath the water.

Wood does not go so far.

Yet Woolf’s delicate method shows us that we are never thinking about nothing, that we are always thinking about something, that it is impossible for us not to think, even if the thought is merely the process of forgetting something.

Thought is intentional, as the phenomenologist would say; we cannot help but think of things; thought thinks thoughts, and to forget, as Descartes would admit, is to continue to think. Is it this that To the Lighthouse shows? For Wood, ‘it brings us closer to what Woolf called "life". In her novels, thought radiates outward, as a medieval town radiates outward – from a beautifully neglected centre’. 

This is beautiful. Thought radiates outward. Thought laps outward, but from what centre? From that, now, that displaces character, narrative, and the fiction itself. And by so doing, perhaps allows another voice to come forward, murmuring, rustling, concerned with itself and turning in itself. This is the voice that speaks invisibly in the novel’s visibilities; it is what turns into darkness even as the surface of the stream seems to dissolve into light. But in its darkness, isn’t also what allows light? And is its plunge from the surface what allows its glitter?

Perhaps there is a thinking that is more than intentional, or that runs backwards from the intended object to the would-be thinker. A thought that is more than can be thought, that splits consciousness wide and lets there run a stream of non-consciousness, the stream that rustles darkly in itself, whose laughter is like that of Odradek and, says Janouch, Kafka: the sound of dead leaves. Might we call it life, too? Might it also be called life, that impersonal current that neglects itself in any narrative, and that neglects us too, so that we continually miss it?

As I Lay Dying is a great book because Faulkner, like Joyce and Woolf (and presaged by Chekhov) uses the innovation of stream of consciousness to allow his characters to forget themselves, to break free of the author’s incessant memoranda, to be in their own verbal confusions.

This from Wood later in the volume and it seems almost a retreat. For it is the novel itself that is forgotten with Woolf (with Wood’s Woolf) – that forgets itself as the narrative voice that drifts through Mrs Ramsay, the other characters, and the plot itself. Perhaps it can be presented as a thought, or as a kind of thinking – only one, now, that is greater than the thinker, like Descartes’ idea of God. Greater, and found first of all, there among the contents of the thinker’s consciousness. There first of all, that point which, I imagine, might be pulled upon so that consciousness itself turns inside out like a glove.

Dream of that book where thought thinks itself outside the thinker. Dream of a narrative voice uncontained by the narrative, of a forgetting that draws it back into the novel, back, even as it is nothing but its flowing surface. After the stream of consciousness comes, with Blanchot, another innovation: the streaming of that impersonal voice of which consciousness is itself a fold. Isn’t this what he sought to discover from the 1930s onwards in his fiction, his literary criticism?

Assertions here, not arguments. I will return to this topic on another occasion.

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

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

from Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co

Were I to Write …

Five posts a day, I always thought that was right. Five posts – like the five prayer-times of Islam, and for what? To write? Quote from who knows where in Duras: ‘To write is an attempt to know what we would write were we to write’. Were we to write, yes exactly that. Were I to write: but what would I write?

I’ve think italics are a way of setting fire to words, not of burning them up, but softening their edges. To burn, to soften – what kind of fire is that? Italicised words (the ones above) seem to lean forward, as if by the pressure of a breeze. Where is the wind blowing? Forward, across the words. Across them – these words, as they lean into what I would write were I to write.

This World

No sign of rats today; just the smashed up black box where they were hiding, and to which I took a hammer, but found nothing there.

Evening; darkness in the yard. No rat-squeaks. No rat-bodies following the wall. Why didn’t they come from pest control as they were supposed to? Why not more piles of poison, spooned from a tub?

No rats, and no Visitor to be disgusted by them. I came home early, lay down; finished a book, thought of reading another one. Then the News, but I felt too dispersed to focus. Who was watching, anyway? And no dinner, prepared from what was gathered from the best shops, all local, all organic, to be eaten together on the leaf of the table that is now folded down.

Evening, and I can play what music I want, and do what I want, on my own. No one upstairs, either; they’re between tenants. No one above me: what peace. But no-one with me: no peace. For it is not as if you can smooth your life flat like the page upon which you might begin to write. Nothing to smooth down or say; was I waiting all those weeks to say something? was there something important to be said? Laughter. Of course not.

A tin of mackerel for dinner. Why not? And then another one. Ricecakes, olive oil, and now an open bottle of wine, I tell myself, to narrow down the night. And nothing to say, nothing in particular, only that gap that opens between the saying and the said (I’ll call it that); between the voice I would want to hear and the words I need to give it. Between the voice that does not need me, and the words I should abandon to it, without caring, without premeditation.

To neglect a page to life: why that formula? To neglect it until it stands up, a quivering arch through which no one passes but through which everything might. An arch – but to where? To this world, this one, and at last.

And the voice? Wind through the arch. The call of this world, this one.

The Prow

Morning. Take a deep breath on words; words come, you breathe them out like mist from a warm mouth. Words, then, and one after another. You’ve strength enough to make a bridge from breath; a voice carries you. The strength of a voice and the rhythms that belongs to it – from where do they come, with their measure? From where the strength of rhythms that carry the voice and demand words of it?

The difficulty’s always the same: you have to find something to write; the voice wants words, even though it came before them. Even though it arrived only as the intimation of a structure, as the skeleton, say, of a boat, that was not yet seaworthy. A frame without words that needs them and is nothing without them.

Is it difficult? More difficult still the sense of being without it, that rhythm that rises words up like a swell. More difficult that lack of imperative, of forward movement, waiting for a voice but in lieu of it, remembering what it might have been but no longer able to go forward.

I think there is always something in me that is suspended in that way: something to be gathered up, swollen and arrived at by writing. And perhaps not even then. The ancients painted eyes on each side of the prow of their boats. Eyes looking forward at – what? At nothing, just forward, and with painted eyes that could not close.

Rats on their Rounds

Last night, I refolded the leaf of the table upon which my Visitor, now departed, used to work, and pushed the table back up against the window as it used to be. I’m closer to the yard now, most of which is nearly level with the bottom of the window frame. The yard: there it is, a concrete shore, absolute. The yard that is like the future and the past, or the time before the future and the past and returns into the present. The yard that says: I will be there before and after; I have always been and always will be.

The concrete yard! Across from me, the rotten door from under which the rats came. Rats, who can dislocate their backs so as to squeeze under a gap of two inches. Do the rats still visit? I took a hammer to the planks of wood that were supposed to box the pipes and hide them. I hammered the box apart, there where the rats used to live and found … nothing at all, no rats, no droppings, no remnants of poison. But I think the rats still visit. Didn’t my Visitor see one right up by the kitchen door, very daring? The big one, the biggest of the three rats sniffing the air, little head lifted, there daringly by the door – our door?

The table, this one I write on, is up against the window. The yard spreads to the wall and the rotten door that will have to be replaced, under which the rats slid and probably still slide themselves to do the rounds of the yard, to search it. What are they looking for? The birdfood that had fallen there. The split bag of birdseed I threw away because it was full of just-hatched insects digesting the mix of seeds. And that, split, spilled open, allowing the insects to escape the bag and fly about. Swarms of small flies that put me off sweeping up the spilt birdseed.

I should have cleared it up! I know that now. The split bag in the outhouse round the corner. In the hollow beneath the concrete stairwell that leads up to my neighbour’s back door. Everything must be kept clean because of rats, I know that now. I should have swept away the spilt seed and bleached the floor of the hollow.

What was I doing putting up a bird feeder, anyway? No birds come here. In the past 5 years I’ve seen 2 birds – a female blackbird, who laid eggs in a nest in the outhouse and deserted them when the plumber and I surprised her, and a magpie who would peck open the bin bags when they were exposed because the wheelie bin lid wouldn’t close. Two birds, no more; but I thought I should try and tempt more to the yard. Thought the yard, a concrete shore, could do with more life.

In the end, it is only rats who belong in the yard. Rats precisely because they belong to the end and the return of the end that is the yard. Rats on concrete, rats moving across concrete, like the coming end.

Sometimes, over the summer, clothes and towels hung from the line. The yard was inhabited; it looked as though someone lived here. We’d even eat dinner on the bench, for that month when the sun would reach us there, that month that was mostly lost, anyway, to rain. An inhabited yard; I would come home to find my Visitor reading there, in the hour of sun. And perhaps I’d sit out there too with her, eyes closed against the sun: it was bright! How could that be! The yard, full of bright sun!

But light does not reach here, for the most part. No light in the enclosed space of the yard, whose walls are high. Plants who like shade grow here. Plants in pots, doing well enough, tended by me, watered. Once I pressed a flowering moss into the gaps between bricks on the wall. I’d taken it from somewhere else, from a wall on the other side of the city, to try and grow it here.

It amused my Visitor, who saw at once it wasn’t going to take; that its roots would not bind to the plaster. And they didn’t; I found the flowering moss (small purple flowers) dried up on the concrete. It didn’t take; the roots found no purchase; nothing grew from the old wall with its gaps. And I’d dreamt of the moss spreading over the wall! That moss and purple flowers would cover it like a meadow! That a meadow would spread up across that north-facing wall and redeem it!

For a time, enthused by the presence of my Visitor, I had great hopes for the yard. I took a bottle of fungicide to the low wall that runs right opposite this window, and separates the path, level with the floor of this room, from the raised brow of concrete the same level as the lane that runs behind the rotten door. Off came the algae and the grime, and there was a smooth magnolia beneath, and the red painted brick of the steps. The low wall cleaned along its length was a creamy white, and I thought to clean the concrete, too, to discover its original grey beneath the algae.

A chewing gum grey, pristine: imagine that! I was pleased at the change in the yard I had effected; I wanted more. It is possible to change and shape the world and your own fate thereby, I discovered. Your own fate: because I always thought the yard in terms of fate. Always thought it was my personal Egdon Heath, the unchanging, running 15 foot back and 20 foot across, but fate nonetheless. I always thought: you return to the yard; you sit at its level. Or, the yard returns, and there where you write, at your level, the extended leaf of the table being nearly continuous with concrete. A wooden extension of the sprawl of concrete. And now I thought: it can be changed, scrubbed clean, and perhaps chipped away.

What did it hide, the concrete? Access manholes to the drains – I saw one opened when the men came to unblock the sewer. I saw the secret channel that runs under the yard. And there is still the long scar left from when the water company came to repair a burst pipe. A band of lighter grey upon grey, that scar, leading out to the rotten door, which I must get repaired, and beneath which the rats come, disolcating their bodies to squeeze through its two inches.

Rats on their rounds. Rats surveying the yard, completing a circuit and then, I suppose, out again, but to where? To the lane behind the yard; to other yards, perhaps, or back to the moor, which although divided by roads, still surrounds this neighbourhood. The moor, you can see it on Google Earth, that fits around this village-in-a-city and from which, I think, the rats come, and foxes and even the woodlice who lived in the black wooden box.

We walked out on the moor, my Visitor and I, this summer. Happiness, as I would never want to walk alone. Up the hills, the ‘town tits’ from one of which you can see the sea, a blue line on the horizon, and the individual hills of the Cheviots (it was a bright, crisp day). And all the way to Morrisons at the roundabout, which I would jokingly call Eldorado. We reached Eldorado by way of a thinning finger of moor, that pointed us all the way to its entrance. Perhaps the rats have gone back there, to the moor. Perhaps it is from there they begin their great circuit, and to there they will return. And perhaps the moor will grow up through the concrete again, and through this flat, this house, and the potted plants will rejoin the earth.

Tuesday morning, and the empty bird feeder hanging from the washing line. No birds came, and no clothes hang from the line. It’s cold; the weather is unreliable. Clothes pegs clipped to yellow string, and the potted plants beneath. Didn’t we repot them this summer? Wasn’t that joy itself, smashing the old cracked pots and installing them in new ones? That was a sunny day; we booked two taxis back from B & Q. Two big bags of soil: the drivers didn’t want to bring those. And fungicide. And new string for a washing line and a garden candle that splashed blue wax on the concrete. And slug pellets, that I spread in a blue Maginot line around the potted plants.

Tuesday morning, at the other end of summer, when it’s no longer summer. The end of a season, and the new one not really begun. A few crisp brown leaves on our walk back from town yesterday. A ‘nip in the air’, but not autumn, not yet. At the other end of summer from the beginning of the Visit, and now beached at the Visit’s end, at its farthest edge where, like a beach, it runs up back into the land. The summer was a glade, or a stretch of water. Turn back and you’ll see a gap in the trees, light. That’s where it was, the summer. And now forward again. But isn’t there a larger glade ahead? Scarcely a glade, I think, but a whole horizon of light?

Yard Without Rats

The yard’s undisturbed; no evidence of the rats today. No digging in the plant pots for bulbs, no fresh droppings. And no sight of them plunging into the drain and out, or poking their noses from the split black wooden box built around the pipes in the corner of the yard.

Are they dead? Or are they nesting, the three of them, in some combination working to produce the next generation of rats: imagine it! Another generation, born in the split black box and crawling out! September’s their last month for breeding, and there’s 3 of them. But perhaps they’re dead instead. Dead and rotting in the split black box.

Should I open its cover? Should I hammer open one of the black planks? My Visitor says no. You’ll get bitten, she says. I want to shine a torch into the box, but she says no to that, too. Are they dead? Rotting? We should smell them soon, the three dead rats in the black box. Three rats who crawled in, ate the poison and died.

Meanwhile, the yard, ratless. Plants in their new pots (the old ones split). Scattered earth dug out by the rats, looking for bulbs. Scattered yellow balls of plantfood, too. And the birdseed holder, from which the seed fell that brought the rats. That, and the packet of seed that was full of hatched insects crawling around that I threw into the outhouse. It split, and the insects grew wings and circled about it, and I didn’t want to go near. And then we were away, and that’s when the rats came, 3 of them, crawling about.

The ratless yard, but still the insects that circle its middle as they would do in a room. And fat flies that buzz around the black box – what do they mean? Dead rats, 3 of them, among the pipes? Dead, rotting rats?

Droppings

Are you writing about rats?, asks my Visitor. Yes, but not humorously. I promised that – not to write about rats humorously. There’s nothing funny about rats, we’ve agreed. They’re disgusting, says my Visitor, and though I don’t find them disgusting, they’re not humorous. You can’t write in a funny way about rats, we’ve agreed. Or write about them at all, says my Visitor, but I disagree.

Rats are constantly chewing, I tell my Visitor; they have to; their incisors never stop growing. If they stopped chewing, their incisors would eat through the walls of their mouth, I tell her. Imagine that! They’re chewing now, I tell her, outside, in their nest next to the drains. Constantly chewing, they’ve got no choice. It’s an instinct, I tell her. What do you think they chewing?, I ask her. The pipes? That wouldn’t be good. The brick? Surely not …

But they’re chewing something, there’s no question of that. They have to. Their incisors are constantly growing, I tell my Visitor. They’ll grow through the roof of the mouth – through lips (if rats have lips). And they’ll grow through the bottom of the mouth, all the way down, through the jaw and out. Disgusting, says my Visitor, I don’t want to know.

Rat droppings on concrete. Black elongated pellets, 10 or 12 of them, say, scattered, some forming a hapharzard pile, the others loose. Rat droppings! It must mean they’re thriving, I tell my Visitor, despite the poison. Perhaps they like it, the poison. Perhaps not enough poison was put down. Either way, they’re eating and digesting; they’re thriving, in a way.

Imagine it! Still alive! Two days after the poison! They live for 1-3 after days eating poison, it said on the tub. Perhaps they’ll die tomorrow. Perhaps not! Imagine! Well, the pest people are coming out on Tuesday, I tell my Visitor. She’s off on Monday, but the pest people will be there the next day. I’m really sorry about the rats, I tell her.

Streaming

Everything ends in rats, I’ve decided. Everything. They’re creatures that belong to the end, and they bring the end with them. Can they get into the shower?, asks my Visitor. No, they can’t. 9 inches of brick separate us from them. Can they crawl from the gaps into the floorboards into the bathroom? Not that, either – there’s 5 foot of air above the mud under floorboards for the rats to scale. And then the brick that separates them from that under-floorboard space. We’re safe from the rats, inside.

They busy themselves in the drains. Are they dying? Have they eaten the poison? Rats eat in little bits, I learn. A little, and then they wait; and then a little more. Which means poison must seem innocuous, neutral. It’s kept deliberately weak. And acts slowly – over 1-3 days. And how many days is it now? A full one and a half.

Are they dying or thriving, there on the other side of the wall? At night you can hear them squeaking, a kind of strangled birdsong. Once, I opened the door and saw them all, 3 of them, dashing into the space by the pipes they’ve made their nest. 3 of them, as though made of liquid, streaming back. 2 big ones, and a little one, young, streaming. And that’s where they keep themselves, in the box-like construction around the pipes.

They’re disgusting!, says my Visitor. Don’t you think they’re disgusting? But I don’t, particularly. They’re creatures of the end and after the end, I think to myself. They’ve seen what’s going to happen and they’re ready. 

Rats

Are the rats dying? We’re watching them from the kitchen window, emerging from the black wooden box constructed over the pipes that they’ve taken for their nest to plunge into the drain where the shower water goes. Three rats, we think, two large ones and one small, all brown, their heads poking out of the box to sniff the air and then they almost slide down, very quickly into the drain. And then up again a moment later, snout first, sniffing …

Are they going into the drain to drink? We think so. But why are they so thirsty? Because they’re dying, we decide. We hope. For wasn’t poison laid down in that black box the other morning. Wasn’t it lain down there, in five spoonfuls, the top plank ripped from the box?

Rats! I was going to start a new category on the topic, like the one on damp. But my Visitor objected: it’s not funny, she said. You can’t make something funny out of it. And it’s true, the rats make us melancholic. Out of the window we look. Rats, sniffing the air. Rats plunging in and out of the drain. As though the world had ended somehow. As if it was already over and this is all there is.