Offal Fortnight

Blah-Feme and I have decided to eat offal every night for two weeks, but it’s hard to find. Rumours of heart sold in Morrisons. Another night, we find cheap liver at Somerfield. But it’s brain, above all, that we’re looking for. Sliced brain, fried. ‘No one eats brain’, says the butcher.

W. phones to find out how it’s going on. ‘How’s offal fortnight?’ – ‘We had midnight haggis the other night. Then midnight kidneys. Then midnight liver. But we can’t get any brain.’ – ‘My God, how can you eat at midnight?’ – ‘That’s when we get in.’ W.’s horrified. ‘And how’s your stomach?’ – ‘Bad, it’s always bad.’ – ‘My God, how fat are you now?’

W. is writing an introductory book, despite the fact that he dislikes introductory books, and has written an essay on disliking introductory books. ‘It’s so bad, it makes me laugh.’ W. is rising very early and opening the book on which he’s writing. ‘I’m ruining it, it’s amazing, really funny.’

W. has been mentioned at an international conference as one of the few people in the world who understand the significance of X. for Y. ‘How does it feel?’ – ‘It’s hilarious.’

‘You really inspired me the other night’, says W., ‘oh nothing to do with your thought.’ – ‘What, then?’ – ‘I bought a bottle of wine and went home and drank it all. That’s how you live, isn’t it?’ 

I’ve sent W. something I’ve written. ‘It fills me with shame,’ I tell him. ‘Shame will survive you, like a dog’, says W., ‘that’s Kafka, isn’t it?’

W. has decided he’s got a higher IQ than me. A few points higher, he says, that makes all the difference. He can be witty, W. points out, but I can’t be witty. You’re just filthy, he says.

W.’s your Jewish mother, says Blah Feme. I tell W. ‘You bring it out in me’, he says.

‘How’s your flat then?’, asks W. There was no electricity for days, I tell him. There was nothing to do at night but sleep. And now the drains are blocked. And the new shower doesn’t work. And they delivered a dishwasher instead of an oven. ‘But is it still damp?’ The plaster’s soaked through, I tell him. I had to sleep with the door open to let it dry. But it’s not going to dry. ‘Why not?’ – ‘It’s the timbers, they’re completely rotten.’ – ‘My God.’ The ceiling caved in, I told him. It was entirely unexpected. So I had to get a new ceiling. – ‘My God.’

The Other Kierkegaard

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.

Literary Research

Somewhere, Deleuze says he dreams of accounts of thinkers which emphasise only their most fundamental concepts. But how difficult to find your way to that simplicity! Nevertheless, I will risk simplification by claiming that Blanchot’s thought, his writing, his life, is concerned with a problem concerning the notion of relation.

A problem that he pursues through his novels and récits, his literary criticism and his more cultural-theoretical and philosophical works. A problem, too (‘let us enter into this relation’) that makes itself felt in the fragmentary works and in the late works – the letters, occasional writings and other miscellany of Blanchot’s old age. And it is as pressing, too, in his political interventions.

Relation, then. Relation – an untustworthy Latinate term, that Heidegger, for example, cannot bring himself to use. A word from a degraded lexicon, which has already carved up the world into subject and object – themselves determinations of the Greek hypokeimenon, which meant, with Aristotle, so much more, and, according to the history Heidegger traces in ‘Age of the World Picture’ was translated subject (that which is thrown under) before subject swapped places with what was called object and came to name, after Descartes, the human being as the measure of all things.

Then the problem of understanding the relation between subject and object – the great epistemological problem – does not reach into the more complex whole Heidegger calls being-in-the-world; no surprise that it is an investigation of Aristotle that led to the composition of Being and Time: that it is the Greeks who constitute a bulwark against the incursion of the Latins. So Heidegger would come to draw more and more on the Greeks to make sense of the present. Recall his comments from the Heraclitus lectures of 1943: there’s no such thing as Greek religion. Religion – ugly, latecoming term; and couldn’t one also say that for Heidegger, as for the Greeks, that there is no such thing as relation?

I begin with Heidegger remembering the intellectual shock reading Being and Time was for the young Blanchot. But I think it may also be important to remember Rosenszweig too, not because his account of the relation between God and the human being, the relation of address, was a direct influence on Blanchot, but because it was The Star of Redemption that Levinas, who read Being and Time alongside Blanchot, encountered with such excitement.

Recall the preface of Totality and Infinity: the influence of Rosenszweig is omnipresent in Levinas’s great work. The address of one human being to another – the silence of the Other face to face with the ‘I’ repeats the address of God to the human being for Rosensweig. What matters is that this address is a relationship which keeps its terms apart: there is no fusion, subject does not become object; the Other is not assimilable to the Same.

This is what is meant by the appeal to height. The Other is, like God, the Most High, because the address reaches the ‘I’ from without. Whence the recourse to the extraordinary formulation, rapport sans rapport, a relation without relation, that is not mediated. Significant that it is upon this relation that Blanchot focuses, altering its sense, in his long discussion of Totality and Infinity in The Infinite Conversation.

Blanchot’s other great friend, Bataille, was also vitally concerned with the notion of relation. Subject and object do not fuse in what Bataille calls experience – this is what is distinctive about his atheological mysticism: the terms of the relation are kept apart, although it must also be said that they scarcely subsist as terms. The subject in glissement has come apart from itself as term; its sliding belongs to a movement which cannot be completed; the object will not be reached. rather, it reaches the ‘I’ of experience what draws it into its errancy, its sliding.

Nothing is mediated – extraordinary that atheological mysticism has this in common with Blanchot’s characterisation of Jewish mysticism. No mediation – and no confusion of terms. But when they meet in December 1940, Bataille having already begun to assemble the fragments that will comprise Guilty, Inner Experience and other works, Blanchot has already completed a manuscript which contains his own very distinctive account of relation. Thomas the Obscure, the novel with which he struggled for a number of years, writing it at night whilst working as a journalist by day, was published in 1941.

It cannot be emphasised enough that the central notions of Blanchot’s thought arrived more or less intact with the publication of that novel. Friendship, relation, the ‘other’ night, the ‘other’ death: it is all there, all at once, and this is remarkable. And it is all there in a work of fiction – this is something that requires lengthy meditation. Of what would literary research consist? What does it mean to think by literary writing?

In the years in which he wrote Thomas, Blanchot had drifted apart from Levinas – it took the advent of the war to bring them closer together, Blanchot taking Levinas’s wife and daughter to the safety of a monastery. Nevertheless, reading the short tales Blanchot wrote in this period, it is striking how close they were to Levinas’s early On Escape, and to the seminal Existence and Existents, begun in the work camp where Levinas was kept prisoner.

What was it that passed between Blanchot and Levinas when they studied together, when they read Being and Time together, and when Blanchot introduced his friends to contemporary literature? I have a photograph taken of the two young friends in my office, and wonder still how was it they came up with such extraordinarily rich notions.

But note, once again, that Blanchot introduced his ideas in his fiction – there first of all. In a letter written to a German critic in the 1970s, Blanchot emphasises that was in his fiction that his ideas came to him. Writing fiction taught him; he learnt by writing: then his literary criticism, his philosophical writings must be explored, as Michael Holland has advocated, from the perspective of his fiction (would that I had done this!). Bataille, comparing Levinas and Blanchot’s account of the il y a, the ‘there is’, argues that the latter cries what the former only discusses.

Thomas has a double, a companion, who undergoes experiences in his place. And Thomas will also speak – presumably allowing his name to name this obscure companion – of undergoing an experience in place of any and all human beings. Dying – the infinite movement towards the end: Thomas, or the ‘other’ Thomas, is the locus of this experience.

He dies in our place, each of us. He is there where we are not. Scarcely a locus, then, but a kind of nothingness. Scarcely an experience, but an event none can endure. Nevertheless, Thomas is also us; the ‘other’ Thomas is also Thomas, being bound to him by a relation that is distinct from that which secures for us a world, and a place in the world. 

Security, place – these depend upon the power and the possibility particular to human existence; here Blanchot is like Heidegger and Hegel in presuming it is in action that one discovers human existence – that opening to the world that is also an opening of the world, its blooming forward for one who is always outside him- or herself, always ecstatic.

Being in the world, as Heidegger calls it, underlies any particular account of the relation between subject and object. Relation, then, is built into the human being from the start – the human being, as existing, is always outside itself, always in the world – the very notions of interiority and exteriority have to be rethought. Then all scepticisms have been overcome; epistemology has to be set back into an encompassing ontology, whose method is that phenomenological unfolding of the existence proper to human beings Heidegger unfolds in Being and Time.

Presumably, the word relation, for him, would belong to the epistomenological endeavour that is now displaced from its primacy for philosophy. If ontology is now called fundamental, it is orientated towards breaking through to what matters most for philosophical reflection, but also for human life: the being of beings.

Perhaps it was this that so shocked the young readers of Being and Time: our world was as though doubled: on the one hand, our pragmatic engagement with the world, overcoming the intellectualism that had understood our relation to things on the basis of theory. On the other, being as it was given in the absence of the pragmatic, in that fundamental mood in which the world presented itself divested of my interest – bare, naked, detached from my powers, my possibility, it was the sense of finitude that accompanied what Heidegger called the nothing.

Being, the nothing: these words, in their near equivalency announce what is vouchsafed to the human being who is aware that he or she will die. And in this awareness, already the sense that the world is given to us twice over: there is what we can do, and what reaches us by way of what we cannot do. There is the measaure of power, the ability to be able (Sein-konnen), and then what measures that measure.

Being and Time, above all, is not a pragmatism; phenomenology leads all the way to what is most concealed; ontology bears upon what is fundamental to all ontology. And the human being, Dasein, is led to that point where it is divested of its powers, its possibilities. Higher than actuality, says Heidegger, reversing Aristotle, is possibility; but higher than possibility – challenging it, contesting it, is the impossibility of possibility, that is, death.

But Heidegger will allow for a kind of retrieval to occur, for the confrontation with mortality to allow the human being to retrieve itself as itself, to attain its propriety, its authenticity. Thus the impossible has become, in a sense, possible; death is now something that admits of a kind of relation – a being towards death, as the English translation has it; a being for death. I will die – but meanwhile, there is the world that is given to the one who experiences the chance of this death. The one, now, who lives resolutely towards death, who does not seek to evade it.

Blanchot does not permit this chance. No authentic existence for Thomas, whose existence is more precarious. Thomas dies in our place – but the notion of dying is now, as for Levinas, as for Bataille, divested of it sense as the end of life. Dying reaches us, or intimates itself, in the most ordinary suffering, says Levinas, writing in a work camp. Dying is experience, atheological mysticism, writes Bataille, who takes long bicycle rides in this period, in the countryside of occupied France. Dying, as Blanchot seems to conceive it, is just that powerlessness, that impossibility, that comes to overwhelm the human being. And now Thomas is there, the ‘other’ Thomas, in our place. The companion endures what we cannot.

In a sense, Blanchot’s conception of dying needs less context than I have given here. Think of Hegel: the subject posits itself in what differs itself – that is, as object, before it retrieves itself as subject. That is, it posits itself in self-alienation as an object before it retrieves itself, and alienation and objectivity, at least for the moment are annulled. New alienations arise; and hence the new need to throw itself out of itself and draw itself back in order to overcome diremption.

A process that Hegel will allow can be compared to death, negation, and to life, sublation. One lives by dying; life involves death, absence, negativity: isn’t it the sense of a diremption that cannot be overcome to which Blanchot is pointing? A diremption, now, that involves the substitution of the first person ‘I’ for the third person ‘it’ as the locus (if that is the word) of experience. The ‘other’ Thomas is a dying that cannot be overcome.

But it is here that Heidegger can offer assistance. Doesn’t he write of suspension in What is Metaphysics?: isn’t Dasein no longer itself at the moment when it comes before the nothing? Bare, disinterested – but then Dasein, like Hegel’s subject, can nevertheless return to itself – it can draw this experience of finitude back into its life, and live from it. Such is authentic existence. The ‘other’ Thomas cannot be re-integrated into our ordinary lives. But how, in this case, is this dying Thomas, this ‘it’ joined to each of us? What is the relation between the first and third person, between Thomas and the ‘other’ Thomas?

Blanchot cries the ‘il y a‘, the ‘there is’, according to Bataille; Levinas only writes it. Perhaps one could make a similar point of Heidegger’s Being and Time – it does not let cry the experience of anxiety, as does, for example, Bataille’s Inner Experience (anguish, though, is not equivalent to anxiety …) The cry is not extra-linguistic, as though there were an experience simply outside language, but must pass through language itself. Isn’t this what literature, or at least Blanchot’s fiction, would achieve?

Blanchot takes fom Hegel the centrality of language (the linguistic turn – in 1807!). No experience is immediate, but is always linguistically mediated. Then the paradigm of the movement of the subject into its self-alienation is always also a linguistic alienation. Is there a kind of writing, a speech, that cannot be reclaimed by the subject? A language in glissement, language wandering, language ‘itself’, unbound from the powers and possibilities of human existence. This is the ‘other’ ecstasis – the one that draws author and reader into relation with what cannot be brought back to the world.

(Who writes? Who reads? Locus of language as it relates to itself. Locus of a relation that lives its tautology in the life of the writer, of the reader. Language itself; the same: you write, you read as a node of its self-relation, its auto-affection. It returns to itself; it streams through you, returning to itself through your life, and by voiding your life. Are you alive? It lives in your place. Lives by your dying; lives as you becomes the voided figure, no one at all, anyone at all, who writes, who reads without being able to.

It began with what you could not do, with incapacity. Began with the ‘other’ ecstasis, as language pressed back against you, who would use it to speak your mind. Errant speech, detour: now the path that searches for itself in your wake. Now the method that crosses itself out, language out over eighty thousand fathoms, language seeking itself and returning to itself, and through you, through what you write.

You had an idea – no, an idea obsessed you, claimed you and overtook you. Until to live forward was to live what sought to return to yourself through your life, through the sacrifice of your life. To die – for nothing. Dying – for nothing. The great arc of which you are part; the return that draws darkness around you and asks you to begin what you are incapable of beginning. And then it calls on another ‘in’ you; the companion comes forward to begin in your place.

He is here, and I am not. He is there, on the other side of the mirror. My weakness is his strength; higher than possibility is his impossibility. How does he survive there, where it is impossible to begin? Dispersed one, silent one, he comes close only when my hands drop by my sides, when I can do nothing. He is there – but is he there? By what relation is he drawn to me? By what suspending of relation?

I think I can only write of him. But I cannot write. And isn’t that the test of writing: to begin with what you cannot do. To write as writing fails.)

But is this ‘other’ ecstasis solely the preserve of literature? Is it only in literature that language wanders? Is Inner Experience literarature? Is Thus Spoke Zarathustra? What kind of boundary can be drawn between philosophy and literature, between the theoretical and the literary? Can Totality and Infinity be read as literature? Can The Star of Redemption? What work of philosophy can tolerate the alienation of writing – the written marks that may well outlive me – such that they cannot be reclaimed by their author? What philosopher can tolerate a writing that cannot be reclaimed? I don’t know how to answer these questions, except to say that with Bataille, as with Nietzsche, there is certainly an author who does not seek to draw back what he writes in his own name.

What might literary research mean? What path of inquiry might be specific to literature? What can be sought by literature, and discovered by it? Is it more appropriate to think of a literary research – a research that proceeds through an experience of language, via language ‘itself’ rather than literature per se? What is at issue when the word writing, bare and simple, is allowed to accompany the word literature for Blanchot in the 1960s? Difficult questions, but pressing all the same.

I think relation is this the red thread that runs through Blanchot’s work. That allows it to achieve its extraordinary effects. Let me say straightaway that I have only sketched what an exploration of relation here; I’ve said nothing. But couldn’t I also say that it was that notion of relation that has obsessed me here at the blog for some time, and that has allowed me to achieve what paltry effects of which this writing has been capable?

I wonder (another tangent) whether it is possible to narrate the life of an idea – or that a life might be understood in terms of an idea. Do not seek to account for Blanchot’s thought in terms of the times in which he lived, its upheavals, its challenges. Perhaps it is the notion of relation (is it a relation?), of literary research (is it a method of exploring relation? – a method: but that’s the wrong word) that lives in his place. But how to write of what is found by that seeking, my that movement of writing? How to write of what is found by writing, so that it becomes a cry and not a discourse?

Dogma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buffoons

These are the last days, says W. It’s all finished. Everything’s so shit, says W., but we’re happy – why is that? Because we’re puerile, I tell him. Because we’re inane.

A few days in my company, says W., and he feels iller than he’s ever felt. All that drinking, he says. And that eating. How do you do it?

When R., who is generosity itself, let us into his flat, we rushed into his bedroom and lay on his bed. Put on his clothes, I said, or W. did. W. pulls R.’s jeans over his trousers. I pull on R.’s jumper over my jacket. R. tells us off. I take pictures of W. We’re laughing. Why do we do things like this?, says W. What’s wrong with us?

On the train heading North, we read the papers. Our stomachs hurt.

We know what genius is, says W. aphoristically, but we know we’re not geniuses. It’s a gift, he says. We can recognise genius in others, because we don’t have it ourselves. We talk about X. He’s our leader, says W. But we musn’t tell him. We’ve always agreed we need a leader. Someone to inspire us, we agreed five years ago in a square in Wroclaw. Our mistake was to tell our leaders that they were our leaders. That scared them off. 

Why don’t you get rid of that jacket?, says W. You’ve been wearing it for years. It makes you look fat. Look – it’s completely shapeless.

W. is wearing a flowery shirt. Look at us in our flowery shirts, says W. Fat and blousy, and in flowery shirts, and everyone else slim and wearing black. What’s wrong with us? We’re buffoons.

I don’t believe you really like jazz, says W. It’s another of your affectations. Go on then, tell me about jazz, says W. Explain modal jazz to me. He sits back, ready to be amused. I try. W. laughs. That’s not it, he says. It’s an affectation, isn’t it, all this jazz? It’s all affectation with you, isn’t it?

Only one person comes to our paper. We take him to the pub. We make a solemn pact: only when we attract no audience at all will we be able to stop going to conferences.

Squalor

W. is discoursing on love again. You have to court women, he tells me. You can’t just jump into bed with someone. Women like being courted, he says. Eight months, he says, that’s how long I courted Sal. This in a Spanish restaurant, outside in the warm night.

A few days earlier, a similar conversation in my flat. It’s very late – three, four in the morning. We drink Plymouth Gin. You need a woman in your life, he says. Look at this place. It’s a dump. It’s filthy. You wouldn’t live like this if you had a woman in your life.

Earlier that evening, I’d started to empty the cupboards in the kitchen, preparing everything to be stripped ready for the damp proofers. What’s that smell?, says W., who is setting down the pots and pans I pass him in the living room. These are filthy, he says. How can you let them get like this?

I wash my hands. That kind of grease won’t come off, says W. Grease coats my hands. Just throw this stuff out, says W. of the pots and pans. Have you ever used these? You don’t cook here, do you? I tell him there’s no power in the kitchen. No power! How long have you been living like this?, says W., his voice high with incredulity. Months, I tell him. Why don’t you get someone in to fix it?, he says. I tell him I knew the old kitchen was going to be ripped out. My God. How can you live like this?, says W.

Your wok is rusty, says W. You need to oil your wok. If you lived with someone, it wouldn’t get like this, W. says. Later, I tell him about the smell in the bathroom. It’s the drains, I tell him. They must be backed up, W. says. Why not fix them now, before you get the damp proofers in? It’s too late, I tell him. W. is appalled. The stench when you let the water out of the bath. The reflux of dirt into the shower. The stench.

Later W. sits on the sofa, a glass of gin in hand. He’s talking about love. Have you ever loved anyone?, says W. You’re incapable of love, aren’t you? Then he tells me about love. It’s an ethical commitment, he says. But you don’t know anything about that, do you? You have to go out with someone you can talk to, says W. You have to court a woman, to find out whether you like her.

You’ve got a death-drive, W. tells me, a few days later, in an Edinburgh apartment. R., who is also present, agrees. Listen to the man, says R. He knows what he’s talking about, he says. R. looms closer to me. Look how you’re sitting, says W. I’m scrunched up at the end of the sofa, hands on my thighs, as though protecting myself. You’re scared, aren’t you? I am scared, I tell him. R.’s scary. He keeps looming at me.

R.’s white wine, the best I’ve ever tasted. R’s sourdough bread, the best I’ve ever tasted. A little earlier, whisky, the best I’ve ever had. A little earlier than the that, the best pub I’ve ever visited for I.P.A. It’s very late. The aparment. Listen to the man, says R. This is good advice, he says. You’ve got a death drive, says W. You have to break the cycle, he says.

Pharoah Sanders on the stereo. They open a bottle of red. I’ve had enough, I tell them, but W. passes me his glass to sniff. The best red wine I’ve ever smelt. As we walk back to the hotel, we admire R.’s taste. The best of everything! And what do you have?, says W. Plymouth gin! Oh yes, says W. You have to keep the bottle, he says. They’ve changed the design for the American market. It’s horrible.

On the train to North Scotland. What are you doing?, says W. I’m playing Doom on my mobile phone. I haven’t seen you open a book for days, says W. Later, I take the gossip magazines out of my bag. Why do you read them?, says W. It’s the pretty women, isn’t it? I tell him I found them on the train. You bought them, didn’t you? Didn’t you bring a book? W.’s reading Logique du sens. A proper book, he says. I don’t understand it, though. Pages without any annotations, he says.

So what are you reading, then? Who’s that? Jordan. Who’s that? Peter Andre. Oh yes, I like them, they’re funny. Why’s she always in the same pose. Look. He turns the page. Exactly the same. So what’s Now all about? It’s a chav mag. He turns to the pages with pictures of grossly obese women. My God, he says, and laughs. That’s you in a few years, he says. When do you think you’re going to get as fat as that? It’s going to happen, isn’t it, the way you’re going.

Both of us have bad stomachs. I can’t believe the way you live, says W. No wonder you’re always ill. He’s getting married next year, he tells me. Sal is fiercely loyal, he says. You need to find someone like Sal, he says. Sal loves you, he says. You can tell from the way she takes the piss out of you. That’s a sign of love. Is that why you take this piss out of me?, I ask. Yes. I love you, he says.

In a pub on the Royal Mile, the football on the television. You don’t like sport, do you?, says W. I wish I did, I tell him. He’d been good at cricket at school. What were you like at cricket?, he says, laughing. I can just imagine you. He reminds me of when he took me to a football match. You cheered for the wrong side, he said.

Are you turning?, says W. Because I’m going to bed if you’re turning. W. on the sofa, me on sheets on the floor. We listen to The Letting Go. This is better than Smog, says W. No way, I say. W. opens up the 25 most played songs on I-Tunes. He wants to see if I’m really into jazz. Just let them play in order, he says. The title track of The Letting Go. Then ‘Great Waves’, with Chan Marshall singing. Then a live song by Smog. Then some Euro jazz. God that’s depressing, says W. It’s got something though, hasn’t it?

Outside, the yard. It’s improving, says W., now the sewage’s gone. Oh yes, it’s much better. He goes out into the yard. Your plants are dead, says W. Look at them. I tell him they’ll come back in the Spring. It could be nice out here, says W. Why don’t you go online and get some ideas of what to do in a North facing yard. It’s improved, though, W. concedes. Now the sewage has cleared up.

W. is worried about my cough. The damp’s turning you consumptive, he says. And even he’s developing a cough, he says, and he’s only been here a few days. How do you live like this? How do you get anything done? But you don’t do anything any more, do you? You need to move, says W. Go somewhere you can work.

You’re incapable of loving anyone, says W. Except yourself. He delivers his judgement from the sofa. How do you live like this, he says. No one lives like this. And more emphatically: no one we know lives like this. They all live with women who love them, and who do you live with? My God – look at this place.

W.’s getting married, he says. Next year, probably, he says. At the restaurant in the Plymouth Gin distillery. This as we drink three fingers of gin each, neat, with ice, he on the sofa, I on the bed I made for myself from sheets on the floor. I don’t know how you get any sleep, W. says. I hobble around the room, coughing. Look at you, says W. My God.

All your worldly possessions, says W., looking round the room. Is this what you’ve amounted to? Pots and pans, sticky with filth; tins of tuna and tomatoes; a duvet soaked in spilt fabric conditioner. No wonder Sal refuses to come, he says. I got the shower fixed, I said to W. Yes, but look at this place, says W. This is what you’ve amounted to, isn’t it. This is what you’ve come to.

No wonder you don’t do any work, says W. I couldn’t work if I lived like you. Out all the time, reading nothing, and living in squalor. This really is disgusting, he says. And the damp! My God, I’ve never know anything like it. It hits you when you come in, he says.

The dehumidifier broke, I tell him. It was never as bad as this, I said. It was built on a mine shaft, I tell him. Look at the way the floor slopes towards the wall. Look how crooked the doorframes are. W. laughs. It’s getting better, I tell him. Remember when the windows wouldn’t open? Remember the sewage in the yard, and all the plants dying? They saw you coming, said W. Who was your surveyor?, he says. Didn’t they warn you? My God. 

It always comes back to love. W. holding court on the sofa, a glass of Plymouth Gin in his hand. You see, I love Sal, says W. Not like you, he says. You’re incapable of loving anyone. Except yourself.

Cousins

Singer, how is it I occupy your voice? How is it that it sings of me? One day, I dreamt, we swapped voices. I sang with your voice and you were silent with mine. I sang, and you listened, and my voice watched over us both. I called you, cousin. We had always been close, without knowing one other.

Which one of us sang? What does it matter? We listened, and the bower of listening became a forest, and where there was shelter there was only wandering. I thought, I am looking for myself, but I was only looking for you.

You: the word was as open as our wandering. I asked you where you were. Here, you said, but here was everywhere.

Dummies

His voice wanders in itself. For me – I’m not thinking of anyone else. Just for me does it exert this fascination. And this ‘for me’ is the cause of my own wandering in myself. I follow him; I search for a discography, I look out for his CDs: he has been everywhere, travelled everywhere, and so must I.

Does he know what his voice becomes? Is he, too, fascinated by the ‘itself’ of his voice, his voice itself? Perhaps there are singers fascinated by their own voices. Who seek only to follow it, to find songs that best suit its wandering. Who from their own labels to record their own songs, who travel everywhere, to the four corners of the world so that it can wander yet further. I owe this to my voice. I owe everything to my voice, for who am I apart from my singing?

Then the singer, like the listener, is set back from his voice. It is not his. He belongs to his voice; it is his ventriloquist. Puppet, how will you ever be capable of the voice you were given? But to whom is it given, this gift? Only to itself, and to its wandering. The voice is already lost, the gift given to itself somewhere far away from you. Now you, like me, are only a listener. You like, me, are the dummy of the voice.

Three dummies of this kind: Will Oldham, who falls short of his voice in serious joy, seeking out collaborative friendships; Chan Marshall, who falls short of it in hazy bewilderment, who can scarcely let herself sing one song in an hour’s performance; Bill Callahan, who wants to be alone to fall short of his voice, letting it echo back to him in empty rooms.

Silent Speech

No surprise that it is only by silence that a cut can be made into anonymous speech. Silence – to draw speech back to itself, to summon back its signifying power. Thus, when the call of conscience, for Heidegger, says nothing at all. Nothing: but it is said to a particular person, to you and no other, drawing you back from the ‘no one’ of anonymity.

Isn’t this the hither side of the fear of the masses as it appears in the twentieth century? Two anonymities – one that belongs to the quotidian, to the fallen world of rumour and gossip, and the other to the ownmost self, to Dasein as it is held out into the Nothing. Or, indeed, to the self elected to its responsibility by the Other who speaks without saying a word, who is pure address and nothing more (Levinas) – a silence that once again that is elective, that picks me out.

And it is there even in Blanchot, for all that he dismisses the distinction between authentic and inauthentic speech: the speech of anyone at all, the anonymous hubbub of the masses, is a cousin of the murmuring that echoes, for the reader in literary writing. Echoes and singularises the one who reads, ‘separating him from the others, from the world and from himself, leading him through mocking labyrinths, drawing him always farther away, by a fascinating repulsion, below the ordinary world of daily speech.’ A fascinating repulsion: because literature redoubles anonymity, gives it a thickness, and allows it to tremble in the ordinariness of the words it presents.

Two anonymities: this disjunction is there in Kafka’s Josephine. The mouse singer’s piping is no different from any other, it is anonymous, indifferent, but why is it also celebrated, why does Josephine’s voice alleviate, if only for a moment, the sufferings of the mousefolk? Because in some sense it redoubles the anonymity of their piping; because that anonymity is presented as such.

Strange ‘as such’ that has no substance; strange detour, in which speech wanders without cease. But wandering, now, that is separated from ordinary piping, that has silence all around it, preserved by a margin that sets itself around her piping. Her song is somehow rounded off, completed, even as it allows its finished form to tremble. Perhaps it is that the artwork, in the midst of anonymity, allows that anonymity to be experienced as by a kind of reduction.

Separated from the world, separating itself, set back from the will or the intentions of its creator, the work turns in silence like a salamander in the flames. In truth, it is only a piece of the world – the singer’s voice is no different from any other – that has been suspended from the world, that has changed its polarity. A piece of the world set back from the world – a fragment lost as it has slipped from use: but to what does it awaken me, the one who was called?

I think silence can only name the deterritorialisation of the voice. There are not two orders, speech and silence, but one. Silence fringes the voice as it is reduced to itself, that is, to the fact that it has no final determination, that it wanders in itself, just because it has no ‘itself’. That wandering sets itself apart from what is fixed and determined in the world, but also from the voice as part of the world. Then it wanders apart from determination: that is its adventure. And it carries me with it, that is mine.

But what kind of adventure is this? Silence surrounds me and unlimits me; what I am is no longer what I am. To what have I been awakened? Two anonymities. When speech found you, you also wandered, although this time by yourself. By yourself, but not yet come to yourself. To what does the second anonymity deliver you ? To the discovery of yourself as the place of your wandering.

Picked out to wander, picked out not to come to yourself: you will not reach what you are, as if being and becoming could be separated. You are already this: wanderer, exile, not simply deterritorialised from the world, but becoming with it, plunged back into its streaming. And silence all around you; silence crowns you, fiery nimbus. It burns at your edges.

I was set on fire by the song. I was set on fire by the book: set to silence, set to wandering.

Anonymous Speech

Aimless curiosity, passing the word along: there is a speech that seems to lift itself from the world, that speaks of nothing in particular, or of everything. Rumour, gossip without foundation barely refers to the world, barely reaches it. What does it matter what is said or who is saying it? Infinite loquacity, the desire to help speech along without detaining it in your own name, to lighten speech by allowing it to say nothing.

Thus the conversationalists of Duras’ The Vice-Consul, or India Song. Who speaks? We are not told. Anyone is speaking, everyone is speaking – anonymous speech, anonymising speech in what is spoken is only the turning of rumour, drifting first this way and then another. In truth each speaker is only the relay of speech, saying everything by saying nothing.

Indifference: voices that rise and fall saying nothing. The decay of speech, but also its rebirth – what is said when nothing in particular is said. To pass the word along; to give rumour the life of speech – entropy, negentropy: how is it that speech lives by dying, that its life is indistinguishable from its death?

Deathless, lifeless, what does it mean to remove the attribution of speech to speakers as Duras does? It is to indicate the indifference of speech, its withdrawal into itself. Itself – but what, then, is speech, when it seems to break itself insouciantly from the world to which it used to refer? Speech lost in its own alleyways. Speech wandering in its own labyrinth.

There is no one here to hear you. But there is no one to speak. No one, anyone – at what point to these words become exchangable? When did they lose their general equivalent? This is what Mallarme fears: crude speech will overcome essential speech, the poetic word will be lost. And it is what worries Heidegger, too: fallen speech, inauthentic speech denies the fact of our mortality that we all share insofar as it would direct each of us to take account of his own singularity, her absolute difference.

But death is already speaking. Death is the forgetting speech bears. Forgetting itself, forgetting everything, it knows itself only in the most unsubstantiated rumours, in the gossip that, in the absence of its object wears away the capacity to refer, until speech lifts itself from the world and streams, glistening in the sun.

Kafka’s Josephine gives voice to anonymity, sings it. But doesn’t she become too greedy for acclaim? Doesn’t she want her voice, whose power is that it is the same as anyone’s to be marked in its difference? Perhaps there is an experience in which our voices are the same. Neutralised – neutered, until they reverberate on the same plain, until all they speak is the wearing away of speech. Who speaks? Anyone, no one. Anyone at all, no one in particular. And who listens?

Posthumous Speech

Late at night, widening: the great speech that speaks without you, and to which all speaking is joined. Late at night, adrift in itself, speech speaks of itself, of the fact of speech and that there is speaking. Because it is only then that everything is said. Only then that speech becomes posthumous, outliving what can be said and what cannot be said.

Posthumous speech, the river that spreads out beneath the sky: Duras reaches it in The Vice-Consul; it is allowed to speak, there and in India Song. Voice without attribution. Speech without speaker: what does it matter what is said? There is speech, the hubbub of speech, but it is only the stammering of the Vice Consul that speaks. He is the only speaker, he and Anne-Marie Stretter.

Their speech is silence; it is the suspension of speech. He suspends speech as he speaks it. It is broken in him, the continuity of things, of time, of speech. And she knows it; only she knows it. What can the young men around her know? She knows; she’s met speech as she danced with the Vice Consul; speech has found her.

Wisdom: she keeps, I think, what the Vice Consul cannot. He is the husk of speech, but she is the one enclosed by its praying palms. Speech keeps her. Speech closes itself at her heart, and she is buried there, inside herself, outside herself, there where speech speaks of itself in his hesitancies, in his inability to speak.

Think back. A hotel room. A phonecall. Remember that. You were half asleep. And then? You opened the door. And then? You were there, drunk and in your jacket. You sat in the armchair across from me, and I listened, half awake. You spoke. I listened to the gaps in speech, its accelerations. You took a bottle of water from the fridge, then another bottle. You spoke, and criticised me for not speaking. But what was I to say?

It was very late; it was early; dawn was coming. Either I’d lived a whole life, or I’d not begun to live. I found a few words. I spoke them; I threw them at speech. But you were the one to whom speech was given. It turned in you. I listened, and thought: you must remember this. Must let yourself be enclosed, must be carried by this memory as between praying palms.

But you were not the husk of speech, and I was never wise. The next day, we met again in the sun. This time, I was to speak; I thought: I must make an offering. Not confidences – I did not speak those, but other things. Until speech flowed like the water in the rivulets that ran along the street. Which one of us was wise? Which one was kept by speech? Neither, I would say. Both, I would say.

Speech Adrift

I miss you even when I’m with you. I remember writing that line for myself, many years ago. Miss you because you are not there when I am with you. Or that to be with you is also to miss you; that I have not caught up with you, or that you have fallen behind me. Or is that I have moved, while you remained the same place? Too fast or too slow: I am the one who is out of phase, and it is you who should say of me, I miss you when I’m with you.

Missed: but what was the appointment we were supposed to keep? A phonecall. I’m supposed to give an account of myself, to speak, to say: this happened, that happened. But it was missed, what I wanted to say. Missed – although I spoke a great deal, although I said everything.

Alcoholics are sometimes possessed of a great urgency, a sense that they are on the brink of the truth. Listen to me, listen – dreadful eloquence, drunken belligerance, speech in search of itself and wandering everywhere. True, sometimes drunken speech can achieve a magnificent indifference, listening only to itself, following its steady course. But too often it is garrulousness and resentment, a litany of petty complaints and whining excuses.

How then to hear what keeps itself from speech? How to mark the threshold from which speech would come, and that yet trembles in speaking? I remember the phonecall nearly at the start of Mirror. The narrator speaks, he rambles without break. Speech drifts. From his tone of voice, I would say he is over-conscious, over-aware, that he has seen everything and knows everything. And still he speaks, still he lets his speech wander. Perhaps that’s all that’s left to him. Perhaps it is his chance, as it is the chance of us all.

He remembers; he is allowed to remember. But then – and this is the miracle – speech itself begins to speak. Or rather, the threshold from which it comes lets his speech enter that neutral place, that blankness in which the voice becomes a double of itself, in which it speaks so as to let its tone reverberate, the tone that is more important than anything said.

A drifting voice, a voice adrift: I think, too, of the long Christmas night of Fanny and Alexander, and those who speak until dawn and past dawn, following speech as it drifts and allowing themselves to be carried by speech. What is there to be said? Of what does speaking speak? Of itself, of its failure to arrive at itself.

Late at night, it widens. Late, very late, true speech begins that turns each of us, speaker, listener, aside. True speech, that speaks of itself, of the surprise of itself, carrying the voice and be carried by it. For isn’t it the voice, in its grain that lets it resound? Doesn’t it need what allows it to speak?

But the voice needs speech to be spoken. Needs, then, what cannot be said – or that does not do so directly, according to the order of the day. Speak at night, and you approach the impossibility of speech – the impossibility, that is, of marshaling what speaks in your own name.

You cannot claim it; it does not come to you, does not arrive; it will not return as the falcon to the falconer. And yet it is what speaks with you, even as you speak. What cannot speak speaks by way of what can, and you the speaker are joined by another who cannot lift himself to speech.

Defeat

Defeat: the sky is too wide, too great. Sink down, lie down. Finality – you have given yourself to the horizon. Everything is finished. I think my favourite works of art are those which begin at the horizon, where others end. That begin with death, with the wearing away of everything. You are here, already at the end. It’s all finished where the horizon is a straight line, diving the earth and land. Over, and before it began.

In what voice will you speak of it? How can it be narrated? The blankest voice, the most neutral. The final book of The Sea of Fertility. Or the violent cops of Takeshi’s films. Or the off-stage voice of Tarkovsky’s Mirror: each time it is the horizon that speaks, the straight line sketched in one stroke as by a Zen master. You’ve outlived your time; it’s finished. Over now, and before it began.

There are books that end with wandering and death, but what of those that begin with them? Basho’s last haiku, written as he lay dying in the last of his journeys: ‘asleep, but thoughts wander on.’ What of the book that begins with death, that has already begun there, and without drama? It’s all happened, everything’s happened, death has been seen, and there’s no need for anything else. Speak with the final voice, the neutral one. Speak in the still voice in which everything has been said.

The Horizon

The land beneath the sky. Draw a horizontal line on a piece of paper: that’s the horizon, where the sky is divided from the land, or from the sea. And remember the paragraphs in the Penguin edition of Mishima’s Sea of Fertility – stretched out, horizon-like and doubling the description of the horizon that begins the final book, The Decay of the Angel. Everything is finished; the book is over before it began. How can it end but here, before the horizon?

Nonchalance

Carelessness: is there a way we might have been said to catch time out, to have found time when it was gathering itself without going forward? When time has stopped going forward except in a kind of duplication of the world, as though everything was caught in its eddying? Suspended time: time without momentum; time that does not find its way to succession. Stranded moments, without continuity. Moments that remain, as though outside themselves. Thickening themselves, doubling themselves, undergoing a strange crystallisation.

I remember; I always remember. Coming again and again: those times, those moments. But I do not bring them; time gives them to me. Gives them, but only as they have fallen outside linear continuity. Moments that should have gone to sleep. Have disappeared into forgetting. And yet moments, too, that seem to be linked to a kind of forgetting – that seem to have forgotten me.

Nonchalance: this is the word that comes to me when I think of those moments that will not pass. The carelessness of time, time’s drifting. It’s true I kept a diary, that I thought those days had to be remembered. But I was only doubling what remembered itself in me. Came to itself, but as though without regard for me. As though I hadn’t lived them yet; as though I’d only begun to live what turned me aside.

Was I there, with you? But I was barely with myself. Memory does not enclose time, but is opened by it. Memory opens like an oyster’s shell. The pearl: the moment thickened, the opacity of time. I do not keep what I remember; it keeps me. Nonchalance: but without regard for me; turning aside. Kept by what turns aside, by a moment that ignores me, but for all that, enlists me as a witness.

I saw, I heard; I touched you. No: it was you that touched me; the affect came from without; it arrived as from a great distance. And you saw yourself in me, by way of me. Sometimes I flatter yourself that you found peace in me; that you lay down inside me and closed your eyes, that I provided a shelter for what does not rest, but turns in itself. But you never stopped turning, and turning away from me. You never stopped forgetting me.

And I think that’s what you do again, here, as I write. Sometimes, memories lose their force when I record them. I am relieved; they lose their hold on me. Writing remembers them for me. But other memories return by way of writing, surprising me. As I record those moments, I also realise I’ve recorded nothing at all. Eluding me, indifferent to me, they summon writing, they ask to be written, only to slip away once again.

The stars in Van Gogh’s paintings turn in great wells in the sky, and that’s how I imagine these moments turn in the great sky of memory. Stars burn as they consume themselves; they ask for nothing else, no substance. And so too these memories are nothing but themselves, burning in solitary passion. And just as stars can collapse on themselves, devouring their own light and drawing the space around them across their threshold, I imagine memories that will attenuate all the others, fraying them, wearing them down to nothing.

Until everything that happened becomes a gauzy veil through which that pale sun burns. But a sun, now, that is the source of no life; that drains life from the world rather than nourishing it. Just the sky, a blank and indifferent sky on a day just like other days. A day like any other, a sky like any other: you wait for me there. Patience, the land beneath the sky. The whole plain, waiting, and the sky above.

Seriousness

I am the oldest of two, but you are the youngest of three. By that I account for the way you spoke as though citing, that words didn’t quite belong to you. Sometimes, it is true, you spoke with great seriousness; to claim words as your own was an enormous task, but for the most part, you repeated satirically the expressions I would use, or mimicked my speech, or the speech of others.

Speech, for you, was lightness, a kind of laughter. I imagined you laughing at your sisters in your mimickry. They were serious, and you were – an imp; it was visible in the photograph your parents hung in their lounge: there was the imp, between the two others.

For my part, speech was deliberate, it did what it was told. Was that why I liked to lose that certainty by speaking to you? Yes, I loved for speech to lighten, to lose its orientation, and to rise from the scraps of countryside across which we walked. But sometimes that lightness changed its polarity – speech fell out of phase with itself, as though it spoke by way of what it could not say; as though communication could not communicate.

Something serious was to be said, and by way of lightness. Seriousness – it is true you distrusted abstract conversation. You’d heard too much of that; you felt excluded. But there was another seriousness, one which bore our speech and, I would say, placed it at stake.

You could say we did not speak deeply. Afterwards, when I left you, I would think, we said nothing at all – and isn’t that what you said, much later: we didn’t say anything. True, nothing was said. But still there was seriousness – still it was the condition of speech into which what we said seemed to set itself back. The surprise of speech, and that we could speak by way of the space it opened between us.

Sometimes, apart for months, years, we corresponded. I wrote too much; you wrote very little, and what you said seemed to say nothing. Pure froth – but was it that? There was a letter; something was written – and wasn’t that enough, that you’d addressed me?

Occasionally, a more decisive letter would come, and you would speak with great brevity. I have been very unhappy. I’ve decided to leave my job. Absolute letters. Decisive ones, in which a new turn was announced. Why did you need to tell me? For the same reason, I think, as you sent the others. What mattered was the address; what mattered was speech, and the distance of speech.

You joined what was said to what could not be said, the written to the unwriteable. With you, communication went by way of what could not communicate, speech by way of silence, and writing by what erased every word. Was it was also in order for speech to rest in silence that you wrote, and that I wrote to you? To rest, to be addressed – speech was lightened by that crossing, by the letters that were sent over the body of England.

Today, writing alone, I imagine my words are addressed to you. My words – not mine, because you are the guardian of my speech, just as I am the guardian of yours. Peace: I wanted them to rest in the unwriteable, to find peace there. And then it is as though we are still young, that this day joins itself to another, half our lives ago.

Desire

Recurring dream as a child: the girl infinitely wise, and who could speak of everything. The girl who spoke with absolute certainty, though I sensed she did not know what she said. Spoke without knowing, and whose certainty had been sent on an infinite detour. And my listening wandered with her; I followed her. Was it by chance I usually saw her as blind, as though her sight was wandering somewhere behind her eyes?

Later, a letter from a friend written with the same sybilline certainty. I smoothed down the page with my hand. What had I touched? Absolute writing. Blind writing, behind which she wandered. How could I follow her?; I could not, though I waited for her letters every day.

I think I have always sought that measure of blindness in another. Desire within desire – for a kind of pause, a waiting place, that opening beneath a starless sky. It’s always still when we go out for our walks, you said. As though everything were suspended, you said. Out of town, by the path only I knew; you’d looked for it, you said, but you couldn’t find it. I knew the path across the park and over the railway bridge. I knew the way into the interval, although it was only you who could summon me there.

Desire within desire, desire unlimiting itself in desire – I wanted to hear you speak, and to speak in turn. Wanted to hear the errancy of speech, to let speech wander, scattering itself across the plain. Later, when I’d come home, I would try to write from that silence, from that speech. It’s true you had beauty, that I was attracted to you, but that is banal. It was that desire undid itself within desire, explicating itself, opening into a kind of waiting.

To wait – but what for? Desire suspended, desire lost in wandering: your beauty belonged to that suspense. It was nonchalant, unowned, like the speech we sent up into the air. I always thought you were careless of your beauty, that it was taken for granted. But in truth, it was nothing you asked for and nothing you wanted. You would like your face to be totally round, you told me, the face of anyone. You would like to be like anyone at all.

And then you laughed at the way I spoke. Mimicked me. And then laughed at us both: who do we think we are?

Prophecy

Prophet, of what have you ever spoken but speech? Of what have you ever sung? For speech is already the future; speech returns as what has not yet happened. Speech itself – speech where speech is divided, and in the interval of itself. Interval – isn’t that what you saw prophet, though not with your eyes? Wasn’t it there you failed to see?

The prophet is always blind. The prophet is deaf. He has not seen, he has not heard, and he bears blindness at the centre of his seeing; he hears by hearing nothing. And when he speaks? The future speaks, and between us. Speech, the return of the future, its coming back, and by way of what speaks between us. The future listens to itself. The future awaits itself. Waiting: but who will cross the desert of speech?

The prophet is always a stammerer, no matter how eloquent his speech. He can never speak in his speaking; he lets speech hesitate, as what is said comes apart in his speaking. And even that is not his, his speech. Even that is the desert across which he’ll never cross, and that opens each time you hear him.

And then you know: prophecy is speech; speech is already prophetic, and whenever there are two of us gathered together, the future has opened, and by way of speech. Opened: but with no one to see it. Opened in the blindness at the centre of your sight, and in the deafness at the core of your hearing.

The Sybil

Errant speech, speech wandering. Fascinated with itself, lost in itself, speech is only the absence of place in which everything is lost. The world lost by way of speech; the world unjoined in speech.

Who speaks? What speaks? The one whom all place usurps; the one who unjoins time: I heard it speak in your voice, in the wavering of your voice. Heard it speak, but it was only your voice that spoke, only its speaking, that detached itself from you and wandered without you. I would like to hear you.

One day I would like to hear you. One day, I would like to coincide with my hearing. For isn’t listening, too, to wander? Isn’t listening lost in its own fascination, with its great passivity that spreads everywhere, ice plain, ice sheet that is gap between listening and itself? To speak, to hear: there is never time to speak, to listen. Never a place for speakers, for listeners.

I think this is the source of the legend of the Sybil. She speaks, but she does not know what she says. Speaks in tounges, away from herself. Oracle, priestess, her eyes roll up into her forehead. Speech – but can you hear what she says? Will you ever understand? Oracular speech cannot be heard. Or what is called oracular is speech that has only redoubled its loss from itself, its wandering.

She speaks of what is lost, and what you lose by listening. Speaks of what lost between, between you and between yourself. Yourself: you listen, you wander. No: there is listening, there is wandering. After you can only recall – what? The mystery of the world detached from the world and wandering, lost, in its corridors.

His Voice

His voice seems fascinated with itself. His voice: lost in itself, wandering in its own corridors. He spoke, but did it matter what he said? The wanderer: his voice lived its own life, and kept him only as its husk. Listen to him and you know your own voice wanders, that it speaks not of what you would want it to say, but only itself, perpetually returning. Only the surprise that it is, the coming to itself of this surprise.

That there is speaking; that there is a voice that bears speech. Bears it, and returns in it, as speech speaks of the communicativity that is its possibility. To have speech, to be spoken: what it says does not matter; that he says it is everything. That it is said; that there is saying: his voice, which still and calm, also trembles. His speech, calm and sure, is out over 70,000 fathoms. 

And when you speak to him? When your voice meets his? Speech speaks to itself; the voice loses itself in the space that is opened between you. A between, now, that separates you from yourself, and by way of the voice. Separation – as though a plain had opened at your heart. As though the winds that blow across the ice let speak that opening.

It speaks, no one speaks – you are divided by what holds you together. Itself: the word has come apart. Whose self? What returns? Division: who hears you speaking? Who follows speech as it is lost in its corridors?

The Bower

Wake me; I fell asleep in your voice. I slept. No – I found myself already to have slept there. How was it I never knew your voice was watching from the first? And was watching over you, too: we shared it; each of us pulled it over him like a shelter. You slept, like me, in the bower of your voice.

Keening

Voice of stone, voice of the earth: to sing is to lose the capacity to sing; to listen to lose the ability to hear.

My voice? Yours? Not even that. A keening raised to the sky, like the shepherdess’ cries in The Sacrifice, indiscernible at first from bird song. I tell myself that bird song is innocent, it does not suffer. Like water in water, immanent, it is unbroken joy. Generation succeeds generation in the fields, in the forests – but what happens when a voice is torn from the natural immediacy? A new voice keens, but a voice destined to suffer – a voice fitted to grief, ready for it.

But whose grief? Whose malaise? It is not that it is impossible to sing joyfully, but that joy always bears grief at its back. It suffers itself, the song, in the singer. Suffers and is thereby detached from everything but itself. Detached – but for all that, it does not come to itself.

Suffering lost in itself, the song lost in the song: keening sounds over the plain.

You Are Free

Faith: she would like to sing with no particular voice, the voice of everyone, the voice of no one. Would like to sing, not for everyone, but in place of everyone. To sing, and to sing of grief and what is lost, not to assuage it, but to accompany it. Not to wipe tears away but to weep with them. To weep for their weeping, for the fact of their tears: how is it she divides loss from itself? How is it she lets pain suffer itself in her singing?

Give grief to itself. Lift suffering from any particular sufferer. Let it become the destiny of no one, let it lift itself to the sky like the aurora borealis. Pain is absolute. Suffering is in the ice and in sky.

You Are Free: but from what does she free us? She abandons pain to itself; she gives grief to grief. Freedom: lift pain to become the whole sky. Lift it, let it flash to itself above the sufferer.

Reverb

Abandon singing to itself, let it sing. Abandon the voice to itself. Why is it only in the act of abandonment that singing is given? Why only then, after abandonment, does it sing and sing of itself?

‘Itself’: in what corridors is it lost? In what dream? Because it seems to dream of itself. Seems to be lost in itself, with a reverb, now, that is internal to voice – it is not a treatment, but belongs to it already, as though it were always far away, even from he who has been given it. Far away: and with what does it echo? Where has it travelled, this voice that is as old as time?

Reverb before reverb, abandonment: Jason Molina’s voice. How can he entrust his voice to itself? How to give it to itself so that it can give singing in turn?

The Sirens’ Song

1. Beasts fear them, and the gods shun them. Is this why the Sirens sing out to passing ships from their island? By their song, they would reach the others, like them, who are feared and shunned. Why then do they seek to kill them – why do they try to wreck their ships on the rocky shore of their island?

I think Odysseus learned their secret, he who refused, like the others, to plug his ears with wax. Lashed to the mast of his ship, he endured what his sailors could not, and heard the Sirens sing of the pain of their immortality, and knew why they cried out to the only ones, like them, who were exiled from both nature and Olympus.

For the Sirens, death was a homecoming, the return to what could not live. How to discover the path home? In their loneliness, their exile, they sought to destroy the ones whose pain could come to term.

Agony. Odysseus cried out, and joined his cry to theirs. They fell silent. What had they heard: that the ones who could die also endured the inability to die, that this mortal, was, like them, immortal. For doesn’t pain bear with it the impossibility of pain’s cessation? Isn’t the agony of dying what does not cease to die?

2. His cry is also their song, and their song what cries out in all human pain.

3. There is pain, there is singing: how to speak of a pain that will not end, and a singing that does not cease?

It is not by our relation to death that we retrieve our humanity, but by our relation to pain. Relation? The shattering of relation. Death turned outside itself and wandering without cease. What is song but the Sirens’ song, that seeks a term for the indeterminable, to exchange immortality for death?

Pain

Orpheus hardly hears himself singing; he sings and that is all. The forest falls silent when he sings; the gods pause, the beasts listen. And of what does he sing? Of gods, I imagine, of beasts, of the forest in which he wanders. Strange doubling – a song of the forest in the forest. Song that passes through words. Isn’t that what makes the gods pause, and the beasts? Here is a human being – here, and perhaps for the first time, is music.

Music that must pass through words, music that is never yet itself, that is given only as it lets language tremble. Orpheus is the first singer, the first musician. But of what does he bring to song, even as he sings of gods, of beasts? What is it that doubles itself by his song?

For Nietzsche, notes Schmidt, music has a precedence over language; only the language of tragedy approximates the song that surges before speech. In music, ‘pain is pronounced holy’; music is the ‘language of the will in its immediacy’. And in the preface he appends to The Birth of Tragedy many years after its publication, doesn’t he regret that his book did not sing?

How to make Dionysian art intelligible? ‘Through the wonderful significance of music dissonance‘. Dissonance, pain: is music, for Nietzsche, the language of the birds and beasts? Is it a language of the gods? Perhaps it is only to tragedy that it answers, in a dissonance that returns to tear harmony apart.

Orpheus sings. There is pain in the forests; birds die, beasts die, but do they sing of their pain? And the gods – what do they know of shattered harmony? Orpheus sings of gods and beasts, but he sings as one who is neither, who knows for the first time, the pain of existence. But a pain, now, of the tearing apart of natural harmony.

The beasts stir, the gods at the edge of heaven listen with awe: who is this new being whose existence is pain? From whence comes the song that tears apart all joy?

The Head of Orpheus

Orpheus, after Eurydice was sent back to Hades a second time, lost himself in loss. He went back to the forests with his harp, singing as he wept, weeping as he sang. But why then did the Naiads who should have pitied him tear him apart? Why did he not move them to tears of their own, he who had lost his beloved twice over?

But who can bear the limitlessness of suffering? Who but wants to put an end to grief? They fell upon him and tear him apart, throwing his remains into the river. It is said that his head continued to sing as it disappeared into the waves, and that it sings yet.

Each singer is Orpheus, each the one the Maenads tear apart. To sing, to suffer: equivalents, one and the same. That is the tautology of song. But singing breaks itself from singing; it searches for its term. Singing is not always the infinite; the ‘to sing’ delimits itself in the ‘I sing’. But why is it I imagine that Orpheus’s head sings regardless, and that the limit always quivers with the limitless?

Singing

1. Alone, but not to be alone. Alone, separate, like a god or a beast, but only to welcome the becoming-god, the becoming-beast. To become other, and not like yourself. Then solitude is not solipsism. Solitude is the waiting to alter. Waiting, forgetting: who will I become? What names will pass across me? What are the words with which I might sing?

Some singers know this waiting, this solitude, and write of it in their lyrics. Some seek to stage the solitude of singing as it is not possessed. Unpossessed, dispossessing, how to mark in words what voids words? How to sing in solitude of what destroys solitude?

Sing of departure. Sing of the exit across land and sea. Let the words take leave. This is what Will Oldham sings on Days in the Wake. The name of the album came late to him. It was issued as The Palace Brothers, and with a blurry photo on the cover. But then Will Oldham understood: it was by this album that he had announced his leavetaking.

He was going. He had gone. No: there was going as there was singing. Sometimes, on these songs which Will Oldham sang in his kitchen and recorded onto tape, you can hear the thunder rolling outside. But in truth, the thunder is in the music also: a thundering silence that says nothing, means nothing, and simply rolls in itself.

Listen with your other ears and you too might become a beast, or a god. The solitude of singing unlocks your listener’s solitude. Listen – be alone, and not with yourself. Become beast, become god. Depart, across the land and sea.

2. It is not that the song waits to be sung. Singing is nowhere than in his singing, the singer. And as it reaches you, as it comes to you. Become god, become beast: how is it that it never stops arriving, that singing is never completed? And how is it that it never seems to begin, but was always there, set back in the song and the singer, and set back in you as listener, as though the song had only rejoined itself as there was singing and there was listening?

A relation accomplished as it undoes its terms. Not the singer, nor the listener, but both undone by way of singing, of listening. The singer is nothing but singing, the listener listening, and isn’t it the case that a kind of substitution occurs. The singer sings for everyone, like Kafka’s Josephine. Sings and substitutes for the each member of an eternal people. Each, pausing in their work, becomes the singer who sings in the song, and by means of substitution. Each, substituted by singing, pauses in that substitution.

And what of the singer? Josephine becomes vainglorious; she wants fame, to be exalted. Why doesn’t she understand that she can sing only because she is exactly like the others, and that she is only a listener, and to the singing she is allowed to sing? A listener, because the song is never hers, because it always surprises her, as it comes without allowing her to stand at its origin.

Substitution, then – the one becomes the other. Or, each time, listener become singer and singer listener – a crossover, a becoming-other in each case.

3. What elects the singer? How has he been separated from the others? Because he waits, because he is prepared to wait. He is no different from anyone. Perhaps he is more similar to anyone than anyone. Shakespeare was unlike everyone because he was like everyone (Borges). More similar, closer to no-one at all, that is to say, to anyone, to everyone, the indifferent man of the streets. But he waits. He endures on the streets, walking among others. He is everyone, as he passes between everyone. And he waits, forgetting everything but everything.

What elects the listener? Who comes forward in him to listen? Who takes his place? He waits for one who has likewise waited. Has waited all his life to hear – this song. His song. But why this song? Why does it become a destiny? Why does it set back waiting in himself, waiting become the listener for which he always waited. I have heard it at last, this is the song of songs – but why this song, and why his election?

Three Singers

1. Nonchalance of the song: it is only when it does not matter that it comes to matter. Only when it is Josephine’s song, the piping of one mouse among others that it attains itself. I could have sung that. Anyone could have sung it. No: anyone sings it in her place, the singer’s. It is anyone singing. Anyone – no one: ignored song, song without importance, that as though sings to itself.

Josephine, for her part, wants special treatment, to be relieved from her tasks. She confuses herself with the source of the song. And indeed, as Kafka’s narrator tells us, Josephine will soon be forgotten in the life of the mousefolk. She is no one at all; she is everyone; her piping is not distinct from that of anyone else.

Obscurity: the singer sings to herself. And not even that. The singer sings – not even that. There is singing, and the surprise that there is singing, and that is all. No singer beneath singer. And no song. Singing, and out over 70,000 fathoms. Out without support, like Kierkegaard’s faithful. On its own, unaccompanied: singing.

2. Bill Callahan in a darkened room writing songs and practicing guitar, and everywhere silence. Bill Callahan alone, but only to be alone with the solitude of a voice that is not his. 

Solitude of the voice. The man content to live alone, says Aristotle, must be a god or a beast. Then the voice is that of a god, a beast. Ventriloquise it, wait that it comes to you to be spoken. A god, a beast – but one without a voice, that needs and borrows yours. And this is why the voice, for all its nonchalance calls on you, Bill Callahan, to live itself. To coincide with itself. It needs you, which is why you wait all day in the darkness.

How to live the fate of such a voice? For what does it ask you? That you become all voice, that the voice is only you. Occupied, who is it that sings in your place? It is not that Bill Callahan wants solitude, not all the time. He needs it. Needs it to welcome the solitude of singing. To let singing attain its solitude, to limit itself by taking his voice, to unlimit it by dispersing it.

All day, waiting in a darkened room. It’s autumn now. Summer passed in darkness. In a couple of weeks, he’s out on the road again. And until then? Bill Callahan waits. Waits until waiting flattens itself out and lies stretched beneath the sky. When will it come? When will its solitude unravel his?

3. Singer, you might tell yourself you are doing God’s work; that it’s God who sings, who lifts your voice. Faith is your refuge – but but what shelter can it offer when the voice is also the dissolution of God, when faith fails in its leap, when it is only falling? No one sings, not God. Faith – but in nothing, and held by no one.

Fear of your own voice, fear of singing: to what fate have you been elected? How to live the song?