70,000 Fathoms

Sometimes I imagine the performer to stand in the same relationship to the song as the listener, that they were joined in amazement that there is a song at all, that there can be singing. In one way, this is ridiculous: the singer was capable of singing; it lay in his powers; his prowess is witness to years of practice, his song to his patient songwriting: and isn’t this why we go to hear him play?

But there is also a way in which the performance sets itself back from that prowess, that to sing is also to enter a state of grace. The singer leans back into the song; the song bears him, this is the surprise. As though it were necessary to be weak to perform. As though one had to fall into the arms of the song, to receive what one cannot achieve by oneself.

Further still: who sings? Is it me – is it the ‘I’, or does the first person, singing, dissolve into the third, does ‘I sing’ become ‘he sings’, and the ‘he’ become the impersonal ‘it’, the dummy subject of phrases like ‘it is raining’. It is raining: but what rains? There is raining, there is singing: it is the infinitive that comes forward when the singer falls into the arms of the song. The infinitive that unlimits itself for there to be song. That gives itself so that there might be the singing of a song.

I also tell myself this can be heard only very early in a singer’s career, or very late. Early, like the first albums by the Palace Brothers, or late, as I thought I heard it listening to Nina Simone’s final albums and Sinatra’s Watertown with friends the other night. Late style: the song worn away. Late: Simone’s voice is gentle, it begins resignedly: to sing again? Must I sing again?

Frail strength – strength held out into frailty: how can we not compare this last of voices to her earlier stridency, to the strength of a voice that lifts itself from the records cut for RCA or for Colpix? But now, I think to myself – vaguely, impressionistically – the voice is as though frayed, not because it lacks any technical means (notes are held, sustained …), but because it has given up a kind of confidence.

Perhaps this is also because she covers songs from Sinatra’s A Man Alone, and even adopts something of his style. Sinatra’s is almost always a performance, and those performances are marvellous, but hearing his strained voice on Watertown – or is it that his straining lets itself be heard there – the persona he adopts there is frayed.

Who is he supposed to be? A man whose wife has left him to go to New York. A man alone in the sticks, in Watertown, with two sons to bring up: a song cycle written especially for Sinatra. But the voice is frayed; it is not what it was, even on Cycles, a couple of years earlier, or September of My Years. Sensing this, Sinatra was reluctant to promote the album.

But isn’t the miracle that he could sing at all? That he could sing, or that there was singing, and he could fall back into the arms of the song, that it carried him, as it had done many times before. But with the elasticity of his voice failing him, that support was needed now more than before. Sinatra knew what he needed.

Frailty: he was ‘not in good voice’. Or better: his voice, strained, was not his own. Didn’t he heard what he could not sing in his own singing? Isn’t that what he knew, that the name Sinatra was stretched across the void? The same, I think, for late Simone. Who was she now? Who sang? The first person sank back into the third: the song as though sang by no one. By the no one in her, occupying her, taking her place. Who sang? Who sings?

Perhaps, I think to myself, it is only in frailty that singing reveals its condition. Late style – or early. In late song, singing knows its frailty, mourns it or is resigned to it. There is much of which I am not capable; much that I cannot do. Simone’s strength was everpresent, even in the tenderest of songs in the 60s and early 70s. And now? Sinatra’s voice loses itself from the late 60s onward.

But in early style? The surprise of being able to sing at all. To find oneself singing: thus the earliest albums recorded under the name Palace Brothers, or Palace Music by Will Oldham and others. That I can sing: this is marvellous. That there is singing: this is the impersonal strength that bears the wavering of the voice.

Ungenerous comparison: Joanna Newsom is so much the product of a creative writing school and the Conservatory. She rests in her proficiency. Early Will Oldham comes from nowhere in particular; he sings with his brothers and his friends, with only informal training. But there is singing, and that’s the surprise. There is singing – no proficiency, but risk.

Each time as for the first time: the strained voice, a voice sincere not because its bearer can be trusted, or because he sings from his heart. The voice out over 70,000 fathoms; the ‘I cannot’ in the ‘can’, where it is the song that sings itself, where it it finds itself only in falling back and being sung from that falling. Impersonal sincerity, sincerity that is those 70,000 fathoms aquiver in the song.

My strength is failing me; I have not achieved my strength: in each case, strength is at stake, and weakness sings, weakness is the unlimiting of the song.

A God, A Beast

Do you need blogging or does blogging need you? For the former, a kind of narcissism – dreaded word, a ‘self-analysis’ carried out in public. For the latter – the opposite of narcissism, for it would be blogging that loses itself in the mirror of the blog, and these words the nymphs that seduces it to tumble.

But then what is blogging that it would need to look at itself? A god, a beast (remember Aristotle’s expression: the man who would live alone is a god, or a beast)? Neither. It is what sets itself back as soon as a certain practice of writing begins. Phrase in italics. Not the blogger as agent, as controller of what is said. As also the one who relinquishes agency in agency, control in control.

And isn’t this the oldest definition of inspiration: breath, received from outside? Divine exhalation? Breathed into the nostrils of the creator, who always creates with, and not alone. Whence figures of inspiration: muses, gods, goddesses, intermediary beings like angels or daemons – a whole bestiary, a whole angelology, a pantheon.

Breathed – or whispered, or sang – or written. Written with, so that writing is active and passive, both at once. What perfomer does not know this? What writer? And that, further, it can never be a question of self-expression.

Easier to see with fiction. The line is crossed. Easier to see with singing. The performance begins. But understand performance everywhere, a priori, from the first. Not your performance, understand. Or that outperforms what you perform, that lets you become actor or dummy. And isn’t there a writing that writes with you as you write? Writes with you, but sets itself back from you; it is not in your power.

It is the angel who writes. It is your forebears. It is your race that sings inside me; your people: all this a figuration of what sets itself into a past that cannot be lived and sets itself into a future, which is why a people is always to come, even as its prototype existed in the murky past.

It is why God is waiting for what you write even as he launched you on the path of writing. And isn’t the devil waiting, too? A host of angels and a crowd of Muses? To see what you write? In a sense. To see what is written by you, and by way of you.

There is writing, there is blogging – but what does that mean? In the past you did not live and the future that is ever to come. Time displaced, time out of phase: write from what does not meet itself in your present. Write from the present disjoined. No narcissism where what is written will not return. No fort-da where what is lost will not come back to you.

Trailing behind you, flowing ahead of you: there is writing, blogging. Writing, blogging sets itself back – and dashes forward. And in the space opened by this movement? In the blank box in which there is to be writing? Make a mirror for blogging, for the god, the beast. Mirror the solitude that lives by way of your writing. Who lives as relation – the relation to you, writer, blogger. As relation – and never rests in itself, is never identical with itself.

Tonight, leave out a dish of water for the god to see himself. Tonight, a bowl of water for the beast. And what will you see in that mirrored darkness? Only darkness. Nothing to be shown. And above all, not you – not you face. Who are you, looking, through whom looks the solitude of a god, a beast? Whose eyes are yours that let a devil’s eyes open at their centre?

To write is to die, always. To be sacrificed – to live, now, only as figure, as silhouette. You are not preserved. No fame – nothing lasts. No one will speak of you. Or you are the object of rumour, of a gossip that dispenses with its object, passing the word along. Torn apart, now like Orpheus, it is not your song that sings from your disembodied head. Drowned like Narcissus, but it is not you who drowns.

A certain practice of writing. A way of blogging, an ascesis. To be without yourself. To let trail the past you will not live, and the future that never arrives. The present disjoined; the self lived apart from itself. Lived – died. How is it the words come to mean the same? A life, a writing. Indefinite article. There is blogging – but with an ‘is’ that crosses itself out, and what word here is not under erasure?

Hope: what speaks across these words, what lives, dies, instead of me, is like the wind that stirs the heads of wheat. That passes like a rumour, like gossip, that bears no weight and does not matter. Darkness in the dark water of the pool; the night drowns itself, the night lives. Life is joined to death, and death to life. Who is there, in the mirror? It is not your face. Who lives in your place? Who dies there?

Blogging sees itself. Who writes? No one who could say my blog. No one who could sign their name to what is written. Or rather, who turns what is mine from itself – who lets the signature tremble. Do you need blogging, writing? Or is it that blogging asks that you become figure?

Privacy

Moved by this post at The Church of Me. He will turn to a private writing now, Marcello writes, or at least one not as public as a weblog. What is the sense of that obscure happiness I feel as I turn over the thought of two decades of a private writing before, and now the decades of a private writing that will begin five years after? A writing for —–. And who were we, who read these five years in the meantime? Who were we, readers of a writing that is now turning away from us to another source of light?

Comets

New posts at Red Thread(s) arrive by way of the long silences that lie between them. By way of them, trailing silence behind them like a comet’s tail, I know they have travelled an enormous distance.

How can ineloquence let itself be said? Bear the fragmentary at the heart of writing, not merely as its form. Fragmentary demand: eloquence torn apart from inside, writing voided of its heart. Or writing turns around the void at its centre, turns, and by the opposite of a centripedal force. But how to hold together what spins itself apart?

Thickening

Drink on the old sofa. Drink the cans until you have no more. And let it die away in you, that drunkenness. And let it come back, the same numbed boredom, empty cans and sweet, stale beer spilled on the carpet.

What time is it? Eleven o’clock. What time, morning or night? Curtains closed against the day. Why is that brightness unbearable? Why is half-light the way to endure the turning of days?

The same, I live in the same. Without memory, it would be bearable. And with memory, that deepens the events of each day, that sinks them still further into themselves?

Sweet, stale beer. The sofa; afternoon TV. Curtains closed. Cat litter on the carpet. Stale gingerbread men from the discount Greggs.

Deep time, doubled time, days thickening as they are lived in series. My bare feet on the nylon carpet. The curtain beginning to fall from the rail: it’s happened before; it will happen again.

Time deepened, instants thickened: this has happened before; this will happen again. Distant pain. But who bore it? Who endured that pain? In truth, I was too tired to bear it. How to coincide with what was not my own? But then, in that house, in the half-light, what was my own?

Time thickened, instants turned outside themselves. Thickened – until each moment was lived in series. I will live it again. It will happen again – but to whom? To me?

Spilt beer, cat litter. The beer spilled. My bare feet on cat litter. Instants, now, that would not pass. They will come again; they will happen again. But for whom?

You were coming, weren’t you? You were arriving, weren’t you, coming as time thickened, avid for the thickening of time. You were coming, blurred one. You saw me.

(And I saw you in the film last night. A Scanner, Darkly. You were wearing a scramble suit. Scrambled, every person at once and no one at all, you were watching me.)

I saw you, watcher. I saw you watching me in me. I saw you, sufferer. I knew what you underwent for me. In the half-light, curtains closed, you were coming. Called by stale beer and cat litter, you were coming.

Scanner, thickening, I knew you by way of what would not leave itself behind. By the instants that returned and were thickened in their returning. Opened now like flowers, into the streaming of time.

‘I am Ill’

In the summer, she lies sprawled, legs stretched out in the patch of light. In the winter, tucked up like a hen. Totem, watcher, I brush your hair from my notebook. 

I wrote, I am ill. The cure: the strength to write, I am ill. And those words on the page, surviving me and surviving my illness. Survival: they have left me behind. But then: I wrote them, I formed them. The words, I am ill.

Cured in the space of the page. Cured as one page filled, and then another, cat hairs brushed away. But no page as perfect as the first. No sentence as perfect as those first words: I am ill.

Notebook With Cat Hairs

For a long time, I was sick. How will you say it? For a long time, sick, sick and unemployed – how to say it? For a long time, sick, I was unable to speak. For a long time, unemployed, speech abandoned me. Months passed, and then a year; then another year, but time could not be marked.

Fallen, lying on the stairwell, afternoon sun through the window. Shafts of light, dust motes, and you with the cat who lay herself in the light. With her, seeing that her black coat was full of grey hairs and brown ones.

A notebook open. Notebook with cat hairs. What did you write? Nothing of consequence. Nothing significant. It was enough to write. Enough that writing was possible. Speech, of a kind. Directed to whom? I reread nothing. I wrote without rereading. No certainties. This voice was not mine. It was a voice, and that was enough. A voice, not mine, to which writing abandoned me just as I was abandoned to time.

Writing, enunciated by no one, possessed by no one, just as when I spoke, I only quoted others who spoke, and I tried to live only as I thought others might live. A voice, a life, the one abandoned to the other. One abandoning itself to the other. But it helped. It drew me back to life.

Helped – words were not indifferent to me. Was that it? But I want to say, too, that it was their indifference, the way they stood up, apart from me, the way they might speak to anyone that helped me.

A notebook without significance, closed, unread. And yet it spoke in everyone’s language; words remained, even as I seemed not to remain. Even as I lived like a series of people, and not a person.

Reborn without coming to myself, reborn, but differently each time. Out of phase, always that. A series, not a man: always that.

And the notebook? Words without worth. Unread words. And yet – a single notebook. A single sheaf of pages. And word patiently after another. One word – another, abandoning itself in my notebook. Pages that lived for me. Pages in which the days consented to be marked.

Worthless words, long forgotten. I never reread them. But to write. To be dispersed by the infinitive, to write. Dispersed, but in a way, now, that affirmed my fall, the dispersal of time. The stairwell, the cat in a patch of winter light. I wrote; sentence bound itself to sentence. Wrote, and by that binding, time caught up with itself.

The Cure

I would like to speak, tell that to your counsellor. I would like to say a single word.

Unemployed and sick. Sick and unemployed, you were sent to a counsellor. I would like to speak, and in my own voice: did you tell her that?

I’ve been abandoned. I’ve abandoned myself: did you tell her that?

But who has abandoned you? Not ‘I’ – not you. Then how to speak, even, of your abandonment?

To be abandoned to speech – but how is that possible? To speak, to exert your pressure on the words you would say: how can you accomplish that?

Unemployed, sick, you might begin to keep a journal. But what is there to record? What is there to say? Days pass; weeks, and without event. Weeks pass – but what does the week mean to you, unemployed one?

Arbitary markers of time. Markers of what does not pass. How to write of that non-passing? How to record it, what fails to complete itself as time?

Wasn’t that your cure? Wasn’t that how you reclaimed speech for yourself? To write, but not to complete writing. To write as you spoke, fragmentarily, and without owning words.

Abandoned speech. An open notebook lost in the carpark. Let the sun read as it crispens the pages. Let the rain read as it blurs the ink.

Cited Life

Months and then years, falling into unemployment. How far would we fall? Always further, as the welfare state drew itself to a close and the city regenerated around us. And we the dregs, the last ones, sick from unemployment, unemployed because we were sick, and switching from sick benefit to unemployment benefit and back again: how did we manage to outlive our use?

No solidarity: that, too, was falling away. Some of us were captured by the counsellors. Some of us decided to ‘work on themselves’. But this was to confuse one kind of sickness with another. Didn’t they understand, those who sat silently and asked us to talk, that we were sick from time, from the withering of time?

Speak: but what were we to say? The word ‘I’ did not belong to us. And the word ‘us’ designated in vain the solidarity of which we were incapable.

‘Work on yourself’: when did counselling culture arrive among us? Who asked for it? True, in the cafes and the scrappy countryside along the river, there were some who had dropped out of work because they were in search of something else. But didn’t they understand that to drop out could only break them from the forward movement of time? To drop out, to get sick, was to become sicker still, to fall back into the stagnancy that separated each moment from itself.

Work on yourself. And when you’ve detached yourself from time? Work on yourself. With what borrowed energy will you bring time to yourself. Work on yourself, and be unworked. Errant one, satellite passed beyond the solar system, you will not be able to signal back to the other world.

What, now, was to happen? How was anything to get done, when it was an effort simply to change the channels on the television? Stagnant time, time lost from its streaming: in what ox-bow lake were we stranded? Who marooned us in a time without minutes?

Say the words, I am sick. Say them, try to let them reach you. Say the words, and let the ‘I’ you speak awaken the ‘I’ who speaks. Awaken him, the speaker, the agent, who can coincide with what he says. But you are already lost. Fallen, in advance, from the words you might once have been able to say. How can you speak but in mimicry of the others? How can you but repeat the speech of those who have not yet fallen?

What would you like to say? What words would you like to bring to speech? – The word ‘I’. ‘I’: that would be enough. To say the word, ‘I’ – but that is impossible. ‘I’ – you say it without being able to say it. Quoted word: ‘I’. Cited from the lives of others. Once, it was possible for you to say the word ‘I’. And now?

‘I …’: word that speaks nothing. Cited word, monument that stands alone in the desert. ‘I …’ mouthed without completing that word. Scarcely a word, but a breath. Scarcely language but the word of concrete, the word of white skies. I would like to say the word ‘I’: say that to your counsellor. I would like the word ‘I’ to reach me: say that.

Quoted life, life in quotation marks. We were your doubles, you who drove home from work in the evenings, you who stepped from the bus in your suits. We quoted you; all our effort was to hold ourselves between quotation marks. That was our effort: to simulate life. To draw ourselves together so we could imitate the way you could attach the word ‘I’ to a statement.

To own speech – but was it possible? To speak for ourselves? We quoted our counsellors back to themselves. We spoke in their language, or in the language of those who were active and able. But in truth, we had fallen beneath speech as we had fallen beneath time.

How could we distinguish foreground and background, the important from the unimportant? Nothing emerged to be said. Nothing, with no urgency, needed to be spoken. If we spoke among ourselves, it was with a fragmentary speech. If we spoke, it was only by failing speech, by words that could not reach themselves.

We did not stutter, or stammer. But with us, language stammered; we spoke and were joined by another speaking. The words undid themselves in our mouths. Fragmentary speech: how could our sentences reach their ends? How could our statements join themselves to the word ‘I’. ‘I think …’, but we thought nothing. ‘I would like …’, but we wanted for nothing.

Queuing in the discount Greggs for a packet of gingerbread men. Queuing in the discount supermarket for a fourpack of sweet beer. Carry home your shopping in a plastic bag: that was already enough. Something to eat, something to drink, and draw the curtains against the day. Eat, drink, and the half-darkness, the afternoon on the old sofa in front of the TV.

A Breath

My name – you always liked to say it. To breathe it, because it is easy to breathe. One syllable.

‘Always liked’: what tense is that? Completed action in the past. That past completed, and broken from the present. That whole past drifting into the archive, to return in dreams, passing across the threshold of the morning and the threshold of the evening. Unguarded hours, when the past is stronger than the present.

But now that past is completed, rounded off. It will not change; it is all there. At the threshold, returning: the promise of my name, the past broken from my present.

Rules

She sorts us according to type, to series. Seeing my brother-in-law, she thinks: he is one of those who will play with me. Seeing me, she thinks: and there is another. For her, one person is always nearly another; she understands the rules vary, and that she must open her mouth for a pill when my mum holds her jaws (‘swallow’!), just as she is always allowed to play-gnaw my hand when I put it out to her.

And when the one died who tilted the mirror so that she, paws skidding on the linoleum floor in her eagerness, could chase light around the kitchen? A cat’s optimism: another will come to tilt the mirror. She waits. Don’t I know the rules?

Jazz

Narrate; remember what happened, and what did not happen. Bringing home from school a story that my parents saw. ‘It’s supposed to have a beginning, middle and end’, said my dad. The end was lacking – and the beginning. An old man reminisced, that was my non-story. Reminisced – and reawoke what happened, and also what did not.

These difficult days, I have wanted another past. I buy CDs, and cover the counter in my living room with Blue Note reissues. Reading the history of jazz, and the autobiographies of performers. I want another history. I enfold myself in their past, and in the world of their past.

And so the days have a forward momentum. To the office, where the CDs I bought online await me. To the books that list and rate recordings. Reassurance: the past classified, the past weighed. And the other past, my own? Know that it is the past, forget it. Forget what could have been your future.

‘I Think Therefore I am Not’

The Wake

Set the controls for the heart of Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure (new version). A few rough and laborious notes to accompany a reading of the penultimate chapter of his novel. These follow on from a previous post.

Thomas finds Anne perfect in death, her eyes closed, her mouth unsmiling. No trace of life; she does not appear to sleep. She only resembles the one she was; death has unleashed a strange mimetic power. In one sense, the corpse is not Anne; it does not resemble the one she was in life. But in another, it has allowed Anne to resemble something that is not-Anne; it is as though death becomes real through her, and as it does so, her body seems to become larger, occupying more space in the room. The corpse absorbs the gaze of everyone around it.

Soon Thomas is left alone with the body. Night has come; he is surrounded by stars.

The totality of things wrapped about me and I prepared myself for the agony with the exalted consciousness that I was unable to die.

Where death is, you are not. And where you are, death cannot be. To Thomas it has been revealed that he cannot die; he seems to have partaken of Anne’s nothingness to have been touched by her corpse such that he himself dies. A death, of course, that has been enacted many times in the earlier chapters of the novel.

But, at that instant, what she alone had perceived up until then appeared manifest to everyone: I revealed to them, in me, the strangeness of their condition and the shame of an endless existence.

Who is this ‘everyone’? Thomas, after all, is alone. To whom can he reveal anything? He seems to imagine a whole crowd around him. Thomas is imaging the others for whom his strange immortality is manifest.

Of course I could die, but death shone perfidiously for me as the death of death, so that, becoming the eternal man taking the place of the moribund, this man without crime, without any reason for dying who is every man who dies, I would die, a dead person so alien to death that I would spend my supreme moment in a time when it was already impossible to die and yet I would live all the hours of my life in the hour in which I could no longer live them.

The death of death, but not its cancellation; the unlimiting of the limit; death become dying, an interminable dying. Thomas takes the place of the always guiltless dying – who die through no fault of their own, and must endure the impossibility of ever bringing death to an end. This experience will henceforward bear his life, even if he cannot be said to undergo it in the first person.

Thomas is dead – but that ‘is’ indicates a self-relation that has slipped out of phase with itself. A relation now, we learn at the threshold of the soliloquy, that Thomas stands in for each of us. Then Thomas is not only a character in a novel – he is not Mr Valdemar or the hunter Gracchus, but is each of us, all of us, substitute who undergoes what we cannot endure by ourselves.

What is Blanchot’s novel? A philosophical tract? A work of sung philosophy like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? Or a fiction in which philosophy, like Thomas, is made to struggle with its obscure double?

Continue reading “‘I Think Therefore I am Not’”

Yes

Write to experience the withdrawal of writing. Write – and it is the withdrawal of writing, that great writing in which anything is possible, writing as the fulfilment of life – that you would mark.

Read a biography, read of the travails of Kafka. In his darkest hours, when he’d written nothing for months and you know, as he does not, that he would write again, but not for months, still the knowledge that he has written something. Still The Judgement; still at least one blessed night that allowed him to follow that story across the hours.

And to have written nothing – or nothing of worth? Not to have had a sign, an intimation of that great writing that falls so bountifully on those writers whose biographies you like to read, and that lifts these lives out of oblivion?

I would like these hours at the desk, before the yard to be the husk of a great writing. Would like my life to be the dross of an anonymous book that would rise out of my life like a new island from the sea. There it is, sufficient to itself; absolute. There it is, the book that is the book, and I only part of its great unfolding, its relation to itself. I would be a limb of the book, that is all, and my life that space consecrated to its unfolding. A willing sacrifice – anything for the book; anything so that life could be lifted from the mediocrity of the day.

And how I would welcome my obscurity! How wonderful the clouding over of a life entirely redeemed by the composition of a book! How marvellous each obscure detail of the day, that is already aglow in the beneficient light of the book! Plato was wrong: it is not the immortality that is sought in the creation of the book, but the sweetness of obscurity. Not immortality – not the fame of a name that spreads from generation to generation, but the oblivion of a name, the St. Andrew’s Cross that is placed across it. Abolish me, book. Scrub out my name. Let every trace of me be obliterated as my whole life catches fire from the book.

Last night, unable to sleep, I broke open my emergency book, the book reserved for the plateau of insomnia. Last night, the last of my Bernhards broken open – last of the secret stash, over which there might as well have been a glass case and a warning saying: use only in case of emergency. I used it – I finished the book. In one sweep, all finished. In a few hours, and then the mediocre dawn, pale light, light rain: done. The last word: yes, and I could say yes to sleep; I fell asleep at last, and woke up too late.

What time was it? Too much of the day had gone. I thought: you’ll accomplish nothing today then. You’ll begin nothing, finish nothing off. Stranded, instead, mid-work. Stranded in the middle of that piece you would like to finish. Stranded in a mediocre writing, stranded before a writing in which you can sense, ceaselessly, the withdrawal of that great writing that would grant these voided hours some retrospective sense.

But there is no sense. A life wasted; mediocre life – life in lieu of what would lift it to life, and to writing. A life sacrificed to writing? That would be too grand. A life lived in the hope of writing? That would be a lie. Life lived in the hope of hope – perhaps that. Not even hope, that would be too much, but the hope for hope – for the chance, the possibility of writing. Hope for the hope that the great writing might be possible.

This morning, having taken the day off to write, I pass from one room to the other. One room – and then another, and there are not many rooms. A bedroom, a living room, a bathroom. From one to the other. The bedroom, where I have a laptop, to the living room, where I have a desktop, to the bathroom, rotten with damp. And there is the kitchen too, which is also rotten. The rotten kitchen, in which the electricity has failed.

A pipe leaking in the bathroom, and a leak in the kitchen, too. A rotten pipe in the bathroom, and a whole rotten wall in the kitchen, from which water seems to seep. Woodlice on the walls in the kitchen, dried there. Woodlice on the walls, slug trails on the worktop, and the mildewed ceiling sagging and cracking from damp. Everything, in short, is disgusting. The kitchen, which is barely a room, is especially disgusting. But then the bathroom vies for its abhorrence with the kitchen.

Last night, I broke open the last Bernhard. This is an emergency, I thought; reach for the Bernhard. Reach for the book you’ve been saving for emergencies. I open the Bernhard. The first sentence is the funniest, greatest first sentence I have ever read. The whole first sentence is a masterpiece, and the rest of the book is a masterpiece. How deft it is! How marvellously controlled! How marvellously it builds up to the climax: to the final word, ‘yes’!

It’s the equal of Concrete; it’s better than Old Masters. A different kind of book than Extinction or Correction, that’s true – and different still from Gathering Evidence, a book whose separate parts should be read in order of publication not the order they have been given in the edition in English. Different – smaller in compass, but great in its own way, perfectly rounded, a book that exists unto itself, absolute.

Happily there is Yes. Happily there was Yes, last night. A spectacularly funny book. A book it is impossible to read without a smile. A book that is marvellous funny from its first lines, which I have to stop myself from copying out here. A book that is not only great, but also funny – now that is a marvel. Funny and great – what a combination. And compelling – I didn’t mention that. It bears you along. It bore me happily along, from page to page. It exhibits narrative tension. One great sentence sweeps you into another, because of the great, sustaining narrative tension.

If I began to quote from it, I wouldn’t know where to stop. If I paused to copy out this or that line, I could not resist quoting another, and eventually the whole book. Perhaps that’s what I should have begun, last night when I couldn’t sleep. Perhaps I should have simply begun transcribing the whole book, line by line and page by page, until the final ‘yes’. Until the final, wonderfully placed, ‘yes’.

Terminal Moraine

A heavy dose of caffeine: I will awaken you, writer. Five hours of work yesterday, but today? An empty path widens and becomes the desert. You will not cross, it says. Nothing is possible today, it says.

I set myself the long task of copying out. The whole chapter – copy it out, and divide it into small paragraphs so you can learn how it progresses, of its internal logic, its coherence. Very well then.

Hours pass; I have written a great deal. Not my words, but plenty of them. In a feeble way, I feel myself borne onwards by the rhythm of those words, by their pressure. But they only push forward the dross of my day, my terminal moraine.

Let Us Sleep

A few notes on one of the chapters of Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure (new version).

Anne is found one day, stretched out on a bench in the garden, already lapsing towards unconsciousness. She is ill; she’s dying, which she at first experiences as a kind of sweetness. She sleeps; the night holds no terrors.

The silence flowed, and the solitude full of friendship, the night full of hope …

Illness seems to be a kind of rest, the sweetness of sleep; Anne will return to the world. In these early stages, illness seems beneficient; she feels its friendship. But then her real illness begins.

… around her, many things were changing, and a desolate climate surrounded her, as if gloomy spirits sought to draw her toward inhuman feelings. Slowly, by a pitiless protocol, they took from her the tenderness and friendship of the world.

Anne rests in a room barely reached by the sun. Her mother sits beside her in an armchair. Hours pass in silence. When Anne attempts to speak to her mother, asking if she had been swimming, her mother tells her to be quiet. Anne must not talk; she’ll tire herself.

Obviously, there were no confidences to be shared with a person about to die, no possible relationship between her and those who are enjoying themselves, those who are alive.

She has been removed from the world, and from those relations with others that pass by way of the world.

Yet, surrounded by hardness, watched by her friends who tested her with an air of innocence, saying, ‘We can’t come tomorrow, excuse us,’ and who then, after she had answered in true friendship, ‘That’s not important, don’t take any trouble’, thought, ‘How insensitive she is becoming; she no longer cares about anything'[….] Soon they would be saying, ‘She’s no longer herself, it would be better if she died’, and then: ‘What a deliverance for her if she died!’

Her composure is unwelcome; she realises she must show a face of suffering, and present her visitors with ‘closed eyes’ and ‘pinched lips’. Only in this way will she assume take on the role for her friends, for her mother, of a dying patient. To speak to those around her in friendship only makes her appear insensitive; if she is to retain their support, then it must not appear that she’s other than herself. She is dying; she must play the role of the dying all the way up to dying. Only in that way will death seem not simply a deliverance.

Then this means she still wants to live – or at least not to be thought to deserve death as a blessed relief. It seems she wants the solitude of her new isolation, her separation from the world, feeling her way into its absence, and responding to its demands.

Continue reading “Let Us Sleep”

The Slug’s Trail

I should be working, of course – when else to work than at this time of year, which rises like a plateau above the forests of business in which I am usually lost? Working – no doubt, but an infection, and then a weary tiredness – the same tiredness, its eternal return, means that work is impossible, and the day is only something to cross.

How to get through the day? How to link hour to hour? To work: no, that’s impossible. I can’t concentrate; can’t gather myself together; the hours do not offer themselves as that propitious pathway along which work can progress. One day, another – and something might be written.

What is written here, of course, never counts for me as work, but nor too as its opposite. A kind of supplement, that comes with work. With it, set in motion by it like a spinning top. Something incidental the wind of work touches and sets into motion. Only it is always a borrowed motion; it does not exist for itself. Like the moon, it is bright only because of the sun.

And when there is no sun? Then writing is lost in the thickets. No plateau; no space to breathe. And no chance of that intake of breath that would precede creation. Lost in the hours, as hour fails to bind itself to hour, as time sags and breaks from itself like an ox-bow lake that separates itself from a meandering river.

Stagnancy, forest swamps – what is possible without work, without the superhighway that leads out to the heights? How to join hour to hour? Computer games, yes, that is true; and even the games on my new mobile phone: old games, games a decade old: Sonic the Hedgehog, Doom, the former too difficult; the Marble Zone (Act 3) being unconquerable. 

Books, of course – simple books, biographies. I can read them, biographies; can live another’s life by proxy. But nothing rises our of the swamp of hours. Sometimes I clear up the flat; sometimes I make phonecalls to the installation team who are supposed to be transforming the kitchen and the bathroom. Damp proof specialists visit; this is welcome.

Something has been done; once again, time has offered itself to work. But then the long hours without work, the old tiredness, the same tiredness. For a time, I took Day Nurse, half-knowing that caffeine was one of its ingredients – oh that caffeine lift! But a lift is followed by a fall, and I have to relearn the old lesson: no overdosing on caffeine. No more than one coffee and a half cup of green tea; and nothing after noon.

The old lesson – how much what has happened to me could be narrated as a neuropharmalogical case study: the effects of caffeine. An espresso and a Red Bull on the way home from work! And then up all night, and the next day – Saturday! – destroyed. I like to bore my friends with these stories. It is the kind of thing I think about: caffeine, and the effects of caffeine, and I think I could happily break off my current life to proselytise for the reduction of caffeine.

Even as I type, of course, the caffeine from my morning cup of coffee has long crossed the blood-brain barrier, and this is why I can type – why my day always unfolds like Flowers For Algernon: first morning dullness, then the morning caffeine boost, then the long and slow decline.

How much more intelligent you used to seem, said W. But that was a result of a different regime of caffeine; it was a neuropharmalogical condition, and now I’m brave enough not to overdose myself, but to wander in that vague fog which seems to be a family inheritance: the fog is genetic fog, it has reached me from generations of fogbound ancestors, for whom, likewise, the day includes tracts it is difficult to cross.

What should I be doing? I know; it is the purpose for which my new laptop in the other room is meant to serve. Work, the Great Work, the lofty striding from peak to peak, the blessed path in the air. Sometimes I wake at night with burning sentences in my head. I should write, I know that, but then – get a good night’s sleep, I tell myself, else more tiredness. Go to sleep; fall further into sleep in sleep, and then write in the morning.

But I can never lie in. I never rise late. Up by eight, always. Up and working by eight, that is usual, and often seven, and sometimes six. Up at six – but awake for a whole hour before! Up early and more wretchedly tired as my mornings grow longer. So they begin as the summer light calls me through the curtains, and I am up, tired at the computer, tired again before the yard, curtains opened: the mediocre yard.

Up, and for what? Another botched day. Another day in the swamps, leading nowhere. I dreamt of this time, all year I waited to gain the plateau – and now? But I have at least written this, and left my trace, my slug’s trail across these forty minutes. This – substitute for work, the work of anti-work, that can at least say, I was here, I was ready at the head of the day.

And isn’t that true of the whole of my life? Haven’t I always been ready, pencils sharpened, notebook open, for the Great Work that has never actually begun? Haven’t I made time, always time, for the Great Work to withhold itself and grant me only the miserable consolation of writing of what I cannot do?

But then I know I owe what I am – what little I am – to this withholding. I throw a shadow ahead of myself, I make dark that patch of time in which the Work could begin. Ah, it is possible, the Work, but not for me. Yes, it is possible – it must come – but never to me.

The Last Pagan

A writer develops a ‘metaphysic’, a system of recognisable motifs, of themes, of relations. A development insinuated in creative work, that permeates what is written, and in a manner at first unnoticeable. The writer does not ask, who have I become? but accepts the changes that cross his writing like light across ice; this is the bounty of writing, it is how writing, like our handwriting, is complexified with age, with experience.

Old rhythms set themselves in motion as they are touched by new ones, and the whole is changed each time, with each book. The whole is changed: motifs, themes, relations retaken freshly: this is the life of an oeuvre, of the climate of a writing. A climate that deepens, becomes richer and greater – that has travelled a greater internal distance, that rises into itself like a stormcloud, and generating internal potencies that must discharge themselves in lightning.

Sometimes it can seem to break away from easy readibility, so that a newcomer may remain disorientated and unseduced: style encountered as mannerism, as pretension. But that style was earned – it sought itself; it came to itself through an immense distance; it enfolds such greatness, such vastness that whatever its disappointments – the bloatedness of No Man’s Bay, the whimsy of One Night  – these are still complexly folded works of middle age, of the middle of life.

What must it have been to have written every day? Every day – and with Handke to have known, each day, the measure of time, its gift – the steady brightness beneath which he formed his books. Across already exhibits a ‘late style’, I’ve decided this morning. Repetition still looks like a novel, but Across? A plot without tension, without resolution. This book occupies a plateau, a great threshold. At every moment, open. What must it have been to have risen each morning to keep that opening open, and to have been kept by that opening as between two hands in prayer? (The Afternoon of the Writer is one answer).

It is as though every novel he would write begins at that place where the plateau opens, a point that normally closes, rather than begins a work of art – think, for example, of the last thirty pages of Lawrence’s St. Mawr, and the long denouement (is that the word?) of Herzog’s Heart of Glass. It’s true, plot seems to lose itself – or it is gathered, at each moment, to the threshold where anything at all could happen. At once, open – but also fated, living the measure according to a kind of justice.

No Man’s Bay would be an epic; the chemist of One Night reads tales of knights and chivalry, which the narrative parodies; Loser, of Across, reads Virgil. Don Juan, still untranslated, will presumably renew the story of the old seducer: each time, an older European form is brought to our new Europe. Or is it that the older form is brought to exhaustion by this worn out Europe, this Europe at the edge of its disappearance into economism? Disappears – and what is left but what Handke allows a narrator to call ‘the evil of the every day’ which must be retraversed in order to recover its hidden bounty.

I think of Handke as a pagan writer, as a Greek, as a Latin: I think he has that resource, a kind of pressure, that reaches him from ancient books. A pagan, whose pages turn in the wind and are read by the sky, as though they were abandoned books, similar to the haiku the travelling poets of Japan used to leave at stages on their journeys. Abandoned, because there are no other poets to read them. Lost in the expanses of Old Europe – lost as Old Europe is lost in this worn out continent, that capital buys and sells to itself.

A pagan – and then as one who is not lost, despite everything; whose narrators have behind them the wind from old Europe, the Greeks, the Latins – but I would not say the prophets, I would not say Judaism belongs to his writing. I’m not sure what I mean by this, but I remember Levinas’s anti-mystical Judaism, that allowed his to celebrate Gagarin’s ascent as the beginning of the disappearance of sacred places, of the pagan.

But then, for Levinas, Greek is the language of Europe into which the septaugint must be continually translated. Greek is rationality and order; Greek is philosophy, Europe’s language. But with Handke, there is another Greek, and a Latin linked to that Greek. Isn’t there something of Heidegger in this novelist? But let me brush these ill-formed thoughts away, except to note that there is a way of living the end of Europe that is no longer Greek, or Latin – no longer pagan, perhaps, and yet that still does not accede to the triumph of capital.

A Metaphysic

Was I ever drawn to literature for literary reasons? I always envied those I thought drawn to literature in purity, in simplicity, who could speak easily of the plays of Dryden, or of Wilder’s latinate prose. I think of my friend’s flat, whose small living room is ringed inside by two sets of bookshelves, until there are only two chairs on which to sit, and your knees almost touch.

Books – thousands of them, and in the finest editions. An original Johnson Dictionary; a complete Dickens in one edition, a complete Trollope in another. But more – much more, for he had records, too. Didn’t I owe to him my introduction to classical music – to Sibelius, to whom we listened conducting his own fifth symphony? And how he could speak (he still can) of music, of literature – of Keats, of Donne, of any composer you can name!

He spoke; he speaks, and what can I say? The books I like seem shells of books, the music, blasted music.  Sometimes he’ll buy books I recommend, and I know they are lost there among the others he owns. Less imposing, less weighty – it is not that my friend is blind to modernity; far from it. He is not closed minded. Read Gardner on Eliot, he pressed. And so I did, finding my own edition (he never lent out books). Have you read Stevens?, he said, and read The Man With the Blue Guitar out loud – and I saved up and bought the Collected Poems.

Why was it different for me? Periods of unemployment, periods of illness, I could say (but illness and unemployment were one) in suburbs adrift from the streaming of life, from like-minded friends, from official culture. And no money – don’t forget that. Too skint for the theatre, for the out-of-town gallery, too skint for the cinema and the taxi home from the cinema (the suburbs are too dispersed; you need a car, but I didn’t learn to drive, not then). Dependent, for a long time, on the kindness of others: a cheap room in a house, in exchange for keeping an eye on the alcoholics and drug addicts who lived there.

Yes, all of that, but broader than that: a comprehensive school education, seven years of poor schooling. Taught literature by kindhearted incompetents who would ask you to draw what you felt about Iris Murdoch’s The Bell or L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between. He would disappear to smoke and then photocopy our drawings into a booklet: that was our English lesson; that was how we were supposed to learn.

No different for the other subjects. Teachers in the sciences did not mark our work. ‘Swap books’ – but we marked our own. What high marks we achieved! Until it came to the examinations, but happily, they, by this time, were easy enough for us all to pass, and pass comfortably. And then, in the sixth form (what a mistake to have gone on to the sixth form), ‘free periods’, tracts of the day when nothing happened – no teaching, just time for boredom and flirting and mischief and wandering.

Rebellion: I ordered Stephen King’s It for my school English prize. But against what was there to rebel? No official culture among our hippie teachers. No sense of constraint. Absurd to miss it, of course – that constraint. And even when it came, in the shape of my cultured, much older friend – himself a schoolteacher – I thought I must have some deficiency of taste. I was not ready, in my first, dreary job in a warehouse, for Jane Austen.

Happily, a television series by Malcolm Bradbury dramatised scenes from Crime and Punishment one week and, I think, The Magic Mountain the next. I ordered the latter from the local bookshop and awaited it excitedly. Eight pounds: had I ever spent that much? I read Mann as summer turned to Autumn – hundreds of pages, sometimes dull in the reading, but the whole, the expanse of the book, the way Castorp fell from his position as a visitor to a friend in a sanatorium to a patient himself. Fell until not months passed, but whole years – he was a bad case and then, when released, he left for the war. And wasn’t I, too, falling?

I became unemployed, and then found my way to university. I shut myself in my room, barely attending my course, and read. Again, happy and unhappy encounters with those happy in book culture. You must read Anna Karenina – and The Heart of Darkness – and Huckleberry Finn. Whole days reading. The first third of Proust. Musil. Rilke’s Malte. Pessoa’s Disquiet. And gradually, out of all of this, a taste was forming. But was it taste?

No one would be so simple as to think literature is the mirror of the world. But nor is it escape. Whatever the connection between the book and the world, it must pass through a life, a particular life. In my case, what had I experienced? The retreat of culture, and all intellectual life, it seemed, to a few remote islands – my friend’s flat, some lecturers at university. And yet a disappointment at that same culture, that same intellectual life. It was a relic, and my friend’s flat a reliquary. But nor did I want the books I read to be contemporary – or racy. What then did I want?

It seems laughable now to read what I inscribed on the inside cover of Bataille’s Inner Experience: ‘the book of books. What I was waiting for.’ Absurd – but it was as though not only my present had changed as a result of that encounter, but my past, too. It had been leading up to this point, preparing me. In the same year, Blanchot’s The Space of Literature, and, later, The Step Not Beyond, and The One Who …

There’s a certain point in his letters to Felice when Kafka suddenly uses the word, literature. Suddenly – and momentously. I am nothing but literature. I am made of literature – this reacting against Felice’s phrase – what was it? – ‘literary interests.’ Kafka was made of literature, but of what was he made? I learnt from Blanchot of Holderlin, for whom the gods had departed – and of the madness that touched him as he tried to write in the absence of God, thickening that absence, knowing it as the indeterminable that had to come to form in the poems.

I learnt of Rilke’s search for a proper death, and that death was never proper – that we must die, in our modern world like flies. But in the wake of God, and after propriety, wasn’t it possible to sense what they had both concealed? Not the existentialist pathos of a life man must make for himself – virile man, resolutely braced against others, preserving his relationship to death, the most sacred, but that doubling of the world that resonates when the words of a poem thicken and grow sonorous, when rhythm becomes important and words search for a way to indicate what they cannot reach.

Or when a work of prose text no longer mirrors a world replete and substantial in itself, a world of certainty, and populated by characters with a commendable psychological realism, and events that reproduce so wonderfully what might occur on the other side of the page. Not the plausible – but not the fantastical either; not the retreat to an altered world, even as it is still our world.

I learned from Blanchot – and then from others to whom he referred, explictly and implicitly, in The Space of Literature, of a kind of doubling – the difference between things and what they are, and that difference a differentiation, an anorganic life. To think the becoming of being – wasn’t this to allow that the world might be different – that it might become differently and there might be a way of joining it in becoming? Another life; the relinquishment of a personal life. A life – an impersonal streaming that passes through the well-upholstered rooms of the nineteenth century novel. Dickens knew it, Hardy – but Egdon Heath only wears through into the novel Tess, it does not alter its form, and Rider’s death is only an incident.

Lawrence calls it a ‘metaphysic’, that bundle of ideas he required in order to begin writing his novels. Doesn’t a reader, too, need a metaphysic of sorts? Until that point, I would say I was lost, lost in my reading. I read this, and then that, without know why it was to a cluster of authors and books to which I continually returned. Beckett and Heidegger had only a few books in their workrooms, I learned, but according to what principle could I pare them down?

A metaphysic. Isn’t this what literature students receive when they come to Theory? In the wake of culture, of the reliquary of the canon, there’s too much confusion. I used to read Leavis with envy: what certainty! But there is can be certainty in philosophy, and in that philosophy co-opted into what came to be called Theory.

Still, I am glad I came to philosophy by myself, and through literature. Glad, that is, I had read Rilke and Kafka before The Space of Literature, that I had already discerned what I thought were common concerns in my favourite writers. And also glad – more distantly – that I had lived somewhat before I read philosophy. Lived – and had therefore a kind of metaphysic to sort my philosophical reading.

And in those days, too, I wrote – just for myself, and found certain themes coalescing that began to resonate with what I read in literature and in philosophy. I had a metaphysic at last, a heuristic; now I was not a dabbler, reading this and then that. I knew the next task must be to sharpen this instrument, to will that my own past, my education, my unemployment occurred exactly as it did.

I made another friend, another cultured man, more expansive than the first, with a house and not a flat. As he drove me from the station, I told him I would like to say, after Genet, ‘I wandered through that part of myself I called Manchester.’ As though Manchester were folded within me; as though there was nothing but my life, even as it had become impersonal, even as it seemed to stream without subject. But philosophy broke that ‘I’ apart still further. Now a dawning sense of ethics, of politics, and not in any formulated sense.

What was literature? Whatever it was, it was also a passion, a way of indicating that nothingness, that virtuality in which the world turns. And didn’t it point to a task, to a way of living, of folding what the world was not into the world? What it was not, what it was – but now in a sense more expansive than the world which seemed absolute as I was growing up. For hadn’t I learnt, and almost from the first, of the impossiblity of politics – of politics fallen into managerialism, into administration?

By literature, by philosophy – and by that metaphysic that held both together, turning in one another – I retrieved, and by way of my repetition of the past (Kierkegaard’s gjentagelse) a sense of the contingency of the world in which I grew up. Things could have been otherwise; it was possible to live another way. No need to sigh after another life, to mourn the death of culture, or its retreat to the university – tendencies I still had, and were not burnt from me for many years.

For a long time, the local library would give me old copies of the Times Literary Supplement. For years, I used to read it at night when I could sleep with a mixed fascination. Culture, intellectual life – all this was marvellous. But I was disturbed by the steadiness of its tone and the tranquility of its judgements. So, at least, it seemed to me then. Gradually, I saw in it an old enemy: culture itself, the old culture, whose conservatism was clear when it came to reviewing works of philosophy. My judgement was simplistic, unsubtle, but one day I took hundreds of editions of the TLS to the dump and felt lifted.

What was it I disliked? Simply that a metaphysic was not allowed to lift itself from literature. Or that the approach to literature was in some way obvious, or transparent, and that judgements could be made. But I asked myself – I still ask – whether this is because I lack something, something quality of judgement; that I am not far enough from what I read – and that, perhaps, others like me also lack. But then I also asked – and ask today – whether those who seek from literature a clue as to how to live, how to act, how to experience the contingency of the world, can only ever be too close to what they are compelled to love.

Compelled – I use this word deliberately. Sometimes I close my eyes and dream again of the ambition of the great avant-gardes to unite art and life into a blazing whole. Or to annul art, or to lift it, by letting it become life, and nothing other than life. How to live, and collectively, what vouchsafes itself in Rimbaud, in Lautreamont? This is a dream that steered me through what I tried to write elsewhere.

But let me put those thoughts aside. I began this post to speculate as to why I reacted with disquiet  to Josipovici’s review of Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet in the TLS when I reread it yesterday. That is, I wanted to surf the affects that review awakened: on the one hand, a sense that I must be wrong, and Disquiet is a rag bag that takes second place to the poems, that it is, as Josipovici say unconvincingly the work of Bernardo Soares, who is too close to Pessoa himself.

And on the other? That the work is instructive because Soares is worn away to become not Pessoa, but Pessoa, too worn away: that its disquiet is what condemns it sprawl, as though it was the whole of a tradition that was spilling out like a river into the ocean. Spilling out into the vast indifference of Pessoa’s twentieth century and our twenty first. Literature is finished; literature is lost – and the only literature is that which knows it began with loss, that its inception coincides with the collapse of the world that could give it place.

In that case, I tell myself it must always reach us from without, and even despite itself. That it might be missed, and reading is a welcoming excavation that must pore over a text, reading it along its grain and against it, looking for its metaphysic, or even tearing its declared metaphysic from the itself. But that is only to say, I love the work for that it embodies a metaphysic, that it lives it and trembles with it; that it comes to embody a philosophy or a counter-philosophy: embody it and not merely state it, the spirit of the text being its density, its thickness, the way the details it recounts seem to point beyond themselves to that reserve literature seems peculiarly able to mark (but then it is, after all, made of language).

Is this a betrayal? Is it to read philosophically what demands to be approached by other, gentler means? Or is it to know literature as research – that the extra-literary is part of literature, and that it is also a summons to live as though the world could be different?

Drifting

Days of no work, days of Cava in the evenings; days of five hundred kinds of boredom. Would that my attention could be direction; would that I could discover a narrowness of focus. Because in truth, I am lost in the fog; in truth, everything claims my attention; I am unsettled, a ghost disturbed from his tomb.

And on these kind of days – quite rare – I look back through the categories of the blog, following corridors into former lives. Who was I, then, when I was alive? Who was I? Drifting – blessed condition. To drift, like the wandering speech of the analysand or the automatic writer. I would like to lose myself. No: to discover myself lost, having been lost for some time. Why do I imagine that speech, that automatic writing, like the voiceover to a life that is lived silently?

The Devil

Sometimes Kafka would allow that nonwriting was also writing, but that was after the publication of The Judgement. He was published, even if it was in the gaudiest almanac – on the cover, Stach writes, a nude woman lying beside a declaiming poet with an outstretched arm. Arkadia, as it was called – and this name in cursive added to the kitsch – sold few copies in May 1913.

Non-writing: Kafka wrote in bursts. For long periods, he knew, he would write nothing. But once he had published, it seems he could allow that nonwriting was part of writing. It was in this period he began to refer to literature, too. He was made of literature, he told Felice. Literature was the devil; he’d been seduced, and in such a way that he was nothing apart from what had claimed him.

He is his books, he tells her and that it wounds him she has not read his little prose collection, Meditation. He is them – but isn’t it that publication gives him that foundation he can then abandon? His writing – literature – is evident in the world. Now he can bear non-writing; now he has a wall against which he is braced.

‘I will write again’; ‘I will be able to write again’. But what is this ‘again’, now he is separated from it by the ocean of non-writing? It waits in him; it anticipates itself. The devil needs Kafka, and this is the point – he is nothing without him, he rests nowhere. Writing needs him; literature waits for itself in him. And who is he who must sacrifice himself in order for writing to arrive?

‘Again’. Returning, the ‘he’ Kafka becomes, and that writing demands. But isn’t writing non-writing in that moment? After all, what can he achieve, he who is voided of himself? Without initiative, without power: here is the most ancient sign of inspiration, which sets itself back into the passivity of exposure, before it can lead to the accomplishment of a task.

Why is it only in moments of crisis that Kafka can write? Perhaps because it is only in these moments – breaking with his fiancee, neglecting the family firm – that the devil can come close to him. Who is he, Kafka? The one who is broken by a thousand demands. Who is he?

Terror: it is the devil. But seduction, too, for he knows a dreadful substitution is the price of writing. Then when he writes, using this word in this most ordinary sense, setting words on paper, it is non-writing that pushes him.

‘There is nothing for me in the world. I am humilated, worse than a dog.’ But Kafka’s ‘masochism’ is everything: how else to work that change where he lets the devil take his place? His place – or rather, what reveals that there is no place – that pure streaming that is also the devil; Cratylus’s river, into which it is impossible to step but once. He holds himself into his substitution; he welcomes it. This is the correlate of the passivity to which it subjects him.

‘Now you can write. Now, remembering your humilation, you can write.’ This is the secret link between suffering and writing. For the devil comes when you suffer. The devil burns inside you. You suffer. You cannot coincide with your suffering, which is pure streaming, the river in which you are torn apart.

But then, writing, you can repeat suffering, living it again. Living what you did not live, the pain you cannot synthesise into a memory. Repeat it – write non-writing; write what did not allow writing to coincide with itself. Write non-writing in writing; inscribe it by letting words tremble – by allowing them to become thick and rhythmic. Write it in the sonorousness of words, by setting them in flight.

That is the poet’s option. What of the prose writer? A kind of ‘reduction’ whereby the novel no longer refers to a world outside of itself. That does not realise a world in the thickness of details. Or rather, that lets those details tremble with what cannot appear. And figure in the narrative the return of the devil; let the characters die – even the innocent Karl of Amerika – so that you can lie down, dying, in the narrative.

(Question: but how does the devil allow himself to be remembered? What survives the Cratylean flux? A minimal ipseity, a witness who knows he has lost his place (or that the he, burning, is the one who burns in the writer’s place). The self-givenness Heidegger no less than Husserl, than Merleau-Ponty, than Henry feel necessary to posit? Task: tear phenomenology apart. Klossowski, Deleuze …)

Sometimes Kafka will speak of his double. He may appear vacillating and indecisive, he tells Felice, but this is because there is two of him. Two – but united in him, in Kafka.

Is it this a tragic rending? Is this tearing his agony, returning anew? But it also bliss – writing, for Kafka, is beatitude. He is happiest in those working holidays he takes from the Worker’s Insurance Agency, in the two weeks when he writes In the Penal Colony for example. A happiness without tragedy. And he is happy when he reads his from his work, laughing with his friends at the opening pages of The Trial.

All this is marvellous. Why, then, his love for Felice, which threatens writing, as he tells her over anew. Perhaps because she, too, lets him write – that to compose a letter to her lets the devil burn in him again, displacing Kafka blissfully from himself. He needs the tension – needs to be broken against the wall of non-writing in order to write. He needs suffering to awaken the desire to write. And so, in his correspondence, he writes of writing; he redoubles it, and speaks of what does not cease seducing him.

What does he need? A kind of external pressure. The threat of non-writing. Marriage with Felice. The coming World War, which prevents him moving into his own apartment. His illness. And his father, too, or perhaps first of all. The incarnation of the masochism to which he would subject himself; the avatar of everything in the world that opposes writing.

(Task: read the psychoanalysts on subject formation and the superego.)

Kafka suffers; he is faint with suffering. At one point Brod writes concernedly to his mother. Is her son suicidal? In one sense, he wants nothing else than to throw himself from the window. In another, despair robs him of initiative; he founders; he is capable of nothing. But writing is asking for him, and by way of his suffering.

The devil is burning. Take my place, says Kafka. Use me, he says. And writes from this substitution, writes in bliss as the double he becomes when he is given to writing.

The Necessary Storm

Is the ‘Sebald’ of his novels Sebald? The erasing line through the centre of the reproduced photograph, the scribbled out middle name in a reproduced identity document: ‘Sebald’ has passed through the mirror and lives another life. Is he Sebald? Or is Sebald (or ‘Sebald’) playing a game with us?

The characters of Bernhard, or of Handke are almost exactly the same across the whole of their oeuvres. The same voice, whether the chemist of As I Walked Out or the threshold-expert of Across; the protagonist of No One’s Bay is indistinguishable from Kobald of Repetition (and even indistinguishable from the other characters we meet in this massive novel.)

Do I mind? I read Handke for the Handkean mood, the Handkean Stimmung; the word is given to me in the same way. He writes for an oeuvre, anyway, not for an individual work: the same themes – the decline of the image, the withdrawal into writing, the evilness of the everyday – the same situations – a meeting with the enemy, an encounter with ‘doubles’ – the same attitudes – a love of walking, of journeying, a dislike of mountain-bikers, a meticulous recording of the natural world: an oeuvre, which is to say, his eye is on the whole, and his novels beat a path of research.

Fiction as research: but what is to be gained when Handke writes as fiction rather than autobiographically? What is the difference? The same question could be asked of Sebald. But still, the same organisation of themes, the same palette of moods. The books overlap in topic and concern, but each is an aesthetical unity: each rounds itself off. Someday a post on what I fancy Sebald ‘discovers’ and refines by way of the techniques of his writing. The free indirect discourse at the end of Vertigo, in which Pepys’ diaries merge with the narrator’s own voice is taken up again in The Emigrants (but I haven’t checked the publication dates, and perhaps it is the other way round.)

Fiction, autobiography: but might an autobiography exhibit its own unity, its own weft of themes and topics? And what of those books that seem to fall between fiction and autobiography (Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death)? – No absolute distinctions, then. No criteria to set one genre against another. And yet -.

To begin a fiction seems to me an act of great daring. What temerity – to write, and a fiction! The temerity of inventiveness! Perhaps I am like those who distrust fiction writers who would usurp the place of God. But then I remember that certain fictional works are more like a destruction rather than a creation: the world is pared down, ‘reduced’ as is said in phenomenology, and now in such a way the author is the opposite of God.

How I love those urgent books that seem to streamline every detail, every scene, so as to throw themselves into the uncertain future of reading. No, I do not want the roof lifted from every house, or for every skull to be unscrewed so I can learn of the thoughts of this or that character. And I strongly agree with Steve: if there is to be a protagonist who writes, we must least learn why there is writing, and from where it comes.

This is the marvel of the first paragraphs of Blanchot’s Death Sentence, or of Handke’s Repetition: it is clear from the first they are written and that writing is necessary for their narrators. Something is at stake. A kind of research is required that must pass by way of writing. Writing, for a time, is everything. I admit that this urgency seems real to me in some novels, and not in others.

Reading Kundera’s Immortality a few weeks back, or The Book of Laughter and Forgetting more recently, I wondered whether the narrator hadn’t set himself too far back from the events he related – whether he did not play with his characters and us, his readers, a little too much. He is too knowing, I thought to myself; he is too much in command. I do not believe him when he says the latter novel was written for Tamina (was that her name?), the character who ends up on the island of children -.

And there is always the assurance of Kundera’s old European culture – when he writes disparagingly on ‘popular’ music, for example, when he speaks in the manner of the most tedious fogey, trundling out the same cliches about our supposedly dreadful modern world. Much fresher Bernhard’s vehement intolerance of nearly everything, past, present and future! An intolerance that does not depend upon the certainties of a vanishing world, or on the emerging certainties of the new one.

Bernhard leaves nowhere for his narrator-protagonists to stand in his novels. Everything is at sea; everyone is at sea, and the waves of his prose dissolve everything but their own great, foaming rhythm. The novels are a gale, but a necessary one. Tomorrow, the sky will be clear again, but only because the present world has been shaken apart. But the storm must come the day after tomorrow, and the day after that – the caustic, world-destroying chaos that rides Bernhard’s invectives.

Preferable, too, is Handke’s minutae, the setting-down-in-detail of events too small to notice which seems to expose his narratives to the uncertainty of the future – to wager them, to let the form of his novels tremble because of an ambition Handke knows to be impossible: to make an epic of the everyday. He calls the ghosts of Virgil and Thucydides to stand over his writing; but there is no nostalgia, no appeal to the wonder of the Greeks, the Latins. And he calls the ghosts of languages which can name the world in a different way. And he even calls for a people, who will never arrive (but he calls them for that reason – because they will not come). What does he write? Your people exist. They are somewhere else. A different people with a different history. We are not the only ones. You will never be alone.

But those were, concerning Kundera, uncharitable words, and I write them here only to note the idiosyncracies of my own taste. I know I like novels that occupy certain moods and do not let up: Bernhard, Handke, Appelfeld. Those moods – but is that the word? – are everything, and reach me so as to ‘reduce’ me, suspending those relations to what I regard, for the period of reading and usually a little after, as the inessential.

I wonder what the ‘reduction’ is that I seek – today’s reduction, not that of yesterday, or the day before. Pure writing, the saying of writing, the narrative voice that lets itself speak through the details and events of the narrative: it is not that I seek what lifts itself from the tale, which renders its details irrelevant, but rather that the telling of those details, those events, is charged with a sense of the stakes of that telling. As though narrative were important, and the act of writing filled with danger.

And furthermore, the danger lies in clinging too strongly to the form of the self (Kundera’s fogeyism – and shouldn’t I also bring in, rather abruptly, the assurance of Auster’s prose style, its smoothness, its riskless assurances?) – one propped up by everything stultifyingly and thick-headedly bourgeois (but what is the word, bourgeois doing here? Where does it come from? Another question of taste worth taking up).

Whence the surprise of reading Muriel Spark: a cosy novelist, I had thought, who takes the bourgeois as her topic – the bourgeois and their drawing rooms. But I didn’t know how cold a book could be, how mercilessly a narrator can play with her characters (The Hothouse on the East River) like a cat with its prey. Cat’s claws through the ‘props’ of the bourgeois novel, scratching away the unities of time and space, scratching apart verisimiliude, scratching until the wallpaper’s torn off and the walls are torn away. That even in a book as fun as The Girls of Slender Means – cat’s play again, but the cat half-asleep, not quite ready to kill, but vicious in her drowsiness nonetheless.

Muriel Spark claws her way into a kind of purgatory; her characters are shades and know they are shades – dead already, strange survivors of death, they live on by replaying scenes from their completed lives, replaying them, but also wearing them away, until it is the condition of fiction that wears itself through. This, at least, for Hothouse: a fightening book, a diabolical one – as soon as I finished it, I panickedly sought to contextualise it, reading secondary commentary, looking for interviews. A frightening book, where the void looks through the eyes of the characters. Characters possessed, dispossessed: the bourgeois world is hollowed out, exposed. We are all dead. Everyone, all of us, was already dead.

Taste, then. In a world assured of itself, novels concerned with great destruction and genocide (Appelfeld), with showing its madness and devilish complicities (Bernhard), with peace, with the image, and even the dream of a people (a ‘Slovenia’ inside Slovenia – Handke). It is true I read novels for a kind of politics, an ethics. For difference, for life – for a kind of scepticism that is the narrative voice itself. This is my ‘taste’, my demand as I read – for a sceptical writing, for writing as scepticism, as it lets tremble a world that is bound too rigidly to itself.

Callers to Order

Listening to ‘Great Waves’ by the Dirty Three featuring Chan Marshall is like bathing my face in fresh water. I wake up, my attention returns from the thickets where it’s caught, and the room seems to open out around me. There are a few songs that are like this, callers to attention, and I use them sparingly. They come to my aid, and I know they watch over me, waiting in reserve.

And yet I also know they watch from me, out of me, that it is also my eyes with which they see. It is as though they needed me, these waiting songs, in order to happen to themselves. Do horses like being ridden? Pointless question. One day, the horse cannot distinguish its freedom from its rider’s. When, otherwise, might it go out for a gallop? And does a song like being heard? ‘Gentle Waves’, I tell myself, is nothing without me. It lies on my hard disk like a leaf.

Callers to order: Handke’s phrase, or the phrase he allows his narrator, in Across, the book I would like to say is his purest. What happens? Read critical works, and they’ll tell you there was a murder. It’s true, of course: the narrator happens on a man scrawling a swastika into a tree. He kills him with one blow and throws him over a cliff.

But that murder is like the one Handke allows his narrator to imagine in On a Dark Night, who longs to topple cyclists from their mountain bikes: it is part of an order of things, an order of walking, of the natural world, of meditative noticing.

Gloriously Handkean; he needs, one presumes, to revive this sense of order every time he writes. He needs to be called to order. But then Loser, of Across, is called away from his work by those callers (what are they? certain objects – archeological remnants).

I still await the first daddy long legs of the summer, remembering how Loser calls them creatures of the threshold. And Across, the whole book, which I have not reread and do not have near me, but that lives on in me, inhabiting me, is all threshold, all plateau: the book between, the book steered gently by the same wind that ruffles the pages of all Handke’s fiction. The wind at the back of the walker, the wanderer, who has as his enemy the cyclist and the fascist.

Beneath Time

Before I was ill, I was unemployed. Or was it the other way around? Illness, unemployment: I switched from one kind of benefit to another. Lost in illness, I became unemployed. Or was I ill because of unemployment, because there were no jobs or because I never wanted one?

What did I do all day, every day? How did I occupy my time? But I didn’t occupy it. I’d fallen; time passed me by; there was nothing to do. Days passed – weeks, and nothing. I think I once kept notes. I jotted down symptoms for my doctor. Today I feel A., today, B. But it was always the same; why write, unless it was to wear out writing as I had worn out life?

There was television, of course. The structure of my day, its frame. At 1.40 Neighbours; at 7.00, the news. But at other times? Antique shows and magazine shows. Was I part of the target audience? But if the programme makers knew of me, long term unemployed, long term sick, it was only as it is known in principle that the signals sent via our broadcast media on earth will reach one day a distant planet.

It was X. who got me diagnosed. I was tired, she saw that. She took me to a sympathetic doctor, who referred me to a specialist. I had to lie about my address to get the appointment, but my own doctor was no help. In the basement of the surgery, the specialist explained about by illness. She suffered from exactly the same, she said.  She wanted our illness to be taken seriously. How long did I want to be signed off? For the rest of my life, I thought.

X., meanwhile, was becoming more ill. For a time, she went to a counsellor. She spoke about whatever she liked every week to a young man in the backroom of a church. He was supposed to keep silent, but one day, he said, I admire you so much. You’re remarkable. He’d fallen in love with her. He told her she was a martyr. But in truth she was ill, and falling towards breakdown.

Her tiredness gave way to paranoia and panic attacks. She became violent, and after a time, she was committed. Then the diagnosis: she was bipolar. Bipolar! How had that happened? Now there was a rift between us. We had different illnesses, or rather, hers had taken her on another, serious course. She had a new life now, attending the hospital every day. And I knew again what I had suspected: I was ill from unemployment, and unemployed because I was ill: they were one and the same.

How can the weak help the weak? I thought X. was strong – she drove a grey Saab with a toolkit in the boot, she owned two houses and a recording studio. But then, in the weeks before her breakdown, she sold her car, and one of her houses. One day, we took hundreds of her CDs to the secondhand shop. She was getting rid of everything, but for what? For what was she preparing herself? I heard, in the end, she gave up her house for sheltered accommodation. She gave up everything for illness, to let illness be illness. She wanted to be alone.

Now there was nothing to keep illness from finishing with me. There was nothing to divide us. My strength had failed; I accepted this. I lay beneath time; this, too was welcome. I slept a great deal; I kept the curtains closed against bright light, but otherwise illness was gentle. I thought: this would be a way to die, like falling asleep in the snow. Even suffering seem to have little to do with me. True, I was tired, infinitely tired, but this tiredness did not seem my own.

Sheltered

Did we suffer? I’m not sure. Or rather, I don’t think suffering was something any of us endured in the first person. Suffering belonged to no one in particular. We were dazed, that is all. Tired – too tired to worry the world was leaving us behind.

From what were we sheltered in our sheltered accommodation? The city – its vastness – all around us. The city, and the pressure of its regeneration: we were cut some slack, were allowed a few years before we had to become worthy of its transformation. How tired we were! How lost! But for all that, sheltered. Weeks passed – months, but we were safe.

Sometimes inspectors would visit us. Sometimes we’d be called in to justify our benefits. How to abject yourself? How to appear as pitiable as possible? They called us clients, but we were dependants. The city tolerated us; the city indulged us. Everywhere regeneration, except in sheltered accommodation. Everywhere people buying their council houses, except for us, except for the ones who lived in darkness.

I liked my flat. Was it mine? I liked the flat through which I was passing. When they showed it to me, I thought: here I will have time. Here is peace. And when they left me there, and closed the door, I thought: I will fill it with nothing; I’ll leave no mark. It is a flat for the ill, and I am ill, just as others will succeed me who are also ill, one after another, in a long series. There are many of us, and we live sequentially. Many, one coming after another, and each of us in this flat.

I thought: the spaces of this flat ache with suffering. But suffering is not mine. No doubt I will lie here in darkness day after day, but my suffering will slowly be lifted from me. This is what it is to have space. It is what it is to have fallen from time. These rooms are totally empty, but for suffering. The rooms suffer, but I do not suffer; I have delegated suffering to this space, this time. I have swapped places with this expanse.

I knew others were ill in their flats all around me. The agoraphobe, who liked Denton Welch. The depressive. We knew each other; we passed by each other, each of us stranded. But I imagined that each of us had made an exchange in the dark, in our flats. Suffering was elsewhere, and we were each inhabited by the expanses of space, and by a time broken from time.

My ailment was tiredness, a great tiredness. My hands were not mine; I could barely lift my arms. What actions could I cause? But tiredness freed me from the great questions: how was I to make my way in life? There was no way. There was here, the space in which I lay down and the flat took my suffering from me.

No community. No friendships, either – or friendships had worn thin, too thin. Associations – bumping into this person or that, but never a knock on the door, and only rarely a phonecall. Once, for a short period, the depressive found a lover; after three days, he proposed to her; he wanted children. But on the fifth day she realised his madness: he was an alcoholic; drunk, he would promise everything. But in the morning, hungover, and before the off-licenses were open?

And so she fell away from him. She fell back to her flat, her solitude, but not without pain. For a time, we spoke every morning. She rang me, every morning until I could bear it no more and unplugged my phone. I wanted my solitude; wanted the space to ache with the suffering I had relinquished.

Then, for a time, when his symptoms lifted, I used to go dog walking with the agoraphobe. We walked an old, half-blind collie through the fog, and talked about Denton Welch. Do you remember that passage where he puts a peppermint on his chest to watch it rise and fall? He remembered. I remembered. And wasn’t Welch ill, like us? Didn’t he die at 31?

We left our meetings to chance. Never did I ring him, or him me; I didn’t know his number. Entirely to chance: he was afraid to enter the cafe to which I would go every day, but would wave to me from outside. Sometimes I knew I’d see him, and took a seat by the window. But sometimes, he would just appear on the street where he did not belong, coming towards me like a lost man.

For weeks, though, he’d stay in his flat. And sometimes I, too, couldn’t summon the strength to go out into the day. I wanted to remain in confined space; the day was too vast, the sky … I stayed in. I stayed in the darkness, my few possessions leaving the rooms of the flat nearly empty and bearing no mark of my presence.

But was I there? Sometimes I had the sense that to be loved, really loved, would mean that I was seen in my absence, as the one who’d changed places with the indifferent space of the flat. But sometimes, it was that the rooms of the flat should be seen without me. Only then would I be known and perhaps loved. Only then, when I was one of the great succession of the ill.

I lay slumped on the old sofa. I lay feverish in bed. For a time, I was determined, like the stranded Crusoe, to keep track of the passing of days. I thought to make marks on the walls of my flat.

But then, gradually, as week fell into week, and whole months came to resemble one another, I saw there was no point, and I might as well drift, and that this was the gift of the flat and the gift of my illness. I have an alibi, I thought. I have a sicknote. Everywhere around me, the city is transforming, but I do not need to be transformed.

Untitled

1. Post titles? Unnecessary. No titles, no signature. And a date – do you need one of those?

You would like to write, no one knows where I am. You would write, remembering Joubert, to forget is to follow the course of time; to remember is to resist it. But how to write and to keep nothing by writing? How to live in the space of names without meaning, where no word weighs more than any other?

Where do thoughts go?, Joubert asks. And answers: into the memory of God. Cross out the word, God, or let it stand in for an impersonal memory, the great archive of the world, the memory of stones and of birds. Now thoughts drift like pollen, falling here and there. Words have fallen across the world; thought wanders without thinkers.

2. Balthus: ‘I wanted to paint a dreaming young girl and what passes through her, not the dream itself. The passing therefore, not the dream.’

I wanted to write of a thinking that passes, not the thinkers themselves, nor the content of their thoughts. As though it were possible to think and not to hold – to receive thought as I, this morning, am received by the dawn.

Early morning, the head of the day, and I know I have been seen. I know that a kind of seeing has seized my own eyes, and that I hear what I have been given to hear. A thinking that is too light for thoughts. Thinking without content, as open as the dawn. And that claims your thoughts and lets them rise like fire balloons.

3. Dawn. Gently, the hours praise time, and know its measure. Hours pass. The passing, and not their content. Becoming, and not things that become. Is it enough to surround writing with a border of white space? To cross out titles and signatures? How to carry passage into writing itself? How to become with writing?

Nothing is identical to itself. The world is doubled. Hours pass – and time is doubled. Close your eyes and you will see, writes Joubert. Or let another seeing open in your own. Let the flow of writing seize your writing. Lighten speech.

The Fossil

The truck came that I ordered and took away the wood that had been stacked for two years against the door of the outhouse. Was it two years ago we took apart the twin wardrobes that were built into the alcoves of the bedroom? That was the Great Summer of Work, when we passed the cows in the field going to the office in the morning, and passed them again in the evening as we came home.

One day lay down upon another; one day – another, like sheets of light. Now imagine I could mine down, stratum after stratum, to find the heart of that summer lying like a seam of diamonds. Sometimes I am aware of the thickness of life, of the days and months that press down upon one another. What traces are buried thus? What forgotten kingdom?

Perhaps my memory of that time is rather like those fossils in which the decomposed body disappears, to be filled in by another substance. I mean that what I remember is a plenitude rather than the openness of those many days, one after another, in the sun. That same summer is filled for me now as by a glittering mineral. It is born again as solid light, as an opaque object I can turn in my hands.

The Shadow

1. He needs me, I know that. He cannot die his own death, I know that. But who is he, who is never the same as himself, or who knows the same only as the fire of self-transformation. I am dying, he says. But I cannot find him, he who dies where I cannot see.

Shadow, why do you ask me to die for you? Patient one, do you intend to wait the entire span of my life? But you know I will always be unequal to what I am; that my life appears in place of itself. Sometimes I think you would disappear, if ever I could coincide with you; if ever we could inhabit the same instant in time.

2. ‘A shadow is a region of darkness where light is blocked. A shadow occupies all the space behind an opaque object with light in front of it.’

‘A shadow cast by the earth on the moon is a lunar eclipse. Conversely, a shadow cast on the earth by the moon is solar eclipse.’

But now consider the shadow temporally. Imagine it is the present, as it falls into the future, that bears the shadow behind it, as a comet does its tail. It is the light of the future that sets the past into darkness. Only the future matters. This is a version of the solar eclipse, where the sun is the future.

More difficult: what if the past is the sun, and the future is the shadow that is sent ahead of the opacity of the present? The lunar eclipse. But now imagine, thinking of Kafka, who said he case a shadow on the sun, that you are the one who throws the shadow ahead. Everywhere there is light – everyone living from the past to the future, but for you, who cast a shadow.

The Twin

To say: everything in me simple. To say: and by that simplicity, you can see, as in a still pool, the face of him I really am, and with whom I have nothing in common. But who is he that speaks from nowhere? Who is he for whom my life is only a way of bootstrapping himself into existence, and who lets me write only to indicate the ‘to say’, the ‘to write’, a writing without definite article? I will not know him. I cannot draw close to him. But he knows me by what I cannot know of him, and he is close to me by way of his distance.

Many pregnancies see one twin miscarry. Sometimes, the dead twin will simply vanish, absorbed into the body of the mother, or into the surviving twin. Occasionally, one twin fetus will not develop, and becomes parasitical on the other. Even more rarely, that parasite – almost always brainless and lacking internal organs – will grow in the body of the other, conjoined by an umbilical cord.

It is he who dies in me, vanished twin, parasitical twin. He draws death to himself, so that I can live. Or is it I who is his parasite, and he is the one who lives and acts in a world realer than the one in which I find myself? My body is borrowed, my body is missing, that’s what he says of me who has always survived inside him.

Elvis Presley had a stillborn twin brother. How to imagine a twin who brings death continually to birth, who says: everything that is possible is impossible? Philip Dick’s twin died at six weeks, but he imagined much later she became his protectress, and it was her soft, feminine voice he heard as he began to fall asleep. But he does not protect me; if he watches, it is not from concern.

There are many cases of ‘mirror’ identical twins, one being right handed, the other left handed; the hair of one will curl one way and the other, the other. In this condition, there is a risk the organs will be found on the wrong side of the body, a condition called situs invertus.

To say: tonight, you will dream of a dead man. To say: you will dream of one who never lived. To say: what kind of thoughts does he have, the one who has limbs and half-formed digits, but who doesn’t have a brain? His hair and teeth are growing. He says: you are the tumour who prevents me from living.