Essential Writers

One-and-a-half hours before I meet friends for a drink and a film, I am stranded in the office without being able to write anything for the book. What to do instead? write about what you cannot write, so at least you have some relationship to what needs to be done, even if it is only at one remove. Vicarious writing, writing by proxy: this is what blogging permits, as letter-writing used to do.

Once upon a time, I would have used this interval to have written to a friend. Such a writing seems very far away now. Remember the joy of criss-crossing letters: one sent to X and another received from X and so on, each with the two to three day wait which detached what was written from what was experienced in the moment of writing. But this is already naive, as if writing did not always demand such a detachment: as if to write and to write a letter was already to have lost what was experienced and to have regained it in a new way, as words on the page.

Now, instead, words on a screen. But this is happiness: the sense something was done, that I will have made something from these vacant minutes.

It is six o’clock here in the office. I arrived hungover at ten this morning; I set to work with the aim of finishing a draft of the first chapter of the book, suffice to say this was not possible. Besides me, a pile of CDs. I listen to the odd numbered Beethoven symphonies. And besides me, too, two printed out drafts of lectures W. intends to give. ‘It is not because Pascal is unhappy that he writes, he is unhappy because he writes …’

What did I do today? Any answer I give betrays the feeling that nothing happened today, and that it happened such that this nothing became tangible, ever-present, there in the blank whiteness of the sky. What I do? Nothing happened and I remember the conversation W. and I have when we are in our cups: what does it mean to write as a philosopher? What does it mean for Heidegger to write, or for Blanchot? ‘For all that he wrote on boredom,’ one of us says, ‘Heidegger knew nothing of boredom’ – ‘By writing on boredom rather than with boredom,’ says the other, ‘he betrays it.’

Steve’s new essay on Auster’s Oracle Night sent me out on the street to look for the book in question, not to buy it, but just to look. I found it in one of the two Waterstones. I wanted to confirm what Steve reported of Auster: that he is unafraid to use cliches if only to release himself from that movement of writing which would have been halted if he had paused to rephrase them. That it is writer’s block that he would avoid by so writing. Then I remembered placing a star in the margin of Josipovici’s article ‘Kierkegaard and the Novel’. Here is a part of that passage:

[Johannes de Silentio] can make us feel vividly that he – and we – cannot really understand Abraham, but the implication remains that so long as he goes on writing about Abraham he himself will never be a Knight of Faith. This is Kierkegaard’s problem. He cannot remain simply ironical, like his beloved Socrates. Times have changed[….] he is committed to writing in order to make people see the lies they are telling themselves, but so long as he goes on writing he remains in the subjunctive mode and so cuts himself off from the life he most desires.

Life! Kierkegaard is like Kafka in wanting to leave writing behind. Should he stop writing?, Kierkegaard asks himself, should he take Holy Orders? Is this what God wants for him?

One could say that Kierkegaard’s personal tragedy lay in the fact that he was not enough of a writer to take pleasure in the writing process itself, but too much of one ever to be a Knight of Faith.

W. and I speak of a thinker we admire. ‘He is always absolutely serious’, says W., ‘it’s just as Blanchot said about Bataille: something serious is always at issue when he speaks’. I agree, remembering that W. always says the opposite of me. ‘You are my id’, W. says, ‘nothing is ever serious in our conversations’.

Does it change when we drink? I remember what Bataille reports of a drunken reading session with a friend. Drunk, they take it in turns to read aloud from a book. It is as though drinking changes the relation to the book. As though something becomes possible in the act of reading.

W. is an advocate of philosophy as friendship, as face to face contact, intimate groups of discussants, impassioned talk. I remind him of what he already knows: when Blanchot praises the seriousness of Bataille’s conversation, he is referring not to the content of what Bataille said, but to the seriousness of speech itself. What does this mean? That there is a way of communicating which interrupts the great circulation of words, which allows there to be felt a contentless declaration, a thundering silence, even a kind of call.

Blanchot had friends whom he never met. He sent short letters to them in a beautiful hand. Asked if he wanted to meet by a friend such as Edmund Jabes, he demurred. Derrida reports a dream where, speaking to Blanchot at the door of his flat, he tries to peer inside to see what is there.

Interruption. This post is growing rather long, so I will note simply that great writers, great thinkers have also sensed those interruptions which divide the facility of writing from itself. Mishima cursed the fact that a rain of words had never stopped falling within him. Bataille needed to break the smoothness of philosophical discourse. Hasn’t friendship, philosophical friendship something to do with this interruption?, I want to ask W. I am thinking of Bataille’s drunkenness, of Blanchot’s retreat, of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. I am thinking of another kind of boredom and of writing with boredom, rather than making of boredom one theme among others.

The last line of the Josipovici essay follows the last sentence I quote above:

But then that too could perhaps be seen as the best way of defining all those modern writers whom, like Kierkegaard, we may call ‘essential writers’ to distinguish them from the scribblers, even the highly talented scribblers, who will always be with us.

The Sound of the Crowd

What boredom may permit, it may also make impossible: bored, sick of the world, you are too bored to seek out others who are bored (and they are too bored to seek you). You’ve fallen to the bottom of the world, exhausted your strength and lost even your relationship to yourself. Bored, no one is bored in your place. An impersonal attention sees the indifferent sky above the congested streets and the flies who circle until they die in empty rooms. Bored, you watch television to assuage boredom. Never do you dream of leaving the privacy of your dwelling place for the streets, those same streets where others may gather in their boredom  and where flames the trail which might bear you to the future.

And yet boredom can volatilise into a stubborn refusal of constituted powers – those dangerous, spontaneous movements which hover between revolution and surfascism, between the great overturning that would bring a fiery new world into being and the desire for a leader to capitalise upon the excess that has been unleashed.

Surfascism: this was the accusatory word thrown at Bataille after his attempt alongside the Surrealists, to turn French workers away from fascism by drawing on the same forces to which fascism unleashed. Contre-Attaque, as it was called, attempted to turn the enthusiasm of the crowd onto a legitimate target – to awaken that great refusal which was also a refusal of capitalism. It finds its analogue, Blanchot is right to argue, in the Events of May 1968 in Paris.

What is the call that is heard on the streets? What is it that opens me to the future? Already Heidegger points the way with the call of conscience: it calls silently; it awakens me from the anonymity of Das Man, Dasein is called to its authenticity, to resolutely bring itself into relation with its death such that it lifts itself from the others. But the anonymity Dasein departs is a figure for the anonymity of the crowd, of those who cross the threshold that would allow each to become responsive to the Other in a new way; where each shares a response to a kind of speech. Once again, it is a silence, a kind of hole in apparent completeness of the babble of the world.

A silence? But listen closely and you will hear a murmuring – similar, perhaps, to what K. hears on the other end of the telephone line when he seeks to speak to the castle – a thundering silence that cuts through all speech which would reduce the other person to a cultural category. Who awakens? What awakens? Not authentic Dasein, summoned to itself, living each moment as a moment saved from death – the Dasein bound to itself and to being in the relation Heidegger calls mineness [Jemeinigkeit] – but the no-one-in-particular, the anyone-whatsoever who is each member of the crowd. The danger is clear: without the resoluteness, the will to which Heidegger appeals, there will be dissipation, the crowd will fall back into blandness before anything is accomplished; it remains an unruly magma and not yet a Volk.

Still, one would also have to ask what Heidegger himself fears in the same magma. What is the call that is no longer a call to authenticity, to the assumption of finite existence? Perhaps it comes not from Dasein itself, but from others, but others of the crowd. Perhaps the call is what happens when one bored individual has found others, too, who are bored, and that boredom hardens into a refusal. The thematics of mood in Being and Time is subordinated to mineness – to the attempt of Dasein to bring itself to itself, but the indication is there.

When, shortly after Being and Time, Heidegger will write of an anxiety which suspends the relation of Dasein to itself, to its world, but which yet also reveals the condition of Dasein and the world: bare Dasein in its bare transcendence, he is close to a reflection on the relation to being which sees it, from the first, as interrupting the relation of the self with itself. An interruption such that the being-there of Dasein reveals itself as an usurpation. Dasein is no longer, it is true, rooted in itself, cleaving unto itself, but ek-static, futural, it is launched at its death, but this is because of a reaction in it has closed itself to what boredom might reveal: the anonymous crowd as the field in which a kind of circulation occurs such that each takes the place of the Other, as that zone where the great usurpation reveals itself in its ignominy.

Those who are brought into the condition of responding to others out of the same experience of boredom, the same experience of the nullity of the quotidian, the same nihilism hear, witness the relation to a turning over of being and nothingness which outplays nihilism. Who calls me? If I am interpellated, it is only by what calls the ‘il’ forward in me. If I am called, it is by what dissolves me as a consumer, as a vendor, as a client, as a worker. This is the holiday of the crowd, its spontaneous festivity.

The call of conscience and the related notion of witnessing sees several metamorphoses throughout Heidegger’s career. By the mid 1930s and ‘Holderlin and the essence of Poetry’, it has transformed into the call to a Volk to come which resounds through the poem. When Blanchot writes on Holderlin, it is to reveal that the condition of modernity is the impossibility of assembling such a Volk. In Adorno’s words: ‘You can build a temple, but you can’t bring a god down to haunt it’.

Of course in his youth, too, Blanchot himself dreamt of a return to the proper body of the nation. Was this was his moment of surfascism? Perhaps the formerly right-wing monarchist Blanchot was disingenuous when he presumed in The Unavowable Community to speak of his and Bataille’s history in the 1930s as if they were parallel (‘notre historie’ …) Yet when Michael Holland worries there is a return to the same kind of rhetoric in Blanchot’s anonymous writings of May 1968 he passes over the fact that the idea of revolt, of uprising and refusal is no longer linked to a father or a fatherland. Thus Blanchot’s Lenin: the one who calls us to go outside …

But the thematics of the crowd are only a manifestation of what Lenin called spontaneism: an uprising will achieve nothing without organisation. Zizek has recently reminded us of this; recalling the Events of May 1968, Derrida will also voice a similar concern: he disliked ‘vibrating in unision’, he says, and even then, the Events are not yet a politics. Communism remains etiolated unless it joins the call to go outside with a determinate political programme. But the word might name a way of linking the common presence of the crowd with a political party, a spontaneous refusal without limits to the revolutionary fire which would sweep the old world away.

The Critique of Everyday Life

If I have made a discovery through writing here it is only one of what I have always tried to suppress: empty time, unemployment, watching dust motes in the air.  Why did this come to me? Because I write here when I cannot write elsewhere; this is a fallen writing which cannot assemble itself into a whole. Sometimes I fantasise that this same experience of inadequacy, of inadequation, but above all, of what might be called the quotidian might have some strange political force, that boredom and lassitude place strange weapons in our hands.

The quotidian (there’s a bug in Typepad which is preventing me using the word in the title of this post): who would look to it for liberatory force? Is it not what reveals itself in the stagnant provinces of Chekhov’s plays? Or in the pettiness of life in the midst of the vast bureaucracies of which Kafka writes? The quotidian appears to be superficiality itself; it is that experience of nullity that reveals itself in tedium and boredom. Whence the desire to escape from the quotidian through the busyness Heidegger calls Erlebnis, the active seeking of sensation. Heidegger considers the quotidian under the heading of inauthenticity; this is not intended as a moral category, he insists, but this is disingenuous. When he writes of idle curiosity and aimless chatter his tone is unmistakably condemnatory.

There is no question that the quotidian can lapse into the most grave depoliticisation: we watch television by ourselves in the evening, each separated from another in our houses. But the quotidian also contains the potential for a repoliticisation: the streets from which revolutions are born are part of the same ordinary life. ‘The quotidian is not at home in our dwelling places’, Blanchot writes, ‘it is not in offices or churches any more than in libraries or museums. If it is anywhere, it is in the streets’. In the streets: in the essay from which I am quoting, Blanchot is writing of Lefebvre’s studies of the  quotidian and wondering to himself what sense there might be in calling for a critique of quotidian life.

What would such a critique imply? For Lefebvre, the quotidian is an untapped political reserve. The fluidity and contingency of quotidian life is always made to conform to an overall order, a system of purposes, meanings and values. Yet there is always a deviation, always unintended deflections which no longer aim to produce an outcome linked to the social whole. Such purposelessness appear spontaneously in quotidian life. To dream idly, to read, to write: such actions are undertaken for their own sake; they have a dynamism and fluidity which escapes the attempt to bind quotidian actions to what is productive or efficient.

This is why the quotidian is always suspect: it is the breeding ground of ideologies. This is why the secret police keep files on everyone, why Mandelstam’s friends had to memorise poems of which no written copy could exist. An analogous fascination drives the market researcher: what is that determines why it is this product that is purchased and not that one? When politicians use focus groups, it is in order to predict and contain the quotidian: to understand the segmentation of swing voters into particular groups in order to target them by specific methods.

You’ve see someone on the street you half-recognise. Who is it? She resembles your friend, and yet she is an anonymous passerby. Yet in the moment of non-recognition it is as though you caught sight of the anonymity of the quotidian itself. Here is another experience of the image of the Other that would allow the relation to any given human being to become indefinite. I have experienced the nudity of the Other – of the other person who no longer presents herself within the cultural categories which allow me to determine my relations to others. The Other, now, keeps me at a distance, at her distance.

The philosophical suspicion of the quotidian lies in this same anonymity. The quotidian human being is anyone at all. I am Heidegger’s Das Man, never yet myself, always distracted and dilatory, ill-disciplined and irresolute and unaware, above all, of the fact I will die. But Heidegger’s recipe for authenticity betrays something telling: what is feared is the limitlessness of the quotidian, its indefinite expansiveness. After claiming the quotidian is capable of ‘ruining always anew the unjustifiable difference between authenticity and inauthenticity’, Blanchot observes:

Day-to-day indifference is situated on a level at which the question of value is not posed: there is [il y a] the quotidian (without subject, without object), and while there is, the quotidian ‘il’ does not have to be of account; if value nonetheless claims to step in, then ‘il’ is worth ‘nothing’ and ‘nothing’ is worth anything through contact with him. To experience quotidianness is to undergo the radical nihilism that is something like its essence and by which, in the void that animates it, quotidianness does not cease to hold the principle of its own critique.

Such nihilism (see the posts at Philosophical Conversations) suspends the relation to death what would allow us to decide between authenticity and inauthenticity. It suspends values, meaning and truth. It is experienced as a wearing away of the power to decide, to resolve, to bring oneself into relation to oneself. The ‘il’, the companion is the ‘subject’ of the quotidian, understood as the locus of experience of the il y a.

What does this mean? In his early writings, Levinas writes of the impersonal “il” as the locus of an an exposure, an opening to what Levinas calls existence in general, existence, as he puts it, without existents: the il y a. The il y a is not linked, unlike Heidegger’s “es gibt” according to Levinas, to “the joy of what exists” but to “the phenomenon of impersonal being,” or what he calls in another essay, “horrible neutrality”. If the “I” opens from the “il” , it does not leave it behind; the il y a may always return. If it does so it is as a horrifying eruption of chaos and indeterminacy. But why does the ‘il y a’ need to be horrifying? Could this ontological insecurity permit the world we share and the others with whom we share it to bring us into relation with what escapes determination?

There is the quotidian : the quotidian is without subject or object; the locus of the experience of the quotidian is the ‘il’: Blanchot presents the quotidian itself as existence without existents, as the il y a and as, here, what is called nihilism. Yet it is not horror he links to the ‘il y a’ of the everyday, but boredom. It is boredom which plays the role of the Grundstimmung which opens up the quotidian.

There is the quotidian: each in the quotidian exists, through boredom, in relation to what is called the ‘il y a’ – to the there is of chaos and indeterminacy. Comes the moment of critique when it is such boredom that brings us together: when we respond to the summons of the Other such that it brings forward in each of us what is called the ‘il‘, the impersonal opening. Critique comes as the everyday allows there to awaken the sharing of that great reserve named by the ‘il y a‘. Thus it is that shared boredom causes there to be born the great movements of rebellion, where each is the passerby and the utopic space of the street bears us towards the future.

The Double

Remembering Sartre’s analyses of Giacometti’s sculptures, as well as thinking of the relationship Charlotte Street draws between the double and the uncanny, I wonder whether Giacometti might be said to reveal not the movement of the living, but a strange restlessness which belongs to the dead. What if Jesus’s command, ‘Lazarus, venture forth’ brought forward not the living Lazarus but the one who was still dead, the corpse still wrapped in his winding sheets and stinking of decaying flesh? Perhaps it is this command to which Giacometti’s sculptures would have responded.

Blanchot remarks of Kafka’s The Castle that it is as though the distance the reader normally has with respect to the text had withdrawn into the text itself. As though the distance which is normally permitted to readers had been withdrawn and the reader is pressed up against what might be called the materiality of language. What if one were to understand a similar withdrawal of the normal distance a sculpture permits into Giacometti’s sculpture itself? (Sartre has begun to understand this …)

Blanchot writes of a ‘passion for the image’, that fascination which reveals to us a kind of shadow of an real thing. It is as though what was revealed came before the thing – as though the image were its condition of possibility and not the other way round. Strange priority. The image is what a thing is when it turns from the tasks and projects to which we subordinate it: it is what resists the very impulse of our existence, that is, to create meaning, to as it were ‘exist’ things into being, bringing them towards us as potential tools or as potential raw material. No longer is the thing what offers itself to be deployed; no longer, indeed, does it exist at any distance from me at all. Fascinated, I am as though pressed by the thing up against its image, as though the heart of the thing held me at what one commentator calls ‘its distance’.

The corpse would exist in the manner of the image of the human being such that, with the cadaver before me, I see what life dissimulated: the presence of the familiar other as it is caught, implicated by a kind of unfamiliarity, an uncanniness. I have lost my bearings with respect to the one who died; I am fascinated, instead, with the indefinite, senseless opacity of a body. Such is the situation where, for Blanchot, a corpse begins to resemble itself: it is the image that, at the heart of the living body, hides itself insofar as the living are caught up in our existence in a manner analogous to things. For the most part, cultural categories mediate our relationships: you are my colleague or a vendor, I am a patient or a service provider; each of us disappears for others into the roles we are made to perform. But what happens when the body holds me at its distance? What happens when I confront the image of the other person?

‘Each living man, really, does not yet have any resemblance’, Blanchot writes; ‘each man, in the rare moments when he shows a similarity to himself, seems to be only more distant, close to a dangerous neutral region, astray in himself, and in some sense his own ghost, already having no other life than that of the return’. One should understand by analogy with Blanchot’s remarks on the image of the thing. The image confronts us when the thing is put out of use, when it no longer has any value with respect to the tasks and projects which occupy us. The thing fails, but even as it disappears from our world, it brings us into contact with the image that as it were keeps its distance at its heart.

What is the image? One might think of it as the materiality of the thing, as its silent weight or presence as it fails to offer itself to the light of meaning. Then with respect to the image of the other person, it is as though the cultural categories which organise our relationship to others in a manner analogus to the way in which our tasks and projects organise our relationship with things have failed. But if these categories can no longer guide us, if it is the other, finally, who is to be revealed, it may appear to have happened too late: the one before me is, on Blanchot’s presentation, is a corpse, or is close to being one.

Perhaps Giacometti’s sculptures remind us of this other. This is because they do not, as Sartre writes, ‘inscribe movement in total immobility, unity in infinite multiplicity, the absolute in pure relativity, the future in the eternal present, the loquacity of signs in the tenacious silence of things’, but indicate another movement, a kind of restlessness. The image is the ‘other’ Lazarus who responds to the call ‘Lazarus venture forth’.

Dust of Space

Giacometti destroys his statues, dozens of them. Giacometti’s aim, Sartre writes, is ‘not to glut galleries with new works but to prove that sculpture is possible by carving’. But how will be do this? It is as simple, Sartre says, as Diogenes proving the possibility of movement to Parmenides and Zeno by simply walking up and down. Yet that simplicity is hard to achieve. Giacometti: ‘If I only knew how to make one, I could make them by the thousands …’

Giacometti’s workshop is full of dust, everything is covered in the dust of his tenacious carving. Still, if he destroys his statues, this is the correlate of a desire to escape the heaviness of the material with which he works. ‘Never was substance less eternal, more fragile, more nearly human’, Sartre comments. ‘Giacometti’s substance–this strange flour that slowly settles over his studio and buries it, that seeps under his nails and into the deep wrinkles on his face–is the dust of space’.

The dust of space: this is what remains as Giacometti resists the attempt to erect the monument, to fill space. ‘Giacometti knows that there is nothing superfluous about a living person because everything is function. He knows that space is a cancer that destroys being, that devours everything.’ Everything is function: reading these lines is to be reminded of the terms Sartre sets in motion in Being and Nothingness: projection, transcendence, the struggle to exist …

Everything is function: this is why, for Sartre, it is necessary for the sculpture who would seek the true semblance of the human being to pare away all superfluity, to reduce what is sculpted to a bare frame. Giacometti’s intention ‘is not to offer us an exact image but to produce likenesses which, though they make no pretence at being anything other than what they are, arouse in us feelings and attitudes ordinarily elicited by the presence of real men’.

How is this possible? The classical sculptor is constrained by his own imitative practices. His temptation is to realise blocky substantiality, imposing presence: to concentrate in the sculpture every likeness to his model he can find. In this way, he seeks to eliminate his own perspective, to attain, with the sculpted form, an absolute semblance, but it is the absolute that is lost. For he carries with him the presumption that the human occupies perceived space as would any object.

Then how might one sculpt the absolute? When Giacometti accepts the relativity of a perspective – when he as it were pushes the sculpture back into an indefinite space, it is at the same absolute he aims. Sartre emphasises that for Giacometti, the human being is presented at a distance: ‘He creates a figure "ten steps away" or "twenty steps away," and do what you will, it remains there. The result is a leap into the realm of the unreal since its relation to you no longer depends on your relation to the block of plaster–the liberation of Art.’ The image is liberated from the material; it becomes art insofar as it is released into the indefinite.

What does this mean? For Giacometti, certainly, sculptors have been guilty in not sculpting what they see:

Even Rodin still took measurements when making his busts. He didn’t model a head as he actually saw it in space, at a certain distance, as I see you now with this distance between us. He really wanted to make a parallel in clay, the exact equivalent of the head’s volume in space. So basically it wasn’t visual but conceptual.

He goes on to claim that to model what is seen would lead to the creation of a ‘rather flat, scarcely modulated sculpture that would be much closer to a Cycladic sculpture, which has a stylised look, than to a sculpture by Rodin or Houdin, which has a realistic look’. Giacometti also outlines the dangers of monumentality – even large sculpture is, he claims, ‘only small sculpture blown up’. The five metre tall sculptures in front of the Egyptian temple only become sculpture when seen from a distance of forty metres. Compared to prehistoric art, or to that of the Sumerian or the Chinese, contemporary sculpture remains conceptual, cerebral: it depicts what is known rather than what is seen.

For Sartre, the point is more complex. ‘From mere space Giacometti therefore had to fashion a man, to inscribe movement in total immobility, unity in infinite multiplicity, the absolute in pure relativity, the future in the eternal present, the loquacity of signs in the tenacious silence of things’. The sculptor is able to close the gap between that great bursting forth, existence, and the rocky substance of his medium. What is seen is what we live.

Of one sculpture, Sartre writes:

The martyred creature was only a woman but she was all woman –glimpsed, furtively desired, retreating in the distance with the comic dignity of fragile, gangling girls walking lazily from bed to bathroom in their high-heeled shoes and with the tragic horror of scarred victims of a holocaust or famine; all woman–exposed, rejected, near, remote; all woman–with traces of hidden leanness showing through alluring plumpness and hideous leanness mollified by suave plumpness; all woman–in danger here on earth but no longer entirely on earth, living and relating to us the astounding adventure of flesh, our adventure. For she chanced to be born, like us.

Our adventure, our existence, our life: we see ourselves in his sculpted woman. What is doubled, what I see, is the springing forth of what, in me, is as yet undetermined. Would it be possible to say, for Sartre, that before Giacometti’s sculptures I come face to face with my freedom?

Passing

Talking to W., who is the great scourge of careerism, makes me ask myself: am I a careerist? I say to myself: when you first began to study as a postgraduate it was only as a ruse to allow you to —–. But what word should I write there? But there is no word – it was a question of a future, a stretch of time in which to be no one in particular. What did I want? To pass across philosophy as a stone is skimmed across water (the word passing is a lovely one; it reminds me of some lines in Char …) I think of Belle and Sebastian’s ‘A Summer Wasting’: a song about time that goes nowhere, the time of river banks and wandering. W. tells me how hard he studied: I never drank, I never smoked, I spent all the time in the library.

Comes a time when you have to begin to write what are called primary texts. When does it come? When through some strange leap you gain the courage to begin. But what kind of courage is this? From where does it get its strength, its conviction? Zizek says if it were not for Lacan, he would have remained a dabbler, writing on Derrida one day and Deleuze the next. He committed himself; he leapt. I’ve always told W. that it’s a matter of writing, writing – write enough, I tell him, and ideas will come, and then the leap can be made. But then I think to myself, you do not have the strength for such a leap, you’re too weak and all this writing disperses you in too many directions …

Zizek remarks that film was his first love; philosophy came after. I’ve often wondered whether those for whom philosophy was their first love are paralysed by that love; they cannot begin to write. Yes, I write, and soon I would like to begin a primary text (laughter as I write this). But this is, as I always tell W., born from an empty desire to make a book. A desire to make something pretty, dense and writerly. And to sing/speak of those few themes which make my blood rush. You have to become a name, W. reminds me, to write such a book. He means the book would have to sell.

‘What if I wrote a book on Smog, or on Will Oldham?’ I ask him. ‘You’d need to prove you could make money to the publishers.’ – ‘How many copies would I have to sell?’ – ‘I don’t know.’ – ‘Five thousand copies?’ – ‘Something like that. Do some research.’

Passing. The book I dream of, as I have written before, is called Common Presence. It will include essay/dreams on Tarkovsky, Shostakovich, each only five or six pages long … and what else? I have little idea of what its pages will contain. And I dream of another book, too, a kind of phantom autobiography. A book about a life with the name: a life …

Always the dream of passing, of moving without disturbing anything in the world. And I remember Deleuze and Guattari on becoming-infinitesimal, and the last lines of The Incredible Shrinking Man. And I say to myself: pass between the molecules. Write a book on the blank pages of the sky and the earth …

The Literary Desert

Blanchot observes that the phrase ‘the head clerk’ as it would occur in an ordinary sentence functions in the manner of allegory. What matters is not the phrase itself, but what it communicates; everyday communication, indeed, occurs as though without words. When this phrase occurs in a literary narrative, however, the name ‘head clerk’ no longer designates a really existing person in this way. The phrase has sense, but no reference; what I know about the bearer on this name comes from the novel itself which means ultimately from a mesh of text, from words and sentences.

With literary writing, such words and sentences do not drop away in favour of what they designate, as they do in everyday communication. The reader has only the words to go on, and if it is possible for her to flesh out the body of a world from this meagre skeleton, it is to this skeleton with which each reading must begin. It is as though, as in Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint, instead of a hot dog stand, there were only a piece of paper on which is written the word ‘hot dog stand’; still, it is not such a miracle that the reader is made to imagine a hot dog stand.

Many modern books play with these referential paradoxes; there is something peculiar about the ability to conjure a world from nothing. Yet Kafka’s case, according to Blanchot is singular, for their aim is not simply verisimilitude, that is, the creation of a living, breathing artefact, but to seize upon the condition of possibility of fiction itself.

Kafka’s novels court interpretation; they lend themselves to those readings which would allow their language to disappear in favour of an opening world. This is the danger of watching Orson Welles’s adaptation of The Trial – a danger Kafka knew when he rejected the idea of placing a picture of the insect from Metamorphosis on the cover of a book. There is only the insect of the text, only a papery creature made of words. The insect, like Joseph K., like K., is a fiction. None of them stands in relation to anything outside the text.

Kafka’s novels escape allegorical readings. What is the source of their resistance? The narrative itself does not yield up its meaning to an allegorical interpretation. Here, what resists is what Blanchot calls the symbolic quality of the text: the way it refuses itself an external referent. We are left with the book itself, its ink and pages. In poetry, what resists allegorical reading is ultimately that from which the text is made: the grain of the text, its rhythms, its sonorities, its syntax: all that might be grouped under the heading of the materiality of language. This is what reveals itself more clearly in modernist poetry which has separated itself from the old didactic order to which poetry was formerly subordinated.

Can one say the same of Kafka’s fiction? Certainly, there is the suggestion that literature can come into its own a certain point: ‘We hear in the narrative form, and always as though it were extra, something indeterminate speaking; something the evolution of this form works around and isolates, until it gradually becomes manifest, although in a deceptive way’. It is not difficult to note its landmarks (I’ll come back to that another day). But what is it that becomes manifest even as it is linked to a kind of deception? What does the text indicate? It is the fact that the key to the text lies within the text; the action it unfolds does not occur as though on the stage of a theatre – the distance between reader and text has changed. But what changes it?

In allegory, the rhythms and sonority of language do not matter. In symbolic literature, it is the materiality of language that foregrounds itself as the condition of possibility for the creation of sense. I read of K. passing over the wooden bridge, read of his first frustrating contact with the villages and of his wearying journey to the castle and I form a mental image of that same bridge, those villagers, and even the castle itself. I imagine K. But the text works such that there is nothing outside it to which I could as it were anchor the world of The Castle. It does not so much drift from its anchorage like an errant ship as disperse across the waters.

It as though the book breaks down and scatters itself – as though the coherency of the world it presents had come part. What happens? I am left with words, with words and more words, with the inky scratchings from which I had begun, as a reader, to conjure a world. I am left with the materiality of language, with all that is extraneous in the functioning of everyday speech. It is as if it were the condition of fiction itself, its hard, enduring skeleton, its rocky frame, which wrecks the ship of meaning and drags it under.

The Castle shipwrecks its reader. Or, once again, if we imagine the narration, now, as carrying characters, milieux and so on in suspension had drained away; as though we were left with only the barrenness of the ocean floor, an inhospitable place, a kind of desert without landmarks, a labyrinth without walls. This is no longer a geographical desert but a Biblical one, crossed not in eleven days but in the time of two generations. Then no longer is it a Biblical desert but a literary one in which the reader wanders like K. himself.

What does this mean? The desert is a name for the experience of the resistance of language, of what resists in language. The labyrinth is a name for the space in which the reader wanders in the instant in which the articulation of sense is suspended. But what is this experience? The surging of what, in the text, resists reading. The repetition of a kind of non-sense which reverberates through all literature. Could it be that all narrative revolves around this repetition? That narrative turns around an event which cannot be narrated such that, at the heart of the most sedate novel, the encounter with the void awaits us?

Certainly this is what Blanchot has in mind when he notes that ‘The Castle does not consist of a series of events or peripeteia that are more or less linked, but of an ever-expanding sequence of exegetic versions that finally only bear upon the very possibility of exegesis itself – the impossibility of writing (and of interpreting) The Castle’. K. goes from exegete to exegete, from one commentator to another. Of what do they speak? Of the experience that awaits us at the heart of reading. Of The Castle itself as it names the secret of literature, of fiction.

Dirty Pipes

W. and I were impatient this year at All Tomorrow’s Parties. Many of the bands were unimpressive. But we were attracted to the charming whimsy of The Naysayer and the facile humour of Neil Hamburger. ‘He’s like us’, I said; W. agreed. We have always thought of ourselves as lacking wit; we rejoiced in a comic whose comedy was based around rude words. Later W. summed up our tragedy: ‘we’re intelligent enough to recognise genius, but we’re not geniuses.’ And then he noted that the ideas of the thinkers we admire are often simple, or can be stated simply.

‘Have you ever had an idea?’ W. asks me. ‘No. Have you?’ – ‘No.’ We’d like one – and what we’d like, too, is that indefatigability which also marks the thinkers in question: it is a matter of making the same point again and again. The same simple point, which can be reformulated in a number of ways. At some point, we talked about Blanchot. W. reminds me that among the extras on the DVD of Requiem for a Dream, Hugh Selby Jr. recalls he began to write after he came close to death. ‘It’s the same for Blanchot’, W. said, ‘you have to die twice.’ Then we spoke of Heidegger on boredom. ‘You can tell Heidegger was never bored’, one of us said.

Watching the bands, W. and I agreed that a number of criteria could be specified as to what constitutes a good performance. The Naysayer aside, we liked anger – angry men. This is why we admired Sean Garrison and the Five Finger Discount. The band were ragged, half-rehearsed, unlike the precise Spoon whose mediocrity horrified us; ‘we don’t play much’, said the stetsoned guitarist when we spoke to him later. Their music could be described as country-rock, I suppose, but Garrison was a shouter, and this was important. He was a middle aged shouter with paint bespattered jeans. He shouted – this was important to us. So, too, was the fact that his band were tattooed. They looked as though they had just come out of prison. They were muscly and menacing but they played sweet country music.

Slint, for some reason, have incorporated jazz and guitar solos into their sound. This was horrible. We were far from the stage and couldn’t see much apart from David Pajo and Todd Brashear’s head nodding up and down. We liked Todd; we saw him playing Staremaster; he looked amiable and wise.

Festivals are not about bands you know, but bands you don’t. W. and I didn’t like many of the bands, we’ve become impatient. We leave if we’re not immediately impressed. I spoke often of The Naysayer. W. said: ‘you’ve become whimsical.’ I agreed, and pointed out that the band were so charming. There was a song about kittens which was particularly lovely. Later I told Anna Padgett the songwriter, how much I enjoyed her music. S., W.’s girlfriend, said that when Anna smiled all of Anna’s face smiled.

Tequila is an excellent festival drink. It’s important, we learnt last year, to bring plenty of nutritious food if we were to avoid stomach upsets. The Guinness is always off – ‘dirty pipes’, said W., and I agreed.

Inadequacy

Inadequacy is a beautiful word. Inadequacy, the lack of adequation, the interruption of truth understood as adequatio, as the relationship between a statement and a state of affairs. As though it were a matter of tumbling into this gap and, falling, of being seized not by falsehood pure and simple, but a kind of errancy, an exile which carries thought far from itself. As though thinking were also a matter of being seized by such an errancy, by the force of error.

Is this not irresponsibility itself: the disappearance of accountability, a high-minded nihilism which erodes the possibility of collective action and rational thought? I think of Marx and those who today remind us of his words: truth is universal, although it is only a universality of which the proletariat would be capable; awaken to this universality and the revolution, too, might awaken.

Zizek’s Lenin is a rational man of action, a calculator, but also a risk-taker, the one who knows when to leap and who then leaps; the one who burns, in that moment, with absolute ardency. How would he have appeared to his contemporaries? Like a madman, Zizek says, and he is thinking, too, of Kierkegaard’s Abraham, the Abraham of Fear and Trembling who does not speak because he fears what is called the ethical sphere of existence whose gentle tyranny allows you to speak but steals the words from your mouth as you speak (perhaps Marx would say they become words of the bourgeois universal, hypocritical words, words born from the streaming of capital). When speech can never be the speech of a madman, it is better to be silent. Abraham does not speak (but the poet Silentio speaks …)

Does democracy, our worldwide democracy, belong to what Kierkegaard calls the ethical sphere of existence – that sphere of universality where to speak is always to speak in the language of the banal, the universal? Dream with Marx of a new universal, the truth to which only the proletariat can awaken. But it cannot be merely a matter of dreaming: it is necessary to work, to build new collectives.

Still the desire to call someone, comrade, as if, when I said that word, every revolutionary in the world would also speak and would have spoken. Yes: comrade, where in this word would resound a kind of pledge, an engagement from the future, from the call that would summon each of us as it reveals the usurpation through which we come to ourselves. Where what resounds is the placeless opening whose place each of us has usurped, that utopia which opens only when the other is met, welcomed, as the other.

Is it a matter, here, of the truth of what Kierkegaard calls the ethical sphere or the truth only Marx’s proletariat could realise? What if, alongside the truth and the movement towards truth, alongside solidarity, comradeship there was an experience of another comradeship – a friendship, now, with the one who arrives as though from the place you have always usurped? Or a friendship where what is held in common is the experience of inadequacy you know only as you fall from your tasks and fall from work?

Lenin summons the workers and leaps with them into the revolution. The revolution is the leap, the turning of the world, the blazing wheel. But what of the ‘other’ Lenin who reaches you when you are far from the possibility of the collective and the universal? The dream-Lenin who, with Kierkegaard (a dream-Kierkegaard), addresses you in your weariness, out of your weariness: the Lenin who whispers: comrade, to fall is also to leap?

Play Acting?

‘You’re a dominant personality’, said R.M. after looking at some old photographs of me as a child. She’s suspicious. I tell her of those high court judges who, tired of their roles, pay prostitutes to allow them to play the role of the insulted and the injured. I think to myself of myself: ‘and of course, for those same judges, it is a game, they’re paying, after all’. And then: ‘perhaps the appeal of disappearing and dispersal is also, for you, a game and what you dislike is only the extent of your presence, your heaviness for others as you have some say over their fates. What you dislike is that place you occupy and even as you write of a liberating weariness, of that falling where you tumble beneath your own work and the possibility of working, is still play, still play-acting. Only one in possession of himself would write thus. It is a kind of reversal of those literary toreadors, of Hemingway with his bullfighting or Mailer and his pugilism.’

Still, I wonder. Because what I also experience is a failure to talk, to write as someone in command of a subject-matter, as an expert. Tired, the other night, I read an old commentary by Wellek on Croce and others and thought to myself: Wellek is in command of his materials, Wellek writes, there is no doubt in his voice, Wellek does not fall from himself. And then: I prefer Bataille’s Inner Experience; I prefer Guilty – I trust a broken book whose author breaks himself and his authority. And then: but what if this, too, is enabled precisely by his strength? What if it is his strength which allows him to write of his weakness.

Weakness: a few days without work, lost from work. It is pleasant; I visit friends; I catch up with my administration. But I am slightly hysterical. Just now a conversation with W. ‘You wanted to escape this time last year as well’, W. observes. ‘But it’s crazy …’ – ‘So what are you planning this time?’ – ‘I don’t know’. – ‘Are you hysterical again?’ – ‘Yes.’ – ‘How does it manifest itself?’ – ‘A complete inability to believe in anything I do.’ I think to myself: it is usually enough to speak, to discourse on this or that thinker, on this or that topic, for the magic to work: to speak on authoritative thinkers is to seize for oneself some of this same authority. As though the activity of speaking believed in my place, and the voice with which I speak – a lecturer’s voice – believed for me.

Once I drew a moustache on a photograph of famous thinker X. (you supply the name). Tired of X.’s ability to talk, to talk on this and then that subject without doubt, without failure, without weariness marking itself in X.’s voice. Zizek and others write magnificently on the need for the strength of belief, for that magnificent sacrifice, that great repetition, the re-taking through which a future, a political future might become possible again. A revolutionary asceticism.

My favourite revolutionary? Yukio Mishima because he will allow doubt to infest his written voice in his novels and essays. As though he shattered his own resolve into characters who spoke each against the other, who prevented the possibility of action. And yet, in Mishima’s text, a great admiration for the one who acts. I will never forget the blow of reading the opening sentence of the second volume of The Sea of Fertility: ‘Honda was forty years old …’ In the first volume, he was twenty, but now – forty! What horror! Honda encounters, in that novel, the young revolutionary who will take his life in ritual seppuku after murdering an old industrialist. It is marvellously dramatised, this moment, in Schrader’s film Mishima.

Mishima admired Bataille. This, too, intrigues me. For all that the drama surrounding Mishima’s own act of seppuku, there is something admirable in his resolve for all that it is carried out in the midst of his own doubts, his own weariness. Of course, Mishima formed a private army with whom he went on training missions. It was madness, it’s laughable, a project of the extreme right. But he overcame his own lassitude, he hardened his body …

The dream of such action only comes to someone infested with weariness. As if, with a last strength, with the merciful surplus of such strength, it were possible to disappear into action. To become a living sun. This is madness, Mishima’s delirium of the extreme right. What interest me, however, is the way that weariness, that fall from work, from the possibility of working, itself becomes a source of hope, of freedom (I am thinking, with the these last two words, of I Cite‘s generous response). As though were we called to fight for a revolution, whatever that means, it would be with the peculiar weapons with which lassitude arms us.

Fraying

I have borrowed an edition of Kafka’s Wedding Preparations in the Country which includes other posthumous prose writings including the Octavo notebooks which I remember once photocopying one lunch hour when I used to work for Hewlett-Packard. Sad memory: the hopelessness of my position at that time: young but also futureless, reading and dreaming but also bound by a series of trivial jobs. I remember them still: covering for a man who had had a stroke, being there to help him, all the while reading Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility for the second time. Then a period in administration when there was little to do. I read Hollier’s Against Architecture in that period. Then there was a time on the assembly line when nothing was being sent down the line to us. I read plays instead: Strindberg, Tennesee Williams….

It was hard to make one’s way in those days just as my friends who work in such places tell me it is today. You can expect, they tell me, upon getting your job, seven years of difficulty, of idiot co-workers and tyannical bosses, seven years of pettiness and short-term contracts, until you find a decent position. Meanwhile, for me, then, there was reading which existed at a strange angle to my present. How was it possible that Mishima’s tetralogy and Hewlett-Packard could co-exist? In a corner of the office, there was even a picture of Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard, shaking hands. And elsewhere, in the coffee rooms, there were motivational posters. Read Runaway Horses in such an office and of what else could you dream of the great conflagration which would destroy everything? Read the Octavo notebooks and dream of the rebellion of office equipment and temporary workers – the faculty photocopier, the glitched computer, the crashed network (I would like one day to write of the strange allies I made in the office, those who belonged to the Outside even as they were inside, strange beings who were stronger than the office and yet consented to remain inside it) …

What purpose do these reflections serve? I am alone in the office, R.M. having become Dr. R.M. and returned to the South (she does not like to be written about and I will say nothing here, not even to offer my congratulations (ah R.M. with the roses on your hairclip and your new jeans!)). In the space where she was, silence, emptiness, and it is as though nothing begins in my lonely office. As though the world were unspinning itself, fraying, coming apart, and I were stretched across those same unpleasant afternoons when, as a temp worker, I would watch the clock and wait for five-thirty.

On the Threshold

Last year I watched Bergman’s Winter Light after seeing Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Bresson’s Mouchette. Bergman’s film, so marvellous, so towering, seemed somehow fake. The acting was theatrical, which is to say, and I wish I could make myself clearer, somehow aware of itself . This is hard for me to write because I admire Bergman’s films very deeply. But I write because of my shock of finding the performances of the great Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ingrid Thulin and Max von Sydow hollow after watching Tarkovsky. They were only actors, whereas Alexander Kaidanovsky in the role of the Stalker is much more. The whole film revolves around his shaven head, his strange mixture of nobility and self-pity, of weakness and authority, of poverty and resplendence.

If Nostalghia looks towards the apocalypse, and The Sacrifice dramatises what happens at its brink Stalker is a film which occurs after the apocalypse has happened.

Somehow, the Zone has appeared. A place one has to cross a national border to enter. What is it? We know it is terrifying and wonderful. Stalkers, semi-criminals, earn a precarious living by leading people into the Zone. There are rumours that there is a miraculous golden ball which can grant wishes hidden in the Zone. We know Kaidanovsky’s character only by his nickname. We begin in his shabby house, where he sleeps with his wife and his paralysed child in a single bed (his wife blames the child’s paralysis on the Zone), and which shudders with the sound of the trains that pass nearby. The Stalker is going to take two people known, in order to protect their identities, by the nicknames Writer and Professor, into the Zone. His wife despairs. But he must go, and he goes. He leads the others into the Zone. He takes them to the threshold of the room with the golden ball. Then what? It is mysterious. We don’t know the outcome.

Tarkovsky, in Sculpting in Time:

People have often asked me what the Zone is, and what is symbolises, and have put forward wild conjectures on the subject. I’m reduced to a state of fury and despair by these questions. The Zone doesn’t symbolise anything, any more than anything else does in my films: the zone is a zone, its life, and as he makes his way across it a man may break down or he may come through. Whether he comes through or not depends on his own self-respect, and his capacity to distinguish between what matters and what is merely passing.

Self-respect? Are we to understand the Zone as this world, our world, through which most of us learn to find our way, however hard it is for some, and however easy it is for others? Tarkovsky seems to suggest that we need to be led, to follow someone. And I wonder, when he writes, continuing his reflections in the paragraph I quoted, ‘My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him’ – I wonder whether he understands his films as a way of guiding us through life. More: are they a way of giving us life?

Stalker finds his way through the meadows by hurling bandages full of nuts into the distance to test for danger. Stalker and his party pass abandoned and decaying technology, broken military equipment. They proceed through a deserted house, through a tunnel, through a room full of sand dunes. A bird seems to disappear into thing air. An Alsation dog joins them, then disappears.

STALKER (picking his words carefully and slowly): The Zone is a highly complex system … of traps, as it were, and all of them are deadly … But people have only to appear for the whole thing to be triggered into motion. Our moods, our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings can bring about change here. And we are in no condition to comprehend them. Old traps vanish, new ones take their place; the old safe places become impassable, and the route can be either plain or easy, or impossibly confusing. That’s how the Zone is. It may even seem capricious. But in fact, at any moment it is exactly as we devise it, in our consciousness …

At one point, Stalker remembers his teacher, the greatest Stalker, one of the first, whom he calls Master. The Master returned from the Zone one day to find himself amazingly rich. But his brother had died in the Zone. The Master had led him to his death. The suggestion is that he found the golden ball and had had his wish granted – a murdered brother, riches. The Master hung himself; thereafter, he was known as Porcupine (why that name?). But the Stalker will not fail. Above all, he has learnt from the episode with Porcupine that he can never give what he gives to himself:

STALKER (frenzied): […] Stalker’s aren’t allowed in the room! They aren’t allowed! […] I am a worm, I never did anything there, now will I ever be able to … I could never provide for my wide and daughter! … And I’ve got no friends there, not can I have. But don’t take away what little I’ve got! Everything I had, there, beyond the barbed wire, that’s all been taken away! Everything I have is here, understand, here in the Zone! My freedom, my happiness … it’s all here … Since I bring people here as unhappy as me, as tormented … it’s their last hope! But I can help them! I can help them! I weep with happiness at being able to help them! Nothing in this whole wide world can help, except for me, a worm! That’s my whole life. It’s all I want. And when the time comes for me to die, I will drag myself to this spot, to this room, and my last thought will be: happiness for all! And let nobody go away empty-handed.

Stalker’s whole life is a life in service. What he wants is to serve, to open a path for others. He will lead only those who feel an absolute necessity to reach the golden ball. For himself, he will wait. And when he is about to die, he will seize the golden sphere and speak his wish. Outside the Zone, at the end of the film, he says to his wife of Professor and Writer: ‘they are my friends’ (his friends – I find this incredibly moving). Then he says he will not enter the Zone again. But we know he will return (he had promised his wife he would not return in the opening scene of the film) and that his friends, his only friends will be those who return with him.

Why does Tarkovsky feel the need to lead us through the Zone? Here is one clue:

Of great significance to me are those traditions in Russian culture which have their beginnings in the work of Dostoevsky. Their development in modern Russia is patently incomplete; in fact they tend to be looked down upon, or even ignored altogether. There are several reasons for this: first their total incompatibility with materialism, and then the fact that the spiritual crisis experienced by all Dostoevsky’s characters (which was the inspiration of his wok and that of his followers) is also viewed with misgiving. Why is this state of ‘spiritual crisis’ so feared in contemporary Russia?

One might remember The Brothers Karamazov, where it is Father Zosima’s dying brother who, in a state of madness, declares, ‘each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most of all’. He continues, ‘Dear mother, I am weeping from gladness, not from grief; I want to be guilty before them, only I cannot explain it to you, for I do not even know how to lover them. Let me be sinful before everyone, but so that everyone will forgive me, and that is paradise’. There is something sentimental and indulgent here. Dostoevsky’s work is always marked by hysteria and pathos. But later, when Zosima strikes his orderly Afanasy in baseless anger, he recalls his brother’s words, and undergoes conversion. Of course it is Aloysha Karamazov to whom this phrase is linked (Aloysha’s face reminds Father Zosima of his lost brother).

‘Each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most of all’. How should one read this phrase? As self-indulgence – as masochism in the emphasis on the I who is always more responsible than others? But guilt, here is not a general law, but singularises each of us. This is the point I am guilty before you – you may be guilty before me, this is possible, but that is your affair. Here is what Levinas says in an interview when he remembers Dostoevsky’s phrase:

I am responsible for the Other without waiting for his reciprocity…. Reciprocity is his affair…. It is I who support all, [… as in] that sentence in Dostoevsky: " We are all guilty of all and for all men before all, and I more than the others ." This is not owing to such or such a guilt which is really mine, or to offenses that I would have committed; but because I am responsible for a total responsibility, which answers for all the others and for all in the others, even for their responsibility. I always have one responsibility more than the others.

I don’t want to follow the winding course of Levinas’s thought, which is more difficult and more demanding than it may seem. What is crucial is the asymmetry of the demand. I before the Other – the Other, according to Levinas, is higher than me. I am responsible before the Other who outstrips me. And the Other can be anyone at all, any of you, just as I could be Other for you. This is the opening of the ethical, for Levinas – but it also recalls the opening of the world. The Other is the very light and wondrousness of the world.

How should one understand Stalker’s vocation? There is always an ambiguity in Tarkovsky’s films – this is an element of their greatness. The films resonate in us. For my part, lost before the worlds of Dostoevsky or Levinas – or even Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time, I can only write of a threshold at which I remain that is similar to the one before the room of the golden ball, into which the characters of Tarkovsky’s film do not seem to enter. I wish I had the strength to affirm, with Tarkovsky, the need for a spiritual crisis. I suppose I feel rather like Kierkegaard’s heteronym Johannes de Silentio before Abraham in his Fear and Trembling: a sense of awe that such faith, such obedience, is even possible.

I want to return to the materialism Tarkovsky repudiates. Is it not the case that in the stranded field telephones and plant encrusted tanks, in the ruined houses, and the patches of grass, but above all in the disparate items of Stalker’s dream – the syringe and the icon, the coin and the packets – there is a depth or profoundity in things, a sabi, to use the word Tarkovsky borrows from Japanese aesthetics? The Zone is a place in which things affirm their revenge for being made to volatilise in circuits of exchange. And Stalker and his companions, picking their way through the Zone? They are friends of the unknown in things, being claimed by a question that seems to open in the depths of the world – a question that poses itself to us, to human beings, because we have emerged from the immanent domain of nature, a realm closed upon itself like water in water. This is what I see in the Anubian Alsatian who, for a while, attaches itself to Stalker, being near him as he lies hunched like a foetus. The dog is a living question because it seems to arrive from the depths of a nature from which we are exiled. And the bandages full of nuts Stalker throws into the distance to test for dangers are like a counter-question, from our side, from the side of human beings who, in the Zone, can become aware of what they always are: usurpers.

An Infinite Book

K. of Kafka’s The Castle is a man on the move, says Waggish, and this is true. The land surveyor is, above all, a man unsure of his employment, his position – he is a person displaced as he wanders among a community to which he does not belong. What does he want? Security? But he has abandoned the country of his birth and has even forgotten this abandonment; once, he says, he was married, he had children, but now? He is the man who has forgotten everything except his position: land-surveyor and the rights which would accrue to him as a holder of such a position. If he was indeed married, he has become one of Kafka’s bachelors, an eternal Junggeselle, a ‘young-fellow’ who has not found his station.

But he moves, he is restless, and he is, in this sense, very different from Joseph K. of The Trial, who was the man who felt sure of his good position as a high-ranking bank official and does not know until too late he has already been thrown out of the world. Rewriting The Castle as a stage play, Max Brod will present K. as a man in search of a loving family; yet there is in K. such a power of contestation that he would reject this security as soon as he found it. Over and again he throws away whatever advantage he gains for himself. The housekeeper’s promise, the benevolence of the mayor, the offer of a job: he is suspicious of all good fortune; nothing satisfies him.

Blanchot comments:

If K. chooses the impossible, it is because he was excluded from everything possible as the result of an initial decision. If he cannot make his way in the world, or employ, as he would like, the normal means of life in society, it is because he has been banished from the world, from his world, condemned to the absence of world, doomed to exile in which there is no real dwelling place.

The choice and the decision had been made for K. before he crossed the wooden bridge through which he gained entrance to the village. Who decided? Fate? is that the word? But The Castle is not a tragedy; it is not fate that will break the tragic hero or heroine against the ultimate limit. Nor is it heroic death that would confront its readers with the magnificent fragility of the human being.

K. is not the magnificent tragic hero. He is febrile, restless, he seeks, but nothing satisfies him. Would the novel have ended with him finding acceptance as a member of the village? Walser comments, ‘the novel does not in fact "develop" at all. it simply shows us the unfolding of a relationship whose pattern is implicit right from the first page’. Then integration into the village community was impossible from the start. Would K., then, have defied the village, leaving it behind (at one point, he suggests to Frieda they should elope together)? Even this is impossible. K., who says, early in the novel, ‘I want always to be free’, is never free of his desire to receive recognition from the castle authorities. ‘I want no grace and favours from the castle but my rights’ he says, a little further into the book. What does he want? In one sense, K. emobides a new modernity: he confronts the castle, as Boa remarks, ‘as an equal and critical partner’; he is, after all, the landsurveyor, whose business it is to ‘measure and redefine prevailing relationships’. Unless K’s remark is disingenuous and this self-assertive man has duped himself. The drama of the novel – the collision between K., who wants to know he has a place in the village, and the implacable authorities would then be determined: it can only be a matter of frustration, of the alternation between moments of grace and moments of setback. Absurdity: nothing is possible; there can be no progress, no resolution, The Castle might run on forever.

Still, it would seem K. may well have been meant to die. This, indeed, is what Brod remembers Kafka had intended for his hero. To die? I prefer the idea that Kafka could never reach death, that, like the weariness from which he suffered at the moment the secrets of the castle were about to be vouchsafed to him, he would likewise miss his appointment with death. And so he would live on in a phantom version of Kafka’s novel: a book with an infinite number of pages; a book which, somewhere, Kafka is still writing.

Voluptuaries

Fie upon breakfast meetings, especially those without breakfast. Up too early, the rest of the morning was a haze. I went, straight after the meeting, for compensatory snacks. I filled my office table: falafels, salsa dip, pretzel sticks, prawn crackers, sandwiches.

In my lunch break, I make a trip to the library to find books on Kafka. And then, between the aisles, feel an immense tiredness. I want to lie down, to sleep. I sink down; I am close to the books. And then I spot a couple of books I never seen before whose spines were too faded to read their titles from a standing position. Two books, one with a marvellous essay by Martin Walser on The Castle and The Trial.

As I walk back to my office, I notice the wind has changed; it has become mild, the ice on the pavement has melted. R.M. is in the office; tomorrow, she has her viva. I tell her I’m so tired we will have to listen to our ‘going home music’ now. We have a strict rota: in the morning, The Killers and Secret Machines, in the afternoon, when R.M. gets panicky and lies down on what she calls ‘the floor of dread’, the Brahms violin sonatas. Then, in the evening, quite late on (9 or 10), it is time for a ‘going home song’: at the moment, the last track from the sixth Lilac Time album, which sounds as it were made for a carnival. It’s on again now.

Afternoon. Time to work. I still have a discounted salmon pate beside me and a few pretzels. I’ll save them for four o’ clock. As I work, I can still taste the meal R.M. and I ate last night at the Spanish restaurant. ‘What was the name of the black pudding dish?’ I ask her. And the peach spirit we drank after dessert? But she has left her receipt in her handbag at home. Then: ‘Do you know what we are, R.M.? Voluptuaries’.

With, Not Alone

Is blogging, the need to write blogs and to read them, a question of sharing, of what can be shared – of shared interests, pursuits and experience? – As if the words of the blog were the general equivalent which establishes the value of all experience, which allows it to become measurable, commensurable. Or is it the impossibility of such an equivalent that is celebrated, not the language that would allow us to speak of something held in common, but the opposite: a language which attests to the dispersal of author and reader even as both appear to be gathered in the happiness of sharing their experiences?

A blog can be a shelter, a way of keeping out of the rain. When the rain passes, you go on your way. Or a blog is a record of one who has journeyed ahead of you, leaving messages in the manner of the wandering poets of old Japan (but I also think of the enigmatic traveller of Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth whom we never meet until his grave is discovered, the one who was always ahead and carved his name on the rocks). Or a blog can be a companion, the one who travels beside you, with you.

Common or uncommon to all these experiences: the unilateral gift of writing and reading, which is to say, the peculiar way in which the blog speaks its reader (you recognise the experience) and from far away (it comes from without, from the other side of the world) and the way, for its author, the words receive tributes from readers he does not know (how pleasant that there are such people). With, not alone – to write as you travel is not to travel alone. And to read as you shelter is to know that there are others who travel ahead of you, a long way ahead, perhaps, but travelling nonetheless. But in the end, to read, to write, is not to enjoy reciprocity or exchange. Words always come from afar, from the other side of the day or the night, which is to say, unexpectedly.

Suffering and Literature

Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering. (Kafka to Janouch)

That Kafka suffered is not in question; read the pages of the diaries. He suffers because he does not write, because he cannot find the time to write. How, then, to understand why writing too would entail suffering, why the release from suffering would imply suffering anew?

Kafka writes in his diaries:

I have never understood how it is possible for almost anyone who writes to objectify his sufferings in the very midst of suffering them; thus I, for example, in the midst of my unhappiness – my head, say, still on fire with unhappiness – sit down and write to someone: I am unhappy. Yes, I can even go beyond that and with the various flourishes I might have talent for, all of which seem to have nothing to do with my unhappiness, ring simple, or contrapuntal or a whole orchestration of changes on my theme. And it is not a lie, and it does not still my pain, it is simply a merciful surplus of strength at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being and plainly exhausted all my strength. But then what kind of strength is it? 

I have commented on these lines before. Here, I want to note the ‘merciful surplus’ in question does not merely bracket Kafka’s suffering as if he had entered, with literature, into a space which had no relationship with his ‘empirical’ self. Suffering is transmuted – but what has it become? It is as though the ‘merciful strength’ has generated another self: the agent who rings changes on the suffering it reports; the self who is creative, articulate and generative. Who is this other self? It is not simply the negation of the first, suffering self who wrote of his suffering. It is still bound to it, but in the manner of a surplus. The ‘poetic’ self (I am borrowing Corngold’s expression, and some of his argument) is a ‘surplus-self’ who is able to ring changes upon suffering.

Suffering becomes literature. Yet literature, too, is suffering. Kafka says to Janouch, ‘Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering’. But why this new suffering? Is it because the changes one must ring upon suffering cannot be sustained from now until eternity – because, soon, the writer will fall from the surplus of strength and become once more incapable of writing, left in the same suffering with which he began? It is the gaps of non-writing within writing that are frightening. The second suffering, the suffering of art, arises from the sense that the literary work must be endless if it is to prevent the return of the suffering from which the writer began.

Write to escape suffering. Suffer because you can never write enough. This aporia, if it sums up the relationship between Kafka and writing, is dependent on the fact that neither the empirical self nor the surplus self is ever satisfied with what has been written. Writing itself does not aleviate suffering; this is clear enough from the pages of Kafka’s diaries where one finds over and again remarks like ‘wrote nothing today’.

Contrast this with the ‘surplus of strength’ of which Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo to describe the state of mind he was in when he wrote The Birth of Tragedy? It becomes, this surplus, the strength to comprehend the affirmation of life. It is the ‘ultimate, most joyous, wantonly extravagant Yes to life’, the ‘highest’ and the ‘deepest’ insight.

But Kafka’s fictions do not change his dissatisfaction. He once wrote to a correspondent that he was made of literature. And it is true, when borne on the draft of a merciful surplus of strength he writes, he can write – ‘The Judgement’, after all, was written in the course of a single night. But when he is not? When that strength fails him? Kafka suffers because he can never hold onto literature.

Still, thinking again of Nietzsche, this does not mean the relationship to literature must always be thought in terms of suffering. Might one think the writing practice of, say, Helene Cixous as testament to a writing of joy which begins in joy and then takes strength in joy?

Farewell

to The Young Hegelian, one of the best blogs around, which has come to an end. The same author wrote the great No Cause For Concern. I’ve been deeply impressed by the mixture of perspicacious commentary and beautiful, precise writing at both blogs. Did he persuade me to read Hegel more carefully? Without question. Expect a tribute to follow at this blog one day or another.

A Merciful Surplus of Strength

I am quivering with excitement: Stanley Corngold’s new book on Kafka is here on my desk (I found it for half price online). Heavy, hard-backed, a brown dusk jacket with the picture of a flaming rolled up ball of paper printed beneath the title: Lambent Traces. Ah the pages are parchment coloured and the typeface is movingly clear (how unlike my own book, where there are too many words crammed onto the page)!

I begin to look through the notes and placing stars in their margins to mark books Corngold mentions that I might want to get hold of myself (David Shur’s The Way of Oblivion: how interesting!) Then I begin to read the preface: yes, everything’s right: Corngold seeks to defend Kafka as a writer against those for whom, he says, ‘his stories, like so many stomachs, can be pumped to disgorge contents that were merely ordinary’. Then a nice sentence: ‘My Kafa is an ecstatic’. And another: ‘This bliss, this feeling himself "at the boundary of the human", is connected to his writing …’

I set to work, making little pencil markings in the margins. But I fail; I’m tired, R.M. and I worked until late last night in the office; I’ve been busy all day. I’m not up to the task of the reading, and the pencil marks are the signs of a man losing hold of a book. Now the book is inert, beautiful, but away from me; I’ve failed it and I’ve failed reading. The afternoon is encroaching: through my office windows the vast sky, a whole grey cloud.

Dull panic (I don’t like empty time …) What should I do? I went to the gym yesterday which means I cannot go today. What shall I do? The manuscript needs work; chapter one, ‘A Merciful Surplus of Strength’ needs several large supplements, whole passages are to be excised and replaced, it’s a mess, sixteen thousand messy words.

But I have fallen below work and below everything. There is the only the pressure of the afternoon. Happily, R.M. is here and so are the jolly daffodils I bought this morning. And happily, too, I was able to mark this dead expanse of time here, to do combat against the infinite wearing away by passing through the detour of writing.

But what kind of writing? Only a post, after all – a post because I do not have the merciful strength, Kafka’s, to disappear into literature. Perhaps I only feel the ‘joy of the notebook’ (the joy of this blog) as Steve describes it (‘Moleskin Notebooks …’).

Weariness

It is often observed of Kafka’s The Castle that it is narrated exclusively from K.’s point of view. The novel was begun in the first person, Brod notes; it was only later in the manuscript Kafka switched from the first person ‘I’ to the third person ‘K.’ Deleted scenes, for example, one in which the villagers make fun of K. behind his back, attest to Kafka’s desire to maintain the perspective of the narrator close to that of K. We are always absolutely sure, as readers, of what K. is thinking. And what does he think? It is always a matter of coping with the course of events; his attention is always focused on his predicament.

It is a matter, for K., of working out the intentions of the denizens of the castle. What do they want with him? Can they clarify what his duties are as the new Land Surveyor? Can they reassure him that he even has this position? Was he right to think he had even been summoned to the village by the castle authorities? He seeks to confirm his station; he is a Vermesser, a surveyor, one who measures and delimits the world, and, as a commentator points out, one who presumes, sich vermessen, who causes a fuss because he will not accept his place.

When he arrives in the village, K. is confident, bold; but he is soon defeated by the distance of the castle itself (he tries to reach it on foot, but collapses, exhausted) and the inscrutability of the castle officials. K. is not the pilgrim on a steady way to his goal, but the weathervane, blown this way and then that, gaining confidence and then losing it again, hopeful and then resigned.

All along, K.’s pomposity is mocked by his assistants; their antics mimic the persistence of their master as it approaches hubris; but he, K., does not understand. His confidence, to which he will always return, withers only when K. is overwhelmed by weariness. We know, although the book was unfinished, that K himself was himself about to die. In the final lines, where K. listens to Gerstäcker’s dying mother, it is as though K. will die of his own weariness, as if that weariness itself were infinitely attenuated, that K. himself were stretched so thinly that there is nothing of him left. And it seems, in these final pages, that his defiance towards the castle and its officials has disappeared. His weariness is such that the castle can appear as what it is: co-extensive with the village, a ramshackle collection of huts, yet, for all that, repository of an expertise which will remain secret.

Joseph K. of The Trial is more defiant than The Castle’s K. At first, he believes his own trial is singular, separable from all others because he is innocent. His trial, he believes, may even become a test-case and he goes about the court believing the other accused believe him to be one of the judges or magistrates. Yet he too spins from assurance to unconfidence and he, like K., will fall victim to a weariness which brings him towards a kind of resignation: to his sense that the trial was his fate and he had to recognise its necessity.

Joseph K.’s death is not tragic; he dies ‘like a dog’; he ‘perishes’ rather than ‘dies’, as Heidegger would say, contrasting such annihilation from the death of resolute and authentic Dasein. He perishes; he does not die the great death in which he runs up against his own finitude. His is not an experience so much of the limit but of the limitlessness of that limit; his death, like a dog, does not allow him to bring himself up against what would be majestically human. Still he perishes, but even as he does so, it is as though he has to die for Kafka to bring a book to a close which would otherwise stretch for a million pages. He perishes, but The Trial, like The Castle, is unfinished and it is as though within its pages there were another story: the infinite account of K.’s own weariness, his perishing, a detour which cannot find its term in death.

Preparation

R.M. visits for a week to prepare for her viva. We are in my office and picnic on snacks bought in the surrounding city. Superb wensleydale cheese and caramelised carrot chutney sandwiches from Marks and Spencers (the same shop mentioned in Bernhard’s great novel Correction which I am finally finishing), prawn crackers in honour of the Chinese New Year. A pot of Tzatziki and old favourites: tubs of reduced fat tuna and sweetcorn and egg and onion. These are to be eaten with ricecakes, which I bulk order from Tescos and bring to the office in my rucksack. Every day, we buy a new gossip magazine to read; R.M. is reading Hello! as I type (yesterday Heat, the day before OK).

All this, of course, is a slight return of the Great Summer of Work last year: 14 hour sessions in the office, the whole day sprawling ahead of us, swathes of reading and writing to be done. Tonight, we have no social engagements, which makes the work day sprawl yet longer; there is time, therefore, to prepare oneself for the day: to assemble snacks, write a preparatory post (to get in the right frame of mind), tidy the desk …

Commemorate these moments of preparation, one almost exactly like another, forgotten when, later, you reckon how many hours you spent writing on this or that day, or in that week. ‘That was a productive time’; ‘that was an unproductive time, couldn’t write, was becalmed, nothing began …’

Style

A friend told me once of the difficulty of verifying which ascetic or holy person did what, since the ascetic in question would spawn admirers who would go so far as to take his or her name, not merely repeating the ascetic’s actions, but exacerbating them, performing feats that were yet more exacting, yet more extreme. Some of the Christian saints and desert fathers are composite figures – but isn’t this intruiging! To exist as a style rather than a person. Or, better still, to become a style, a certain style (imagine writing: I am a Gilles Deleuze, I am a Marguerite Duras) …

A Child Writes

Rereading Benjamin’s A Berlin Childhood Around 1900, I remembered what Deleuze insisted when questioned about his own childhood : ‘what’s interesting is to find the emotion of a child, not the child that one once was, but also the sense of being a child, any child whatsoever ("un enfant quelconque")’. Any child whatsoever: Deleuze insists on the formulation "I was a child’, noting ‘the indefinite article has an extreme richness’.

Borges quoted by Steve at In Writing: Everyone is defined forever in a single instant of their lives, a moment in which a man encounters his self for always. To encounter oneself – but what does one encounter? What would it mean to encounter oneself? Is it a question of a particular event, a particular revelation? Of a sign which would contain in minature the secret of a whole life? Or is it something different from a sign – an indication, a testimony of one, in me, who comes forward in the encounter. The one to whom the unknown opens before I grasp the unknown, to whom the event occurs before I can narrate that event. The one who maintains the unknowability of the unknown, who witnesses what cannot be synthesised in the articulation of identity. Who indicates the play of the self in a larger movement, in the great dance of folding and unfolding.

Encounter: Deleuze’s child, a child, is the one who comes forward to take your place (the one who reveals there was never a place to take …) A child belongs to the streaming from which the self coalesces and into which it disappears. Not, here, at the beginning and the end of a life, but ceaselessly, at every moment. Always it is a matter of living with the outside, of bending it in, making a place from which one lives (a place constantly displacing itself, which is displaced with respect to itself). All the while knowing that to enfold oneself is always to resist an unfolding – to stand against the vacancy which threatens to invade the place from which you strive to begin and rebegin. Invasion – but what invades? Perhaps a child is a way of naming what you become when you are claimed from without – when you are enfolded by what takes your place, revealing your place was taken.

A child: the one who, in me, outside of me, is undone in my place. A child – the one who relates in me not to what is known, narratable, but what is unknown. A Bracknell Childhood around 1977: is it a question of asking a child to write my autobiography? But a child is not the one who remembers; the child is forgetting itself …

Deleuze: A writer does not appeal directly to his private life […] does not dig through family archives, but rather remains a child of the world.

Let a child write – how? But it has already happened insofar in a kind of desire which opens across writing. Writing, no longer your writing, writes in your place even as you write. Writing with you, within you, which is also to say outside you, a child writes.

Time Pressure

I’ve seen your film four times in the last week. And I didn’t simply go to see it, but in order to spend just a few hours living a real life with real artists and real people…. Everything that torments me, everything I don’t have and that I long for, that makes me indignant, or sick, or suffocates me, everything that gives me a feeling of light or warmth, and by which I live, and everything that destroys me – it’s all there in your film, I see it as if in a mirror. For the first time ever a film has become something real for me, and that’s why I go to see it, I want to get right inside it, so that I can really be alive.

Tarkovsky recalls the work that went into editing Mirror, in which the structure of the film was altered and the sequence of the episodes changed. It would seem the film would never find its form, that too much was missing. And yet, one day, he writes,

the material came to life; the parts started to function reciprocally, as if linked by a bloodstream; and as that last despairing attempt was projected onto the screen, the film was born before our very eyes.

Somehow, the two hundred shots of Mirror came together. Tarkovsky writes of a ‘time pressure’, in which the scenes have to come together to preserve a consistency of time, in the same manner one joins water pipes of a different diameter. The criterion that guides editing is life, according to Tarkovsky – life as it is ‘constantly moving and changing’, allowing each person to ‘interpret and feel each separate moment in his own way’.

What is essential is that the audience experience a time that is uncoerced by the director; yet, as Tarkovsky writes:

There is still an apparent dichotomy: for the directors sense of time always amounts to a kind of coercion of the audience, as does his imposition of his inner world. The person watching either falls into your rhythm (your world), and becomes your ally, or else he does not, in which case no contact is made. And so some people become your ‘own’ and others remain strangers; and I think this is not only perfectly natural, but, alas, inevitable.

I am intrigued about the notion of taste at issue here: the idea that, somehow, the director’s experience of time would resonate with one’s own, to the extent that one is possessed, or, perhaps, dispossessed by the work. Better still – there is the notion that this play of possession and dispossession is at issue in every moment of our lives, and particular when we give ourselves to drifting or to idleness, or when our attention is captured for a moment by something that is mundane and surprising.

What is essential is to cross the bridge from the opening to the work to life. This is not an opposition. Perhaps the bridge leads into the work itself. It is never a question of the representation of the world in the film. The film, sculpted from time, resonates with the rebirth of the world. ‘In a word, the image is not a certain meaning, expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected as a drop of water. Only in a drop of water!’ A drop of water: an event, banal but world shaking, ordinary but extraordinary insofar, in a moment, it captures us and holds us still. A drop of water – the image is sufficient unto itself, but so too is the event. We live our lives at one time in terms of our desire to complete tasks, to finish projects, but at another – and in the same moment – in the fascination when we are unable, any longer, to be able, to assemble ourselves such that we are capable of anything at all.

‘Everything that torments me, everything I don’t have and that I long for, that makes me indignant, or sick, or suffocates me, everything that gives me a feeling of light or warmth, and by which I live, and everything that destroys me it’s all there in your film, I see it as if in a mirror.’ – Everything is in the film. But this is because the film answers to the movement within things as they give themselves to be experienced and as we give ourselves over to them. Everything is there because it attests to a kind of ‘push’ or pressure that inhabits things, that is their movement in time, their constancy, their flowering or their withering which escapes determination. This is what resonates in me as I watch the film; I am claimed not by director’s vision, or even his experience of time, as Tarkovsky suggests, but by time itself.

Mirror is not the film in which one recognises oneself, or recognises one’s childhood. I cannot contemplate Mirror – I am not the spectator; the work does not lay itself before me. Above all, it does not let me see myself. Alexei, the child of the film is fascinating because I am seized by the fascination that seizes him as he gazes into the mirror. It is then that he allows us, too, to gaze at the film as into the mirror in which we can no longer see ourselves. At that moment, we are no longer capable of seeing, of assuming a distance from what we see. We see the film with the blindspot which permits our sight – with the incapacity from which everything we are capable issues and to which it must return. Websites as rich and as beautiful as Nostalghia mean that none of us, now, need be alone in our fascination with this film. But we share nothing but our blindness.

The Empty Room

Tarkovsky is totally averse to symbolical or allegorical interepretations of his work. But there is a marvellous interview at Nostalghia.com where he speaks very candidly of Stalker.

Should I recall the plot of this extraordinary film? I tried to do so here. But to recall: Stalker leads two men he nicknames Writer and Professor through the Zone to reach the Room in which there is a golden ball which is said to grant the wishes of all who enter there. ‘Stalker’, we are to understand, is also a nickname: there was another Stalker, who was said to have been the greatest Stalker of them all, who was said to have entered the Room. He was the teacher of the present Stalker. One day, he returned from the Zone and found himself amazingly rich. Yet his brother had died in the Zone; the Master (as Stalker calls him) had led him to his death. The suggestion is that he found the golden ball and had had his wish granted: the death of his brother and countless riches. But then the Master hung himself; thereafter, he was known as Porcupine.

Who is Writer? A talented man who is burnt out. A popular writer who wants to enter the Room in order to recover his abilities, to find relief from the burden he is carrying. Later he worries that if he becomes a genius, he will stop writing, as everything he’ll write will be perfect. Writer then thinks about the story of the Master. Perhaps, he speculates, the Room grants you more than just the wishes you consciously select. Tarkovsky paraphrases Writer’s musings:

Perhaps they are true wishes pertaining to the inner world. If, let’s say, I wish to become rich then I’ll probably obtain not the riches but something more compatible with my nature, depth, the truth of my soul — for example poverty — which is closer to what my soul needs in fact.

What about Professor? He carries a bomb to blow up the Room since it is a place which will draw those who would wish for unlimited power and might endanger human life. Yet he gives up this plan – after all, those who set out for the Room desire only primitive things: money, fame, love. But he also comes to understand that the room offers something important: hope, longing, the ideal.

And what of Stalker? What is he looking for? Does he believe in the marvellous powers of the Room? Of the golden ball therein which will grant the wishes of the Writer and the Professor he has brought with him through the Zone? Tarkovsky:

Stalker does not enter the Room, that wouldn’t be proper, that is not his role. It would be against his principles. Also, if all this is indeed a fruit of his imagination then he does not enter because he knows no wishes are going to be granted there. For him it is important that the other two believe in the Room’s power and that they go inside. Stalker has a need to find people who believe in something in the world in which no one believes in anything.

Stalker is a man of faith, but faith in what? Perhaps he only has faith in faith – a faith that would retrieve faith from its disappearance from the world. Tarkovsky, speaking of Stalker:

He has a highly developed sense of his own worthlessness but at the same time he says to himself: why enter if nothing special happens there and most likely no wishes are granted? On the one hand he understands that wishes cannot be fulfilled and that they won’t be fulfilled. And on the other, above all, he is afraid to enter. His approach is full of superstitions and contradictions. That’s why Stalker is so depressed — nobody really believes in the Room’s existence.

But it’s not the Room’s existence which concerns him as a wish-fulfilling device. Tarkovsky:

The Zone is in some sense a result of Stalker’s imagination. Our line of reasoning was as follows: it is he who invented that place to bring people there and convince them about the truth of his creation […] I completely agree with the suggestion that it was Stalker who had created the Zone’s world in order to invent some sort of faith, a faith in that world’s existence. It was a working hypothesis which we tried to preserve during creation of that world. We even planned an ending variant in which the viewer would find out Stalker had invented it all and now he is heartbroken because people do not believe him.

I have said that Stalker is a nickname – that there are other Stalkers. This is certainly the case in the novel on which the film is based. But Tarkovsky transformed that novel when he filmed it. Now, we are to be unsure whether the Room itself is not just Stalker’s invention.

Writer completely questions [the Room’s existence]. He says: "It probably doesn’t exist" and he asks Professor: "Who told you this Room even existed?" The scientist points to Stalker. So he appears to be the sole witness. He is the only person who can testify to the existence of a Room with the power to grant wishes. He is the only one who believes. All the stories about the Room come from him — one could imagine he has invented it all.

I would like to reiterate something I said before. When he returns from the Zone, Stalker says to his wife of Professor and Writer: ‘they are my friends’. Friends, it would seem, because they entertained a kind of hope with him. That they joined him, for a while in a kind of hope for hope: this was their friendship. And is it in the hope of a kind of friendship that Tarkovsky made this film? Where does he lead us, Tarkovsky the Stalker? To the brink of a Room we know is empty. Who is there? God? Nothing? But we remain with Tarkovsky at the brink – there where, just beyond, hopes and ideals once burned.

I like Stalker the most. The is the best part of myself and at the same time the least real one. Writer — who is very close to me — is a man who has lost his way. But I think he will be able to resolve his situation in the spiritual sense.

Mortal Substitution

Antelme marching with others, led by the SS, through the woods. A column of 4000 silent men marching through silent trees. Then: shots: first, a deluge, then more isolated. The men do not turn. One of their number has been shot. The column moves ahead. In the silence they hear ‘the sound of solitary fear and nocturnal, diabolical terror’. Terror: but the column march, they can only march. What will happen? Each fears another 50 will die – then another 50; perhaps they will all be killed. Meanwhile, they must march and march until there is no more column for the SS to lead.

An Italian is summoned by the SS: ‘Du, komm heir!’. The SS man is looking for a man to kill; anyone will do. The victim blushes. He knows he has been selected by chance. He does not ask: ‘why me? Why not another?’; there are no criteria. None of the marchers is worth more or less than anyone else.
The column is silent. Each tries to ready himself to be chosen at random to die. Each is afraid for himself, but Antelme notes ‘we probably have never felt such solidarity with each other, never felt so replaceable by absolutely anybody at all’. Think of the one who stood next to the Italian. Hearing: ‘Du, komm heir!’ and seeing another go forward in his place, Antelme writes, he ‘must have felt half his body stripped naked’.

Nakedness, nudity, exposure: someone will die in your place, just as you might die in the place of another. It is the possibility of this mortal substitution which allows each to feel solidarity with the other.

Nothingness

Do not watch the liberation of Auschwitz on television, read. Read Levi, or, perhaps, Antelme’s The Human Race, a testimony of the author’s experiences in the work camps.

The narrator learns that K. is going to die; he’d been in the infirmary for a week. He looks for K. at the infirmary, but cannot find him, although he recognises a few of the patients as he passes a row of beds. Where is K.? he asks a nurse. ‘But you passed him. He’s over there’. Antelme must have passed right by K.’s bed. The nurse points out K.; Antelme goes across: here is a man with hollows instead of cheeks and expressionless eyes. Formerly, he had been lying down, now he had raised up his head on his elbows. Perhaps he is smiling. Now Antelme goes towards him, thinking this patient was looking at him. But where is K.?

‘I went over to the next bed and asked the guy lying on it, “where’s K?”’ He turned his head and with it motioned towards the person propped on his elbows’. Then the patient with the long nose and the smile was K. But this frightens Antelme: ‘I looked at the person who was K. I became afraid – afraid of myself – and I looked at the other faces, seeking reassurance. I recognised them clearly enough. I wasn’t wrong; I still knew who they were. The other person was still leaning on his elbows, head down, mouth halfway open’.

Where is K.? Antelme looks into the blue, unmoving eyes of this patient. Then he looks at the other patients, whom he recognises. Then Antelme addresses the unknown patient (the one who has taken the place of K.): ‘Hello, old man’. ‘There was no way I could make myself more visible. He kept that appearance of a smile on his face. I didn’t recognise anything’. Antelme moves away. ‘Still nothing but the drooping head and the half-opened mouth of nobody in particular. I left the infirmary’. In one K. had become unrecognisable. A double had substituted itself for him. True, the other patients knew who K. was – he hadn’t become nobody for everybody. But Antelme hadn’t been able to say: ‘This is K’.

K. was dying; he would die that night. Dying, K. was no longer the man Antelme knew. And he – Antelme – did he exist? ‘Because I no longer found the man I’d known, and because he didn’t recognise me, I’d had doubts about myself for a minute. It was to reassure myself that I was still me that I’d looked at the other guys as though to recover my breath’. The ‘stable faces’ of the others grant him a surety in his own existence. But K.? K. is no longer stable; even his death will not reassure Antelme. ‘[I]t would remain true that between the man I’d known and the dead K., whom we all know, this nothingness had existed’.

Nothingness. How should one understand this? From the last text Blanchot published, a tribute to Antelme:

Not recognising, in the infirmary, a companion he had come to see, who was still alive, he understood that even in life there is nothingness, an unfathomable emptiness against which we must defend ourselves even while being aware of its approach; we have to learn to live with this emptiness. We shall maintain our fullness, even in nothingness.

One day, you may no longer recognise the one who is close to you. One day, it will be someone like a dead man who stares back at you. Death, half-smiling, holding your stare. Horror: it is death in life that regards you and, looking, you know that you, too, will be claimed by the same oblivion and death will shine from your face, too. But perhaps the dying, the dead reveal only a kind of nudity, a simple ‘presence’ which may burn darkly in your place at any time, at any moment. Is this what Giacometti revealed in his sculptures which, for their differences, are also all exactly alike?

Common Presence

To reach a kind of writing where only writing writes. Without theme, without event. A limpid surface to reflect – what? Not a sky, but the absence of a sky. Not the starry night, but the night without stars. Aspiration: to reach, in writing, that great annihilation in which the world disappears. Anti-narcissism. But one tied, inevitably, to the traces I leave as I try to exit writing by means of writing.

‘It’s like looking in a mirror’, says R.M. of blogging, which she distrusts. What kind of mirror? I wonder to myself. The membrane between this world and another, like Cocteau’s Orphée? The many surfaces of Tarkovsky’s film in which one generation is permitted to see another? In which the young actress who plays his mother, wiping the mirror, sees the director’s mother, already aged? If the film itself is a kind of mirror, and this is as it seems from the letters Tarkovsky quotes in the first pages of Sculpting in Time, then it was not, as his cinematographer objected, too personal a project. That cinematographer left, to be replaced by another. And what happened? The most personal film was the one in which we all seemed to recognise something, if not ourselves, then – what? – a kind of edge along which each of us is exposed. A place in which sharing is in movement. Or a kind of substitution in which each of us finds ourselves reborn in the film.

The post I most want to write is called Common Presence. I have written another post under this heading, but am still unable to find the words I want. I know it concerns a kind of roundplay, a game of substitution in which each participant can take the place of any other. I know I want to present in terms of the circulation of a strange kind of currency – an anti-currency, if you like. I am thinking of that beautiful phrase of Heraclitus’s: ‘fire is an exchange for all goods’. The general equivalent is fire. The measure of all is fire. Heaven blazes. ‘Now come, fire’, writes Hölderlin in The Ister. A coin which destroys coins as it circulates. Which, in destroying, gives but does not give itself. Which buys us each the power to give.

Common Presence. How to find the words to evoke this secret circulation of all things?

‘… because we love you’

I would link to Shostakovich’s Testimony if it were a true record of his life. It looks, however, that it was largely faked by the journalist Solomon Volkov, who claimed Shostakovich dictated the volume to him. But they met only three times and Volkov has never granted anyone access to the Russian manuscript of the book, which has appeared only in translation. It’s still an interesting read; more interesting, however – though much less surprising – is the way it was taken up in the West. Published in 1979, in the last period of the Cold War, it was received as proof that Shostakovich had been, all along, a secret dissident. He was a capitalist all along! One of us! Richard Taruskin, however, argues that Shostakovich always retained a loyalty to Soviet Russia. A communist? ‘Communism is impossible’, Shostakovich once said. Yes, but for all that, still necessary …

Shostakovich was a star from the moment his First Symphony was performed in Berlin in 1928. He was twenty one years old; he had already received a commission from the state for a large scale choral-orchestral composition to make the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution (his Second Symphony). After composing incidental music for Mayakovskys’s The Bedbug, he became the most sought-after composer for Soviet theatre and film.

It was Lady Macbeth, Shostakovich’s second opera, which changed all that. Pravda contained an unsigned editorial called ‘Muddle Instead of Music’. It was 1936; the composer was twenty-nine years old; the opera had been a brilliant success for two years. The opera was a reinterpretation of Leskov’s story, whose central character was the embodiment of evil. She became, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth, class warrior of a kind: a woman exacting a just punishment. But Stalin was appalled at what he saw as graphic sex scenes and commanded, I think, the editorial in Pravda.

Shostakovich allowed his Fifth Symphony to be called ‘a Soviet artist’s creative reply to just criticism’. Taruskin claims there is a stylistic change in Shostakovich’s work in this period. Formerly, the composer’s style was satirical; it was reminiscent of the Weimar aesthetic of Neue Sachlichkeit, ‘New Objectivity’, embodied by the young Hindemith.

Its satire arose out of a play of incongruities – a rhetorical doubleness – that undermined eloquence and ‘seriosity’. The most primitive (and popular) examples were ‘wrong note’ pieces like the Polka from Shostakovich’s ballet Golden Age, in which dissonance, normally an expressive device, is used pervasively within a trivial dance genre where expressive dissonance is rarely, if ever, employed.

A dissonant Polka – here the normal association of consonance with ‘low’ art and dissonance with ‘high’ art is reversed! Shostakovich would often employ the lyogkii zhanr, the ‘light genre’ in his Symphonies and Concertos in this period. One finds the same in Lady Macbeth (but not, of course, in the ardour of the Second Symphony or the grim seriousness of the Fourth).

After the ‘Muddle’ editorial, Shostakovich adopts what Taruskin nicely calls a ‘heroic classicism’; his work is now organised around what musicologists call ‘topics’ which permeate rhythm, harmony, timbre and contour. Passages of music can now be identified as pastoral or as martial, as ecclesiatical or as scurrilous. He conforms to the dictates of the contemporary musicologist Boris Asafyev: the content of the music must be made as clear as possible. The same period sees the rise of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM), who advocate the production of marches and mass songs. In the same period, Shostakovich repudiates lyogkii zhanr.

Taruskin writes of Scheinberg’s study of irony, satire, parody and the grotesque in Shostakovich:

She astutely associates the watershed in Shostakovich’s career in 1936 with a shift in the nature of his ironic practice. Once a (mere) satirist, for whom irony was a means toward a debunking end (irony as stimulus in Kierkegaard’s terminology), the composer became, in the battered latter half of his career, an existential ironist for whom irony was a detached and melancholy worldview (irony as terminus).

Whence the suspicions of nihilism and hopelessness with which his work was dogged from 1936 onwards. I was troubled by Scheinberg’s book and had been meaning for a long time to write about it here. But Taruskin has shown exactly what its problems are:

Shostakovich’s doubleness, in her view, is entirely of his making. Her reluctance to acknowledge that irony is as much a way of reading as of writing is a dated prejudice that greatly limits the explanatory reach of her theory.

As much a way of reading as of writing? Taruskin makes an excellent case against those who would make Shostakovich into a saint or a hero. ‘Better let the contradictions stand’, he writes, and this is compelling. Otherwise, one might yield to the desire for an imaginary revenge against what became a terrible regime – supposing, far too quickly, that Shostakovich was a good capitalist like the rest of us. There are many interesting texts in the as yet untranslated Glinka archive which make Shostakovich a far more interesting figure.

How else might one understand the irony of Shostakovich’s last years? As ‘existential irony’ – which would seem to mean, in the context, a kind of global disgust with life? Would this give us the key to the Third String Quartet or to the Eighth Symphony? To the bravery of the Thirteenth Symphony, written to commemorate the victims of Soviet anti-semitism?

Nestyev says, in an interview collected in the same volume as the Taruskin article:

Shostakovich demonstrated in his music a knack for ‘combining what was uncombinable’, an approprch later to be described by Russian musicologists as ‘polystylistics’. In Russian music today, composers often combine ultramodern devices with old-fashioned ones, the complicated with the simple or even the hackneyed[….] He had no compunctions about using stridently grotesque combinations of style elements borrowed from the Baroque (Bach and Handel) with those borrowed from Romanticism (Mahler), sometimes also including elements from msuic of the sort you might hear on the streeet, including the most trite and commonplace.

Polystylistics! Doubtless this is why, according to Nestyev, Stalin unexpectedly phoned Shostakovich in 1949, asking him to travel to the United States as a delegate to the Congress for World Peace. Stalin said: ‘We have criticized you, but we criticized you because we love you.’

When Shostakovich’s autobiography Testimony appeared in the West in 1979, it was greeted with delight. The great Soviet composer an anti-communist! He was one of us – a secret dissident all along! But this is to fall into the same trap as Stalin with respect to the ‘polystylism’ of Shostakovich’s work. It is to say the same patronising because we love you which would ignore any aspect of the richness of his work which fails to conform to a particular model.

In a conversation with the theatre director V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Stalin expressed his opinion about Shostakovich: ‘He’s probably a very talented individual, but much too much in the “Meyerhold” mold’. Stalin, of course, was referring to the renowned Russian avant-garde theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was arrested by the NKVD [later renamed the KGB] in the late 1930s and shot as an “enemy of the people”.

Let me write far too quickly that Stalin’s strange ambivalence is the same as that of those who welcomed the publication of Testimony: on the one hand, like Meyerhold, the artist is always too avant-garde, too difficult, ahead of everyone. But then, on the other, it is always possible that the work can be made palatable, that it is explained such that it can become part of our culture, ending up as another monument in the imaginary museum (eliciting museum sickness). But let me say, too, that those who read Testimony with glee (he was one of us all along! a secret capitalist!) exhibit the same ambivalence: confronted by the work in its richness, its ‘polystylistics’, they interpret it only as a kind of protest, a cry to the ‘free world’. But this is already a reaction to the unbearable richness of the work.

Richness, polystylistics: do not account for this in terms of what the composer would or would not like to ‘express’ by means of the work. The work did not place itself in Shostakovich’s hands, but nor does it place itself in ours. Already, in the Weimar of ‘New Objectivity’, the old artistic ideals had crumbled: now ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture exist alongside one another. The claim that it was only after the Fifth Symphony that Shostakovich’s work organised itself around ‘topics’ is too quick – after all, the Second Symphony ‘To October – a symphonic dedication’ was already programmatic. Shostakovich, I think, was sincere in this dedication.

Those were heroic times! What came after was horrible, but it is necessary to keep memory of the Soviets, of communism in its youth, its fire. But back to Weimar (and one might as well say to Dada and Surrealism): the work of art in that period was aswirl, ready to link itself to anything even as it was ready to withhold itself and maintain its joyful turbulence. Joy: yes, that is the word. Joy that was mercilessly crushed by what was to come in Russia and Germany. But the joy of art as it shattered every horizon in which it could be enclosed.

Joy: and what survives of joy in the Fifteenth String Quartet? Or in the first movement of the Tenth Symphony? It is the joy of the work which has not been extinguished. That it still lives, the work – that it issues as what Kafka called the ‘merciful surplus’ from profound tragedy. In the years of persecution, Shostakovich never stopped writing. Works poured from him. But what was it that poured forth? Dissidence? Protest? No: the work, only the work, still aswirl. Irony as stimulus? As terminus? No – the joyful irony which springs from that extraordinary self-division of the work. It gives of itself, endlessly, but it also withholds itself in joyful indifference.

The Muses

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

The singer, of course, was Homer. But did he compose it? Poets, then, were singers; nothing was written; each performance of epic verse was unique. Accompanied by a lyre, the poet, the singer, would be permitted to improvise, to recast events. But at the outset of the performance, it was necessary to call upon divine assistance: the Muses were invoked.

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

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

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

The Muses were said to be daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. Some asked how, if this were the case, the poet could call upon the Muses as eyewitnesses of what happened before the birth of Zeus. Inventive poets gave another genealogy for the Muses, claiming they were born from Uranos and Gaia, gods from an earlier stage in the theogony. The Muses would have to come first of all, else how could a singer like Hesiod compose his epic? But then the theogony can only reach back to the Muses, recounting their birth and their progeny. Before them, darkness, the forgotten.

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

I think it was this: the gods, all-powerful, receive something over which they can exert no power. They learn once again of the wars of Troy and, with Hesiod’s Theogony, of their own birth. What else do they learn? That there is something in the song which escapes and threatens to destroy the gods themselves. Homer and Hesiod give way to a generation of philosophers who agree that the epic poets have already made the gods all too human. In place of the manifold gods of Hesiod and the Olympus of Homer, there is the burning logos of Heraclitus, the divine law, which he refuses to call Zeus.

The Hero

Who is the hero? He does not belong to the most ancient times – to a time populated by dwarves, ogres and witches, the time of magic and cave paintings, in which the community paints the beasts it will hunt (and rarer and stranger beasts too – think of the extraordinary creatures of Lascaux …) There is as yet a common horizon, this is a horizontal world, a world that has no sundered itself from the natural immensity, from the immanence of the natural realm. The hero appears by shattering this horizon – he is the transgressor, the one who tears up immanence.

To fight, to conquer – the hero lives in the glory of his acts, in the splendour of immediate action. It is possible to begin, to find a firmness from which to leap into the world, to accomplish deeds. But this presumes that another experience of the world, revealed in the most ancient tales, has disappeared. No more dwarfs and witches – now is the time for light, for a revelation which admits of no division. Essence and appearance are joined in the act; the name of the hero suffices only to name the most brilliant of heroic deeds.

But the hero’s name depends upon the song in which he is celebrated. After the feast, the bard comes forward to sing; in the song, the hero lives. Didn’t the heroes of the Wars of Homer’s poem know their fate? Hector says that before he dies he will accomplish something great ‘whereof even men yet to be born shall hear’. Agamemnon says ‘even men yet to be born shall hear’ of the shame of the Achaeans’ retreat from Troy. The heroes know their reward lies in posterity; their names will resound after they die. Thus, the hero owes his existence to the telling, the song, to the language in which his deeds are repeated. True, the hero is unique – he has a name, and a unique glory as the bearer of this name that is sung in the great hall. A uniqueness born of the splendour of an act that his name substantialises, and this is the miracle, the surprise of heroism: a name can attach itself to such great deeds.

A human being can be marvellous: this is what the epic rhapsody celebrates as it repeats the name of the hero, begining the tale again, over and again, embellishing it, transforming it even as it is yet the same tale. Sing of the Pandavas in the forest again! Sing the story of the Rama one more time! Tell us of Krishna’s deeds! It is true, Rama, Krishina, and the Pandava brothers name avatars, or men who can claim divine descent. Perhaps one should think of Heracles and Archilles instead – of Roland and Cid….

Still, the epic is a tale without beginning or end. An epic which must end as history begins (‘and then darkness fell over India …). The hero does not belong to history. His time is passed – who now is capable of a deed which flashes out through heaven and earth? Who can lend his acts to the memory of the epic? Yet the hero exists in the tale and this is the condition of his existence: he is alive in the retelling of the tale – alive in the presence he has for the listener in the great hall.

Some say the Trojan and Theban wars were caused by Zeus in order to end the Heroic Age. In the Odyssey, it already seems the Trojan wars already belong to another era. All, even Ulysses, are keen to hear songs of Troy. And isn’t it knowledge of Troy that the Sirens promise to bestow? It is already, with the Odyssey, a time for song. Soon, the hero’s name will be eclipsed by the name of the singer. The bard steps out of obscurity and anonymity to lay claim to Achilles.

Now the act belongs to the bard (the author). Literature begins. Does the singer become a hero in turn? Is it necessary, now, to write rather than act – or to act and then write, recording one’s exploits? Must one create one’s own legend? Eventually, the hero is replaced by the adventurer, the novel is on the horizon. It is a question, once again, of the horizontal, of the common horizon …