Breyten Breytenbach

Intimate Stranger

To Ms Reader

“The inside is just the otherside of the outside, but it’s also a different place altogether.”

A. NADER, Notes on Love

“Umlomo yisihlangu sokuzvikela”

(The mouth is the shield to protect oneself)

XHOSA SAYING

“Mimo, chitatel’, mimo!”

(Wrong, reader, wrong!)

VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Lips to Lips

PRE-WORD

the older you become the more silent you are

outside in morning sun

light over one shoulder

you read in the book

a knapsack for the night

the wisdom of all uncertainties

(oh, the showdown of the word!)

through heavens the pink hot-air balloon drifts

with tongue of stalking fire

on its way to mountains

you don’t hear

and later cicadas go murmur-murmur

to stitch and hem heat’s silences with shadows

the hunter’s fire-stick barks

in the hill of the fox

and the boar and the frog and the rabbit

so rapidly death jumps up

with mute cry

of life’s anguish flared in eyes

soon to fade

you cock an ear now

the world no longer revolves round

the long dance of life with wife

with child with choir of words

with old dog patiently watching the yard

until you are ripe enough to eat –

everything wonderful

white and merciful

to lose

listen, there’s a small bird somewhere

between pewit and quail

with duskfall it shoots

two thousand meters high

into the shuttered sky

to while and hood and wink

and wing away

the night on the wind

for its legs are too weak

to sleep on earth

and sometimes it never turns back

I don’t understand it either

tonight with moon against slope of darkness

a cold stone cheek

you look into the mirror appearances

of uncertain eternities

and see the sheet

a knapsack of day

the rictus of the old word-fool

and slip away in ashes of duration

and the dog’s noise of blackness

to lip-touch the nothing-eye stillness-lie

as pre-word prayer to whiteness

POETRY IS THE BREATH OF AWARENESS

“However much you feed a wolf, it always looks to the forest. We are all wolves in the dense forest of Eternity.” This was written by the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the man said softly as he stroked the silver fur of the animal crouched in his arms. The animal pricked up its ears, then strained to look back at the dark copse of trees where shadows moved as if alive. As if alive and waiting to move out into the open.

Listen, this process called poetry is an exercise in imagining memory, and then having that memory snare and cherish imagination. Yet, every poem is and will be a capsule of territory in the perpetual present tense, a vessel taking on the ever-changing colors of the sea.

Poetry is the breath of awareness and the breathing thereof. I even mean this literally, for underlying the flow and the fall of verses are ‘natural units’ of consciousness sculpted by rhythm, by recall, by movement reaching for the edges of meaning and of darkness. One could illustrate by averring that the poem is a membrane, rippling, thrumming; reminding us that we are breathing organisms continually translating the space around us, continually translating ourselves into spaces of the known and thus drawing circumferences around locations of the unknown. From this one could extrapolate that the practice and process of remembering/evoking/awakening events and our selves lead quite naturally to questioning the polarities of other and I, to writing (and un-writing) the self, and toward rewriting the world. The boat changes the water.

Poetry is also the wind of time and thus the movement and singing of being. An old poet friend of mine — now coming to the end of his life and cold to dying, the earth lurching under his unsteady tread as he hides his eyes behind tinted glasses to soften the glaring (maybe the gloating) look of Dog Death sniffing closer — told me the other day that whatever memory and understanding he has of himself, of the route and the roads traveled, of seas navigated, of big H history, he knows through the resonance of a clutch of poems.

“If we want to know what it felt like to be alive at any given moment in the long odyssey of the race, it is to poetry we must turn.” (Stanley Kunitz)

For when you hold a poem to your ear you hear the deep-sound, the movements we are part of, conveying not so much a literal meaning as an existential sense. It constitutes the spinal chord of remembering. And it reminds us that remembering is movement.

Yehuda Amichai once claimed that poetry was the last art form meant for the single human voice to communicate in a totally free fashion across boundaries of tongue and of time. Nothing could be more personal and nothing could be more selfless. It may be described as a Way of Telling (off) the Self. He might as well have added that it is also the first form, the most ancient chant of daybreak, fragile and indestructible. It conveys no power (except the non-power of freedom and free-fall); it normally doesn’t give access to privilege or to status. Alles van waarde is weerloos, the Dutch poet, Lucebert, wrote. “Everything of value is defenseless.” And the defenseless should be held cupped in the heart.

Over the ages contexts fade to a palimpsest, references become interpreted to an utter corruption of the original intention, the religion within which the poem lived like a fish in its ocean or bathtub of unsolicited understanding will have disappeared, the music to which it was set no longer exists — and yet this thing, this harmless but explosive mining metaphor and tool tracing the texture of living, this frail bark — the poem — comes to us down the ages in an instantly recognizable shape. As drunken boat. I am the beloved addressed by Li Bai in his Middle Kingdom lament all of these many centuries ago; the deep-sound comes to me through the mutation of a tongue of languages. The poem survives unadulterated because poetry partakes of the how it is to be alive, not the because or the therefore.

It is, always, a homage to all those alive at the time of reading it — written in the possible tense, not the past or the future imperfect, but the perpetual might-be: when it functions fully it will bring a tongue-exciting beauty and appear as effortless as water seeming in a well. And curiously, it is as always an epitaph, drenched and darkened by an inkling (and inking) of death as certain and as enlightening as dawn; it will be water smoothed by wind which came from nowhere, waiting to be drawn by Charon’s oar. And the voice will remain encapsulated in its form the way wind is born from nothing. The poem is crypt, or just a hollow in the ground, where the swaddled remains of rot-darkening flesh has long since perished but where the voice is kept alive. The poem is the phone booth of the ancestors.

Poem is process. Of course it is also a product: the budding of a moment in time defined by whatever environment and sensitivities hold sway when it comes into being. The poem is thing indeed — one should never underestimate its thing-ness. But then, I’d submit that thing is process. That is why I say it is written in the possible tense, because it is a take in progress, a visible and audible mouthing of the combat against death and nothingness, and a statement (or station) in becoming.

Can one be known, identified, pointed out as ‘poet’? The function, as old as rocks, is there for all to see. The poet dances with the void as partner. S/he is a shaman, a priest — if you’ll admit that priests fornicate, lie, pilfer, and can be hopelessly politically incorrect. Naturally, Reader-Poet, I cannot vouch for your priestly fornication, I have not smelled the hem of your dress, but I would wish that political incorrectness (maybe ‘insubordination’ is a closer term) — in other words, the rage to remain consciously and critically alive with all senses alert and true to the shifting light — would find in you a proud protagonist.

In Afrikaans the shaman would be sieketrooster, wondmeester, geneesheer — meaning ‘comforter of the sick’ and ‘master of wounds’ and ‘gentleman of healing’. The poet-shaman uses deep-sound as primeval exorcism to console and confirm the known but also to destroy certainties, perturbing particularly the comfort of moral make-believe. He will put up signs as inscrutable and ineffable and brave as rock paintings exposed to the glare (and the gloating?) of time’s wind. The poet makes manifest the magic in which we still live, even in a globalized, post-modernist world. We will always have with us the open-ended, the beyond and the before, the cruel and the knowing, the warmth of seeing-which-is-making, the deep breath of our mountains, our human way of becoming part of the stars when the bottom of the boat gives way, and then the reverberating nothingness and dark light of space that cannot be sounded.

I suggest that you have to let this fire of beauty run through you. What’s left is the ash of the poet’s craft in which all fire will be remembered embers to be recalled and read like runes and stones and bones still smoldering in the streets of wind and water, so beautiful and so bleak. These are the poet’s remains we hope to return to; that, and the grace of his continuing without certainties but with the writing ear ever alert to the profound echoes of human commerce. .

Now I pause to wonder what it would be like to be a poet in South Africa now, in that country where I no longer live, six years after Mandela triumphed and two years into the presidency of Baba Mbeki. The answer, I expect, may depend to an extent on the language used. But it is again becoming urgent to turn and look into the hungry eyes of the question. .

What I would have liked to detect would be a voice totally of its place and time but not ‘South African’ — neither in inflection nor pretension or excuse or even preoccupation — that is, not South African in the wishy-washy querulous and whimsical way we’ve come to expect and experience. I’d love to see clarity of line and depth of feeling and resilience and truculence, and a nearly reckless insistence upon the qualities of excellence. I’m looking for resistance to bullshit, to the sweet and simple fodder of feel-fine moral fat making all too easy distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ to the drone of slack triumphalism, to the worm of apocalyptic despair, to the insidious barbarism of mediocrity justified by the hocus of an ‘egalitarian’ ethic or other self-indulgent ‘post-colonial’ dirges, to the gentle art of forgetting the past, to the thundering silence of finding extenuating circumstances for our cowardice, to new hegemonies of taste and to new depths of lying and the ass-like adherence to bovine orthodoxies — be they of the so-called liberation variety. .

I’m listening, I’m listening. (Ah, what a fool I am!)

memory is a space:

slide away death’s lid

and lower yourself

to walk about

in landscapes of recollection,

the pulsating dimensions

of view and of breath

perhaps my eyes

will no longer be of the best,

colors be more brash,

distances more intimate,

and those birds

are they crows or bats?

is heaven of ceramic or fluff

or of flesh?

and that wind soundlessly

weeping through hollows and crowns –

how to return to the place

which I have always borne

like a grave rhythm under the skin?

could it be my imagination

or have I truly forgotten?

WATER WALKING

If I were to propose a course I’d say that the coming pages would not, properly speaking, be a discourse on poetics, but rather a few causeries around poems, approaching the edge of sanity (from whatever side) with a balance of curiosity and tactful distance, if not distaste. The less you know the more tactful and circumspect you ought to be. It would be neither the history of any particular period or tradition or mode, nor that of any given poet. The situation of the poem may be highlighted though. For there are many places of poetry: magic, mysticism, youth, the public forum, breath, history, memory, loss. . There’s also the place of diamond shining.

Of central concern will be the function or the workings. Poem is as poem does, and I think one paradoxically learns the ‘how’ of poetry long before understanding the ‘why’. Writing is a process of creating consciousness and thus the making of a self, because awareness is expressed through a vector, however abstract. The nature or intention of that ‘self’ is of secondary concern.

In so doing I’d want to look at some contradictory givens: the poem as disorderly and unlawful as ‘reality’; the poem predicated upon breaks in an attempt to encompass or imitate a whole; as stilled movement, or moving stillness. You see, the position of the poem may change but the problem is the same ever since breath became audible and visible incantation. Poem is a capsule of space and time; it is always finished — you can no less add to it than you can detract from it — yet never completed until such time as it has been consumed (consummated) by you, Reader. Sure, there will be as many original versions as there are readers, since each partaker uncovers her own reading; poem is self-enclosed in its thingness, and yet will always depend on the reader for final and total completion. The world is full of strangers. Finally, it is a simple equation playing with invisibles and unsayables as if these could be seen and said, and they are, as “consciousness running away through words” that can carry but not keep. The word becomes world, dense and explosive, but the sense — the location and the reach — depends on or is triggered by the between-words, all those other components and contingencies making (up) the verse: prosody, line, shape, texture, harmony, dissonance, silences, ruptures. The function of the poem is to fuck the words good and hard.

The practice of poetry — as opposed to the coming about of poem — may on the other hand be described as an idle sport framed by the indignities of time. Grown men do it so as to buy cigars; women new garters.

With the above in mind one would want to trace notions and mechanisms of consciousness as flickering in the writings of the Chinese ancients, Rimbaud, Lorca, Celan, Vallejo, Pound. ., and examine presence /absence and empty /full; of how poems are written in the possible tense.

Can we say that the object of writing poems is to create a microcosm “more true than Nature itself”? (Tsung Ping), in which case we are involved in the restitution of vital universal breath? Do we go about this by grasping the internal ‘lines’ of things (which we re-present), thus to fix the relations which they have to one another?

But these ‘force lines’ can only come into becoming (incanted to incarnation) on a background of emptiness (the Void). “Nothing belongs to the trait, […] not even its own ‘trace’. . The outline. . retraces only borderlines, intervals, a spacing grid with no possible appropriation.” (Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind)

Therefore, in poetry as in the universe: without the Void no circulation of breath and thus no shaping of opposites that, together, ensure harmony. And so one can say that harmony is not possible without movement.

“How do you know that my kind of voyaging doesn’t rejuvenate me in some obscure way?” Fernando Pessoa asks in “A Voyage I Never Made.” Or again, later, in the same text: “. . my salvation lay in interspaces of unconsciousness.”

Emptiness, expectation, resonance. . must be built into the verse — indeed, into the very word! Then, when writing arrives at the point of being self-evident, “without traces or footprints,” it will appear to be a natural emanation of the paper, which is itself Emptiness. This ‘invisible’ written, that which has come about on the paper, the ejaculated seed, the spilling of whiteness, will prolong and purify the ‘off-page’ or the ‘beyond-page.’ “Conscious of the White, containing the Black: the way to mystery” — this was said by Huang Pin-Hung in reference to painting.

In this context we’d then look at the nature of the poet, how writing is a means to inventing the self — even as that first person singular whom we sometimes meet and grimace at in the mirror. “This seeing eye sees itself blind.” (Derrida) We look at the (dangerous) ways in which the line defines, calls forth, confines the future. We try to observe the poet as shaman, healer, historian, magician, agent of transformation, chameleon. We encounter the poet as outlaw and as terrorist.

We move forward.

Only the Tao (tracing /uncovering /writing /walking the flow) can obviate or wipe out the Dharma (the Law, Teaching).

WRITING IS FISHING

Writing is fishing for memory in time. Viscous. Time black. Sometimes you see it flitting just below surface — memory — miming time. Memory takes on the blackness of time. Memory will be time surfacing. Use word as bait. Beat the water. Beat the weird beat of baited words. Boated. Wounds. The bleeding words like wounded boats on a black sea. Let the fleet wash up. The coast is the beginning of the sea’s wisdom. It comes with the territory.

Words have their own territory, they return home as in a song. The fish only discovers the water once it is removed from it. This land a memotory.

But not peaceful. Memory as trigger for territory and tongue. The mind is full of bloody pieces staked out by tongue. Is there room enough? Memory killing memory.

Vicious. Terrortory. Territory comes from terre just as memory flows from mère.

And the sea. Sea is the beginning of the metamorphosis of the coast.

Let slip. It will all come out in the red wash of remembering. Invent roominess. Invent, vent, wind. Wind winding up mind with bated words.

Mind is dream coming home. Coming to mind. Mindcoming. Mindcome all over page. Mind coming to mind, minding itself and mending, muttering matter.

Book the writing. Make of book a dormitory full of time water. A dreamotory.

Wisdom of vices, virgins and vixens. The bloated bumping of drowned bodies just below the purpose. Terrier smelling fox barking at porpoises populating the Middle World just beyond moon. Shitty sheet. Copulating corpses.

Just over the lip.

WRITE TO THE TRUTH!

Enough of that! Write to the truth! But writing is not truth. Or is it? Does it make any sense to put the two, writing and truth, in opposition? What is truth? I have never quite understood why there should be this quest for absolute truth. Surely we know that we will never ‘know’ fully? We live in the flame of the consumption of our ignorance. We know — we can experience — a beginning and an end, and yet know nothing of before or after. ‘Truth,’ for me, I’d equate with satisfaction, a deep experience of beauty, a physical and mental well-being.

This needs to be teased out some more. What is it that brings satisfaction? Is it the contentment of understanding or accepting that there’s nothing to understand? The peace that comes after a job well done? Why is it important that a job should be well done? Is this a cultural reflex? And why and how do I experience beauty? Was this taught to me? Are there certain forms and manifestations of beauty that will be experienced alike by all humans whatever their conditioning? Surely there must be a number of inherent characteristics, ‘presences’ that we are sensitive to, that will provoke similar reactions wherever we may be?

Harmony I’d say is one. Balance may be a clearer approach: the experience (and the acceptance) of coming and going, ups and downs, light and dark, cycles beyond good and bad. Shape may be one such satisfaction-giving ‘presence,’ because it helps me to situate myself and thus promote consciousness. Pattern too (and of course the breaks), because it reminds me that there is on-going, there is resonance — we sometimes incestuously confuse these with ‘sense.’ Texture must be another: the joy of the feel, the pleasure of experiencing the state of being alive.

Will that be ‘truth’ then — accepting (knowing) that you don’t understand, that you’re only part of an ongoing process, that there is no good or evil or reason, no origin and no finality, no final form and no definitive content, and then the superb pleasure of experiencing being?

Writing is neither an explanation nor an expiation of our condition. Should it try to convey ‘certainties’ it would be like weighing our food down with stones. Writing is an extrapolation of the reality of not-knowing — some would say an excommunication thereof! It is a reflection (and a refraction) of being, of becoming, of consuming, of a process. It is the preening of wings with which we will not fly. (This does not mean that we cannot fly. .) It constitutes the weaving of the skin of being which will carry the signs and the stigmata of our ‘truth’ of inconclusiveness.

We inscribe ourselves in a text in progress since all time. We pick up tunes and try to carry the rhythm. We chime with the ancestors. Kafka, in a letter to Max Brod: “Kleist breathes in me like an old pig’s bladder.” (Important then, not to be kicked around or to burst inadvertently.)

Maybe I prefer writing — the ongoing un-search with its innate impulse toward manifestation, and its own laws (due to its nature and origin and history), the knocking against the tomb’s walls — maybe I prefer this knocking about to a scratching around for truth because I sense that the latter will be final and fatal, a full stop, le point mort. Who says one has any choice in the matter? Perhaps one should just feign truth the way a politician would, and live as if you knew that life was worth living. Perhaps the fantasy (and the fancy) of who and what we think we are is just the fleshing out of the reality of what we already and since always have been. “Reality is frighteningly superior to all fiction. All you need is the genius to know how to interpret it” (Antonin Artaud). Still, part of the joy of writing beyond interpretation must surely be the possibility (or the illusion) of passing into ‘the other world’, of writing oneself into the extinction of reality.

In Poble Gran there’s a Museum of the Cinema, an interior consisting of mirrors and thus, curiously, without walls. The limitless enclosure. On a partition I saw this note: “The mirror reflects the human mask, it creates a new awareness of identity and leads to vanity, but it also provides a link between truth and appearance, awakening our desire for an unreal world.” From one room to another illusory space, as in a labyrinth, we come upon the dream-making machines, camera obscura or camera lucida, lenses and projections and animations that man invented to fool the illusion of reality. Deeper inside the museum there is an exhibition of texts and photos from a movie shot on the Costa Brava during the early fifties: Ava Gardner — luminous and tall and shapely and American — and opposite her Mario Cabré the poet bullfighter, his back braced and his hair oiled down, his eyes flashing the pride of the poor hidalgo. The way they looked at one another was a lark’s mirror neither of them could resist. In a glass case you can see the volume of poems he wrote for her. Frank Sinatra had to fly in to protect his relationship with Ms Gardner — a photo shows his fashionable wide pants, the florid tie, the cigarette dangling nonchalantly, the scowl on his face. Perhaps he lured her back ‘home’ to Hollywood with whisky and money and tinsel fame. She wouldn’t have lasted here. Her mother-in-law would have been dressed in black; sooner or later her lover would have been gored in a ring flooded and blinded by light, blood as a fountain of red carnations flowering from his groin.

I write the above on a blue day outside Poble Gran, making notes for the book I’m working on, to be called On The Art Of Being Intimate With Strangers. I’m sitting in front of the ancient stone-walled house of Can Ocells, still in the shade of the cloak of night. August 15th is always the moment of turning, around the Mediterranean the air becomes cooler. It will be as if everything comes to its senses after the folly and the heat of summer. Your ears still sing with the intensity of flames. Now there’s withdrawal, rethinking. Nights are getting longer. Plants — the laurel shrubs, some rosebushes — take heart and go into a second and more gentle blooming. The rosemary bush and the patch of mint are in flower: bees are busy and multi-hued butterflies are at work like fluttering handkerchiefs from scent to scent — goodbye, goodbye. Over the distant volcanic mountain range toward Banyoles and Olot a white cloud has unfurled its sails and a pink hot-air balloon (a mongolfière) drifts along on its flame. Swallows dart and swerve, sharply outlined against the sky. Other birds are twittering and chirruping their morning prayers. Yesterday I spent cutting back an overgrown climber, pulling up weeds and nettles, hacking at bramble bushes, training the honeysuckle, stacking cut branches for the winter. I watered the vines, the olive and the palms. The weeds will all grow back and the nurtured plants come to naught as if nothing had happened. Man’s hand is ineffectual. The pruning and shaping will have to be recommenced eternally. Some plants will die and others will survive our prolonged absence to suddenly spurt flowers and sweet odors.

As a friend of mine once said: “Those who live will see; the dead will have to peep through closed eyelids as if looking into the mirror.” They are twin brothers under the skin, breath and death. Why does it all make me feel so good?

WHAT IS IT ABOUT?

1. A young person writes (could it be you, Reader?), asking what poetry is for. “What is it about?”

How must I answer the question? A verse of Czeslaw Milosz rises to the surface:

The purpose of poetry is to remind us

how difficult it is to remain just one person,

for our house is always open,

there are no keys in the door

and invisible guests come in and out at will

Implicit in these lines is the argument that ‘one’ should try to remain one. I will counter that poetry is ‘about’ our multiplicity, our un-fixedness, our fluidity. About how we are modified by the ancestors and the ghosts, taken possession of by the invisible guests. Voices also need a house to sleep in.

But how to approach such a vast subject? Historically? Ideologically? Within its present permutations? Or perhaps, creatively? In the same way that a notion acquires meaning in the search for it, the reader will form the perception. I have no idea what you wish to hear. Besides, do you, as readers in the plural form also, have any cohesiveness? Can I say anything worthwhile to fit the listening where expectations and experiences diverge?

Let me try. This is what I’ll convey to her (to you):

First we must speak of the surroundings in which our exchanges take place, for all of us are subject to what may be called the ambient discourse, even if only in our angry rejection of the fuzziness of the lexicon. In this post-colonial world where we dwell, our cultural composition of many parts accentuates an excessive vagueness and nicey-niceness when we meet (for we all lean backward over our shadows in order to be ‘tolerant’ in respecting differences): perhaps that is why we have settled, publicly at least, for a corrupt, cliché-infested sociology-speak. Is it the ultimate expression of self-indulgence not to be ‘personal’? Or are we masking in this way our profound indifference to the other? The post-modernist discourse with its facile moral feel-good spin-off, has led to a wallowing in the troughs of the self. We think it is intellectually challenging to be fucking flies. (Thank God for the right to abort.)

Whoa, you say. Hold your horses and pigs before they trample our contract of decent intercourse at the trough! Who is this ‘we’ you’re passing, hoping that we won’t notice the unbuttoned flies?

I’ll tell you. For the purposes of my argument it is the public figure with the many mouths, the responsible and deeply concerned citizen who thinks he or she (still) has a contribution to make toward redrafting a better world, who may want to cling to stalwart concepts of economic and social justice, equal opportunities, decency, dignity and grace and elegance and humanism and responsibility as opposed to that ‘cutting-edge’ claptrap of a devalued vocabulary promoting lazy thinking and cynicism — and thus a morbid value system — in which we all have to live with awesome cool. You could say the ‘we’ is the rebellious multiple mouth with no correct mind-mindedness of its own. But it happens to be the me-we you addressed your question to.

Language, you see, is terribly important. It must be rectified incessantly. “All wisdom is rooted in learning to call things by the right name” (Confucius). Depriving people, however insidiously, of the possibility to use the fiery route between thought (or emotion) and expression, the mother tongue of texture and color, the unambiguously inhabited language which allows you to fight and fold the matter, perhaps even accede to the authentic echo of origin embedded in the word — is to draw them out onto the shallow terrain of hollow demagoguery, of convoluted qualifications and empty statements, of fly-fucking in other words, and ultimately to that alienation where the borrowed language of modernity becomes devalued.

2. “To idealize [here I’m quoting Martin Amis from a recent essay in The Guardian]: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart. When I dispraise, I am usually quoting clichés. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed values of freshness, energy and reverberation of voice.”

Sounds admirably pure. But is the language of creativeness really all that different from the learned porridge we serve in the academy? Well, yes and no. No, as every creative linguistic expression should obviously always be an inventive effort at using the known or the understood to propose more applicable or transforming concepts. Yes, since poetry is a precise and tactile tongue, even though it can be called ‘universal’ because it always speaks poetry, irrespective of the language it inhabits or hides in. “Poetry is my mother tongue.” (Yang Liang)

Visual art is a language with its own alphabet. Music is a language replete with intent and with meaning and yet without words. These and other forms of artistic expression are the primary or original languages. They differ from our everyday working verbal tools — philosophy, science, theology, sociology and politics — in that they’re not dependent on a consensus of lexical or contextual meaning. The languages of creativeness certainly also mean (they may even make sense and sentences), but the meaning is carried by the totality of means at their disposal: color, texture, echo, absence, shape, etc. They are both non-elusive and endlessly allusive. More than that, these languages are bound to forge new meanings, to transform perception in the real sense of the term. Ideally they don’t carry meaning but become as many meanings as there are minds. A poem is not just a statement or a lining or limping up of words; it is also the actualization of metamorphosis in process. You may say it is thought on its way to the unthinkable.

So, my first answer is: poetry is for writing straight, skinning the words so that they may shine as primary manifestations. Or, as second first answer: poetry is for writing over because we have been crooked out of a close communication / communion with the world in us and the world outside us, and we have to cheat our way back to paradise.

3. You say you are a beginner. How lucky you are! You don’t say, but I take this to imply that you have already indulged in verse, or else you wouldn’t be asking me these questions.

I’ll let you in on the secret everybody knows: Writing poetry is one of the most general forms of crying and communication that we humans attempt! We all write poetry at some point. Why? I think it is because we instinctively reach out for more powerful and perhaps more sincere ways of trying to access the essential (at that moment) or the unsayable, through words that are more than mere concepts; this is when we use a sharpened awareness of sound and rhythm and texture and spacing, of silences and omissions. . In other words, we attempt to capture what is beyond or around the words and their meanings by chiming with the ‘non-verbal’ components of communication.

In Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels said: “I became obsessed by the palpable edge of sound. The moment when language at last surrenders to what it’s describing: the subtlest differentials of light or temperature or sorrow. I’m a Kabbalist only in that I believe in the power of incantation. A poem is as neural as love; the rut of rhythm that veers the mind. . This hunger for sound is almost as sharp as desire, as if one could honor every inch of flesh in words; and so, suspend time. A word is at home in desire. No station of the heart is more full of solitude than desire which keeps the world poised, poisoned with beauty, whose only permanence is loss.”

My attempted explanation, young lady, should be expanded: in the light of the above quote I further believe that we experience the need to merge or identify with primal movement in gestures and rituals shared by all of us since the very beginning of time. For, although creativeness breaks new ground, eroding or extending consciousness, it is also always recalling the underlying earth (ageless and timeless) of deep-sound, exorcism, incantation, the primeval gestures and movements outlining the ebb and flow of awareness. And although this may recall the original shared memory, essentially of our mortality, the manifestation will not only be ‘public’ but also, private and idiosyncratic.

Let me reiterate: Creativeness is both intensely individual (the lines of recognition and fashioning produced by one hand) and profoundly universal. ‘Universal’ by using a means of expression (in this instance writing) and, to an extent, a field of references shared generally. But universal, as well, because the major themes according to which we live our lives have been common to the species since the first dim glimmer of consciousness: death (or non-being), the urge to go beyond and thus the need to project (imagination, creating utopias), the desire to suspend decomposition by remembering (and remembering is a forgetting hand), the paranoia which comes with the fall between understanding and not understanding, building the face of presentable survival and then ‘facing’ the mirror of the other. It would appear that we need this recognition and affirmation of our shared rhythms of birth, growth, love and loneliness, maturing, fall, death and decay. Following the lines of the known will liberate the hand; sometimes, decay comes before death and the hand will be devoured by the maggots of words.

From this unfinishing business of passing from thought to dust will flow, I think, ethics and social responsibility (but also the urge to destroy), the sense of family, the pursuit of power. Power is the abuse of pain in the forlorn hope of extinguishing it. Even if we only do so vicariously by entering writing through reading. The first act of poetry is always a read: deciphering the stars, observing stick-like people shuffling over a horizon of shifting mirages in Africa, plunging into the dark heart of love. . And as we move, so we repeat. You will have noticed how one keeps on unearthing the bone of a favorite poem — surely because we want to recreate the instant, that identification with the original moment of feeling, and not because of the information encapsulated. The dog of time would have gnawed white the bare meaning of words. You will also know by now that the open process or proposition of a poem is only completed once it has been taken possession of and integrated by the reader. Each poem is unique and never finished. And there are as many poems as there are moments of reading, as many moments awakening the puckered mind of beginning. You are the dog, the poem the bone.

We are all beginners at the ‘useless’ pastime of planting the sun and later digging up the bone (which we will then venerate as an ancestral thigh), however long some of us may have been tilling the field pretending to put together the riddle of memory through the artifacts we found. Stanley Kunitz talks about the endlessness of beginning in a poem called “The Round,” and he’s now ninety-six years old and lately the poet laureate of his country. It just never stops. Also, it doesn’t get any better than this.

Of course, to be a beginner is neither simple nor easy. I’m saying it is important to approach the act (or the suspension) of writing poetry as if for the first time, with awe and wonder, experiencing the words as familiar foreigners in the house: it is about time to get to know them better before they rob or rape you. (Or if you permit them to do so, at least have some pleasure in return.) Partly because no poem is ever a final cure or even curse — it is but ‘marking’ time.

Neste papel

pode teu sal

virar cinza;

(“On this paper / your salt could / turn to ashes;”)

João Cabral de Melo Neto in Psychology of Composition

Every beginner ought to be given, as you have surely received, the tools of the craft. Or else one must beg, borrow or steal them. (Better still to fashion one’s own. .) If you ask what poetry is ‘about,’ it means that you have already started learning alliteration and assonance and allegory (being ‘other-speak,’ as it means in Greek). You will perhaps have become familiar with the female or feline or ferocious forms of ballads and ballades and blank verse and the blues, of cantos and chants and concrete poems, of eclogues and elegies and epics and epigrams. In due course, as you go along, you will find your feet: the iambs and the trochees and the dactyls and the anapests and the spondees. You will move through found poems, free verse, odes and rengas and villanelles and pantoums and rap, ghazals and haikus and limericks and lyrics and madrigals — by means of metaphor (the ‘vehicle of transport’) and image and line and strophe and quatrain and stanza and rhythm and rhyme (ah, of many positions and several genders, even terza rima if that’s your perversion). You may end up as a dark well reflecting the stars in sonnets and sestinas. . Don’t be trampled by horses at the watering trough! Death starts at the feet.

Please don’t take my fumbled mumbling for gospel and don’t be put off by my oblique approach: as a beginner I too am only now starting to understand why I set out on this journey.

4. What is poetry, you ask? Put differently — what are its ambitions? No, we may not know once and for all what it is, but we can trace some of its characteristics in the movements. For it is of the essence of poetry to do, not just to be. True enough, it may well be in the nature of any language to be, fixing our approximations of meaning and serving as communication, but there too it must perpetually become in order to raise our desires — to allude, slide away, open spaces by looking for ambivalence and cracks, and thereby engender the images which will arise from these.

The psychiatrist, D.W. Winnicott remarked somewhere: “Artists are continually torn between the urgent need to communicate, and the still more urgent need not to be found.”

I’d suggest that poetry is a world (the world inside and outside us) shaped by breath. It is the breath of dreaming drawn from a hunger for awareness — the awareness that tells you that to be awake is also the result of dreaming expressed in the internal vibration of rhythm.

Poetry is a love. Of what? Of the discovery and the celebration of words, things, feelings, ideas, undigested memories, insights, other people, yourself, other selves, mystery, sense, eternity, other eternities, nonsense, nothingness, the whales and the foam and the shadow of grass on the mountain, the bones of the dog buried in the garden. Of love itself. And it is an engagement with all of the above. It is a love-act.

Poetry is a love of that art of making which will take you away from self-indulgence — for even as you fashion it, it takes on a life of its own. And although it is the freest of entanglements, capable of containing whatever you wish to put in it (provided you can make it fit), it does have form and tradition. Indeed, when the poem starts working its form will emerge to take possession of the shape. (“The very age and shape of time is form.”) This you have to recognize. You should curtsy or touch the brim of your hat. The paradox is that you imagine you are emptying the self on the page, and what you get is a mirror in which the triteness or relative (un)importance of your emotions is weighed. One finds that an endless fascination with self and the caressing of one’s own loneliness will not take you very far down the road of becoming other. Staking out the self is a lonely business; you end up finding your shadow a noisy stalker scaring the self into a fearful blathering. Nothing is as banal and common and goat-like as the self. It is true though, that this mirror of inconsequentiality can also, through recognition, constitute identification with larger attitudes and convictions and expectations; it will reflect the shadows and smoke of history’s movements even as these darken your eyes.

Yeats said love comes from the energy to create and the energy to create comes from love.

Forgive me if I repeat myself. I have already said that poetry is the process of transfiguring words back into the original breath, the beat of the world. It goes without saying that words will always retain their intrinsic or agreed-upon characteristics — those that they evoke in sound and texture (the ‘heart’ is after all not an organ, but in its own way, as word, it beats with resonance, origin, sound and taste) — and then, when alert to the power of context, placed in a field of tension, modified by proximity and juxtaposition and in pattern with other words, tested by distancing. . they become the moments in a metamorphosis provoked by image and metaphor, “lucid objects of language”, to open on to a “third dimension” beyond the references of word-meaning.

I’m suggesting that poetry can be a discipline of consciousness. It may furthermore embody an ethic of being. It can. It ought to. It can be a life-long mirroring meditation on life. It can be a companion light as you go toward and into the darker spaces of death to join the nocturnal tribes.

Perhaps I was just giving way to anger and frustration when I tried to pit the languages of creativeness against those of academia. It is more likely a case of ‘horses for courses.’ Nevertheless, my ranting might inadvertently have highlighted the specificity and autonomy of the discourses of creativeness. In a well-known essay called “The Redress of Poetry,” Seamus Heaney wrote: “Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world. To put it in W. B. Yeats’s terms, the will must not usurp the work of the imagination. And while this may seem something of a truism, it is nevertheless worth repeating in a. . context of politically approved themes, post-colonial backlash and ‘silence-breaking’ writing of all kinds. (—) Poetry is understandably pressed to give voice to much that has hitherto been denied expression in the ethnic, social, sexual and political life. Which is to say that its power as a mode of redress in the first sense — as agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices — is being appealed to constantly. But in discharging this function, poets are in danger of slighting another imperative, namely, to redress poetry, as poetry, to set it up as its own category, an eminence established and a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means. (—) Poetry, let us say, whether it belongs to an old political dispensation or aspires to express a new one, has to be a working model of inclusive consciousness.”

5. And what is poetry not? This too I have already said: it is not a way to power or riches or status or position. Not even at university. It is not an answer to loss and it cannot assuage the sorrows of the world. It will not bring down governments. It is not a blotting paper to life, sopping up the bloody ink to give back a fuzzy ‘truth’ all the more meaningful because now indistinct mirror writing. (Although, you should please keep in mind and in mouth the fact that what emanates as poetry is always inserted in the public domain. We have to live this duality. Italo Calvino wrote in a text called “Questionnaire, 1956”: “And I believe that the writer must keep open a discourse which in its implications cannot but be political as well. . Everything that forces us to give up a part of ourselves is negative.”)

I have learned (as a beginner) that one must read, read and read again. As well, that you must be reckless but patient. And if you want to be honest in your verse, if that is your thing, remember that honesty is to be open, unprejudiced and available — no matter if the digestion produces an enigmatic turd. Don’t let the dog in dogmatism and the Oedipal in the paranoid search for hidden meaning cloud your mind and stink up your nostrils. Freedom is a search, not a found fundamentalism. Beware of sloppiness, the dead word and the inflated simile. Protect yourself against easy sentiments (often no more than sentimentality), and especially from the blight of ‘correct’ moral and political postures. Don’t ever wave the flag: it is a shit-cloth meant for wiping the ass and polishing the easel; it is the rag in which you fold your dead flies. Eschew generally shared beliefs that are but ‘public opinion’ or ways to escape from the asperities of life and an intractable environment.

El Greco wrote as a note in the margin of someone else’s treatise: “Although it may seem that the masses have a vote in architecture and in music or rhetoric or painting, the fact is that this happens only when time and informed opinion have revealed the truth. And if once in a while popular taste is right, it is usually by accident and is not worth taking into account.”

Don’t be ‘nice.’ Don’t try to be clever. There is such a thing as creative intelligence, kneaded into the dough of your art. It has little to do with the acquired monkey cleverness of the person wanting to impress and please the powers that be. Wanting to be ‘relevant’ is piddling pomposity. Leave that to the politicians.

Please don’t imagine that poetry is a cool way of double-speak so as to hide meaning. Don’t make of the poem a cheap riddle. Don’t be a furrowed brow in quest of wisdom. Enough already! The poem is meaning. The poem is its own meaning. Poetic knowledge is born in the deep silence of phenomena not understood, thoughts unformulated and fate unknown of scientific knowledge. From that which cannot be explained comes poetry. (Or, by default, it will at least be the sextant allowing you to “keep watch over absent meaning,” as Maurice Blanchot said.)

(mirror note 1)

This is what I come across, leafing through Habitations of the Word of William H. Gass:

“Our oblivion has been seen to. . and unless we write as though the ear were our only page; unless upon the slopes of some reader’s understanding we send our thoughts to pasture like sheep let out to graze; unless we can jingle where we feed, sound ourselves and make our presence heard, unless. .

So hear me read me see me begin.

I begin. . don’t both of us begin? Yet as your eye sweeps over these lines — not like a wind, because not a limb bends or a letter trembles, but rather more simply — do you find me here in your lap like a robe? And even if this was an oration, and we were figures in front of one another. . holding up the same thought, it would still not be the first time I had uttered these sentences (though I seem to be making them up in the moment of speaking like fresh pies), for I was in another, distant, private place when I initially constructed them, and then I whispered them above the rattling of my typing. .; I tried to hear them above the indifferent whirring of their manufacture, as if my ear were yours, and held no such noise. . God knows what or where I am now — now as you read. Our oblivion has been seen to.”

READER, SWEET READER

Reader, sweet Reader — I know I ask much of you. You have been very patient with me, waiting for the meaning of my rambling (if any, if ever). But the longer I hold forth the closer you will come to me until, at last, you sigh in my arms.

This is my dearest desire. I start to sense you through the words, the way they bounce off you. You are still young and so beautiful, you have a curl to your lips, you sometimes look askance at me through your eyelashes. Dare I think that your heart thumps a little quicker as you turn the pages? How well you know me by now! (Or think you do.) At night I toss restlessly when I dream of you and in the morning there’s the odor of your sex on my pillow.

And yet, I do not want to tie you down; for us love will be in leaving, just as it is without end or design. For this story to move forward to closure there must be the two of us — like Huitzilopochtli, the white sun god as personification of day and summer and south and fire, and the black Tezcatlipoca, s/he of the set sun and of night and firmament and winter and north and water. Yes, eventually there will be parting.

The presence of both of us for now will ensure that the book remains in equilibrium. Where are you? I certainly need to continue talking to you, I search for you from day to night. Maybe I am looking for myself, maybe because I only exist in your mind. But I start to sense myself through the words, in the way your reading and looking bounce off me. This book will be our meeting ground and our shared existence. Of course, I’m making of it the bed in which we shall lie for me to whisper stories in your ear. I don’t want to be forward, but perhaps then you’ll turn and look at me and the sun will set in the water.

Will you? Without the one the other cannot exist. Today I heard about two twin ladies in their great old age, having lost both their husbands and the memory of orgasms and names, sitting together in a room warmed by an evening sun, and the one turning in utter uncertainty to the other to enquire plaintively: “Tell me, am I alive?”

WHERE IS MY LOVE

in a big room behind a glass wall

looking out above water

the color of green oblivion

how ferryboats waddle from quay

to fog-written islands in the bay

mirrored in pane the vague figure

of a naked man as he waits

now and then the veil blows away

and a bone city on distant mountain coast

flickers fleetingly

flits and flattens again

to an imagined memory

where is my love my love

on either side the soaring gray metropolis

of concrete and shine and neon thoughts

along streets the trees in a still

fire of fall

a few cars soundless and wet

sometimes a pedestrian with mouth of cold breath

a dog on a leash

a crow flutters by and later a gull

storied debates around the nature of being

and for what will man be held to account

the rush of voices

as the heart bears its shout

where is my love my love

on the edge of this continent

of forest and snow

by the end of the world

at the hem I say

of a dark ocean

where whalefish roam

to hollowly sound their despair

in waterlogged waiting rooms

if one were to let darkness flood

who would identify the corpse

who fold the shroud like a wing around absence

what name as solitary password

will be pinned to the waterlogged heart’s hollow

a crow flies by and later a gull

where is my love oh where is she now

Vancouver

WRITING SUMMER

The summer has been dense and crazy. More so than usual, and not easy to come to words with. Or is it just my imagination silting up as I grow older and less flexible? Am I having trouble imagining and therefore shaping the understandable? Maybe there is a point of saturation beyond which the digestion of impressions — through writing — becomes difficult.

Still, the past northern or European summer was for me an illustration of how problematical it is to live in this world with some grace and equilibrium, let alone a sense of enjoyment and satisfaction.

I’m referring, of course, to the outside story of our times. There was the flaring conflict in the Middle East with seemingly no resolution in sight, despair and brutality and thus brutalization on both sides, depression and destruction and death. There were the days of Genoa which ushered in a fore-grounding of the divide between the official powers of a new world order (the G8) and contestants of many different origins and directions — eco-warriors, anti-globalists, anti-capitalists, so-called illegal immigrants (“people without papers”), anarchists and idealists and revolutionaries. . And what does the confrontation and its repression say to us? Where is it leading to? What will come next? How does it affect our local environments? There was the ongoing painting out of wars and horrors and disasters in Africa, probably not by design but because that continent just doesn’t figure on the radar screens of the powerful who interpret and classify information, those people and instances who decide what will be ‘news’ and what relegated to the obscurity of ‘non-events.’ But the unnamable will flow over into other parts of the world: pateras bring their cargoes of espaldas mujadas over the Gibraltar Straits to the coast of Andalusia (already 10,000 clandestine migrants have been intercepted so far this year, hundreds coming from deeper down Africa die in the desert on their way to the Moroccan ports of embarkation and many more drown when their makeshift crafts capsize); desperate Afghans and Kurds and Pakistanis try to walk through the tunnel under the sea between France and Britain; boatloads of refugees are adrift off Australia and Europe and probably America too; and there’s a continuing tide of people trying to get into the United States through Mexico. Mount Etna erupted, spewing its antediluvian anger in brimstone and smoke. There were floods and wildfires and catastrophes elsewhere. And earthquakes. Nearly all of the European continent is still afflicted by the plagues of ‘mad cow’ and ‘foot-and-mouth’ diseases. Soon there will be ‘bird flu.’ And then we witnessed a kind of low spluttering of international concerns and justice — Milosevic brought to The Hague to stand trial, the beginning of a resolution to the civil war in Macedonia. There was the bizarre wipe-out of the royal household in Nepal. The destruction of the Buddhas in Afghanistan and, worse, the darkening plight of all women in that sad country. Chinese authorities carried out the executions of ‘criminals’ by the thousand, shooting them behind the ear and often removing right there in the fields of death the vital organs for transplantation. In the West too, we entered the slippery domain of stem cell research and fetus manipulation and eventual cloning — how Mengele must be laughing in his grave! We could observe the gradual shifting into hostile positions of America and China, and more specifically the perturbing unilateralist stance America was taking internationally — renouncing the Kyoto agreement on attempting to turn back the pollution of our shared planet, protecting its ‘right’ to make land-mines and chemical and bacterial poisons, wanting to scrap anti-nuclear proliferation treaties in order to put up missile shields, its near total inertia in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, continuing to bomb Saddam Hussein ineffectually, walking away from the Durban Conference against racism. .

How do we write such a summer? What is writing? Maybe life is the answer. Life happens (“while you’re crossing the street,” as the songwriter said).

I must not proceed too quickly. So much gets left behind, perhaps forever. Allow me to return. I remember a scene from Tarifa. 15,000 ‘illegals’ from Africa had been intercepted last year. Now on this bright summer morning 33 more had been caught in one roundup, the majority of them young women. When asked where they’re from, in several languages (each person crossing the Straits like the soul crossing River Styx to the other shore where nightingales sing, destroys her or his identity papers so as not to be returned to the country of origin), they smile very sweetly but do not answer. Then, as if hearkening some invisible signal, they all start singing a very sad song to the bewildered Guardia Civil. Was this a spontaneous recognition of identity? Are they appealing to a shared humanity? Or do they believe they can in this way ‘put a spell’ on the miscreant but powerful whites? Later, I visited the piece of land where the many who wash up drowned are buried. Ah, to die nameless and be hidden away in some no man’s land where the bones as are shadows! The gravestones are anonymous, bearing just a date and a serial number.

Still later, in a few years’ time, it will become nearly impossible to cross the Straits. Then thousands of desperate would-be emigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa will throw themselves on the barbed enclosures around the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco, try to scale these barriers using rudimentary ladders made in the forest, believing that if they could only make it onto Spanish soil they’d be allowed into Europe, and cut themselves to ribbons, and get shot. And later still tens of thousands will flock to Nouadhibou in Mauritania, having walked and hitched from Senegal and Mali and Guinea and Guinea-Bissau and Gambia and Sierra Leone and Nigeria, and pay a minimum of 150,000 ouguiyas each to a passeur (about 500 euros), they’ll live like animals under rudimentary shelters while waiting to embark on a crude cayuco for the Canary Islands. The embarkations will be smashed on reefs and treacherous shores or turn turtle on the high seas; the clandestine passengers will drown; when they wash up somewhere they will be put in the earth anonymously.

Writing remains the surfacing of a sense of being alive, of living and experiencing the only ‘world’ we know — which is life. Wanting to change it too. Being petrified, sometimes, by the cracks in the sidewalk and the slips and slopes of the mind. Frustrated by the restrictions and exhilarated by the challenges and the unforeseen discoveries of ‘surfacing.’ In that sense then, writing is always against death, obliteration, extinction and non-writing. But writing is also a way of situating yourself in the one world we inhabit.

In The Witness of Poetry, Milosz remarks: “Through the mass media poets of all languages receive information on what is occurring across the surface of the whole earth, on the tortures inflicted by man on man, on starvation, misery, humiliation. At one time when their knowledge of reality was limited to one village or district, poets had no such burden to bear. Is it surprising that they are always morally indignant, that they feel responsible, that no promise of the further triumphs of science and technology can veil these images of chaos and human folly? And when they try to visualize the near future, they find nothing there except the probability of economic crisis and war?”

I’m not suggesting for a moment that you ought to be writing about ‘the big issues.’ Your only authority (and authorship) lies after all in exercising and presenting consciousness located by the experiences and apprehensions of your own heart-mind. From the effort at extending consciousness — through invention, imagination, structure, detail, texture — a conscience about the implications and perhaps even the imperatives of being alive at a particular time among specific people may or may not flow. This exercise need not be universal to be effective; it can be personal, private and apparently intimate. It will, however, imply a choice of position and approach. The writer can, I think, through her words and images and characters and stories, transmit and translate many of the tensions we live with. The writer is giving voice to the inchoate and the incoherent, even when only in an idiosyncratic and partial way. That voice is not an antidote to violence and madness and idiocy, but it may help us turn around and see the terror as also the beauty.

Is a story a slice of life, a raw slab of meat on the counter still seeping blood that can be equated with words? Or is it a construct consisting of condensations and cadences, patterns and artifacts that will give it the verisimilitude and veneer of life and the slightly metallic odor of blood? Must the ‘imitation’ exercise choices of ellipses and repetitions, shifts and breaks, in order to be like the ‘original’? Isn’t awareness brought to the surface of self-telling already the establishment of a text? Is it at all possible for reflection to present itself other than as narrative? Do we not, the moment we stop to think about ‘life,’ fictionalize ourselves irredeemably? I suspect we do. In fact, I don’t imagine one can locate and identify ‘self’ except through narrating, and thus at least partly inventing it to the self. And as you mark, so you rub out. That is why I prefer to talk of the fiction of self.

On the other hand, can we propose that life is (only) a story? We tend to assume that a story is less determinate and more innocuous than life. Is this true? Robert Alter, in a discussion of Nabokov’s novel Invitation to a Beheading, saw the author’s crucial point as: “it is life rather than art alone that is inexhaustible, and that art’s ability to renew itself, to be infinitely various and captivating, finally depends on its necessary inadequacy in the face of the inexhaustible enigma of conscious life.” Of course, the story of life is larger than the story of words, but we can only appropriate the first (if such should be our goal) by means of the second, by endorsing their twinness. And look at how extensively we inflect our lives by the narrative structuring of our daily existence, exactly as we’d do in fiction through plotting, directing, anticipating character development!

The word-web we spin is as close to life as a hide — hide as in skin, but also as a place of dissimulation and protection. The process of apprehending life (imitating it, recreating it) through telling must surely correspond to the very profound human urge and need to visualize, imagine, project, direct or re-direct, disarm, obfuscate, empower, delete, escape, exorcize, destroy even.

To move and be moved. By re-living and re-inventing we hope to take the fear out of the unknown and break down the unacceptable.

Where do these deep impulses originate? It must be survival instinct, but also the visceral need to go beyond our limitations. Projecting ourselves beyond our limits is a survival strategy, even though we know it to be foolish and that there can be no prolongation or birth on the other side of demise. Those will remain unwritten pages. In the meantime, we understand ourselves in terms of what we want to be. Perhaps we know all things — and then the telling, the creation of beauty and the allaying of fears will be ways of dissimulating the fact that we have already come to terms with the mysterious absurdity of our mortality and /or the modalities of our immortality, which includes effacement and dissolution of the self.

Maybe, at heart, we are at ease with the untold! Are we just going through the motions, Reader? With such passion?

We measure the world — or what we can experience of it, that which we call ‘life’ — by the reach and limitations of ‘self,’ which is consciousness in process. Which is word. And when that self disappears, will life be one endlessly unfolding but invisible text with neither head nor tail? For now we know that the elements and mechanisms of life and writing (mirage and mirror) are alike: a patternmaking of understanding, recognizing that textures and colors as surfaces of awareness are needed to make reflexability tactile. Thus are we tied to living. We cannot let go (if such should be our intention) until and unless we know how inextricably we are tied to continuation by our senses, by the breath of shaping through structure and rhythm, by this long dialectical dance of completion / extinction.

So, the link (the sameness of process) between ‘story’ and ‘life’ (or fiction and fact if you prefer) is in the telling: self-telling, telling the time and the temperature, telling it on the mountain. The self as transit point of awareness is a tale. To recount a fact — or advance an opinion, as in an essay, and we mostly take our opinions to be facts, particularly when they figure in an essay! — is to be entering a process of fictionalization. Not only because the contours of ‘facts’ are delineated by our situation and approach, depending on who we are and from what culture, and not only because the hardest fact must still be put in its historical relativity and will then be seen to be evolving — but also, as I suggested earlier, because the tools of apprehension are means of creativity and thus of metamorphosis. The first location of a thought, as carried through the essay, for example, is after all language. Seeing is shaping.

This way of looking (defined by the modalities of perception and the traditions of understanding) will constitute its own presence. That is why I prefer to talk of the self of fiction. The discourse has a face that will start pulling faces. This may well be what we mean by ‘voice.’ And so, without blurring the demarcations any further, but in recognition of the many ways in which fact and fiction interact and temper one another, I wonder whether we shouldn’t modify the categorization to fictionality and factionation: ‘fictionality’ with its echoes of ‘finality’ and ‘rationality’ and even ‘nationality’; ‘factionation’ with its associations of ‘fascination’ and ‘imagination’? Thereby allowing fiction to be more fixed and fact to be more fluctuating or factitious, maybe facetious, to be the de facto nation (or station) of fictions?

What remains of the differences between fact and fiction? Certainly there’s much less of a contradiction between these two ‘opposites’ than we’re led to assume. For starters, we need to imagine (visualize, format, relate and situate) even the simplest fact in order to grasp it. Making sense necessitates a constant telling to self of the observed phenomena, and thereby it becomes a story. Furthermore, the fiction will establish a presence, leave an imprint, act as fact with its surroundings. It is nevertheless useful to keep the two poles alive so that we may, in the process of teasing out differences and incompatibilities and similitude and sameness, hone our skills of perception and interpretation.

Skill can be vitally important. And so is the ability to distinguish between ‘reality’ and ‘story’: operating on a human being or piloting a passenger aircraft, say — there is surely no room here for suggesting that “all observations and interpretations are equally truthful.” The example often used is of the hunter depending for a livelihood on his ability to correctly ‘read’ the prints of his prey, and thus of making distinctions between fancy and fabrication. It is a fact that he needs to know this so as to bring home to family and affiliates the fat and the meat. They may not care a fig for his flights of imagination! Still, his reading of the traces will be informed not only by acquired knowledge and discernment, but also by the invisibles, by imaginings. Even a deduction based upon experience will still have a measure of imagination as locking device. We imagine in order to understand. By writing we enter a dialogue between fact and its fictions.

We know now that writing will change us and therefore modify our relationship to the world. We also know that it will be like throwing stones in the river in an effort to get across. This is a singular journey. There are dangers along the way: the stones may turn into crocodiles or they may have dissolved, or we may be side-lined into dreaming of just going with the flow as we study the patterns of swirl and froth and (mirror) nothing more.

What we are hopefully going to learn about is how to find passages through our fear of writing/change. We’ll look at strategies for wording the spaces between I and You. In so doing we shall be studying, as we always must, in close and critical reading of our diverse and multifarious stories, looking at both sides of the avenues of reflection, the concrete exigencies of composing a text: theme and its formulation, the choices the writer makes when he creates characters, techniques of representation and angles of intervention, structuring and texturing, rhythm and rupture and repetition, the tension between thought and image, etc. Particularly the etceteras. It may even help us identify the stones we’ll be eating.

NEW YORK, 12 SEPTEMBER 2001

“Then it went dark. Real dark. Like snow.”

words of a survivor

will the hand endure moving over this paper

will any poem have enough weight

to leave a flight-line above the desolate landscape

ever enough face to lift against death’s dark silence

who will tell today

the huge anthill of people remains quiet

somber and shrill, bright and obscure

as if the brown effluvium of sputtering towers

sweeps still the skyline with a filthy flag

who will weep today

today images wail for voice behind the eyes

planes as bombs stuffed with shrapnel of soft bodies

then the fire inferno flame-flowers from skyscrapers

human flares like falling angels from the highest floor

down, down all along shimmering buildings of glass and steel

fluted in abandoned beauty and fluttering

weightless and willowy and flame-winged to streamline

fleeting reflections in the fugitive language of forgetting

the hell-hound of destruction has a red tongue of laughter

who will tell and who will count

gouged eyes do not understand the blue of sky

through a dismal and chilly nuclear winter

people stumble people shuffle

stumble-people shuffle-people worm-white-people

where lie the faces

old before their end or their wedding

grayed in ashes from head to toe

as if clothed in coats of the snowing knowing of ages

beneath rummage and debris rosy corpses move and mumble

and in East River confidential files and folders float

with shreds and feathers lacerated human meat

scorched confetti for the dog’s feast

who will tell tomorrow tomorrow

where are the faces

will the tongue still think

still pulse its dark lair

with flamed memory of bliss

will words still drink oblivion

will any poem some day ever carry sufficient weight

to leave the script of scraps recalling fall and forgetting

will death remain quivering in the paper

I SIT HERE

I sit here with bent shoulders, eyes smarting from looking at the screen as if searching for the truth. The screen is a lit funnel giving onto darkness. Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Writing this as a diary, slithery snake, knowing I will never be able to cover the days or foresee the nights. Writing is such a contradictory process.

Why do we do it? And why do we continue doing so, or have to do it over and over again? One knows there are many easier ways of drawing attention, of parading the self with its paradoxes and its pain. There are certainly more effective means of conveying information (though there seems to be ‘existential information’ embedded exclusively in the primordial need for making words). One also knows that the practice is not remunerative: given the effort and time consumed (for even at best one doesn’t produce more than two good pages a day) it is a singularly inept way for the human to make a living.

So then, why?

Ancient Chinese lore has it that writing evolved from magical signs, from runes and the ‘symbols’ or ‘depictions’ of the bones cast by diviners. It is said that on the day man started to codify the signs and their meanings by repeating them at will, and thus losing him / herself by beginning to trace the openings to the unknown, gods and demons wept because now there was no longer only Heaven and Earth. Man had manifested herself, interjected herself between reality and dream, and bared the cunt of creation. Now there was a go-between straddling the known and the unknowable and something autonomous (writing, conscious becoming) came into being with its own realness, if not ‘reality.’ A twin emerged. An intimate stranger.

Writing is a conscious attempt by the human to participate in his fate, that ‘story’ written from birth to death. Casting spells, exorcizing, whistling in the dark, inventing the textures and the structures of consciousness, keeping a backdoor open to memory, getting to know who and what we are, both reflecting what is and shaping the new. Memory is nothing but dead time, but death seeds the soil: from forgetting new shapes sprout. .

For writing is a means to transformation: using words and their interacting combinations — the meanings, the feel, the sounds and the shadows — to broaden our scope of apprehending and understanding ourselves and others, and in the process creating new spaces and references. Sometimes looking down into hell.

REMEMBERING IMAGINATION

We will of course continue our discussions — looking at structure, point of view, voice, texture, etc. — always with our identical twin lode stars of ‘truth’ and ‘invention’ or ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in sight; we shall track the fictionalization of experience and the infactuation with story. How reality is invaginated by imagination, and thus seeded by understanding. Let the holy spirit do its duty. I suggested that it is inevitable for truth to be turned into fiction from the very moment that you start writing (or telling), that it is innate to the act of telling (perhaps even to language itself) to transform what is told — because of the techniques we use in order to fix consciousness: structure (selecting, discarding, shaping) and texture (using sounds and images and rhythms to convey emotions or thoughts), and these take on a life of their own. Perception of ‘pure facts’ linked to ‘instant recall’ gets slotted away in memory for later use (we do not write as is immediately), and there the material will be selected, discarded and shaped. Information and experience structure memory; memory structures experience and information. Only fiction can unveil reality.

In April 1966 Vladimir Nabokov stated to Alfred Appel: “I would say that imagination is a form of memory. . An image depends on the power of association, and association is supplied and prompted by memory. When we speak of a vivid individual recollection we are paying a compliment not to our capacity of retention but to Mnemosyne’s mysterious foresight in having stored up this or that element which creative imagination may use when combining it with later recollections and inventions. In this sense, both memory and imagination are a negation of time.”

A fact remembered will be a fact imagined, and the ‘imagined’ fact preserved and culled from a selective memory may well be as close as we will ever get to the rubble of truthfulness. In other words, it will be fiction. Nabokov: “Bare facts do not exist in a state of nature, for they are never really quite bare. I tend more and more to regard the objective existence of all events as a form of impure imagination. Whatever the mind grasps, it does so with the assistance of creative fancy.”

This holds for any passage from the observed to the expressed. The human mind, in its desperate quest for understanding and procreating survival (perhaps understanding is survival) will ‘order’ perceptions and information, highlight some and repress that which is not useful to the purpose or may be too disturbing. Memory is a source, not a neutral receptacle. To put it in the terms of another writer, R. Scholes: poïesis is not about mimesis, but on the contrary about “all writing, all composition, (being) construction. We do not imitate the world, we construct versions of it.”

From this inadequacy to reflect the totality of our experiences and thus from the choices we make in transmission, and from the fact that verbal communication (particularly in its written expression) is a structuring of versions of the world, arises what we may call ‘false consciousness’ — ‘false’ in that it is neither complete nor totally instinctive. But this is not the same as ‘bad faith,’ where we bamboozle and lie to ourselves and to others whilst earnestly believing we are in the true!

To the extent that we can show a mind working at full stretch (is the mind not a mirror to the universe?), and if we can empathize sufficiently with the characters and objects and situations depicted so that the story has both a directed fluidity and an autonomy outside the teller, we will bring about a truthfulness apparently as full-fledged (and fulsome!) as ‘reality.’ The more the story lives up to its own laws and realness, the more it will be (like) life. Charles Olson, the Black Mountain poet, claimed: “Art is the only twin life has.”

I have suggested already that fiction will become true in the relating. First of all, because every creation exists and therefore it constitutes a fact, even if only on paper available to a limited number of eyes. Too, because anything written will take on a given authority. The present war between different parts of the world is a conflict of texts — more precisely, the unquestioned value ascribed to the Word in some cultures where it is fanatically believed that altering the text will be like defacing God and spitting on his tongue — so that, as somebody remarked, “this war will be won by words.” And then in any case, because you have to ground fiction — factor in a life-like unfolding and logic true to the story, where voice and form sound right, making it resemble a plausible reality — to make it work.

One can therefore say that the act of telling, however sober and close to the facts, is a process of invention, but also that the very symbols and signs we use (language) root the telling in ‘reality.’ Language is (a) reality; each word corresponding to a concept or an action is a fact, and the bringing together of three words or more inevitably engenders fiction because of the relations established. Words talk to one another whether you want it or not; they tell stories. Hear them at night! Maybe it is due to the unstoppable fictionalization coming to mouth in the very act of telling, the process of self-invention, that some cultures prefer to leave their gods nameless.

It would seem to be a primary human instinct to want to be reassured /reminded that one is. Memory invisibly threads the substance of reassurance, suggesting that there is continuation and accumulation. Let’s reduce it to a simple equation: I was therefore I am. Furthermore: to the extent that I remember who and where I was, I can situate and recognize this “I.” And if I can recognize it, it must have autonomous existence. “That is me in the photo.” (It is interesting that there can be no recognition of “I” as essence except through being or doing — being is doing.) By remembering we shape and modify and imagine the memory, we bring about continuity. Perhaps we fill in the blanks. We need continuity to make sense of our existence and to have a purpose.

To take it further: this need for reassurance of being — in the face of total unknowingness, the absolutely opaque mystery of ‘before’ and ‘after’ — is normally satisfied through interaction with the ‘other’ (mother, brother, fother, sother. . the family, the species, hence the importance of ‘grooming’), the mirror, or the non-I (things, events, ideas, the environment. .). Or it could be assuaged by an interaction with the imaginary: the projection of self, the memory of self. We fictionalize also to have somebody to speak to and this interlocutor could be an imagination or a memory of the self. This brings about a twinning. You will have ‘yourself’ as doppelgänger. Inside you there is this demanding reader as skeptical observer, a lost soul hungry with anger. You write to placate the fear and to impress the unbeliever. Ultimately to seduce yourself. (Of course the ‘other self,’ the sother, is infinitely more seductive than you are: attractive, intelligent, proud and strong, and panting to be seduced. .)

AN APOLOGY

Reader, I owe you an apology. “Why do you want to be a writer?” was of course a silly question, and in your answer I sensed that you were irked by it. After all, the mere fact of your being here with me in the writing should be an answer, not so?

This note is written a few days after the two towers of the World Trade Center were brought down — but I also want to jump into the future and refer now to an obituary of the poet, Czeslaw Milosz, who will die nearly exactly three years later, written by Leon Wieseltier. In that essay, to be published in The New York Times Book Review of September 12, 2004, Wieseltier will say of his dead friend: “All that he required for a justification of existence was a description of existence.” And then to quote the poet: “Description demands intense observation, so intense that the veil of everyday habit falls away and what we paid no attention to, because it struck us as so ordinary, is revealed as miraculous.”

It might have been more useful had I been more specific, like asking: “How do you want to be a writer?” Or: “Why do you want to be a writer?” (As opposed to just writing as you go along.) Or: “Why do you want to be a writer?” (As opposed to, let’s jump, a dancer like that nimble black guy in the park, or painter or architect, for example.) Even: “Why do you want to be a writer?” Like, why me? Is there something wrong with me?

My excuse? I wanted to get some sense of you. Since we are working together.

I thought the best way of getting to know you would be through your writing. (Writing is a recognizable gesture of conscious/unconscious expression, unique to each person.) Presumably, the assignment I gave you might have been about describing a cherry or discussing Dostoevsky’s soul — he’s one of the few authors who knowingly had one, as you’ll remember, and he guessed that it was an internal excretion brought about by repression and punishment, the unhealed wound of the break-off point between animal and human, causing him endless pain and discomfort, but it was also his easel to ecstasy. Didn’t he mount his soul? And didn’t it talk to him, conveying truths in donkey-talk that he didn’t understand?

I’m reminded of a beautiful tale — it may not be apposite here, or even appropriate, but so what? It is recounted in the Talmud, if I’m not mistaken. A rabbi bought a big carp in the market and is taking it home for dinner. The fish is still alive and to keep it fresh (or warm, or hidden from concupiscent eyes) the rabbi carries it under his coat with just the tail sticking out at the top. The thrashing fish slaps the rabbi in the face with its tail. This was inadvertent, one would like to think. The townspeople are outraged by the insult to their beloved spiritual leader. So a trial is organized on the spot and the verdict is that the culprit (the fish) must be drowned for his effrontery.

Part of writing consists of this self-reflective/reflexive meditation on writing — on the interaction between you and the materials you use, on the nature and the purpose of words (they are remarkably resilient mutants), on the role of imagination (only fiction can reveal reality), etc. As it should. Wieseltier will note that Milosz showed a preference for poems that “honored the object, not the subject.” And I was reminded of something Einstein is reputed to have said, along the lines of: Everything must be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. (He also said ‘time’ only exists so that everything does not happen all at once.) This too, I wanted to hear from you. Because, however general the relationship to words and images may be, each writer approaches the tools in an individual way. No two hands fit around the haft of the hammer in exactly the same fashion. Your tools are simple words.

Nevertheless, a further part of being a writer that I might have wanted you to respond to consists of asking what a writer does in this world of shit and smoke. Anything special? If I eschew concepts like ‘task’ or ‘duty’ or even ‘function,’ when the wings are resolutely folded, then there’s still an ongoing process of interaction between pen-pusher and word-sucker. How? To what purpose or effect? Does it change either? Is there an ethical component to what one produces? Do people need writing? Do societies need writers? I noticed that your answer to this implied query purposefully kept the sights low, in a somewhat self-deprecatory way. Was this to keep the expectations realistic, or does it denote a deflation of the writer’s ambition in the community?

Mary Catherine Bateson wrote in Composing a Life: “Why do you suppose you want to write, to tell stories? For others, of course, for fun, for glory, for the game and the endlessly fascinating puzzle of it, but also always to rewrite and restage your own inner dramas. Any writer who denies that aspect of her work is lying to herself. True works of art happen, I suspect, only when inner and outer come together. That’s an important reason they’re so rare.”

This still doesn’t add up to a motivation for being-with-word-in-the-world, but it is a beginning toward constituting a mode of reaction to life. (The mode, as I suggested earlier, may well reflect an affliction: it is not easy to dissimulate a live fish under your coat.)

You will keep on asking yourself these questions as you continue, and the answers you come up with will not be the same at different stages of your trajectory. Indeed, they will be shaped by the stage, the station and the situation your life finds itself in at the time of asking. In the article which Wieseltier is going to write in three years’ time he will report on how it was said at the time of Heine’s funeral that there would appear to have been two possible answers to the questions about the writer’s ‘purpose’ or ‘sense’ — that of Goethe who was “destined to work and to live,” and that of Heine whose way was “only to laugh and to die.” Wieseltier will then extol the virtues of his deceased friend Milosz who “had come to work and to laugh and to live and to die.”

In my own lifetime, with much living and little work, my tentative answers changed (at moments they were quite adamant!); even my questions were modified several times.

I wouldn’t be dogmatic about this if I were you: cometh the moment cometh the attitude, and perhaps the conviction. By which I don’t wish to convey that one should comply and bend with the prevailing wind. Rather, my own inclination is always to arc against whatever wind may be blowing out of some hellhole of history. I don’t like to be pushed. I also often get blown over. But we all live through cycles. Outside events shatter our certainties. Who will now think of herself, and thus of her work, exactly the way she did a bare month ago when those ugly towers still stabbed at the sky? Besides, what is the use of a mind if you can’t even change it?

Writing still is the existential game of amusing ourselves and others through the magic of inventing the known and hence the surprises of seeing it new; it is still also a process of digesting our lives, transforming perceptions, drawing the boundaries of our comfort and shaping the contours of our discomfort; it is, as ever, an ageless event and need, bigger and more mysterious than any of us, through which we may be crystallized. (Or cremated.)

Ultimately, the mode of apprehension may become a way of life defined by the culture or the time you come from. In ancient China, as I pointed out elsewhere, one had to be proficient at painting, poetry and calligraphy, with a smattering of music and philosophy added, in order to be a fully aware citizen — and then you were likely to be commandeered for political and administrative service unless you ran away to the monastery or the mountain. ‘Renaissance man’ could be another example of how artistic creativity became a life discipline. In this, perhaps, lies the difference between being ‘a writer’ and only writing. This need not imply that you play unnecessary roles or go dressed in obsolete attitudes as in a long dark coat for carrying fish around, but it does suggest that you make of writing your angle to life and the spectrum through which you translate your surroundings.

‘To be a writer’ could be good and it could be bad. What it ought to lead to is greater empathy and insight, the ability to quarter the meat of existence, deeper questioning, developing the practice of doubt without reifying it to a doctrine, more objectivity, finer compassion, perhaps some understanding of what it’s all about. That is, if you do not get mummified by the paint coming with the role and the personage; if you do not choke on the bad fish meat of words. But if you can hold on to the sheer magic of being a first-timer, the footlights blinding you, even when knowledgeable and cynical, you would have won the day and earned the night. And maybe have the pleasure of seeing the cheeky fish swim away in the water of oblivion.

(But I also need to go down on my knees before you, Reader. Please don’t ever indulge in writing just because you’ve been taught the craft as some do-it-yourself technique, like fishing, and now you have something momentous to convey to the world, like fish knowledge; and please don’t ever write just to mourn the fading in the water of Narcissus. I don’t want to hear of your achievements, prizes, grants, grunts and groans. Please don’t show your soul to me. Help us keep banality down by regularly, quietly and undramatically eliminating a creative-writing-course-produced or academy-embedded poet. Through drowning, if possible; as a boat put to water. . It’s a matter of moral hygiene, of conserving the merits of madness.)

LIFE WORK

I’m not certain about the extent to which life — the ‘ordinary’ or ‘living’ life one is leading — enters or impinges upon the work. (By ‘work’ I mean writing and painting, making films or plays, etc.: that activity of the mind and the hand which purports to metamorph matter into art and imagination into memory, that is, into the substance of consciousness-making.) Of course, your life can be the gray matter of your writing if that’s what you set out to reflect, and even when you don’t do so on purpose it is more than likely still seeping through.

In any event, what is ‘world’ and what ‘word’? Geoff Bennington, who advanced many insightful ideas about The New Modernism, wrote: “Referral is not referenced in the linguistic sense. Deconstruction does not have a place for language over here and a world over there to which it refers [my italics]. Elements in the language refer to one another for their identity, and refer to non-linguistic marks which refer in turn for their identity and difference. There is no essential difference between language and the world, the one as subject, the other as object. There are traces.” (But not to be different does not mean that one is the same. .)

One’s own experiences, emotions and relationships, constitute the most readily available material: however broadly and distantly one may imagine and project the stories, they still must come from the mind, and mind — I believe — is both the origin, the originator and the product of all the above, or at least of our translation and interpretation of those experiences. The mind is also the imitator of outside reality, the way the markings on a moth’s wings will imitate the eyes of a predator. We paint our faces to ward off homicidal spirits, we write to capture (and captivate) reality in a living mirror. This lies at the heart of what writers do. (By the way, I think a possible definition of ‘heart’ can be mind plus hand — in other words, mind being able to help itself, including imagining the mind and the I and killing it and ‘self’ if necessary; ‘heart’ is an agent of activity, it only exists when it is manifest, when it leaves traces, as in writing.)

(I’m not now talking about ‘me-ism’: the seemingly inexhaustible fascination with the self — its history and manifestations and consumation, its aches and joys and glories, its strangeness and the smells of its gases. We so often dote on ourselves as on long-lost children. Obviously, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with exploring the self; it is even a necessary point of departure for the knowledge of others — the philosopher Levinas claimed that the Subject is both the host and the hostage of the Other — but narcissism, the closed-in mirror, the capitalist and consumerist entitled self-referent, is very meager ground indeed upon which to engage the reader. The domestic ‘self’ is not exactly a transport toward more exciting insights: it eventually pales into insipid indifference through masturbation. Fish need water to breathe. Why get stuck in the known? The point is not to ignore the ‘self’ but to avoid becoming blinded. Buddha advised us to take care of the ‘body’ as of a person with nine wounds, with great care and compassion but without attachment.)

Writing is a necessary form/expression of schizophrenia: it implicates the observer and the doer. It demarcates the joints and ruptures between the ineffable fullness of being and the full autarchy — nearly an autism! — of a system that captures perception and expression within its own history and horizons. I don’t think one should attempt to ‘resolve’ the problem of duality or even imagine to ‘understand’ oneself better through creativity. Writing is not therapy. Forget the sloppy self-indulgence of ‘healing.’ If one has to be ‘sick’ and ‘healthy’ enough in order to write (naive and cynical, innocent and manipulative) the purpose is not to be cured but to write better. In other words, to transform better and more effectively in the work, into narration, the ambiguities and imperfections and impossibilities thrown up by the process.

(The ‘better’ and ‘more effectively’ I allude to here have to do with clarity of communication and affect. And by ‘clarity’ I don’t necessarily mean intelligibility: we all know by now that a shadow will be obscure, or that a flock of words can be without cognizable connotations, while still being ‘clear’ if there is texture, and still expressing ‘saying’ if it hangs together in contexture (conjecture/context).

“The higher he ascends/the darker is the wood;/it is the shadowy cloud/that clarified the night,/and so the one who understood/remains always unknowing/. . This knowledge by unknowing / is such a soaring force/that scholars argue long/but never leave the ground/. .” (St. John of the Cross, I Came Into the Unknown)

I sat down at the table

and the poem descended like a mantle

upon my shoulders. The rain was outside.

Out there was such a rush and rattle of rain

that no footsteps could be heard on the roof.

My window was open to the waterfall of sky

but I at bay in my moth-whispered cloak,

wrapped in wings with no memory of flying

The act of creativity is the beginning of unleashing metamorphosis, of putting something out there, of starting a process. We become aware of the implications of tangling with matter, of engaging others. In the ‘making of things’ (stories, poems) we shape identities, we forge links between aesthetics and ethics, we learn about the importance of an environment within which rhythms and resonance can take on meaning, we begin to understand about embellishing the existent, we reach out to the supposed non-existent, we bring new light to known objects. It makes it possible for us to imagine transitions and bring together the discrete in a plausible bounded mirage of purport. After all, the collection comes into being because of the collector. On condition that you remember the fact that your vision is only one possible way of seeing, collecting, and thus of making. One must not confuse the finger with the moon.

It was painting that made me aware of the thingness of creations, of the object’s ‘own language,’ with logic and internal references and therefore history, of the similarly explosive functions of metaphor and image, and that meaning will be secreted from the dialectical game of look-alike-alive components which, when drawing in the reader or onlooker or listener, provoke the illusion of movement and thus become process: rhythm, pattern, space, reference, harmony, dissonance, repetition, obliteration, the color underneath, texture, structure, jump, break, fuck-up. . (Thing as process and not as product, now that’s democracy for you as opposed to the fascism of making of everything a commodity!) For ultimately this: the process (and its mirror — poem, painting) is the matter of awareness for both maker and taker. Montaigne says: “Je ne peins pas l’être, je peins le passage.” I don’t paint the being, but the going.

Meaning (if we reduce it to its regular orotund ontogenesis, if we search only for its semantic delimitations) is the thin sop of communication, of ‘lay there and don’t move’; it is old Mister Unum, the One-God in whose name we fly into towers or drop bombs from dizzying heights; it is language as authoritarian structure. Monotheism as avatar of Meaning must by its essential and founding premise be jealous, totalitarian and intolerant. .

To be looking at the thing or the group of words though, as they get a move on, is to be aware of an image (a presence) behind the interacting combination and composition of components, a kind of hole in the mirror. It is to become two, onlooker and doer, because it is a self-confrontation. Since most of us do not have access to Chinese ideograms with their radicals (roots) and word-pictures where the dichotomy I’m referring to is both more evident and nullified, and as we no longer practice the arabesques and humming thinking and word-for-every-thing-and-dream and image-for-each-thought of oral traditions, we risk walking into the abstract, into the trap of the written word. As the convention of meaning became the supreme norm, the autonomous movements of the means to expression faded in the eye; we forgot that ‘meaning’ can only offer us the appearances of preserving perception and keeping awareness. Reality however (and the words impregnated by it), is different: it is rot, chewing gum, the implosion of singular meaning, the multiplication of loaves and fishes. Meaning made it impossible for us to sleep with truth, where we twin to be one fugacious orgasm.

Writing is an acquisition (of words, understanding, attitudes); ideally it is also a process of skinning and of dismantling (of attitudes, understanding, words). Because possessions can be inhibiting. To take leave of that which forms attachments leads to a progressive reduction of the I, and this will allow the mind to expand and become more vacuous. You need to be involved simultaneously with the walking and the final destination. That is why the Zen master Dōgen suggested we should live as if we were the Buddhas we already are: to sit and listen to the uninterrupted news of silence, part of the imageless action, and thus experience all-ness. And, because one is anyway part of it, to reach immobility within movement and play inside immobility. Our whole being should be as a lung: when breathing out you open and become emptied and the interior flows away and perishes so that you are at one with the totality, the void; when inhaling everything around you and outside you enters to become part of you. There are thus two movements, a duality, a come and a go — both integrated in the coming-and-going, so that there can be movement without movement, an un-danced dance, quietness without stopping. Everything/reality is a lung and you are being inhaled and exhaled.

It is truly a dance. You and your ultimate opponent, the shadow-self, move together like water in the wind. Keep the neck straight; it must be as if the crown of your head were attached to a navel string from heaven; and when you lift your hands, like this, feel then the wrists hoisted by threads: when you open your palms upward you must be holding twin birds, which can neither stay nor fly away. Relax the belly, particularly the hip joints, straighten your back without stiffening: the chi should circulate freely — when it is not hindered you will experience the palms of your hands becoming warm as if a mild breath blew against them, ruffling the birds’ feathers.

In the mind also, you become aware of space when it is suggested neither by the presence nor the absence of objects but by their ending (nirodha). A triangle is not circumscribed by three lines but by the three edges where triangularity breaks off.

Like this you are unconsciously concentrated, on your guard and ready without any rigidity. And like this too, in your writing, you will obtain the ‘relaxed tension’ of a flowing alertness. You will need it as you see your text taking body, in order not to take fear. Because you are finally your own enemy.

Writing through the ‘self,’ whoever she may be, need not be a limitation (and I have suggested elsewhere that one is always walking the road of “writing the self and rewriting the world” — that is, you invent the self and reshape the observed outside and other out there to some form of understanding). We are writing from nothingness, at best through ‘self’ as conduit of consciousness, while we all carry within us an infinity of characters and mutations and stories. The mind-hand combination — here I again equate ‘hand’ with ‘writing’ — operates like a mirror, which can be held up to all kinds of situations and to all four faces of the earth.

A beautiful woman I once knew (her name was Leah), who lived the pain of not writing her life, referred to this infinity of openings as “the nation of images.” (I bring her into this unmade text as into my soiled bed because movement knows no hierarchy.) You may be reticent about what to use, sensitive about impairing your relations with people close to you, of staining the sheets of paper, but for all practical purposes you are quite an unscrupulous magpie, filching whatever shiny object attracts the attention. What goes into the word-grinder is, as well, the writing itself — I mean, the fact (or fiction) of leading a writing life. As you use your senses to mediate the world in which you move, so you employ writing as a further sense — both to correlate the physical ones and to negotiate some kind of peace process between your fortified experiences or prejudices and the nascent ‘self’ as liberation movement.

Does exploring (and exploiting) the ‘coming-to-self’ as means and as material imply that one has only the ego to go by? No, I certainly don’t think so. Writing has enough of an ‘outside-ness’ to it — its own volition and laws, its desire to come about — for you not to be confined to fumbling (for) yourself in a self-reflecting darkroom. In any event, as I’m suggesting, the ego is but a repository for an ongoing process of coming to consciousness informed by both outside and inner events, a station hall for many selves and shouts, a shard of that big mirror we call life.

(mirror note 2)

Slowly now, what about the counter-arguments? Ernest Gellner wrote a book, Language and Solitude, in which he challenges many of the assumptions of Malinowski and particularly Wittgenstein on language. There’s a chapter, “The case of the disappearing self,” where he quotes David Hume: “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other. . I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. . I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” Kant as well (we’re told) held that there is nothing abiding except the “I,” which is simple solely because its representation has no content. . All of this preceded and influenced Wittgenstein, who wrote in his Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus: “If I write a book called The World As I Found It, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book.” And thus: “The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-coordinate with it.” Gellner then observes (and I quote snippets): “It is quite obvious what has happened. The empiricist insistence on refraining from trespass beyond the immediate data ends up by eliminating both an independent world and an independent, persisting self. Both dissolve and, moreover, flow into each other, and both disappear. The solitude is total. This surely was the problem, and not a solution, for Wittgenstein. He was not seeking a bolt hole from Kakania, he was looking for an escape from the bolt hole. . The one and only alternative theory of meaning, by contrast, promised and provided liberation from this solitude, and a kind of guaranteed gregariousness. Language as a mirror of reality led to loneliness; language as a cultural function led to community. . [But] Wittgenstein never pointed to any actual historically existing culture, such as Kakania. Examples continued to be conspicuous by their absence. . In the end, culture was treated as ultimate, as a kind of new ultimate visual field. So the solitude of the visual field (co-extensive with both self and world) is replaced by the solitude of culture. .”

WRITERS WANDER

Writers are the scattered or lost tribe of the world. They originated from one belief — even the tenets have since been lost — shared rituals and music, and the same place, which was an oasis port on the edge of dark badlands. Because of a history of roaming and Diaspora long, long ago, the individual members became stultified in separate languages and they took on as protective coloring the customs and the beliefs of the populations among whom they lived. They may have given their hearts to the people. But when they meet they recognize one another by a look in the eyes as if squinting against the sun, and by the clumsy gestures of hands. Their hands are uncertainly looking for sugar signs of sharedness. This they will see, maybe with mortification, remorse and shame: that they are indelibly marked by the same stubborn illusions, the same shortcomings making their fit into life an awkward one, the same yearning for projecting connectedness and for initiating transformation. As they go about their business of assessing ass (this is a slight sleight of hand, I’m sorry) they have the same timid desire for transgression. Speak not of transcendence, friend. They’re not sure how they relate to the other tribes of the Book, and perhaps they don’t really care. And they intermarried over generations and ages and seasons to the point of becoming mongrels and bastards mistaking themselves for dogs when they see a mirror. All they do know is that despite the distances of exile and fusion, they have the same phantom aches and passions that put them apart from the preoccupations of their environment to start with. Does the dog ever consider losing its dog-ness? This tribal condition can be isolated as a genetic weakness that one is unaware of but which will rise like a cloud of flies in your face the day you open a book — it is the first day it is the last day — to obscure your self as in a mirror or a sunken Atlantis. So this is where I belong? This is where I will become whole? Of course, it doesn’t work out that way. Once inside, you’re lost for good. And for bad. The consolation, friend, comes from recognizing your affinity with the other lost souls flailing around for purpose and for meaning. With those barking at the stars in the night. Ah, the pleasure comes from realizing that the sicker you get the better you will feel; the more isolated and alienated you are the more you are tied to others of your kind.

THE ASHES AND US

it is the tree coolness by day

like a robe of grace

draped around the trunk

it is the fire by night

burning holes in the dark

it is where sun and moon perish

and the answerableness

of identity

is weighed slaked shifted

to all evil things worded away

not-us is the fulcrum of rancor

in squatting together for solace

memory is leisurely fumbled

folded fashioned

measure for measure

and fitted to words

do we know who we are

one by one

for you and one

for me the blood and the clay

the rememberer’s song

but when the tree is chopped down

so that sun burns a stain in the eye

and fire goes to ashes

to a scorched blot of absence

we are strewn to four winds

do I not know who I am

wandering through the flame-fed day

and night’s shivering articulations

looking for you as if for mirror

NIETZSCHE’S HORSE

I have been mulling over in my perambulating or peregrinating (or percolating) thoughts the notion of ‘the function of writing.’ In the light of the September 11 parting of the waters and the ensuing war. Note: not necessarily ‘the role of the writer,’ for that chestnut has for some time already been a horse drowned in many a shallow ford (in a manner of speaking); and no wonder the beast expired screaming and frothing at the bit, because numerous self-aggrandizing scoundrels, standing in the stirrups to look tall, had been flogging it to death. In my mind and memory I try to avoid the trap. Nietzsche, it is told, finally lost the remnants of his clear mind when he saw a horse being whipped in the street, and he went up to it and threw his arms around its neck and wept. But I’m not Nietzsche. And then, if I wish to hold to my tenet that “writing is an awareness-enhancing process,” I have to engage the question of how the above events affect our writing. And what our consciousness implies.

How are we all dealing with the aftershocks of incomprehensible death from the skies torching the skittles of our Western vanity? (Incomprehensible because carried out by humans like us.) Are we more or less alive than before? Has it modified our concerns? Did it change our writing? Is there any other perceptible smell except for the whiffs of decomposing flesh? Do revulsion and sadness and anguished anger smell? Rather — did only the flesh perish (and with it our glittering conceit of invulnerability, the ostensibly endless triumph of human ambition and ingenuity tumbling in a cloud of gray glory), or did some conceptions and values also fall away? How do we come to terms with naked terror? You were too shy or intimidated to talk back at me, other than saying you perhaps sleep less soundly and are more skittish. I respect your timidity, or possibly it is reserve, but at the same time I have to insist that you are a writer, that all our discussions around technique (arc, voice, tense, sense, angle and character) will be hot air unless we also think about how this activity fits in with larger social and ethical concerns. (I might as well say existential — you have been generous and patient enough to listen to me claiming that words are the original breath of awareness, and not just hot air.)

And how do we handle the spectacle of seeing the world’s only super-power using the awesome might of its air superiority to attack forces which, give or take a few caves and anti-aircraft artillery, can be compared to the New York Police Department? How do we come to terms with naked terror?

Talking about caves. . If it is true that the US and its allies occupy the overground it also implies that there is a vast underground out there. Portions of the population right here in America belong to this ‘underground.’ At least that is where they operate, even when they don’t know it. For it is not true that the word is too weak or insignificant or jaded to reflect the enormity of what happened, nor that it cannot digest and ultimately regurgitate the implications of what’s going on now. We will be producing notes from the underground, as has always happened on these occasions, and they will consist partly of the personal and partly of the public because this is the way we are and this is the duality in which writing always presents itself.

Take it further. There is an international conflict of interests. (Nobody is talking very much about the geo-political economic interests underpinning the conflict where vested multinational corporate privileges, the ‘right’ to strategic resources, are at stake.) Mr. Bush feigns genuine perplexity when he querulously asks why America is so much hated out there; to suggest that it is a misunderstanding “because I know how good we are” is either a fable or a fib. Same glib fish. He should consult his colleagues and his father. The world is a bitter and a hungry place for most people. It is also very angry. The rulers are seen to be the USA and its Northern allies (the other ex-colonial powers) and the gentlemen’s club of corrupt manikin regimes bolstered and fattened to fatuousness by these vested interests. Slowly an international ‘underclass’ is filling in the dots between their condition and their situation. Of course, it is silly to suggest that the dichotomy is simply a black-and-white one — peasants in Africa are not at war for the same reasons as those in Asia or Latin America and among the ranks of the ‘underclass’ you will find many bourgeois intellectuals. A well-off filmmaker like Jean-Luc Goddard is as fiercely angry about globalization squeezing his works out of the arena of public awareness and ruining his food and his certainties, and his colleague Wim Wenders is as anguished by the deceptions of the American dream he idolized and tried to emulate, as the Senegalese groundnut farmer obliged to buy his genetically modified grains from an American multinational company will be. And it is true, as well, that much of the humiliation is fed and compounded by the sight of unattainable consumer society products being dangled on TV screens worldwide (the way flashers expose their danglers), creating for the poor viewer the ambivalence of wanting to imitate as well as to vomit, and leading to the self-disgust which breeds fanaticism. We gag on this factitious Western paradise shoved down our throats. But this is also a tragedy, because our Manichean vision of Babylon is based on ignorance.

The world would benefit from knowing more about the diverse textures of American life, the dissidence and the solidarity and the tenderness, and the fears of many ordinary wonderful cussed human beings. And the fact that it will be the poor and the struggling and the half-alienated, including many immigrant would-be Americans, who are going to pay with their lives for the greed and the folly of the cowardly and corrupt masters of war. The world ought to be introduced to America, and vice versa, but not through the good offices of the present administration, because the only Americans they want us to meet are the interrogators and the spooks and presumably the oil executives.

Maybe we can then together dispatch Unum One-God, be He called Word or Profit.

And live happily ever after? The states screwed us. I mean, the construct of ‘state.’ After all, injustice originated with the protection of the privileges and the property of the powerful few (king, church, pure revolution — all ‘anointed’ by what could be termed the One-God), and it still does. In most parts of the world State has become a thing, an organism conflating its interests and prerogatives with those of the ‘country’ or the ‘nation’ or the ‘people.’ If however, you believe with me that (wo)man naturally strives for freedom, you will also agree that (s)he will aspire toward being a ‘free agent.’ And that you cannot be a writer except as free agent. Which does not mean that you do not have the same responsibilities as everybody else. Only that this is it, this is your charge and responsibility to society, as also to time and place and history: free agency. It is only ‘natural’ that the State should wish jealously to control perceptions of what it is doing, and why — telling us that now is the time to sacrifice some ‘individuality’ (indivi-duality) for the sake of the common weal and purpose draped in the patriotism of flag and anthem. ‘Superior interests’ always do, and patriotism in an environment where so many people have made a basic commitment to trying to be American is a potent prescription for making parrots of the population.

So it is going to be a tough ride for the searching spirit: free agency will be curtailed, accused of being a wanking cop-out at best. Or betrayal. But believe me: to compromise your right to be wrong is to irrevocably blunt your writing tools. Honesty in trusting your doubts and burrowing for the pain is not a value, it is a tool you cannot do without.

I repeat what I said before, that consciousness is ultimately a personal discovery, but it is also partly at least communal belonging. The word may be a tamed and color-crafted scandaroon, yet you ultimately have to let it fly so that other eyes may follow the whirring in the sky. Events like September 11 and the ensuing war (or blind man’s buff) bring home to us the challenges of our craft. We are lucky to have had this catalyst to shake our values, sharpen our perceptions, reshape our priorities, remind us of our inadequacies, reaffirm our conviction that the word — fashioned and used with patience, humility, grace, perseverance and dignity, and with the awareness of its discouraging obduracy — can reach out to mirror the terror and the complexities of reality.

(mirror note 3)

Talking about caves. . Chuck Wachtel, to whom I show the above entry, reminds me that there is another ‘cave’: resistance from within against the dumbing down of the public discourse, the apparent obtuseness of this (his) country’s foreign policies, the manipulation of sentimentality and fears kept vivid by ignorance. More to the point: there has always been resistance from writers. Maybe from shamans painting the animals and the trances on the walls of the cave. I must agree. (And admit that it may be hurtful not to point out the existence of these ‘counter-voices’ more consistently.) In class we looked at a section of Kenneth Patchen’s Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer. The man had been shamefully forgotten, and with him the struggles of his time. In preparing for the session I came across an essay written by Henry Miller about Patchen, maybe as an introduction to a book: “Patchen: Man of Anger and Light.” Miller found Patchen a powerful, sensitive being who moved on velvet pads. “A sort of sincere assassin. . He is American through and through, and Americans, despite their talkiness, are fundamentally silent creatures. They talk in order to conceal their innate reticence. . It’s always because we love that we are rebellious; it takes a great deal of love to care a damn one way or another what happens from now on: I still do. . No one in his senses wishes to admit being a voluntary part of this world, so thoroughly inhuman, so intolerable has it become. We are all (whether we admit it or not) waiting for the end of the world, as though it were not a world of our own making but a hell into which we had been thrust by a malevolent fate.” Every incipient artist in America, with the misfortune of being an artist and a human being, working away in the waiting rooms of sleep, will once again have to rise up in the revolt of the angels. The time is 1946. Atomic bombs had shaken the world and loosened the stays of morality; the nuclear race was on. “If through indifference and inertia we can create human as well as atomic bombs, then it seems to me that the poet has the right to explode in his own fashion at his own appointed time. . When men deliberately create instruments of destruction to be used against the innocent as well as the guilty, […] the sick, the halt, the maimed, the blind, the insane, when their targets embrace whole populations. . then we know that the heart and the imagination of man is no longer capable of being stirred.”

ON USING THE NOTEBOOK

When you wake you may still have echoing in the deep ear a last shout of the night’s trip. Immediately the images fade, coherence crumples as in a photo negative turning glasse-yed and glossy with whiteness in the fire of exposure. That whiteness which is totally dark. Similarly, when slipping into sleep, the jumble of images coagulate, cohere, rising from an exposed negative being dipped in the acid bath of what you always knew without knowing it. And you dream away.

This is why your notebook is important. It is a portable keyboard for exercising the fingers of the eye, ear and nose. You jot down the impressions, note the riffs, run the words until you can see the sinews and the curve of muscles oiling the light. You draw instant portraits. You encapsulate a whole novel in one clear vision of fifty words; it will be obscure by the time you re-read it. A notebook is not a place of drafts, but of draughts. It is a seedbed. Of course, many seeds just die and others are eaten by birds, but birds are not bad at being dream messengers with night-colored wings. You could do worse. (You could be an Afghani waiting for the terrible birds of destruction to rain over your land at night. .)

The notebook is a word-camera. You move through the city and gather the pickings of the senses. Extremes come together on a page. A pavement of fugacious feet has inscribed in the cement a timeless relic of love in the shape of crude initials carving up (and caving) a heart. Or you see inscribed in one such stone: I love Chicago. This is New York. You will become aware not only of the visual collage of impressions but also the auditory, all those throwaway phrases of raw indiscretion on the wind. The tiny and the extravagant blend: your eye tries to spell the infinitesimal squashed insects pretending to be numbers on a phone card, and you look up to have skyscraper-high electronic Times Square letters in blaring colors smash your retinas. In Mulberry Street, a discarded door on a rubble pile has scrawled over it: So long, Scheck, you won’t be missed. A young lady pushes her fully clothed cello before her down the street. From time to time she stops to wait patiently, holding the bloated-bellied instrument now sagging over its one small wheel. Then she bends down to carefully collect the droppings in a plastic bag. As you cross her path you hear the cavernous groans; she must have a bag full of dark notes by now. When it is the annual festival of San Gennaro you will wend your way through the dense crowd of sausage-gobbling bulky humans and off the main thoroughfare find a side-show proposing the smallest woman in the world, Little Lena, twenty-nine inches high with hands barely two inches across and wearing size two shoes, and a billboard announcing: West Indies cultural export. Don’t you see there’s a miniaturized world to be peeped at in there? In the Metropolitan the Ingres drawings are an afternoon’s worth of eternity scribbles snared in one sitting. On Union Square market where one can buy a minuscule tot of snake-green cat grass juice guaranteed to make you meow, you see a hand-scribbled note: If you get to it and you can’t do it — there you jolly well are! Lord Buckley. In a run-down rotting area of the ‘Loaisaida’ an outer lives with all his junk in a battered ‘Oldsmobooger’ splattered with stickers: Never play leapfrog with a Unicorn; We don’t give a damn how you did it up north; Out of my way! My kids need to pee; A clear conscience is nothing else than poor memory; If you’re not calling Dr. Kevordian, keep smiling. .

Writing is life in progress. And your notebook is there to remember it.

BERNARD

This in-between season when it is not clear whether one is still in autumn or already in winter, but already it is dark, can be bitter. Some days are balmy, the late afternoons in the park may be warm with an orange glow staining the brick facades of the buildings around. But the sun dies earlier, the nights are longer, they may even seem endless when one is poor and homeless. Often, there’s a dirty wetness in the air billowing from the two rivers on either side of the city and from the opaque ocean further out. The tops of buildings are obscured, swathed in ragged fog. Everything is hard. The sidewalk under one’s feet is hard and cold.

Bernard’s only hope is to last out another year. By now he doesn’t remember how long he’s been in this city. He came here many years ago to pursue a career as a writer. He knew he had his twin brother Simon somewhere in one of the boroughs, they’d lost contact long ago when they still wanted to study medicine and both dropped out, mostly because they couldn’t afford the tuition and had nothing against which to borrow. They went their different ways. Bernard already had this problem with drink. It made him smell bad and caused him to be sour company. Once, in the shop of a man framing prints, he heard it said that Simon was married and living somewhere in the anthill; he wouldn’t know where to start if he wanted to find him. He did not linger to ask for further information because the framer’s vicious dog attacked him, ripping a wound in his leg, maybe because he smelt of dirty streets and old vomit. He didn’t particularly wish to find his brother either. By now, if they crossed one another in the street, they wouldn’t recognize each other. And if they did, what would they have to talk about? It is a city filled with strangers, some of them mumbling, each with her or his own anger or despair or illness. People are nicer to dogs than to one another. When they come upon a pooch on a leash they go down on their hunkers and purse their lips to baby-talk to the animal. They cannot help but fondle the animal’s ears to show what clean lives they’re living.

In earlier years Bernard managed to find lodging with other bohemians, people with bright but dirty shirts — and in the beginning there was a woman, older than him and with rolls of puckered cellulite around her thighs, the relationship did not weather well — but since many seasons now he has been shuffling from cheap boarding house to asylum to vacant lot or the porch of a derelict building. He knows some of the other vagrants — the little old Chinese woman in baggy clothes transporting a mountain of collected empty cans, the mysterious lady with the long overcoat reaching to the ground, the gloves, the dark glasses and the broad hat pulled deep over her face, pushing a pram with all her earthly belongings, the old men with their stiff movements and their hand-printed cardboard signs imploring help — but he seldom speaks to any of them. In a duffel bag slung over his shoulder he has some clothes and a wad of manuscripts. Lately, particularly now with the cold coming, a cold wind blows from hell, he has started using a push-carriage to keep two blankets and some unfolded boxes upon which he sleeps at night. He will be an isolated animal entering its burrow, safe in its own smell.

Tonight he has returned to a sidewalk on the Lower East Side where weeds grow from the cracks. A broken awning offers some protection against the inclement weather. The police don’t patrol here too often and mostly they let him be. It is going to be a long night and he knows already that his leg will be aching again.

He lays the cardboard strips flat on the cement and then wraps himself in the blankets before lying down. He has covered his head but is not yet asleep when he feels somebody or something, it could be a stray dog, gently nuzzling or prodding him. He folds the blanket away from his face and looks up with a disgruntled squint. A very old man is bending awkwardly over him.

It is immediately clear to Bernard that this old-timer is a bum. The clothes are reasonably clean and a soft cap partially shadows his features but the air of indigence is unmistakable. When one is at the end of the road you always recognize the fellow travelers. You mutter a curse and you look away, but you can’t help seeing them.

What do you want, I have nothing, Bernard says. The old man shakes his head. It looks as if he has difficulty speaking. Then he says: Warmth. All I want is some warmth. Why come to me? Bernard asks. There’s a flophouse on Bowery. Why don’t you go there? No, no — the old one protests — my legs won’t get me that far. People steal your underwear. I just need some warmth. I won’t bother you. Tomorrow, I’ll move along tomorrow, promise. Can I lie down here with you?

With an expletive and a grunt Bernard covers his face again. But now he can’t find the relief of dark sleep. After about ten minutes he lifts the blanket. The old man is sitting on his haunches some five yards away, arms wrapped around his knees, staring at the ground. Hey you, you old-timer! — what’s your problem? Bernard asks. Are you sick?

The old man smiles and repeats that there’s nothing wrong with him, he’s just tired and looking for some warmth. That he intends moving along first thing in the morning. Look, he says, and opens one hand to show a coin.

Bernard sighs and scratches himself. Then he reluctantly motions to the old man to come over. In another faraway place, a lifetime ago, an ancient one once said to him with a toothless complicit and wet smile: Us sinking rats don’t abandon one another. He moves closer to the wall, lifts the blankets and tells the old man to get down but not to try any funny tricks or else he’ll smother him with his own cap. I’m not that kind. The old man snuggles up as close to Bernard as he dares and pulls the blankets over him. He says thank you several times. After a while he announces: My name is Jesus Smoke. Bernard says he’s not interested, didn’t ask, and in any case it is a silly fucking name. He can feel the slow heat of the old man seeping in under their shared covering and finally it is not unpleasant to drift off to sleep in this brooding, enhanced warmth.

It must have been well past midnight when he wakes up to a low monologue interspersed by sobs. The old man is addressing some absent person, perhaps a forgotten god, alternately telling what his life has been like and urgently attempting to convey a message. Tell Lilac I didn’t mean it, I just got lost, he says. He seems agitated. I got the money, Lord — he says loud and clear. The coin glistens in his open palm. Bernard angrily jabs the old man in the ribs, curses, tells him to shut up and let decent folk get some well-deserved rest. Jesus Smoke shudders as if his frail frame is rent by a suppressed groan, falls silent, rolls over on his back. He has taken off his cap, which he now clutches to his chest. The lips quiver as if from the backwash of the earlier speech. There is a silver tear in one of his wide-open eyes. I got the money, Lord — he says again, a little softer now.

When Bernard wakes up the next morning it takes him some time to remember where the unfamiliar weight of another person next to him comes from. Wake up, he says and prods the old man. Jesus Smoke — what fucking kind of name is that? Are you a freak, or what? When the old man doesn’t respond Bernard struggles out of the blankets and sits up. The old man is lying on his back, the hands crossed on his chest, the coin just protruding from his closed lips, and his open eyes, opaque and grey now, are still wet. The dark face, though very old, is remarkably smooth.

MIND SHADOWS

“Poetry is about repetition,” Karen Blixen wrote. And when we repeat, as long as it is not just empty patternmaking, we bring about space because the ‘super-structure’ of meaning is weakened and other aspects of writing are foregrounded. In a similar vein, I already suggested several times that writing is a consciousness-expanding activity for both writer and reader, if only because it brings sharpened awareness of what we cannot say or would have liked to say better. After all, the more you expand the greater the space of the unsaid and the unsayable around you; the more we know about the horrors of warfare, for instance, the greater will be our sense of inadequacy at expressing it. The matter of consciousness (not that which we are conscious of — people, places, situations, desires, even thoughts) is, for lack of a better concept, a mind-picture. But it remains that only: a fleeting glimpse, a dream and an unconscious perception, a negative space, unless and until it materializes in writing, painting, music or other forms of expression / creation. We have to create in order to know. The word and its world will be the secreted gray presence of awareness.

Where do these mind-pictures that we work with originate? An easier question may be: what sets them off? (For who says the pictures don’t pre-exist?) Obviously, there is a sensory stimulus at the outset, a perception. The field of reception / transformation of the impulse, I’d suggest, consists of memory and imagination, immediately prismating (prison-mating) into combinations and cross-breeding of the two, giving way to invention, intuition, knowledge, experience, analysis. . What we can ‘know’ of the ‘outside’ world also comes to us through imagination (apprehending) and memory (relating and situating). In fact, I think memory and imagination so closely shade one another that they may as well be two faces of the same mirror.

Who looks into the mirror? Why, the face looking out! Or the face remembered by a connection of imaging. That is imagination (or image-generation). That is, the face imagined by memory.

But this matter (the mind-picture), because of its specific consistency made up of becoming, when passing into the flesh of words ‘takes on a life of its own.’ It ‘re-members’ through patterns of references and repetitions which exist independently of the intention of the rememberer; what would seem to be an autonomous consciousness ‘breathes’ through the rhythms and is ‘grounded’ in textures; it ‘invents’ or imagines or colonizes by allusions to the ‘known,’ presenting new variations, stretching the expected meanings of the material by breaks and jumps that arise from the core or the nature or the history of the words; and thus it ‘presents’ (presences) itself in some ‘sense-making’ (presence-making) manifestation of its own. You could say the mind-picture has its own past, which you can only guess at.

Could we be chiming with rhythms and sounds coming from way beyond? Do the ancestors, going back all the way to dust, speak through us? Are we just receptors? What if the Unknowable were just the (provisionally?) Unsaid? And what if we all knew the Unsaid which, potentially at least, is just waiting to be pictured by mind? Could it be that we are giving shape (pre-sence) to the Unknowable in the process of translating mind-pictures into material modified by its (own) consciousness? Creation is repeating the known — as exorcism and transformation — and making the unknown familiar; writing then a pealing silence. .

Let us approach it from another angle.

Manuel Rivas, a Galician writer (in an interview with Libération, 26 October 2000) claims that he started writing short fiction because it is the most popular genre in Galicia. It is popular because it descends from oral literature. And one can see how the short story has been shaped in contents and form by oral transmission. To hold the listener’s attention the storyteller must not go on for too long; he (and in many cultures it was more likely a ‘she’) should not make it too difficult; at the same time there must be enough flesh to engage the audience, the intrigue (or the lesson) must be kept alive and carried to the very end, and style (vocabulary, rhythms, tenses, voice) must not come between narrator and listener. (Or, one could say, between teller and told.)

The material must be allowed to stand on its own.

But you don’t want it to go awry. How does one make of writing an honest woman, or a presentable kept man? You walk her or him on your arm down the street and you pretend she’s virtuous, maybe even virginal (and he honorable in his intentions and scrupulous in his thrusts). When you take her or him into your usual haunts you hope she won’t be indecently flashing her charms and her wares at the regulars, or he won’t go ogling and pawing the other dames.

Manuel Rivas makes the further point that fiction-writing often renders the unacceptable sayable. This task or effect, he suggests, is a form of public engagement. He refers to this function as la curación de sombras (the healing of shadows). He says that it habitually happened in his country that somebody in perfectly good health would go to the curandero (the healer) to complain that “I’m fine but I feel bad.”

The healer would answer that the malo (the illness) is in his shadow.

The historical story doesn’t interest him, Manuel Rivas says, since literature is in the camp of life, not that of History. He’d only be interested to check if that history was still present — alive or applicable. Two things worry him: the mechanisms of producing hate and the suspension of consciousness (or the conscience — in French ‘la conscience’ could mean both or either). History is a succession of things that ought never to have happened, and the writing act is a kind of revenge against this. Literature allows you to get closer to the real than you could through history or sociology since it reaches where witnesses cannot touch. Dreams and the imagination of what might have happened (or should have happened) will incarnate or say reality. The carpenter’s pencil speaking to the ear of the soldier about designing the scaffold brings about a link between the victim and the executioner, and this way of writing is more real than that which we denote as ‘realism.’ The real consists of concentric circles. Reality is but the first circle, the only visible one, and the most interesting parts can be found in the other circles. “To write is to be weaving in and out of the circle, as if one were invisibly stitching a cloth.”

Then he says: “It is ridiculous to believe that writing can change the world, but it may help you survive another night, one more night after the thousand and one nights, so as not to be cold.”

(mirror note 4)

Is the mirror the memory? Is it not true that memory is always in the present tense, with the tenseness of the unpassed present? In his Imaginative Horizons the anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano quotes Saint Augustine famously claiming that memory “is like a great field or a spacious palace, a storehouse for countless images of all kinds which are conveyed to it by the senses. In it are stored away all the thoughts by which we enlarge upon or diminish or modify in any way the perceptions at which we arrive through the senses, and it also contains everything else that has been entrusted to it for safe keeping, until such times as these things are swallowed up and buried in forgetfulness.” And later on he has Augustine suggesting that it is “a sort of stomach of the mind.” Which brings one by the ways of nature to digestion and to reflections on flatulence (a tautology, surely). To excretion. That which has not been absorbed, “buried in forgetfulness” (the mind), will be shat in words. And how are we to preserve the crap? Never before in the history of mankind has so much memory been created so effortlessly, odorlessly saved in electronic files, disseminated in blogs; never before have we been able to access and to log on so broadly. All together, in pealing silence, we establish an all-inclusive virtual consciousness. We could say God. How to stock it in time though? Soon we will not be able to access it — support, software, programs, the machines themselves will be nullified by time and become obsolete. As we forge and spread and imagine we wipe out. We will know everything and remember nothing. There will be no origin, only process. We will be the immaculately conceived offspring of Narcissus. The stomach will be a forgotten myth, the ass a dry mouth.

THE LONG AND THE SHORT

Ought we to apply a hierarchy of values to writing other than those, which emerge from and are embedded in the text itself? Is ‘long’ better than ‘short’? Is ‘reality’ more important than ‘imagination’? Should one adapt one’s imagination to reality? Why? To be more believable? And how? By allowing the lived experience (le vécu) or the biographical to become fictionalized?

The example of Pier Paolo Pasolini comes to mind: his private life subsumed his essays and his poems and thus became public — his ‘deviation’ as gay and communist (in Italy at that time still considered ‘abnormal’ for a young man of good provincial stock) became ideologically argued positions and certainly also shaped the themes and the intentions of his films. Often, he himself would enact a role in these works. Did he end up confusing his life with his creations? Was he, in a manner of speaking, sodomized by his own invented and nurtured existence, by the rough and tumble of his positions? He showed an enduring interest for the stories of the marginalized poor living on the outskirts of Rome, particularly the young men who were often part juvenile delinquent and part pimp. For him they had revolutionary potential. To be ‘without class,’ young and virile and rebellious, cruel and tender and still tied in a gory and mocking way to the rituals of Christian superstitions, was to be primed for revolution. And that’s how he dies, battered to death by one such occasional lover on a strip of vacant land near one of the grimy and gruesome ‘developments.’

Silvina Ocampo, the lady who worked so close to Jorge Luís Borges, transgresses the accepted writing norms in another way. She does not strive for the ‘unity of effect’ that E. A. Poe prescribed, nor is there often any logical, linear structure to her stories. Rather, what we get is a voluntary deconstruction. There is nearly never any singular discernable referent that could calm the play by excluding other angles of perception. For Silvina Ocampo, existence is unintelligible, and so she renounces logic and reason. For her, stories (to be found in Los días de la noche and La furia y otros cuentos, and I’d also recommend her novella, El amor es una droga dura) must be like life, ambiguous and with neither rhyme nor reason. What fascinates her (and it transpires in her work) is the dark dimension of everyday existence. She will convey this fascination by her attention to detail, to the incongruous, to the disorderly. This focus without any meaning makes for a very powerful and present voice. Some may call the sort of product she delivers ‘fantastical,’ but it is neither arbitrary in its presentation of events nor marvelous in its reach for the supernatural; what she does bring along is the disorder of the occult, of the other side of the mirror, the sinkholes and the hollows we normally pretend not to see. As a critic pointed out: “Hers are the tales of an adult Alice.”

We are talking about form, and a little bit about movement.

Quite apart from ‘long’ and ‘short’ in fiction there are to my mind (and in general when we speak about writing) two kinds of form. The one is ‘formal,’ recognized and classified, which we’ll find pegged as novel, etc. — and within the same long form, say, we may then encounter a variety of genres such as the ‘picaresque’ or the ‘epic.’ I’m here of course referring to fixed forms like the sonnet or the ballad in poetry. In terms of this approach we’ll think of the novel as having more or less a given length and structured differently compared to the essay or short fiction.

Then there is the other kind of form, perhaps more aptly called shape, which emerges or becomes apparent as a necessity of contents, enhancing or amplifying the latter, giving the impression of inventing itself as it goes along. Recognizable as form, it is itself an element in establishing the authority, the totality and the reach of the work.

One could submit that the first form is ‘formalistic’ and arbitrary (which does not imply that it cannot be a powerful pole against which to play and set off tensions, and in so doing open other spaces); the second is more unexpected and organic.

Form, whichever way we want to look at it, is expressed in space and length of time. Thereafter it is given face by the way it is textured, stretched or cut up or made hollow.

Can one move from the short story to the novel by just adding chapters and scenes as one goes along? Garcia Marquez wrote somewhere: “The effort in writing a short story is as intense as beginning a novel. . But a short story has no beginning, no end; either it works or it doesn’t.” What he’s saying is that the short story, like the beginning of a novel, will be dense and allusive; it must show its tricks over much more condensed ground. It will still be read sequentially, but the ends are so close together that the impression will be one of simultaneousness: a swallow in time, like a gulp, not the furry animal of the mind squirreling away acorns of information for later delectation as it would when reading a novel. Richard Rhodes comments (and I took the Marquez quote above from Rhodes’ manual, How To Write): “(It) helps explain why the short story is such a resonant form: all that follows in a novel, all the elaboration of story and character — the long middle and the brief, resolving end — is held latent in a good short story, left for the reader to fill in from imagination and from personal experience.”

Maybe the reader’s mind has to be more active and participating when dealing with shorter texts, for brief fiction does not have the space or the length to take its leisure in fleshing out a totally autonomous world and then to populate it the way the novel can. It depends for its effects on a stronger and more immediate presence of the building blocks of narration. We normally experience the short story as a whole (and we want no loose ends), whereas we’re willing to accept duller or less interesting parts in the novel, to give it time and head, to even let it be for a while. Time is not always of the same intensity — in the novel, as in life, there will be times of forgetting. The bigger the canvas the more you need ‘gray areas’ (plains, emptiness) to highlight the aspects you wish to bring forward. The main characters, for example, will be less pertinent if all the subsidiary characters are as fully and sharply delineated. A novel is also ‘easier’ on the mind because the division in chapters, to name one option, allows for those major breaks in the narrative that will jump out painfully in a short story unless you can handle the transitions.

One provokes movement in form by, inter alia: resonance, allusion, punctuation, repetition, other patterns; by metaphor (because it shifts the gaze and sets off flares to illuminate the surroundings) and dialogue (you can cut corners and get much more done in a shorter time than a description will take); by switching tenses and swapping attitudes or voices; by jumps and by breaks.

Process, though bordered by form, is incarnated in movement. Sometimes movement is form. You may wish to write in a headlong rush, a river in flood hustling along the pebbles on the bottom. Or use a clipped phraseology so that the movement is in the intake of breath between the bare and brief indications. The movement is in the water, not the stepping stones. Silvina Ocampo brings about a forward and backward flow in the way her focus shifts all the time: the flag flapping is neither the wind nor the cloth, but the mind moving.

And there are differences between narrative movement (the unfolding of the story) and structural precipitations created when you shape your material in sentences, paragraphs and chapters. There may be a movement of ideas relating to larger discourses. Here the form matters; presenting the thoughts in an essay may make them more authoritative, more ‘objective’ than when doing them in a story, as the importance of the thoughts will be foregrounded and not confused with the characters’ traits. And movement can be suggested or introduced by what’s left out. A displacement is caused by the tension between full and empty. Completion is sucked in. One would use all of the above techniques differently depending on the form. The novel may indeed necessitate a fuller engagement (a long-term relationship), but it has a shorter immediate memory: if ideas or images are too far apart in the space of the novel you will lose some resonance and connectedness, and thus ‘sense.’

Henri Focillon wrote: “Human consciousness is a perpetual pursuit of a language and a style. To assume consciousness is at once to assume form. Even at levels below the zone of definition and clarity, measures and relationships exist. The chief characteristic of the mind is to be constantly describing itself.”

And to assume form is to take on responsibility.

I end where I started. Writing (in this instance) is moving into the unknown in order to picture it, to bring it — however tentatively and unsuccessfully — within reach of appropriation and identification. It is writing to the heart of nothingness, whether to exorcize or disclaim or become it. Who knows? And does it ultimately matter? Nor does it matter in the land of writing whether in this process (along this road) the void is out there or in here. Walking the road of itself depicts and becomes the fear and the fall and the oblivion and life resurgent: it becomes the human condition, the state of man.

(mirror note 5)

Suppose I tried to tell you that what I’m actually saying is giving expression to this half-wild animal in my arms, the man said. Fox or wolf. And that I have to let it go because it is pawing at my arms, drawing blood. Suppose when I let it go then, it doesn’t run off to freedom but turns around to look me in the eyes.

Transgressions and connections — thus Picaro closes the subject of a months-long reflection on writing in a note to his students. (That he who is so lost between make and make-believe should have been teaching!) You will remember that we set out with the intention to closely read a number of texts by Carver, Sebald and Kundera, he starts — and that we’d then approach these through discussions pursued to wherever they might lead us? Of course, we were on our way to the Middle World of wanderers and parrots. The intention was to identify those considerations that speak to us as writers as we navigate the reefs of writing. That’s why I did not propose formal lectures, or the academic study of a particular literature, but rather an exchange of insights and thoughts around specific texts. Like paper boats. No need to have the keel ripped off.

Writing is in essence a self-taught discipline. By that Picaro says he means, as well, a discipline of teaching the self what writing is all about. What we tried to do together was to dedramatize the act and the process by scrutinizing it more objectively, testing our reading and our interpretations, stepping away from too cosseted a relationship to our efforts. By looking closely at the work of others we may be more sensitive to what they saw and heard, and to their ways of transcription. The wound that allows you to write will, if sufficiently infected, keep people away from you. Do you then write so that the thing you write about may go away? It is true that once something is defined or cut down to size, it may either fade or mutate, or just quietly slip away in the water. He says this was a question.

From these premises, Picaro says, we then moved to the ground where fiction (heightened language) and non-fiction (ordinary communication) meet. How do they inform, shape, deform, imitate or deflate one another? What both share may be the fabrication of lies, either dull or subtle, and the elaborate making of disguises.

The Transgressions in the course title was meant to indicate that we would be crossing genres and categories — for instance, by looking at poetry as non-fiction; or to observe how, in poetry as well, there can be movement and a tension between the so-called ‘real’ (the lived experience, le vécu) and ‘projection’ or ‘imagination.’ Transgression, exactly, because we expect to find few hard and fast distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, obviously with the exception of some scientific texts on the mating habits of bugs — and even there (Picaro claims), we soon find that narrative creates truth. And then we tried to see whether using the same techniques could establish connections between fiction and non-fiction. Among these: the uses and the effects of projection, imagination, tense, points of view, voice, the narrative arc, pattern making, rhythm or breath, “the relativity that is indispensable to novelistic space,” etc.

Beyond that, Picaro admonishes his students, we intended to consider notions of ethics — that is, the role writing can play to be ‘good’ in itself and within larger contexts.

“. . the need arises concretely of building a new intellectual and moral order, i.e. a new type of society, and hence the need to elaborate the most universal concepts, the most refined and decisive ideological weapons.”

A New Type of State, Antonio Gramsci

Fiction/Imagination is an unveiling of what we didn’t know we knew. It is not possible, as far as we know, to think the ‘unthinkable.’ Imagination pre-figures its implementation by shaping the thinkable. We write into the pre-existent pool or underground of images, memories, thoughts, etc. — if only because the words we use connote meaning or morph into metaphors. This ‘pool’ will to a large extent be collective and to some smaller degree personal. “I, Picaro Wordfool, go into the mirror to exist.” It is an ‘unknown’ continent we may wish to explore (or sail across with closed eyes) — but also a continent in progress so that we may never chart its outlines and features once and for all. ‘Uncovering’ the shared Atlantis of the imagination does not imply that it is fixed. (Note: he’s not referring to the Freudian ‘sub-conscious’ although there are obvious similarities.) Because it is pre-existent, ‘out there,’ we may say we are but reporting (bringing back) from what is shared and thus not inventing. We are describing non-fiction. Fiction resides in the ambiguity of lineage.

Story (when it articulates effectively!) modifies perception even about the verifiable existent. It becomes part of the substance of non-fiction. The stones brought back from the moon by the astronauts turned out to be green cheese.

Milan Kundera goes further. He postulates an aesthetic effect to the search for meaning by means of creative fiction. In The Art of the Novel: “Whatever aspects of existence the novel discovers, it discovers as the beautiful.” And: “Beauty, the last triumph possible for the man who can no longer hope. Beauty in art: the suddenly kindled light of the never-before-said.”

Non-fiction/reporting, Picaro argues, depends for its effectiveness, perhaps even accessibility, on means and methods we usually associate with fiction writing: the shaping through choices and presentation, the ‘making-story’ in order to obtain traction. “Oneiric narrative; let’s say, rather: imagination, which, freed from the control of reason and from concern for verisimilitude, ventures into landscapes inaccessible to rational thought.” (Kundera)

Maybe this is the only way we can encounter and extend consciousness. Even when transmitting a thought, as in non-fiction, it has to be ‘storied’ with its rise and fall to be accessible. Similarly, we both need to encounter and abide the reader’s attention if we wish to enter her or his mind. And we only exist in the minds and the imaginations of others. At this point he could have suggested to them how he came to live in the clothes of Simon Snow, or how much he would like to penetrate Reader’s mind and her mother-mouth — but this, he thinks, is too personal to unwrap; it could provoke shyness. Truth, in order to exist, must leave a part unsaid. That is why veils and hats are so alluringly important. “The dark inside the mind/ lies hidden” (The Art of Writing, Wen Fu).

A person wearing a hat in a story has certainly an unavowed life to hide or display (or not). And that is why Carver’s stories seemed so ‘real’ to us in class, Picaro concludes this section of his recapitulation.

Imagination gives access to ‘meaning.’ Story telling is a system of knowledge; the very act of narration carries a presumption of truth. It would seem that we are hardwired to see intention in the world, Picaro observes. We are predisposed to the art of learning causal maps: that is, disclosing by intervention. We become by making. We realize ourselves through acts of transformation. “Here we are.”

‘Writing’ is thus both the translation of an opening to non-fiction, and — through fiction — the bringing about of non-fiction. If you were to imagine yourself a woman out walking with a dog (Picaro says), the mere sniffing at the soil by the animal will expose the bones of a story.

“. . the very distinction between real and imaginary events that is basic to modern discussions of both history and fiction presupposes a notion of reality in which ‘the true’ is identified with ‘the real’ only insofar as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity.” (The Content of the Form, Hayden White)

Look at how Sebald in his Austerlitz promotes the transgression between ‘fiction’ and ‘fact,’ Picaro says, obviously taking cover behind an established author’s coattails; how he melded and moulded the two: merging the voices as one would expect in non-fiction mainly through the effacement of the I (in any event a close invention); in creating distance, as one would expect, by dint of his use of an apparatus of footnotes, pictures, French. See how he employs in his work of fiction the effects and the artefacts of non-fiction: the quasi-scientific lists from botany, astrology, entomology and architecture. Watch how he brings real people into the narrative, like Darwin, and have them lift their veils to shake hands with the population of his mind; how he mixes real sites with imaginary ones, all bathed in the same luminescence of gloom, until we take the made-up for real. Topography, where the illusion of precision is created, seems particularly important to him, Picaro points out. The real is an ever evasive, evanescent entity. That’s why it bothers us. Look at how he equates the labyrinth with forgetting, and that with cruelty. In his instance (Sebald’s, but also Picaro’s) one could hold that ‘imagination’ (as close and as buried as that living death we call ‘memory’) is a matter of focus. We sense throughout the despair of trying to be. “Moreover, I had constantly been preoccupied by that accumulation of knowledge, that which I had pursued for decades, and which served as a substitute or compensatory memory.” Words, words, words over the palimpsest of words meant that “everything was fading before our eyes.” The quotes are from Sebald.

The difference between fact and fiction is the focus brought to bear on the matter of the text; perhaps also the latitude of space we allow the reader. But ‘focus’ implies intention, thus imagination. Part of the latitude allowed the reader may also be confined by limitation — another possible attribute of ‘focus’ — and sheer mindlessness brought about by a blind obedience to repetition.

What is it we are imagining? Picaro asks. The ‘real’? Can it be argued that imagination recognizes the real and does so by imitating it? In order to imitate you have to recognize the other as an agent; more precisely, you have to recognize that the other incarnates a goal. What’s the difference between pretending (to understand) and imitating recognition? It is believed that non-human primates do not have the capacity for monitoring shared attention, and thus they cannot teach one another. How do they learn then? By mere aping? What is it that they imitate if not the gestures and actions that would ensure survival, like putting on hats and veils? But then, Picaro says, he has read that the mating dance among chimpanzees and baboons may be far more intricate than among humans — that with chimps, for example, the loud sounds made during sex will reflect careful and sophisticated social calculation. It is believed (but how can we ever know?) that the female tries to blur paternity by mating with as many individuals as possible when her sexual swellings show that she’s ready to conceive, because the males are prone to kill any infant they believe not to be theirs. By shouting (being “acoustically exuberant”) while getting fucked the female attracts and excites and recruits other partners, hoping to thus gain many influential protectors for her future offspring. But when a higher-ranking female is present she will be as quiet as a mouse, even while she’s being had, so as not to incite the obstructiveness of her elders. One has to feed. “Copulation calls are not a feature of public life in Western societies, but the situation could be different in hunter-gatherer groups, which enjoy little privacy.” (Nicholas Wade, The New York Times)

By imitating the form of writing we try to apprehend contents, Picaro postulates.

So as to survive we mime the stories of ourselves. We are apes imagining ourselves to be human and hairless the better to invent selves. Hence the importance of veils and hats.

The dust of this body of mine is the Veil face of the soul, Behind the Veil they treat me as men treat parrots,

Hafiz

But (Picaro warns) we should not mistake this imitation/ apprehension of the ‘real’ as the incarnation of ‘truth.’ It may well be but a projection of one possibility among others. Kundera tells us that Kafka’s writing “represents one fundamental possibility of man and his world, a possibility that is not historically determined and that accompanies man more or less eternally.”

Ethics come into play in the implications of what we imagine. On a very basic level, evidently, Picaro holds, we may argue that we recognize the ethical approach in writing by what it is not, what it does not transport or relish in: racism, gratuitous cruelty, deliberate misrepresentation, ‘inventing’ facts, old women giving blowjobs to young medical students in Paris. . But can it not be reasoned that this is censorship underestimating the reader’s capacity for making her own judgments and drawing her own inferences? Transportation is, after all, not the same as promotion. Or is it? Codes of behaviour may be as important in real societies as they are in imaginary ones. Drawers are useful.

Responsibility — to both material and reader — lies in the choices we make, according to Picaro: ordering (sequencing), which implies a hierarchy of attention if not importance, and is played out in structuring and elimination and highlighting. Can all information conceivably have equal value and importance? Will the consciousness be able to access information unless it is given the ‘texture’ of inequality in presentation and treatment, of degrees of resonance and implication? And can we therefore say, he speculates, that there may be opposition between doing away with ignorance (by putting everything out there, however horrible or despicable, going to the limits of the conceivable, and beyond) and compassion (trying to help bring about a modicum of liveable conditions by, for instance, limiting cruelty and greed)?

Or is this not a concern of writing? Picaro would like to imagine himself a hedonist. Are we not here to entertain and divert? Perhaps to edify, but moderately? (“Small fish ought to be fried lightly.” [Laotse]) And is oblivion not as important to human congress as anything else? Writing may be about re-membering but it is also about for-getting. Why should we know that which we can do nothing about? In the world that we inhabit there’s “the progressive concentration of power, tending to deify itself; the bureaucratization of social activity that turns all institutions into boundless labyrinths; and the resulting depersonalization of the individual.” (Kundera)

Picaro, if you paid attention, dear Reader, wrote about this extensively in previous chapters. He now repeats: “We need to remember that we’re bastards and forget that we’re obedient citizens.”

“The ideal of truth inherent in its entirely unpretentious objectivity, at least over long passages, proves itself the only legitimate reason for continuing to produce liter-ature in the face of total destruction. Conversely, the construction of aesthetic or pseudo-aesthetic effects from the ruins of an annihilated world is a process depriving literature of its right to exist.”

On the Natural History of Destruction, W. G. Sebald

But we write a life, Picaro argues. Living (mostly unconsciously) and writing (often wittingly) are processes of finding and according a fullness to life and attempts to sidestep death for as long as possible. “Once more he found himself in the presence/ of mystery. Rain. Laughter. History. Art. The hegemony of death. He stood there, listening.” (Listening, Raymond Carver)

Death can be sidestepped by imitating life. (This is another of Picaro’s fond wishes.) For that you have to camouflage yourself so as not to be noticed — you have to become one with the surroundings. Don’t watch too overtly what’s going on: an open eye is a sign of fear and “an eye is a hard thing to disguise in nature.” (The Book of Angels and Dogs, Simon Snow)

To be believable/invisible you have to learn not only the tricks of blending but also the art of the rupture. “Now you see it, now you don’t” — this is the craft of the bird-catcher. “Now you are part of it and now you are different.”

Picaro reminds his students of how he suggested that a tentative ‘approach to ethics in writing’ might contain the following elements:

Ethics inform aesthetics when there is exactitude in telling. The ‘exactitude’ I’m referring to, he explains, the clarity, is not necessarily brought about by linear narration or even precise description: a big part of establishing clarity is induced by the spaces left to the reader to invest and participate in. How else is he going to snare her? Ruptures and discordances can be strategically important. The fuckup remains a creative principle. That was my rule of thumb in writing the dying days of Simon Snow, he now claims.

The painting out of self helps. The ‘I’ is a fiction, a construct — imagined in part by culture and history and theology. It is, however, also a necessity of consciousness as point of passage for observations. And again, the ‘ways’ of seeing will be defined in part by culture, history. . Ah yes, the ‘I’ is the dark glass through which we look.

The less ‘I,’ Picaro proposes, the more neutrality, the less self-indulgence, the less we are obsessed by our ‘right’ to happiness and to ‘private space,’ the less we think of ourselves as ‘victims,’ the less infantile we are in our needs for ‘understanding’ and for ‘healing,’ the less judgmental and moralistic we are — the more there is room for things and events to ‘speak for themselves.’ The authority of the narrative will be enhanced by obscuring or obliterating authorship. (He knows he may be whistling in the dark here, but refrains from saying so.) “Mehr Licht!” These were Goethe’s dying words.

But don’t get hung up on the importance of the self, even negatively, he advises. (Here, Picaro reminds his students, you will remember that Reader objected vigorously and vociferously to the drift of his argument. She said: “You may be right, sir, and put that way it sounds attractive even if it may not mean much. For writing grows out of a self that takes itself — or at least its own questions and vision of the world — seriously; a self that opts to talk rather than listen, at least momentarily. And one depends on the other, of course. . Is writing or voicing the self a symptom of insecurity or a path toward clarity? Isn’t thinking enough? Are words necessary bricks of, or toward, original thought, or do they limit it, since they are created, borrowed, worn out by others? How can we invent a private language that can communicate to others? Is that what love is? Private and shared emotion or vision or experience beyond words? Do words break its unspoken power or allow it another dimension? What do silence and inner calm reveal? Strength, death, inhibition, fear, implosion, wonder, honesty, patience, faith, deception, all, nothing? Are true silence and peace possible, or are they horizons?”)

These were a whole bushel of questions. Picaro knows he did not respond in adequate depth, although he appreciated her talking back. He did admonish Reader, and the others as well, not to reify individual words. Words are like ants and will ruthlessly climb over one another to get at the food, but they only really make sense when they are subsumed by the whole, by the anthill. Sense or ‘meaning’ is a labyrinth in the apparition of an anthill.

As regards Self, it is only one of a pair. God or Void (to give the Unknown a name) begins wherever the I stops. Whatever you cannot conceive of is God. (Again Reader interrupted: “But isn’t it possible for our conceptions to embrace the Void — the ineffable — the untouchable? Horizons without lines, the rise/drift/erosion of an intuition, silence in a minor key. . And there must be a few things we can’t articulate that aren’t godlike.”)

The two of you are separate, contingent, perhaps interacting agencies. In any event, dependent on one another. It may be said that you (the I) are God’s imagination, its dog, since you will begin where his I-ness stops. The void is bound to imagine /inhale substance. This ‘cannibalism’ and confusion may well have been the intimate and ultimately alienated relationship between the narrator Sebald and his protagonist Austerlitz, where, according to Picaro’s reading, we have a take-over of the one by the other, a displacement or perhaps a confiscation of voice. Who flows into whom? Who barks? “Shut up! Have you ever heard me bark?” the blind man asked his dog who was barking at strange passers-by.

“The self is an imitation of the imagination of self” (On the Art of Meeting Strangers, Picaro Wordfool). He feels it legitimate to bring himself into the text, especially because he likes the sound of the formula.

Michael Fried in his Courbet’s Realism writes about the phenomenon of narcissism that may arise, and then quotes from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Aesthetics: “The universal and absolute need from which art. . springs has its origin in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness, i.e., that man draws out of himself and puts before himself what he is and whatever else is. . This consciousness of himself man acquires in a two-fold way: first, theoretically, in so far as inwardly he must bring himself into his own consciousness, along with whatever moves, stirs, and presses in the human breast; and in general he must see himself, represent himself to himself, fix before himself what thinking finds as his essence, and recognize himself alone alike in what is summoned out of himself and in what is accepted from without. Secondly, man brings himself before himself by practical activity, since he has the impulse, in whatever is directly given to him, in what is present to him externally, to produce himself and therein equally to recognize himself. This aim he achieves by altering external things whereon he impresses the seal of his inner being and in which he now finds again his own characteristics. Man does this in order, as a free subject, to strip the external world of its inflexible foreignness and to enjoy in the shape of things only an external realization of himself. Even a child’s first impulse involves this practical alteration of external things; a boy throws stones into the river and now marvels at the circles drawn in the water as an effect in which he gains an intuition of something that is his own doing. This need runs through the most diversi-form phenomena up to that mode of self-production in external things which is present in the work of art.”

Fried argues that for Hegel artistic production is at bottom a form of self-representation — or self-production, a notion that would be developed by Marx and enthusiastically endorsed by Picaro. “The effacement of the very conditions of resemblance (the breaking of the mirror-surface of the river) also means that the boy’s relation to the spreading circles in the water might be described in Flaubertian language as one in which he is ‘present everywhere but visible nowhere.’” (Picaro likes being part of the chain quoting a recognized thinker like Hegel. He hopes the proximity may bestow some weight of reflection.)

When you conceptualize a subject you define a space between the recognized and the environment, and that tension between ‘full’ and ‘empty’ gives rise to movement. The space may be duplicitous: it may be nothing more than the clearing where the shaman moves between shadow and substance.

Then Picaro proceeds to what he considers to be the practical application of his thoughts. Stylistically, he says, it will help if there’s willingness to let language come into its own, through rhythm and texture: you will promote textual ‘space,’ he says — and no creativity without space, and no hope for ‘conscience’ without the creativeness of awareness.

The surface of fiction will bring about its own ‘non-fiction’: by focusing on the materiality of the means the illusion of veracity, which is mirrored by fiction will be destroyed. An experience of corporeality — the act of writing — will suspend the demarcation between ‘subject’ and ‘material world’ (in this instance, words). Writing — the production or clarification of consciousness, Picaro claims — is the mediating movement between fact and fiction.

It depends how you situate yourself to language. You are the ‘initiator’ and the ‘companion,’ not the ‘controller.’ (“As with love,” Reader interjected.) Be neither bully nor expert. There can be no Homeland Security in language or, for that matter, in writing narratives. Cervantes left room for both Quijote and Sancho Panza, and then for everybody and everything else as well — time, history, debunking, a multiplicity of lives, imitation, substitution. .

Ethics/neutrality demands that one leaves room for a certain ‘moral imagination’ — that is, the promotion of fragmented spaces for doubt and for the unexpected, even and perhaps especially for what you as writer did not expect to find. And who will take you to the underworld except the processes of creativity? How are you to cut your veins other than with the shards of the smashed dark glass? he asks rhetorically.

If you write ‘down’ to your readers, Picaro warns his students — because that is ‘what they want’ or may ‘understand’ — you are putting yourself up as authority and judge of intelligence (worse, judge of the heart) inside your own text, and this will influence your attitude to your tools. Because of obtuseness your tools will abandon you. Self-effacement is not a moral stance; it is a survival trick. (“Unless it is genuine.” [Reader])

Authenticity should not be confused with ‘authority,’ Picaro finally concludes. Authenticity (the integrity of the voice, not its coherence or its homogeneity) goes beyond reliance on “verifiable facts or information.” Ms Reader, he hopes, will sense whether he can be trusted or not as ‘search party’ into the thickets of existence. She may well be enticed out of the bush. Will she snort and hoot? Authority, on the other dirty hand, is a construct shaped by perceptions about reality (the way the media do about war); it draws its sustenance from collective prejudices and preferences — patriotism, nationalism, religion, racism. .

For a poet, there is terror in the dust.

Wen Fu

OF PENISES AND PENINSULAS

the cento as dirge

Nonetheless,

it was too late.

By that time,

we had all been royally fucked.

(Clary Stopes)

I spent all night dreaming about god

as though some blank bird called

(There were) scuff marks where I

have been running from the shadows

the barbed wire

the bloody bodies the naked women

crawling in the hope of

staying alive

Alone at dawn, alone watching

the rotting face of the grinning thing

The open window means little

to the disheartened dreamer –

the world is empty as a song

and we lose the place where we belong

Alone at dawn, alone watching

the shadow dunes washing their black

back into a green sea of grass

the vertebrae of gulls aglow

and now as how blood

clots to black its platelets

of newspaper ink

splashing the banks of the river

so some other ass could drink it all up

Alone at dawn alone watching

the rotting face of the grinning thing

the hint of lips

held flush with papier-mâché and masking tape

walking on top of words so soft

(the memory of these passing breasts)

who fiercely guard the empty spaces between us

A gray horse looks into empty windows

The world is empty as a song –

the open window means little

to the disheartened dreamer

but we lose the place where we belong

Time is slow and moves at

a slackening rate as the fog floods

your valley with a frail sea

Don’t be afraid to open your eyes

though the rolling-calf

draws its chain in the wet grass

Why should our bodies

not steal from dreams?

I’ll deliver all the lands for the chosen in a single night

and what will I do with shoes, clothes, underwear?

Those kinds of things fell to men

who had the barbed wire

the bloody bodies, the naked women

clawing in the hope of

staying alive,

girls who were fourteen but looked legal enough

to the Dakotas’ drinking eyes

If death were a field of sugarcane

I am the mongoose’s tail burning a trail

through its snake ridden heart her

tan crust of skin roasting

in our smoke turning black

The open window means little

but we lost the place where we belong

to the disheartened dreamer

and the world is empty as a song –

you feel this most in our eye, the love

the torturous going their own way, sparks

in dying embers:

they all left

except the wineskin whore

People pull out their dead graves singing

these bedazzled beings dressed like foreigners

and in the street

a piano and the winter evening smells

of wine and roasted garlic

carbolic skin

and that silent slow smoke

from a cold coal stove

Not our abused gods but old wifeless

men in a procession that

precedes us immemorially with their dying

walking on tops of words so soft thought

that everything is burning everything

I spend all night dreaming about god

as though some blank bird calls:

Painted sparrows carry

my body to Elysium one

glittering bit at a time:

how slowly I say goodbye

How slowly I say goodbye

Don’t go without ringing

The boy’s ossified heart

And dance even when

You the only music

Putting on the cold shoes

Of a man leaving with certainty

Listen late, and you might hear the bark:

some things aren’t needed

some things aren’t said

and guide us to a calm in spite of ourselves

I can’t listen anymore

I’d like to die

in my poem a little while –

show me where

and go away

or face the rot of the grinning thing

looking into empty windows

That’s what you meant. Right, Bro?

New York, Sept. — Dec. 2006

With thanks. And dedicated to: Scott Bear Don’t Walk, Mercer Bufter, Brian Chung, Ishion Hutchinson, Brian Kalkbrenner, Dante Micheaux, James Miller, Mrigaa Sethi, Adam Wiedewitsch, Ron Villanueva, Ronnie Yates, and John Murillo.

WRITE AND WRONG

One plunders the notebook again and again. I don’t know whether I’ve written this before.

I find: “The past is the ink with which we write the present — and in the process and the flow of writing words, concepts and ideas, the images, the flights become. . just ink. Whereas, what we’d probably like to write would be an open hand wherein time, which is the future of the present movement of surfacing, could find its fit and its fist.” (One also remembers that there is lamp-black in ink.)

A little further I find: “You must polish the word — not to have it shiny or smooth, but to make it as clear as the mirror or the pebble in which you can read your face, and may see that your face is death.” And then: “The recognition and the acceptance of the Other’s humanity (or humanness) is a maiming of self. You have to wound the self, cut it in strips, in order to know that you are as similar and of the same substance of shadows.”

These reflections surface during the visit to Weimar where I’m to be a member of the jury tasked with deciding which philosophical essay best answers the question of how to free the future from the past and the past from the future.

It is a curious town, the small provincial capital of Thüringen, egg-yellow facades are washed to keep up a sun-splashed face of classicism and quaint comfort and the late bourgeois charms of GDR democracy — but in the back streets houses are rotting from neglect and decay. The place is flooded with Goethe; he is on every menu — the dogs don’t piss against trees and lampposts, they bark snippets of the great man’s wisdom. And to a lesser extent there’s Schiller and Herder and Liszt who played his piano in a big room with an ornate ceiling and Nietzsche who stroked his madness in his mother’s house as if it were a moustache. . Their spirits flutter above the rooftops and the steeples the way banners are the remembrance of republics and of battles.

It is dark when we visit the replica of Goethe’s Gartenhaus. A blonde lady architect guides us through the low-beamed rooms of the exact copy of the small house where the master used to work. Look, she says and points, we photographed the floor-tiles of the original dwelling so that we could faithfully reproduce the spots and the scratches; and look, this is the identical copy of his writing desk where we made precisely the same ink-stains blot by blot. When she turns her back to escort us to the next room, Andrej Bitow, the Russian author, slips a kopeck into one of the desk’s drawers, “to fuck up the symmetry and destroy the German soul.”

But why this? Because we wanted to see if it could be done, the girl guide says. It cost nearly 2 million Deutschmarks to assemble. Now you see it, now you don’t. The original nearby in the dark garden of the night is for pious ogling only — the clone here you can run your hands over. But is that not the definition of totalitarianism, ‘the repetition of the same’? And now, what about aging? Will they touch up the copy to show, in time, the same wear and tear as the original? Or will the original be brought in line with its monstrous shadow?

On Sunday, after adjudicating an essay called “A Dictionary of Winds” the best entry, we go up the hill to visit Buchenwald. It is so close by — a raven could bridge the distance like an open hand writing a single line of invisible ink without even thinking! And yet, how distant it is.

There are trees up there, many trees, and clouds racing through a high-domed light-soaked sky, and birds fluttered by the wind, and probably insects in the soil too. There’s a breathtaking view over the gentle surroundings of flowing valleys and peaceful towns where Goethe must have taken his walks. And suddenly it is cold, so desperately cold — as if we’d moved into another world.

We have moved into another world. We shouldn’t have come.

A young man takes us through the camp. He is thickset and has dark half-moons under his eyes; he speaks English with a Scottish accent, probably that of the soccer fan, but the German breaks through painfully. He blurts out figures and facts relentlessly. This was a training ground for the SS, he tells us. Already from as early as 1934. They came here young, sometimes only 16 years old. They were to be the new elite to revolutionize society. New Man could only be unshackled in a hierarchy of self-abnegation and arbitrary violence and torture. He saw this job as guide advertised in the newspaper, the young man says, and so he applied. Sometimes he wonders. He has met survivors. He asked them: “What were your first thoughts when you woke up in the mornings here?”

We are shown the barracks. We see the exact replica of the small zoo where officials brought their families on Sunday outings — hardly three meters away from the barbed-wire enclosure keeping in the inmates. We pass through the narrow wrought iron gate to the inner camp, with its mocking iron letters: Jedem das Seine (to each his own). Then we see the bare expanse, the broad view from up here overlooking the world with its harvests.

And then we’re taken to the execution block, the tiles of the autopsy room, the furrows to sluice away the blood, the instruments shiny and elegant like slivered mirrors or like pebbles. Then the ovens and the urns, and in the basement the hooks and the piano wire. . We should not have come here. I’m so sorry.

But this I cannot look at. This then is the Other. This is Me. This is what we do. This is what we’re like. Vietnam. Ruanda. Kosovo. Afghanistan. Iraq.

We cling to one another. The wind is in our eyes and in our throats. A beautiful sunset purples the sky. Grandfather sky and father sky and son sky. (And man.) Grandmother wind and mother tree and daughter bird and grandchild insect through all the ages. And man once only. Once is enough.

Back in the hotel, Andrej Bitow gives me a full glass of vodka, “to take the shiver out of the soul.” He clumsily cuts up an apple with a bottle opener. “One must always have an apple with the vodka,” he says. “Now go and take a hot bath.”

Immediately I fall into a bottomless sleep. I have a first dream.

A bright, sylvan scene. A clearing in the forest. We hear, at the periphery of our eyesight, a thrashing in the undergrowth. As if somebody (or something) is observing us from the invisibleness, but clumsily now camouflaging its presence. We then know it is an immortal. How can he be lured forth? Only one thing will work. We peg down a book in the sun-filled glade. This will be the irresistible bait. We know he/she is desperate to know what’s written. Does the wind turn over the leaves of the book? Can the wind read? And what is the title? I’m so sorry.

How rotten with memory this earth is! And how the one thing slides over the other! When does memory become obliterated? Can we write everything? Are we not obliged to approach obliquely, camouflaging our presence, turning away our faces? Can we see Goethe whole?

It should have been burned to the ground and left to the wind. The town, too, should have been given over to the dark ink of time. No memorial, no ceremonies, just the salted earth forever. Because we have no right to remember.

Thereafter the night turns, and it is empty. And when we take leave the next day to return to our respective cities of time and of rhythm, Andrej Bitow and I, as writers from nowhere at the end of one century and the beginning of another, exchange the empty bound books that we had been given by the organizers. He writes in the copy which he hands me:

“I would like to present you something. But we, in our monastery, have nothing. .” Underneath he jots: “For writing nothings.”

And in my copy to him I note: “1. Thou shalt not kill. 2. Thou shalt laugh with thy whole face and thy whole belly. 3. Thou shalt study the expressions on the faces of ants.”

FRÈRE KHÈRE^1

exile

memories terribly leaked away

(Sappho)

will you stay with me as far as I go

brother stone still throb with the stillness

of a spoilt moon rotting and rending

the sea of stars

era la negra

negra solitud de las islas

there was

the black aloneness of islands the hard

cold hour deserted like the wharves at dawn

when cold stars and whales heave up

black

birds migrate as free goddesses leaving port

y solo la sombra trémula se retuerce en mis manos

(and only the tremulous shadows twist in my hands)

what were you before I found you

Neruda what

who was I before you made

yourself known and how will I know you

brother stone petrified eye of time

fearless and lidless or tongue

and if so what word was stilled

as vowel of eternal becoming

qué dolor no exprimiste qué olas no te ahogaron

say

what sorrows did you not express

what waves did not drown you

say

I was told

that with you to put on top of the head

I would stop growing to darkness and wings

because you would be my moon mind made visible

to trace and confine the shadowy earth

I was told

that with you as word in the mouth

I would never again tire of flying

in place

as tiredness itself would be pronounced

a grave pebble under the tongue

and when

and then

and now

es la hora de partir oh abandonado

when it will be the hour of departure

will you stay my hand

brother

stone

be the marker of my absence

KNOWING IS ALWAYS A FUNCTION OF GRAMMAR

Mind is an insatiable gormandizer. You, as toilsome writer, will lay down a page, perceptibly mind will devour it and ask for more without giving so much as a passing thought to the time and the pain of composition. One never knows when one has had enough. To become conscious is to be alienated. Perhaps the price of survival or the penitence for alienation is to never reach satisfaction. Does one experience this feeding frenzy because Reality cannot be hunted down or recovered?

Mind slurps up the surroundings and presents as justification that the about-mind can only take on shape through the process of swallowing-and-integration. A partisan and parasite argument, if I ever heard one! This may be true if one accepts that it is impossible to know anything except through the subjective point of being. And that no other shape of knowledge can exist. For something doesn’t exist until I have taken cognition of it. (But this taking-notice-of or getting-acquainted-with may be unexpectedly sudden and brutal, as with a lamppost in the dark, or with death.)

Now this happens: the gorging and digestion of consciousness is the creation of unawareness. And also a replacement. There is neither ‘environment’ nor ‘world,’ only the waxing and chiming of consciousness. But equally true: without surroundings there can be no coming to consciousness. I cannot be without becoming, and only become in reference to that which stimulates me to understanding or reflection. Mind is but a growing awareness of the existing environment. Mind is but a tiny reflex action of an unborn and immortal and all-pervasive rhythm. Mind opens up, opens up, and doesn’t exist. The most pure being is to stop being, is nonbeing. It is also the Buddha nature. Mind is movement.

And it is in writing that we put down the dullness: both the cooled residue of pure consciousness and the seed of new awareness. Writing is the mediating line spelling out the paradox. Writing is the ongoing imagination and invention of that which has existed since all darkness and absence. It is our way of visibly trying to breathe rhythm.

THE RETURNS

So what did I bring back from my trip to Berlin? First, a lake of black tiredness like a liquid mirror just below the horizon of wakefulness, threatening to rise at any moment and engulf me in dark oblivion. The Afrikaans word for jet lag is vlugvoos — to have been made spongy, perished or rotten by flight. Then, a jumble of impressions.

Airports have become irksome and dangerous places. The illusion has been punctured. It was probably never going to be ‘normal’ for the human to fly, but these entry zones were intended to lull you into thinking you were in some shopping mall piping soothing music, with service people, polite and efficient, processing you painlessly through the various stations of embarkation, and your fellow-departees interestingly attractive. It was to be painless, though dull. Now it is chaos in there. To get on board is like going into combat: sullen but ill-trained functionaries body-search you and dig into your luggage repeatedly, irritated clerks ask silly questions over and over, waiting lines snake for miles down the corridors, fellow-travelers are disheveled and grumpy, flights are retarded beyond decent delays. In Frankfurt, on the way back, rushing for a connection, I made my way to the head of the line by telling people they should not be fooled by my beard, that I’m actually seven months pregnant. You wouldn’t want me to have a messy miscarriage right here, would you now? An angry woman with glasses spat at me. At the screening posts little old ladies of eighty or more, clutching forms and passports and tentatively tottering on spindly ankles, were ordered to return to the check-in counters and book their umbrellas. One had visions of madly yelling grandmothers spearing pilots and transfixing them to the walls of the cockpit. And once you surmounted these obstacles, were you finally to feel more secure? Of course not. The only slight distraction was to try and spot the air marshal. As the aircraft growled and shuddered to get into the air one was painfully aware of the howling emptiness below.

On board I read a news item about problems at Tel Aviv airport. It would seem that the take-off flight path has planes fly directly over a considerable cemetery. The descendants of Aaron, the Cohens, destined to be priests, are not permitted to enter burial-places so as not to be defiled by death. A ‘solution’ had been found: these believers take their shrouds with them (in effect, plastic body-bags), and zip themselves inside for as long as it takes for the shadow of the plane to move over the impure place. Due to more stringent security concerns, one is no longer allowed to take along your folded death envelope as hand luggage. The authorities worry about people smothering in their sheets. A rabbi who was unwilling to break the rule hired a small private plane to fly him, wrapped in his shroud, to Cyprus where he boarded a regular connecting flight to London.

We are moving into a whole new world. On an incoming aircraft a gentleman got up from his seat shortly before landing and hurriedly made his way to the forward toilet. Time and bladder have their own pressing habits. Immediately two flight attendants and a third person in civilian clothes (obviously the air marshal) floored and overpowered the hapless man, holding a cocked gun to his head, and all the other passengers had to stick ’em up before placing same on the backs of the chairs in front of them. The trussed man apologized profusely, explained that he is a full-bladdered lawyer, to no avail. (Being from Mexico, his skin was also the color of sunned wind.) The plane landed, agents came on board to take the unthinking fellow in custody, and he was only released hours later, sopping wet by then one presumes.

I crouched in my seat and promptly tried to get drunk. Just before leaving the house I learned about the death of my mentor and old friend, Jan Rabie, far away in South Africa. I was told that it had been hot and sultry there for quite some time. He would have been uncomfortable with the early season heat, lying in his bed in a home for the terminally weak. He’d been suffering from Alzheimer’s for a number of years already. He had become shrouded in grayness. The last time I visited him there he recognized me immediately, but it was as if he had to come back from far to focus; Golden Lotus and Gogga were with me, and he insisted on speaking French. On the 14th, last week, he had his 81st birthday, and the next day his heart stopped. Maybe he’d tried to sit up, to get one last look of the blue mountain wall behind and the ocean rustling below, smell the wind and taste the salt. He’d been a singular traveler, always going against the trends of his time, execrated by the bourgeoisie, so little understood, denigrated even by his fellow writers. . How I loved him.

I tried to write an angry poem about our ranks being thinned out, and how futile our battle against the subversive and sly and cruel Dog Death is turning out to be.

Some months later his wife, Marjorie, the painter and mistress of gossip, will have a massive brain hemorrhage on the opening night of a retrospective exhibition of her work in Fools Forest. When Jan was too weak to resist she used to go to the hospice where he lay at lunchtime and eat up all his food. Now she will end up in the same place. When she finally comes to and is less befuddled she will ask after her departed husband, he has left and she doesn’t know where he is. Friends will gently remind her that he’s dead and gone, but she will contest that and tell them she has been reading the obituaries in the daily newspaper and there was nothing about Jan.

On the German side, when you arrive, matters are more relaxed. You step high and try to look sober. The autumn days are blustery but clear. Many men have clipped moustaches and short, graying hair. They go dressed in long, elegant coats of good cloth. The women are noticeably slimmer than those on this side of the Atlantic. They use little visible make-up and wear their hair loose. Their feet seem to be narrow and their shoes are shined to a high gloss. People carry briefcases (there are few backpacks to be seen) and stride purposefully. Many have folded newspapers that they then open with crackling sounds as if unveiling revelations. They frown their brows and make snorting noises. On the front pages there are reports of the war in Afghanistan and photos of summary executions carried out brutally. Some of the headlines are in Gothic script. Articles describe how a Green Party minister in a three-piece suit voted with the senior coalition partner, the German Socialist Party, to send soldiers to the war, and then speculate about how this may break the ruling alliance. I wasn’t used to being in an environment where people are in appearance so homogeneous, so predominantly white. The streets in Berlin are smooth and clean and often tree-shadowed. I saw no dogs outside. The buildings sometimes have colored facades and the windows are double-glazed. The Tiergarten is aflame with the slow fire and rust of the dying season. Despite growing economic difficulties there still is a lot of good money in Germany. You can smell it on the soft necks of people when you embrace them or on their manicured hands.

The conference was a textbook example of wasted effort, energy and money. Well, perhaps not entirely so. One of the working documents was a recently approved UNESCO declaration on the rightto (cultural) diversity. Although it was written in the regular gray putty of Internationalese, clearly the product of many a compromise arrived at through dull and cynical committee chugging and slugging, it still constitutes a reference point of legitimacy for the oppressed or ignored minorities of the world. Under the title, “The Global Dimension of Cultural Policy,” the conference grouped UNESCO bureaucrats responsible for the implementation of that strange institution’s cultural policies, those running the “Haus der Kulturen der Welt” in Berlin, directors and other top dogs of the Goethe-Institut and the Institut Français and the British Council, and random stragglers and strugglers of culture and creativity.

Of course, some of us immediately contested the very idea of culture (or rather Culture), arguing that it was certainly not, or not only, an exportation of ‘values’ (such as human rights, secularism, democracy, the celebration of diversity. .) from the privileged Center to the impoverished world, but rather that one should read these as the expression of a given country’s diplomatic policy which cannot be separated from the more overtly rapacious economics and politics pursued by it, as may be witnessed in the ways in which oil companies (for instance) plunder the riches of the third World. The Ogoni people in Nigeria have been disarticulated by the pressure and the exploitation of Shell, an Anglo-Dutch conglomerate, and when Ken Saro Wiwa led a revolt against this humiliating condition he was captured, tried and executed by the Nigerian authorities of the time, working hand in glove with the multi-national. . And oh, the webs of intrigue and complicity (even with ‘the Evil One’), all motivated and justified by profit. There is this story, which cannot be told here, of FBI agent John O’Neill investigating various terrorist attacks on American targets only to find his attempts to prove Bin Laden’s guilt blocked by the US State Department at the behest of the oil lobby making up President Bush’s entourage. The former Soviet republics — Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and especially Kazakhstan, also known as “the new Kuwait,” are swollen with oil and gas reserves. Russia will not let the US use their pipelines, Iran is an unpredictable rogue, and that leaves Afghanistan. Chevron, directed right through the 1990s by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, is deeply embedded in Kazakhstan. Unocal in 1995 signed a contract to export $8 billion worth of natural gas through a $3 billion pipeline from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to Pakistan. The royal house of Saud protects Bin Laden (for as long as he doesn’t attack them, but only infidel American interests), yeah, and Saudi Arabia, without even the beginning of an inkling of that weird mutant process called ‘democracy,’ spawns the narrowest doctrines of fanatic Islamic fundamentalism to be found anywhere and finances their spreading all over the world. But the US will never offend or inconvenience Saudi Arabia. This is called “respecting the Culture of the other.” If ever those turncoat ‘terrorists’ were caught they’d have to be tried and executed by secret military tribunals lest they start spilling unsavory beans in public. After the wild-goose chase an embittered Agent O’Neill, as head of security at the World Trade Center, haplessly but perhaps fortuitously goes to his death under avalanches of rubble and the hellfire of burning jet fuel. Onward Christian so-holdiers. .

Now I’ve gone and told the story anyway.

But this is not what the conference is about. Let’s talk about Culture and Diversity. On the second day, when it was my turn to speak up, I started by explaining how I work at present in the creative writing program of a university in Babylon. My graduate students are of diverse backgrounds — the urban metropolitan jungle, the ghetto, rural hinterlands — but also of distant foreign parts like India and Pakistan and Cambodia and Croatia. This multi-cultural and multi-ethnic environment surely came about ‘naturally,’ shaped only by movements of people and the law of supply and demand. It has a pleasant absence of hegemony or orthodoxy, at least culturally speaking: everybody is different and nobody inferior. However, understanding and accepting and maybe even valorizing our differences will only have a fair chance of being put into practice when together we concentrate on the same discipline of creativeness, in this instance writing. The project and process of expanding consciousness — growing perceptions, transforming ideas into words and words into ideas or dreams, becoming aware of implications and responsibilities — establish a shared space where differences can be appreciated and mediated, where there will be hybridization (even of values, up to a point), but as well an affirmation and recognition of irresolvable specificities. Hybridization gives one another ‘identity’ but does not necessarily resolve or even dilute the constituent parts. We are lucky, I said, to have a circle of activity where we exercise the knowledge of a communal human root and perhaps even similar existential aches.

Now, in this joint creative activity, I found that we deal sooner or later — among other more mundane concerns — and from many different angles, with notions such as the following: what if any are the limits of the permissible and, related, does imagination have a moral content or connotation? In other words, the question of the links between aesthetics and ethics. Is creativity a form of power, or do the arts constitute a non-power in opposition to (and as a subversion of) the power of politics and the market? If non-power is in contrast to power, why is it not then a counter power? Because it doesn’t try and gain adherents or exercise influence, perhaps? The writer and the politician both rely on words, they work the field of perception manipulation — but do they use the same vocabulary? More importantly, how do the purposes of communication differ? Is the one language not dangerously infectious to the other?

Here I used an example. Señora Lourdes Arizpe (who used to be the UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Culture and is now a socio-anthropologist teaching at the National University of Mexico) had said on the first day that, “Politics is the art of the possible.” I propose that art or creativity is, among other things and manifestations, the politics of the impossible — that is, both the dream and the responsible materialization of transgression.

Will power always be corrupting? Or (and I was still talking about notions that emerged in writing class): what is the impact of beauty on reality, if such an antinomy were thinkable? Let us rather ask what the impact of beauty on matter could be. Can we submit that ‘a thing of beauty is a truth forever’? What is beauty? We identified some underlying components: harmony, shape, structure (and are these not synonyms for ‘order’?); texture and color. But also disruption and rupture, jumps and breaks and open ends and inconsistencies. Then we asked ourselves whether these ‘elements’ are valid and operative in all cultures.

Why do we seem to reach for the same forms of exploration, questioning and celebration? What do we do about ‘identity’? Is it just a mask to scare others with?

Is it important? Is it unique? Is it unchangeable or interchangeable? Do we not have several identities up our sleeves, like monkeys, and are some more important than others or is it a question of “horses for courses?” Is memory immutable? Do we have an obligation toward communal memory? Why? How?

Then, for instance, September 11 happened. And we said in class (I told the audience): creative writing is so futile and insignificant — how do we come to terms with happenings which blow our minds, leaving the hollow stench of death beyond the reach of words and imagination? Should we even try? And along similar lines of horror: what do we do now that we live in the shallowing of human intercourse where the only expressions of global species similarity seem to be the propagation and the hallowing of comodification, the reification of consumerism?

I suggested that these reflections, and all the other hollow questions, may come across as abstract or trivial (were we not gathered here to discuss The Global Dimension of Cultural Policy?) but then assured them that they could be translated in concrete writerly concerns. Like: How to use the metaphor as transformative device — indeed, as radical undermining of our simplistic assumptions about ‘reality’; how to grow into the authority or the illusion of what we call voice; how to explore the pleasures of a narrative arc with its pretense at order and control; what to do about the question of language, of belonging or not belonging, of who it is that the writing is intended for. And then that these approaches could be applied to other walks of life as well.

I repeated (obviously there was just no way anybody could get me to speak to the subject of the session!): Tolerance, or even just reciprocal acceptance, must be rooted in the concrete field of transformation to make sense. Differences, even when these are confrontational, can be mutually enriching when explored creatively, in a practical environment — or rather, an environment of practice — always tending toward producing something you can lay your hands on — the book, the painting, the movie — where they (the differences) are examined critically and, if possible, self-critically, where they are not permitted to become institutionalized as some form of support for power.

Unfortunately, as we know, large sectors of humanity (let’s call these sectors ‘cultures’ for the sake of convenience) are led to believe that in the beginning there was Truth, and maybe innocence, and all of history since then is a sorry story of decadence and decay. When any culture, however rich or ancient, is but a confirmation of prejudices or the conservation and parroting of so-called truths, it is doomed to be exclusive, voracious, totalitarian, ultimately fundamentalist. I am not referring here only to known expressions of fundamentalist monotheism, although I’d venture to say that monotheism inevitably predisposes to fundamentalism and thus to intolerance.

Let me jump (I said): when the president of the United States and the prime minister of Britain suggest that September 11 was an attack on civilization, they are in effect equating civilization with globalization (which is but the married name of whorish expansionist capitalism), and therefore by implication making a case for Western global fundamentalism.

For my part, I don’t believe that ‘revealed’ Truth is ever innocent or benevolent. It can be dangerously evil. For me, the story of mankind is the nomadic search for many, many truths along harsh roads bordered with the flesh and bones and the apparitions of truths long since eaten by birds; it is looking for truths to fill a grumbling stomach, and spitting them out like pebbles when they have lost their flavor.

Reader, I don’t imagine my contribution went down well. But then, I was the only statutory terrorist present and had to live up to the image. Osama Bin Laden’s beard is longer than mine, that’s all.

That was Saturday. We were all tired of talking important sounding nonsense. I went for lunch with an old accomplice, Joachim Sartorius, now in charge of Berlin’s annual cultural festival. Towards the end his wife and a blonde-haired friend joined us. I told them how I saw Naipaul levitate recently in New York as a reincarnated Lord Vishnu, an affliction that had come over him ever since he’d been given the Nobel Prize. But how admirable and profoundly compassionate it was, too, that he expressed his appreciation of prostitutes who initiated him to the pleasurable apprenticeship of self-disgust and reassured his shrinking manhood. The blonde friend was a novelist who just recently had one of her books turned down in the US, ostensibly because of the very graphic descriptions of bestiality and zoophilia involving dogs and refugees.

The wine carried me through a long afternoon of quite useless arguments.

That evening we went to dine in a Thai restaurant. I found myself seated between a journalist with liver spots on her hands, who seriously tried to elucidate for me the deontology of relations between the media and politics, her hair was artificially red and her bare shoulders had the appearance and the substance of slack sea bamboo, and on the other side a delicious old Frenchman who spoke several Asian languages and could converse in slow admiration with the pretty waitresses. One of them particularly, lowered her eyelids in a demure figure of seduction, and made suggestive use of her hips as she walked back and forth from the kitchen to our table. The old gentleman, it turned out, had been born in Vietnam in 1921. Smoking and beautiful women kept him alive, trim and vigorous, he claimed. He was a cultural anthropologist specializing in oral literatures. His grandfather, whose name he inherited, had been a wandering journeyman of Greek or Provençal or maybe Catalan origin, his grandmother was impregnated when the hay was still freshly cut, and then abandoned, he himself grew up a bastard, some of his grandchildren are black and some yellow. Life was such a wonderful and unforeseeable adventure. He was in no hurry to die. Peasants are the wisest people on earth. Suddenly he started telling me how hard it was in the Japanese concentration camp where he’d been interned during the war. The guards wouldn’t allow the prisoners to beg for cigarettes or food. It was demeaning, only dogs beg, and they’d be beaten if caught. Like dogs. The only way he could get a cigarette was to kill fifty flies. So he’d spend his days on the rubbish heap of the camp, killing flies in exchange for smokes. Until he learned how to read the facial expressions of the guys playing poker or bridge. As an astute observer of foreign customs he developed a special talent. Once he started playing and winning at cards he didn’t have to kill flies anymore.

The Sunday morning session on Cultural Policies in Times of Crisis, the last one I attended before beating a hasty retreat to Tegel Airport, turned out to be heated. The subject was introduced by a countryman of mine of Indian descent, Sarat Maharaj, currently a co-curator of the Kassel Documenta. I was made proud by his incisive intelligence, even though he was clearly an unconditional and quite uncritical modernist. He made the point that crisis is not just good, but essential for any artistic breakthrough, insofar as it illustrates that old forms are ill adapted for dealing with complex new realities. Señora Arizpe objected that ‘crisis’ meant death where she came from, it’s no salon game now (we all had flame-flowering towers besmirching the islands of our minds), that a Duchamp ‘ready-made,’ such as his famous toilet bowl, would have been senseless in Mexico when it was first sprung on mankind in a full flush of avant-gardism, whereas the murals of Diego Riviera bound the people, interpreted them to themselves, gave shape to the dream of a nation respecting diversity. I intervened to suggest that this ‘crisis’ (of clashing civilizations) we all twalk around without naming, is nothing new, for a long ongoing time there has been a crisis of hunger and exploitation in the poor world, translating into death, yesterday today tomorrow, and since Duchamp may indeed be an inappropriate protagonist given the more than likely absence of such sanitary pedestals there, it may be more apposite to suggest as vector for modernity in Mexico at that time Frida Kahlo, the fat Riviera’s wife, who with her dark blood disguised as paint certainly struck deeper chords than the muralist. Maharaj went on to laud culture (we had a similar problem with the concept, he also preferred ‘creativiteness’) as vehicle for heterogenesis, the production of difference — as opposed to the logic and the celebration of sameness. Culture, as practiced and exported by the rich countries and by an international bureaucracy like UNESCO, could not honor the ethics of difference; it led to representationalism where all one had to do was to make the other visible (and mighty self-satisfied you’d be for doing so), to managerialism as ‘pis-aller’ for true and vigorous exploration, and ultimately to cultural consumerism or tourism confirming the mere retinalization of differences.

Thereafter things fell apart. People in the hall became restless and wanted part of the act. It was suggested, appropriately to my mind, that UNESCO was certainly a diligent (though indigent) and equitable custodian of the world’s cultures, but it had no mandate from any popular constituency, and there was a noticeable lack of input from creators and independent-minded intellectuals. No stimulation, no juice. Finally, it was doomed to be only collecting and preserving dead things. UNESCO is the custodian of the dead and their winds. The director of French Institutes worldwide advanced the conviction that one just had to operate within the boundaries of the realistic, umm, politically realistic, even if it meant imposing some contortions on the rebel (rabble) conscience, that the international cultural traffic was a means toward federating skills and knowledge, that it is in the nature of all politicians to attempt avoiding death. Whereupon it had to be pointed out to him that most politicians not only do not shirk from terminating human life, but indeed verily relish the enterprise. As long as those terminated are ‘foreign,’ obviously. (Later on, during coffee break, we would lift our upper lips at one another and show teeth in what would just have to pass for smiles.) It was brought to our notice that, as for the bright cultural export idea of promoting convivéncia, the world living together harmoniously, it needed to be said that the poor world may well experience the diffusion of culture from the rich part as an encroachment. When last did a delegation of African anthropologists travel to Europe to go and measure the circumference of a typical Auvergnat peasant’s head? And when you open your cultural institute in some underdeveloped, coughing, foot-shuffling country — should you not simultaneously open a similar institution in your own country to disseminate their culture? Surely reciprocity should be an absolute guideline? How else might you prove useful, messieurs les riches de ce monde?

To promote true exchanges. To open up spaces for vigorous creativity down there. To let us see some of the diversity and incoherence and confusions of your cultures, not just the smooth products adobed (and daubed) by officialdom. Why are you so expansionist? Is it in your barbaric nature? Are you not using ‘culture’ as the lubricant for better screwing the rest of the world politically and economically? In the front row a man with a very expressive and unruly moustache became more and more agitated. He put up a finger, either asking for assistance or requesting permission to leave the hall. What about this politically correct nonsense of cultural equivalence? Can we not agree about a number of basic taboos, the infringement of which will be intolerable and unacceptable, and then build further? Clitorectomy, pedophilia, the enslavement of women, ethnic cleansing. . “Are these expressions of culture?” someone asked. Capital punishment, as indulged and largely condoned in the United States of America. .? The moustache was by now crawling over the man’s face. It was time to go.

(mirror note 6)

The only real divertissement came when a gentleman with a prospering moustache, functionary of UNESCO, explained the wondrous project they’d embarked upon to establish (create?) The Memory of the World. One had visions of an enormous echoing space, maybe a cave, that had to be furnished with the elements that would constitute our shared human memory. In this way shall we become global. The earnest man of Arab origin, a librarian by profession, presented his paper while projecting on the wall behind him images of our memory genes. That is, our documentary heritage which was being rescued from the attrition of time, “acidified paper that crumbles to dust, leather, parchment, film and magnetic tape attacked by light, heat, humidity or dust.” Next to him on the podium sat a ponderous German historian, eminent member of an organism called IAC, the International Advisory Committee, white-haired with age and seasoning, and nodded a solemn and wise head. Trouble was that there was little traceable correlation between the discourse and the images. Peccadilloes! The beauty, surely, was that here you had the dream of creating a vastness with neither beginning nor end. Like the Borges story of attempting to draw a true remembered face of the world, this ‘map’ would eventually have to be big enough to cover all of human consciousness. Were there criteria?

You bet, sir! Documentary heritage must be shown to have had major influence on the history of the world at a particularly important time and crucial place, associated with people who made an outstanding contribution; it should give valuable information about a major theme, or should be an example of outstanding form or style, encapsulating a cultural and social or spiritual value which transcends, transcends. . And the morsel of heritage will be enhanced if it has a high degree of integrity or completeness or if it is unique or rare. But how do you decide as poor, coughing, foot-shuffling humans? Oh, oh, sir. It is almost too much to bear. Maybe the old tried method of leaving the documents on a table overnight and that which has not fallen off deserves to be included? Are there exclusions? Well, after months of agonizing but expert deliberations, it was decided not to include anything relating to the ‘Condor Project’ in terms of which a cabal of Latin American dictators and the CIA had physically eliminated thousands of leftist agitators and dreamers. . This was too horrible to remember. And nobody knows yet how to incorporate the Berlin Wall.

SURFACE

I’m cutting up words and pasting them in a painting. And I have to think of the Tibetan prayer flags, words and wishes scribbled on cloth to flap in the breeze at crossroads or in inaccessible mountain places. To forward pleas, to appease the gods and the departed spirits. What is the ‘use’ of beauty which ‘nobody’ can see? No one will ‘read’ them: these are sounds confided to the wind. Especially to wind — the presence of absence, the breath of immortality and of death.

We have covered much ground in the weeks we spent together; it has been an exciting time and a privilege to be with you. And yet, we only scratched the surface. We looked sideways at some of the elements and implications of writing, but we only paused to discuss more closely when they surfaced through your stories. For example, we did not consider the primordial importance of the sentence — the donkey — that essential beast of burden encapsulating breath or breathing a wisp of thought. Nor did we study the function of texturing through sounds and patterns and associations, or how repetition leads to absence. (Or does it originate from the void, like a reverberating sound-wave, effacing itself through repetition?)

Surface is important. It constitutes and illustrates the flapping of our minds. It is the federation of intention and illusion, of emptiness and of manifestation, and then it exists and shimmers in its own right. I have often thought that it might be worthwhile to try and write a treatise on The Metaphysics of the Surface.

We always work with sensitive spaces, both in our relationship to what comes down on the paper (and this will be a sustained tension all through one’s writing life) and in the way we position ourselves to the product — the adaptability and acceptability of it, its coherence or resonance or success; and then the attitude to the reader’s expectations and our relations with other writers and the links and breaks among our own various writings.

Writing is the dialectic between absence and presence. It is the art of leaving out so that you can let in more. It is the process of surfacing. As you write, you surface to yourself — like turbulent water stilling to the rise of an image. The water is not any less deep and there are as many creatures gliding through the sweet thickness of currents, but it now allows itself to be focused to a surface of reading, to what I referred to earlier as ‘a plausible bounded mirage of meaning’. . (Movement, of course, obviates the need for a recognizable face.) And then, if the writing works, it will allow the reader to surface to him- or herself. As Russell Banks put it: Writing is the art (and thus the pleasure and the pain) of being intimate with strangers. With yourself as the first stranger.

You always start out having at least an idea of what you wish to write. But then, it is only in the writing that you find out what you’re about. This is the creative tension between intention and discovery, and it is this relationship that makes for welcoming spaces.

The ethical respect you show your stories — to the characters, the situations, the plot, the environment, the tenses and the tensions — will consist of not having your texts preach your convictions about rape and violence and racism and global warming and war, or the free market and other aberrations of stupidity. The only effective action as writer against social folly is to write better, go deeper, open the mind more, be more democratic in the space you allow the reader.

Enhanced consciousness — that is, first of all the matter of touching and smelling, running your hands over the rough edges of words with their histories and their bastard natures — is the bedding of conscience.

TERRITORIALITY

In the bright morning a daymoon just the barest knuckle of a reminder of subterranean dimensions. Red birds flit and flutter in the bare branches of a big tree. This is Connecticut. We are staying in the house of an old writer. There are many rooms smelling of ancient dogs and manuscripts, narrow passages, creaking wooden floors, framed New England faces against the walls. For breakfast we have ‘hambiscuits’ — salty and sweet Virginia meat cured by the master in his bathtub, then glazed.

It is the season of silent waiting before the first snow that will bring memories of visitors and family. The forests rolling over the hills are armies of threadbare veterans retreating from the summer wars. One senses the throb of muffled drums. I go walking with the master: we see deer tracks in the soft dirt, a neighboring farmer leading two big white horses with steaming flanks down the road to the fast river that spilled over its banks many years ago when my host first moved here. There are several other writers living in the vicinity, he tells me.

What is Writer’s Land? It is a territory of the imagination, more familiar than any existing place, that area of the heart that the writer speaks from. Sometimes it will be consciously delineated and populated, as with William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Shelby Foote’s Jordan County or Gabriel Marquéz’s Columbia of the mind where retired colonels and killers live. Very often it is the shadowed land of one’s youth that cannot be found on any map. It may be left undefined so that only recurring situations will constitute an environment, giving one the feeling of having been there before. It could be political surroundings — somewhere you escape to because it provides a sanctuary where the problems of the day can be dealt with metaphorically (with Zamyatin and Kapek in their respective socialist paradises these ‘worlds’ were futuristic), or the place you run away from because, paradoxically, the issues are starker and the implications more momentous there (with Kafka it was that of the suspended nightmare).

Arthur Miller’s world is mostly urban and imbued with the political consciousness of the working classes. Allen Ginsberg probably lived at the chanting intersection of Jewish liturgy and Buddhist ritual where the prayer flags flap, but it was more likely the land of desire than that of quietude. It may be a land of traveling, as it was with Arthur Rimbaud, who pushed to the frontiers of himself and was destroyed by what he found there.

It can be a land of time, often tucked into a specific period, and then the borders will be drawn by the story of unfolding. With older writers — William Styron, Norman Mailer, Edgar Doctorow, Philip Levine — you notice how they revisit it phrase by phrase: a familiar landscape smoothed by their attention to the quirks of consciousness and burnished by their lives. The land they walk over is as loyal and hand-tooled as an old dog or a family retainer. They come across deer tracks, pass neighbors leading white horses to sound-spitting rivers. There are still impenetrable copses though, and the unexpected dragons of depression and madness.

South Africa used to be considered ideal writer’s territory, a country of heroes and villains, of loyalty and betrayal, of climatic extremes and severed heads; but it was always too easily and seductively so: the challenges of violence and confrontation, of distinction and acceptance, were exacerbated as forms of escape into the never-never land of portent and moral prancing. Under those circumstances it is difficult for the writer not to become an angel. And the angel has no sex.

Writer’s Land is the invisible ‘book’ behind the words (these here now, also) — larger than the volume but confined between its covers. It may not be attractive, it may be that place which is covered with the anonymity of burial sites, and the extent of your success in making it live will depend on your capacity to familiarize the reader with its contours and its natives, thus on the sounds of your sentences and the way meaning glances like light off your words; but if you identify and inhabit it you will have a voice, and at least be a citizen of somewhere.

REALITY IS AN OPTICAL ILLUSION

Over the last few days I had the opportunity to become acquainted, a little, with David Hockney’s theories on the uses of optics by master painters from the very early Renaissance on. I must admit that I was skeptical. It just seemed to me inconceivable that such methods — using mirrors at first and later all sorts of lenses to project images on canvas that would then be traced or copied in an effort to create the illusion of ‘reality,’ employed systematically over centuries, and all of this collectively referred to as ‘secret knowledge’ by Hockney — would not have been written about. After all, historians of the time, like Vassari, wrote exhaustively about the lives of the painters and their techniques, and every major practitioner had a whole studio of apprentices working with him. Or, for that matter, that no art historian or contemporary painter worth his wits has since tumbled to the same discoveries and conclusions. To my knowledge there’s not a whisper in the dusty tomes, although it is true that the paintings themselves sometimes refer obliquely to the ubiquity of these potential devices in the vicinity of the makers: eyeglasses resting on the pages of an open book, someone reading with a magnifying glass, the convex mirror as in Van Eyck’s wedding portrait of the Arnolfinis — a dark, bulging, all-seeing eye. The (partial) answers to my caveat would seem to be that, a) there are (or were) indeed written traces of these ‘occult’ goings-on, a reference to Caravaggio with his head stuck under a black cloth here, the hosed legs sticking out comically, some other puzzling process observed there. .; and b) that the old masters were far more secretive about their discoveries, and therefore protective of their businesses, than is generally realized. Jan van Eyck, for instance, is said never to have revealed the composition of his marvelous glazes. Artists of the time belonged to guilds and brotherhoods. All thought of themselves as alchemists — were they not bringing into the world images more real than what the naked eye could ever perceive and was this not producing the sublime from base materials? — and in order to push back the limits of realism, or its depiction (or substitution?), they used whatever measuring trick, broth, talisman, golden rule or theory they could lay their hands on. They knew they were indulging in magic. All creation, be it in words or visually, is a transgression, lifting the skirts of existential darkness, and manipulating the mysterious power this ability bestows is not only human but possibly obligatory if you want to communicate with the unknown. The initiated one has a pact with the mysterious. It was only normal, in order to protect and preserve their power, that certain discoveries or ways of doing should be kept confidential. If the patron king or cardinal didn’t think they were magicians of a kind they probably never would have received the commissions they did. Still, can it really be believed that since six centuries no-one has cracked this momentous code, that all scholars and lovers of fine imagery were struck by some historical blindness?

On Friday last, over lunch at the New York Institute for the Humanities, Hockney’s accomplice in this crusade to invent the wheel, a physicist working in the field of optical science, named Charles Falco, failed to convince the audience completely. Doubts were the deeper shadows framing the highlights of his intellectual bavardage. The Irish term is ‘blarney.’ He first explained why and for how long he has been a motorcycle enthusiast and then tried to pull the wool over our eyes with all sorts of jargon relating to ‘laws of nature,’ ‘depth of fields of vision,’ hypotheses and theories (and how a scientific ‘theory’ is a radically different bird from the artistic one), ‘vanishing lines of perspective,’ fractured edges and fractions of degrees and angles. In other words, he could measure the magic. And, if needed, develop the tools to do this with. It seemed to me odd though, that one should start with the ‘scientific’ proofs and proceed via the methodology to arrive, after much close scrutiny and more than just a slight sleight of eye, at the ‘problem.’ Never mind that none of the old fellows would have approached painting so systematically, even if they thought they did. All artists have a bee in the bonnet. Douanier Rousseau thought he was the greatest living painter in the ‘Egyptian style’ and Picasso in the ‘Greek style.’ He told Picasso so. The creative process has the empirics of ‘natural’ growth (one thing calling up the other and then establishing relationships) and more than a smattering of voodoo (ascribing transformative and ‘covert’ power to these relationships), but many decisions made during the course of the process are arbitrary, destructive and irrational. When I pointed out that all of these paintings born from projected images, at least in part, would then have had to be painted upside down, and this should be visible to the perceptive eye since brushstrokes go from the top down in their movements and are from left to right or inverse, depending on whether you’re left- or right-handed, he lamely refuted the flight of my argument and held that this could not be visually verified. I concluded that he has no understanding of what the hand and the eye do in the game of drawing or applying color to a surface, and he certainly is mistaken in thinking that artists proceed like scientists.

On Saturday, Hockney himself put up a much more attractive fight. The occasion, “Art and Optics: A Conference Around a Theory,” hosted by the Law School, seemed to draw New Yorkers in droves. Hundreds of people were waiting in line all around the block. A sardonic friend of mine suggested there were several reasons for this extravagant interest: Egalitarian New Worlders would like to witness those old European genius ‘masters’ brought down a notch or two by having it explained how they were just tricksters; paradoxically, this would make their works more accessible since Americans just love the idea that creativity is finally but a ‘do-it-yourself’ paint-by-numbers activity that can be mastered if only you knew the techniques; even the sophisticated city dwellers cannot resist being awed by snake oil salesmen — this naivete, too, is part of the American dream bolstered by a pioneer spirit; and any diversion that arouses passionate polemics would be a welcome relief from the post September 11 depression syndrome. In fact, my (American) friend smiled, you could say this is another expression of “America strikes back!”

Hockney, his shoulders bent so that it looks as if he’s developing a late hump (he did say that all of this had started with a hunch), and apparently totally deaf, introduced a BBC film made on the subject. The film, frenetically applauded, was a marvel of humor and insight. Some sadness too. In it he was shown walking through the masterpieces of smoke and mirrors left us by Van Eyck, Caravaggio, Lotto, Velazquez, Vermeer, Chardin, Ingres and others. Apparently he has more than a thousand ‘cases,’ reproductions of artworks qualifying for examination, pinned to his studio wall. His curiosity was first aroused by the strong light on the faces of patrons sitting for their portraits in studios, light only found outside under the sun or close to a fierce window. Then the film showed him attempting to reproduce the methods and means ostensibly used by the ancients. This involved dressing up desirable young men in Medieval apparel and draping bunches of grapes over their curly heads. One of them had distinctly rosy, tumescent lips. You could envision the juices. A lot of this was, perhaps inadvertently, very funny. It could be done, sure, but the procedure was cumbersome and the results inferior. Some gems were brought to our attention, like a Dutch drinking scene with all the revelers left-handed, including the monkey at the bottom of the frame. But all in all, he seemed to negatively disprove his theories: his own work, done by simple eyeballing, trusting the well-worn working relationship between eye and hand, was far better and much more ‘life-like’ than all this complicated maneuvers necessitating apparatuses. I could not help but think what a great artist he is, and how typical with this unlikely, cranky obsession!

In the ensuing commentary on the film, he did elucidate a few points. For example, according to a London curator (Hockney says) one can indeed see on a Caravaggio painting how he made initial markings from an upside down projected image, then turned the canvas right way up to continue painting. On the other hand, after watching Hockney laboriously trying to reproduce the procedure he thought Van Eyck used to paint the very intricate chandelier dangling from the ceiling in the Arnolfini portrait, I was left wondering why Van Eyck did not then do the same in order to make the wedding couple more ‘realistic.’ They are waif-like and willowy, very distinctly not life-like! And how (a questioner wanted to know) did Michelangelo succeed in giving such an intense appearance of realness to the hands of his Piëta sculpture? In other words, was the perception and depiction of what is ‘real’ really dependent on lenses?

Panel discussions were to follow, pitting intellectual luminaries of the likes of Svetlana Alpers and Keith Christiansen and Jonathan Crary and James Elkins and Susan Sontag and Martin Kemp against one another. Fur and spittle were certainly going to fly. But I’d had my fill. Besides, I had far better nourishment in mind — a meal and some wine in a restaurant on Thompson Street with friends, including a fine painter from down under now working at Yale.

Over wine we thought about how man has since the beginning tried to imitate or reconstruct the ‘real’ (why? to appropriate the power of the image and the creative act, or to deny it its potency?), about how this activity was kept secret in dark caves, exactly the way movies are still projected in dark rooms — and does this not mean that man must go inside himself in order to see the light, and too, that he knows obscurely he has to ‘reproduce’ but also ‘invent’ an image which, exactly, should not be an exact replica of the model? Then the conversation turned to the similarities between painting and writing, at least in approach. There is painting in writing and a lot of writing in painting. Both present us with human constructs about the nature of reality. More precisely, they make us aware of the nature of seeing — that is, the mystery, the wobbles and approximations and limitations and interpretations — and alert us to the fumbling mounting of consciousness by words. (With hose-clad legs sticking out comically below the black cloth.)

Florence saw the ‘invention’ of perspective in representation, with apparently converging lines and diminishing sizes as observed and operated from a single-point position. Bruges and Ghent developed the Flemish approach, where successive ‘squares’ of a painting would receive the same intensity of attention to closeness and to detail, creating the effect of a collage, ‘flattening’ the surface. The same differences between closeness and distance can be observed in writing; it is defined by one’s interpretation of or need for verisimilitude. Is seeing and rendering life a process of parsing and discarding, separating the important from the ‘supporting’ and the drivel — or is it a dissolution, a way of entering the rhythms of creation?

‘Voice’ has to do with point of view. If you wish to maintain a certain distance and an objective, authorial authority, you’d want the omniscient voice, or at least the singular awareness, which relates to the fixed point of perception from where everything is put in perspective. In foregrounding that which you consider to be important, you’d inevitably ‘distort’ or ‘blur’ the rest, the surroundings. What is out of focus in painting would correspond, in writing, to that which needs to be kept in mind but is not momentarily present in the line of telling. In writing we refer to this as providing ‘setting’ and sketching ‘secondary characters.’ To maintain the illusion of life-likeness — nothing exists in isolation — you have to make the setting believable and, to a certain extent, alive, without it becoming intrusive. In a painting the looker will graze his eye over the surface, taking in both the essential and the ‘background’ and putting each in its place instinctively; in writing this relates to rendering the description of the ‘background’ vivacious enough for it to be kept in mind (or memory) for long enough to still be operative. The living memory of the text must be kept immediate. As writer you have to develop and establish the bird’s-eye view while still recognizing and accommodating the fact that the reader will read sequentially. How do you keep that which is out of sight as alive as aftertaste or as an echo? Writers have, of course, developed various techniques for doing so — mainly by creating resonance through patterns, flashbacks and metaphors. The time / totality of conception in painting and writing may be the same, but the reader will be handicapped by the obligatory linearity in apprehending the text. Can it be different? Can it not be argued that, so as to hook the reader, a story should have thrust and not just be thrashing about?

The ‘collage’ approach will depend on how close you want to be to the words. By breaking down the fixed or singular point of view, you actually get inside the painting or text. You may merge, may even become matter.

The two different approaches have interesting implications. One could argue that ‘perspective’ denotes a choice for coherence of vision and for a hierarchy of images, where some figures and motifs will be more important than others. It would suggest that you subscribe to the notion of conveying a ‘message’ or ‘meaning’ since you are bringing forward a central narrative. You are the master of your domain, in charge of your fate, a reasoning man facing the chaos of creation. This sense of purpose and order, an expression of our need to understand, can only be achieved through illusions. ‘Reality’ in a work of art is there because of the contrast with what is not real.

One approaches and appropriates ‘reality’ through imagination. The human needs to invent himself and his circumstances, and identifies through projection. Understanding is a leap of the imagination. Writing, for instance, is moving forward through imagination. Writing is imagination projection. The reader/onlooker will be involved because he/she moves with the ongoing or unfolding observations setting off linkages and creating patterns. Movement, which includes turning back to where one has already been, is an attribute of consciousness. So is the establishment of a periphery because it creates the illusion of being centered.

‘Collage,’ on the other hand, will imply a more diffused vision, you could almost say a more democratic attitude; one accepts the ostensibly more natural and pragmatic assessment of two-dimensionality (this is a picture on a flat surface, not ‘reality’; this is a story, not ‘life’) as contrasted to the illusion of three dimensions suggested by perspective (this is an evocation or mimicry of ‘out there,’ which in your mind will become a reconstruction of ‘real life’). In ‘collage’ you are allowing, implicitly at least, for the autonomy of the means. Attention is sucked into the very surface of the text and to the material used. In painting, the ‘background’ as colors, contours and textures — not necessarily being anything more than paint — will be the environment contrasting or chiming with the ‘figures’ which stand out in the looking. In writing this environment will be language itself. You will work more with the text-ure and the immediacy of words as living organisms.

One may perhaps wish to go further by suggesting that these two ways of making, of engaging consciousness, have ethical repercussions. Certainly ‘perspective’ implies more authority, a stronger sense of generally accepted moral conventions, and a clearer conviction of what ‘identity’ is all about. ‘Collage’ could be interpreted as anarchistic, where one is not looking for Truth but for connections, and Reality would then be a point of view, a passage continually reinvented, recast, questioned, mediated and discarded.

TOWARDS THE END

Towards the end of the semester a nightmare pushes me back in time. I have managed to wing my way through class so far, sounding suitably knowledgeable without getting bogged down in the matter at hand. The trick is to keep the pace, the pose and the pitch, and use your age advantage like dead weight.

Now we meet for the last time. The school is built on the mountain slope looking down to the gray winter sea. The cold in New York can freeze off your cojones. I have asked for the windows to be opened so that the fresh smell of damp fynbos may fill the classroom. (Fynbos is the collective name for a number of odiferous shrubs indigenous only to the Western Cape.) Clouds and fog roll up the flanks, closing our view of the city. Low cover, alive and boiling, obscures distance.

I have my black teacher’s jacket on. Class has been running for a while when my old friend M walks in with a companion. I have known M for years. He is an agile go-between when it comes to bringing the paw of writing to the ear of public presentation. He is, forever, Mr. Fixit. Even when nothing is broken. Especially then. The gentleman with him is thickset with short hair of faded straw. M sucks his big front teeth, looks at me over the dirty eye-glasses perched on the tip of his nose, and announces with a gesture: “This is the inspector.” And he says, gesturing equally amiably in my direction: “Inspector, this is Mister D.”

The inspector, I understand, is to check and verify the groundedness of my teaching craft. I bow. He bows, rustling under his arm the sheaf of forms that must be completed. You’re welcome, you’re welcome. And so are you, sir. He then goes to the other end of the room where there’s a table covered with a black cloth reaching down to the floor. He will crouch under the table, out of sight except perhaps for a leg of hose sticking out. How will he see to do his work? Can darkness be penetrated? Does he have a pocket lamp? Or a secret lens? From there his voice is muffled when he asks the occasional question. “Life is a terrible business,” his choked voice says at a certain point. “It embraces the terror of territory.”

Oh, we manage to get to the end of class. It was no easy feat. I can tell you I was nervous as hell. The words in my mouth suddenly had another taste, awkward and of a faded chalkiness like that of pebbles, making the spittle flow copiously. I now took scant pleasure in the spiky gelled hair of the men and the youthful curves of the women. M watches the proceedings, grinning, the hands in front of his bulbous belly held fingertip to fingertip. This is his affable way of weighing words, particularly when they are slippery with saliva.

The final assignment was a story submitted by C, a good one as it turned out, culminating in a wedding ceremony with the couple of protagonists pronounced mistress and man.

But no, I’m lying again. C’s contribution was about the fable of the blackbird. It goes back all the way to the beginning of remembering when everything was still sung. Originally the future blackbird appeared in the Braytobook family coat of arms as a hand held out in some kind of protection. Later depictions showed it, black already but not yet gloved, plucking a harp. Times were unsettled and potentates thirsted for blood. The motif turned up as a clenched fist of war, smiting infidels. Then later still, in a country of full moon and fragrant nights, the hand, by now liberated from the shield, was recorded as writing songs of illicit love. It got itself arrested by the sultan’s goons, jealousy and intrigues were rife, and in due time it was sentenced to be amputated. His beloved in the alcove, peeping through the latticed window, fainted with a melodious moan when the blood started spurting. Ever since it has been this bird, balancing on the chimneypots and TV antennae of the city, and filling the air with its plaintive song. Since it took to roosting in the city of the dead it has also started looking after the corpses. In fact, it may now be seen as the incarnation of death, singing death’s songs to a dying sun.

And when it is over the inspector emerges from under the table with some fluff in his straw hair. We go outside on the balcony overlooking the city, but there’s not much to be seen: the clouds are even thicker at present and white, blinding the eyes.

“Ah,” says the inspector as he breathes in the wonderful smell of fresh mountain earth and plants. “We must love life more than the meaning of it. That’s from The Brothers Karamazov. Your arguments in there were compelling (he waves back to the classroom where M is now holding the floor, telling impenetrable jokes), but your underlying thinking is both bloated and flaccid. Your demagoguery is morbid. . That story about the singing hand. . What do we really want? We want for them (back there), man and mistress, to be des mordus de l’imaginaire, carrying with them on the road in the muttering and murmuring book in the pocket the mother and the moon.”

GOING

To start from the distinct and tangible and attain full-blown emptiness — that is not within reach of the beginner.

Huang Pin-Hung

There is always the moment of going. All too soon. Rain moved in from the sea — or wherever rain comes from in these parts — the tops of the tall challenges to the force of gravity, built by man in steel and glass and chrome, reaching for the sky, are wreathed in invisibility, the trees on the square below our apartment house are spent so that one can see the paved red walkways shining wet, and hear a dog barking. Now is the hour; it is time to move on. And as ever, before leaving on a long journey, one wants to drop some advice, some reminders in order not to be forgotten, the blown leaves one used as hand-maps to dreams, a few left-over insights. .

1. Emptiness or Void promotes interaction, transaction, transmutation even, between Heaven and Earth, and thus between Space and Time. Time may be seen as the actualization of vital space. Emptiness introduces a discontinuance into the process and so doing assures rhythm and breathing. Time sucked into breath becomes space. The only way we can live with this Time /Space dichotomy is by having the “empty heart” (hsü-hsin). In this fashion — the way, too, of being in the right receptive posture, and with neither interests nor judgments nor even expectations — we can interiorize, perhaps by imitation, the processes of mutation. This play and interplay of empty /full will modify the meaning of the reach of your words (or brushstrokes), and impart to the writing (or painting) its own consciousness or ‘image.’ (Remember — ‘image’ is the anagram of magie, ‘magic.’) And so the relationship between writer /reader and the world mediated by the work — this breathed unit of timed space — will be changed. There will be interaction between the “inner feeling” and the “exterior landscape.” Try to suscitate the void needed for movement by deleting the subject, the I. (Shehe is a dead squirrel at the best of times.) It is not unlike sucking. The resultant emptiness will evoke other absences and create further resonance: you could mistake this movement of emptiness for ‘thinking.’ By being rubbed out or “underheard,” the subject interiorizes the exterior. Other becomes I. (Hello, Dolly. .) Through empty I the landscape comes into the writing. Writing becomes instant land scaping itself. (And landscape is memory, and memory is passage. . or resistance.)

2. Be aware of things within themselves, of words also outside themselves, of surfaces, the laws and by-laws and in-laws of meaning and how to transgress these, the face of the Real, movement, the invisible and the void pulsating below the surface, birth and death and other cycles and bicycles, writing as boat in which you row at night through the cornfields of crackling stars, the relationship between writer and writing and writer and reader and writing and history and the seen and the said. . Why? Because you don’t want to die an idiot, your drool will sully the sheets; because it is one of writing’s functions to raise consciousness the way one raises chickens to have eggs in the house (apart from also exorcizing pain and dulling the sharp cut of knowing); because transformation of self and of thing and of context — ‘writing’ is finally the presumptuous business of creating the existing — is predicated upon a mastery of the components and the interactions among these; because this is what the reader hungers for and recognizes as something that. . works, that sounds right. How so? How now, multi-hued cow? Awareness is to be dancing to a tune of meaning, memory, forgetting, invention. It is about movement — becoming other, shifting perspectives, making the landscape shake. It is to be movement. But also the reassurance of repeating the known steps to cover old frozen ground with the sounds of a new sweetness. It has to do with camouflage — hiding in the black light of writing, feinting being, making false bottoms, weaving to blend with the background, catching a you with the word, shifting the pea under the cup. It is about disguising a mountain in the metaphor and making of the writing a mask and a cardinal frock to dance and die in the shadow of that mountain. Awareness is about elimination and displacement — not only recognizing live from dead material, but knowing too that ‘leaving out’ is a way of situating what’s left in, of entering upon a dialogue with the absent, of saying and showing that the absent is in the present, of having the shadow of the concept peering through the hole burnt by the word. It has to do with autonomy — the thingness of text and its parallel life unlinked from the personal diary. And texture: to have appearance run over the surface through color and glitter. What you see is what you get. Word-stones are the washed-up measure of the dance, irrespective of the ‘meanings’ they may carry. Play with the colors and the constituent parts of words and phrases, make patterns and cross-references and riffs, let them weigh (in) with their own existence — this, all together, will be your texture. The taste of writing is in the texture. The skin is the surface of eternity. Through texture is awareness awakened and bonded. And by striking the jarring note, by rubbing dulled expectations the other or ‘wrong’ way, you can make of awareness the line of living the present, of moving in the possible tense where dream and reality merge dynamically.

3. Writing is not an art form, it is a life discipline. Write from the totality of your being, not only from the confessional or the ache of unrequited love. It must as much come from the loins as it emerges from memory (this is surely a tautology!). Love is not a technique, it is a secret. Explore that secret continent creatively and assiduously. Change it; allow yourself to be changed. Truth and falsehood have nothing to do with fact. A fact is but a finished act. Or a fucked one. The fact is that some act as if fattened by fucking. Writing is the intelligent but unbiased heart living in its own beating. The only way to gain detachment, also from that heart, is to remain intimately involved with its ebb and its flow.

4. Traveling is a moment of creation. By moving you make. The identity is crystallized or re-configured by confrontation and by change; you hold the mirror up as compass and the Other is flushed out or seen in a new light; the point of view shifts; you bring something more to the landscape (if only your shadow); you rewrite the world. Because you are not only crossing over into the unknown — you are also unraveling the line of (your)self and singing the topography. And memory then becomes a place of resonance, a gland secreting the digestive fluids of comprehension. You are living perpetual change against a backdrop of the unchanging. You continue journeying to keep one step ahead of death. But it is through traveling that you ultimately ripen for death, when your shadow comes to sit on your lap. You will die from having eaten too much time — and then you will be time. (There’s a time for everything. .) You have to empty the mountain first, though. Wisdom is when you gradually discover (or uncover, from emptying the mountain) what you’d known all along.

5. Rhythm, repetition, making patterns — these are not only important devices for shaping the strange and abstract instrument /object we call a poem or a story, but they are craved as well because of our primordial need for reassurance, the sense of security we get from moving over the known. A mystery doesn’t lose power in revisiting. Writing is not just to know, it is also to console. We need to be reminded that we are part of the obscure rhythm of birth and decay. It is the humming that matters.

6. All true writing moves with profound ethical concerns. (Ah, this is a mouthful. .) It has little bearing upon what we think of as ‘morality,’ ‘good’ or ‘evil.’ But the act of writing, engaging the emptiness, is after all the living proof that man is born good, that Heshe can praise life and sing death to continue inventing Shimself. Which is metamorphosis. Always imagine that there’s real life beyond the page. Don’t be afraid of vulgarity. Allow yourself to be angry and to cry. Sing as often as you can — it is also an excellent breathing exercise. Remember that writing is breath. Get drunk frequently, but always with friends. Do not, however, depend on drugs or drink for an escape. Rather try breathing through one nostril at a time or standing on your head or love-flying. Visualize the community you are part of. Remember, there is no ‘purity’ of race or culture, only a seamless life of mixing, a ceaseless hunger for Other, an ongoing bastardization.

7. Beware of psychology: understanding is a trick for castrating creativeness. Don’t take the puerile and sometimes curmudgeon conceits and /or marvelous flights of fancy of writers like Freud and Jung as science. It is all snake oil for the ache of the absent soul. Western psychology is a ploy in the quest for power and control, for servicing the ‘self’ and ultimately an obeisance to Unum One-God Warlord. Be religious if you can do no else, or at least be aware of that transport, because the rituals and the homes of the gods are often very moving, but know that monotheism will take you to jealousy, inferiority, guilt-production and intolerance, maybe cruelly to the marble ovens and tombs and vaults and truth-rooms or other torture chambers of Western arrogance and power, to bombing starved children from dizzying heights and having colonies of non-people in off-shore concentration camps. Better, if you find it too lonely being an infidel, a heathen or a pariah, to respect humor and honor all gods and spirits, and partake of all rites and the eating of rice. Practice particularly the ritual of mountains, trees and water. Cover your bets.

8. Read as much as you can. Texts, articles, comics, testicles — this is all manure for maturing the mind. With time you’ll find that you read with more discrimination, mainly because you have less time, and then it will become both communion and communication as if you were writing it yourself. There’s a lot to be said for forgetting. Don’t bother with theory and criticism. Never read the kind of shit you have at present under the eyes. Don’t judge. Leave that to the power-mongers, to those who wish to impose democracy, to them who think Africa can be saved. (Or so they pretend.) But develop your capacity for feeling what you read and see.

9. Every stretch of writing that works aspires to its own inevitable shape and form. You have to learn how to accommodate/accompany the emergence towards that shape. Structure, texture, posture — work at these essentials. Shape form. Don’t shy away from structuring, even the old-fashioned way: the most beautiful flesh must still be draped over an assembly, a topography of bones. (You could say death structures life.) The structure embodies the ‘image’ of the writing that will imprint itself on your mind. Don’t be stingy. Think big but speak like a knife. Be irresponsible too — in the sense that you’ll burn your boats and everything else (including the sea) in the wild quest to extract that drowned kernel of the essential life. If you see what I’m getting at. Burn without compunction. Then be kind to yourself. Listen to your stories. Let them sit on your lap and listen to them. Read (to) them aloud, and also those of other people, so that you may feel how rhythm and sound and spacing go toward structuring a sense.

10. By ‘posture’ I mean not only voice and attitude, but also the alert waiting position, the readiness. For that you need to be clean as the barrel of a gun. Keep contact with what’s just below the surface of day. Go fishing. Remember previous paragraphs where you fumbled for fudged kernels. You are the fisher, the hook, the bait and the fish. At all times keep a small notebook on you to wrap the catch in. Don’t scorn a bite when it comes: reel it in, gut it in your pages lest it sink into the mud of a telephone directory or disappear into the virtual forgetting of computed memory. If you don’t it will stink up your head and attract flies. The trick is to keep just enough order in your mind-memory, without Order pushing you out of line. (I don’t know what this means either.) Posture is also finding the right balance. To breathe with the spine.

11. There are many exercises to promote the flow. Make verbal sketches of landscapes. Jot down situations, rhythms, dreams, the things that move through the head. Make an effort to translate from other languages. Improvise variations on a line, even when it is another jazzman’s theme. Make up songs. Use the odd news item as starting point. Reality is an open sore, richly oozing. Cut up and reassemble texts. Write writing books. Write the portraits of your family. Especially and maybe preferably when they’re dead. Make collages and posters and kites.

12. Walking strengthens the mind and loosens the images. (Jogging can be problematical, since you risk running the breathlines out of memory.) The best ‘ideas’ may upear while you shower or brush your teeth or work rhythmically at physical labor, and then probably provoked by the repeated gestures, by the pre-birth sound of water, by the mind being put in neutral. Take these gifts when they come and be grateful. Don’t impede the flow. Don’t ask for names or reasons. Take no names! Don’t bother, at first, what the story wants to be ‘about.’

13. Let it hang to ripen so that the sinews and ligatures may become self-evident — or, at least, so that the ‘thing’ may pass from darkness to familiarity. Let the story become used to you. It may help, literally, to put it up on a wall.

14. Revise, revise, revise. It is never too late to die. This is the other form of writing. Like translating the shape behind the initial clutter.

15. Try never to forget what it is/was/will be like to be a writer-in-progress, wildly paradoxical and deeply ethical: that is, to live (on) the edge, close enough in any event to push the fly-blown Self over it. In this direction lies responsibility. And dignity.

16. I know no more.

17.

what a wonderful journey it was across continents and seasons

through snow and through sand

and past cities with names

singing on the tongue

everywhere poverty, everywhere despair

everywhere abattoirs and battlefields

and towns burnt blunt

in the rich man’s kitchen pots simmered

on the street the maimed sidled on haunches

late night the woman’s hand was a vow

the child played with sticks in the dust

in bookstores paper voices murmured

in execution chambers people swung from ropes

like pendulums over a topography of life

from mountain peaks there was smoke in the valley

birds warbled in the darker copse

islands were floating arks on the horizon

what a wonderful journey it was

across continents and seasons

18.

Silently and without cover You should cross the dark stream —

The riverbank trees have an abundance of mute birds

With twilight eyes;

Besides, that burning hat on your head

Is not yours.

Goodbye. One must always go well. Hamba kahle.

New York, November 2004

NOTES

1

Khère is ‘stone’ in Wolof.

Content

Breyten Breytenbach
Intimate Stranger

PRE-WORD

POETRY IS THE BREATH OF AWARENESS

WATER WALKING

WRITING IS FISHING

WRITE TO THE TRUTH!

WHAT IS IT ABOUT?

READER, SWEET READER

WHERE IS MY LOVE

WRITING SUMMER

NEW YORK, 12 SEPTEMBER 2001

I SIT HERE

REMEMBERING IMAGINATION

AN APOLOGY

LIFE WORK

WRITERS WANDER

THE ASHES AND US

NIETZSCHE’S HORSE

ON USING THE NOTEBOOK

BERNARD

MIND SHADOWS

THE LONG AND THE SHORT

OF PENISES AND PENINSULAS

WRITE AND WRONG

FRÈRE KHÈRE1

KNOWING IS ALWAYS A FUNCTION OF GRAMMAR

THE RETURNS

SURFACE

TERRITORIALITY

REALITY IS AN OPTICAL ILLUSION

TOWARDS THE END

GOING

NOTES