Spurious

The Hammock

In Portugal, I took pictures in the bookshop - of the covers of Lispector volumes, for a start, with her made-up aqualine face, very striking, and then of the recommended section, with Broch and Musil there, and plenty of Pessoa (the Pessoa museum, by the way, was a tremendous disappointment), and then, as I passed, of the readers' room, long and narrow, and completely full of book browsers sitting in two long rows with their prizes. But then I got told off by a shop assistant, first of all in indignant Portuguese, and then, when I said I couldn't understand, in English. No pictures were to be taken unless I asked the security guard's permission. I felt rueful. I couldn't take pictures? Why not?

The Portuguese are booklovers, I could tell that. Books are expensive there. I rather wanted an original Livre du Dissassego. I saw one in a pavement store. How much? 24 Euro! 24 Euro! But in the bookshops - and it was only a paperback - it cost 36. Madness. No original for me. In the flat, I read parts of Zenith's Penguin Book of Disquiet. I don't own a copy - it wasn't mine. I like my Quartet Encounters edition more, underlined and annotated as it is. It bears the marks of my reading (and rereading). At one time, it was an essential book for me. Reading it now, with the Bridge of 25th April visible from the 6th floor, I remembered that first flush of readings. How old was I then? 22, I thought, or 23. Terrible years, and in which my taste in reading changed altogether. The Book was at the heart of it, I remembered. Everyting turned around the Book (but weren't there other books, too - Kierkegaard, for example? Stages on Life's Way? Guilty/ Not Guilty?) 

I was in Pessoa's Lisbon, had had my photograph taken next to his sculpture in the cafe, and hadn't I bought a Pessoa teeshirt (too small, alas, though it was marked 'L'. A child's size, I said, giving it to my Beloved)? Pessoa! I wondered whether the name was for me only an index of a time when reading was essential, when it was at the heart of things. Zenith's edition seemed as cool as our air-conditioned bedroom. Black covers. Many, many pages, with numbered sections. Appendices in which I would wander for hours. And a fine introduction, too, from this most admirable of Pessoa scholars. But I remembered by Quartet edition, and finding it in Manchester, in Waterstones, and reading it puzzedly, then compulsively, over and over again. The Book of Disquiet, which fell, engimatic stone, into the heart of my reading, drawing everything around it.

The Pessoa museum, as I said, was insignificant; there was nothing there. Happily, we had had a marvellous lunch in a nearby cafe - marvellous because we ate alongside office workers and ladies-who-lunch, their hair solid with hairspray, because we ate from a small menu almost identical to that of every other cafe - marvellous because it was any-cafe-whatever. We were already content, slightly drunk from the wine, well fed - fish, marvellous fish. These long lunch hours! These three hours stretched like a hammock from the poles of morning and evening!: the Portuguese knew how to live, we thought. They ate and drank a full meal at lunchtime. They met and ate and talked and drank and all of this on Pessoa's street, on the street where he lived in his last years, when he wrote so much of his book.

On the way back to our apartment, we stopped for several hours in a park, and I looked through my photographs. Lispector! And a whole display of Pessoa's books! What they meant to me! Or rather, what they had meant - what they meant then such that they could mean anything now, such that what reached me on the pages of a borrowed Penguin Disquiet still glowed from an older, higher reading! I was nearer the Source, I thought. Higher up, by the mountain streams, where Literature began and still begins. Why then, why there? Because of the misery of those years when my reading changed, when it changed direction - when, for all the reading I did before, what I read took on the shape of my life. Who would I be? Didn't I learn of it then, aged 22, aged 23 ...?

I was an office worker, of course. No long lunch hours dangled across the day. Work and more work - data entry, filing. What was Pessoa in all this? The opposite of 'all this', but whereas Bernardo Soares was imaginable in Lisbon, he was not so in Bracknell, or in Winnersh Triangle. The Book was the opposite of that world, as it might still belong in Lisbon. The opposite, and this is why Literature with a capital 'L', and I should say Modernism, was never a part of our lives ('our' because there were other readers, scattered around). Never part of it, away from it, impossibly far, but for all that, impossibly important.

Everything I read since then has been a reading of Pessoa. Everything that search for a kind of hammock in the day - not for reading, but for living of a type that was not allowed anymore. Pessoa lived on a street near the cafe. He belonged there; even Bernardo Soares had his two feet on the ground in Lisbon; he was no ghost: that's what I tell myself this morning, however foolishly. Or he was a ghost who still belonged to a place, haunting it to show that another life was possible, that you might live in another way. But here, now? No ghosts, no possibilities; no high place to reach by way of reading.

Toy Stars, Real Stars

There are books you have to stoop to read; you can't stand up straight. Kafka's aphorisms, say. Late Mandelstam poems. Tsvetayeva 's long poems. Books that are their own law, their own religion. That seem to press further into themselves, and all the same to have reached something - a solitary point, burning alone in the sky. A star that burns into itself, falling endlessly into its own idiom. And separated from us in so many ways, not least the great, burning catastrophes of the twentieth century. But it is not as if you have to part veil after veil to find them - learning German, learning Russian, learning the history of Prague, or the history of St. Petersburg. They burn through all veils and that is the point. They reach us somehow, and as themselves, absolutely themselves. 

Laughter. What nonsense! As though you could gather the 'treasures of world literature' around you like gems. As though that gathering, the act of looking for 'literature' - or the pretense that it actually came to find you, shining through all the veils - was not a horrible kind of acquisitiveness. Some books you have to lose to find. Some books will not tolerate being placed alongside others on the shelves. Nothing worse than a collector of books, than a sniffer after old editions. Nothing worse than the literary fantasist who dreams the classics burn around him like the toy stars on a child's bedroom ceiling.

Toy stars, real stars. I'm not sure what kind of constellation my bookshelf collects. Fake or real? What am I looking for as I read? What do I want to find?

Bright Books of Life

It is not very companionable to read - for a couple to be reading separate books side by side on the sofa, say, or lying on the bed. I read Gombrowicz's A Kind of Testimony - at first engaging, with a marvellous voice - a voice that I would have thought has been selected from a slew of voices; a voice - this voice - that is fitted to the task of the laughing defiance of the opening chapters; but becoming drearily self-same, displacing the other voices the book might have called for, until it becomes reedy and narcissistic.

But how can I pay it attention, really - how to listen out for those other, occluded voices as I lie side by side with my Beloved, or sitting alongside her? There's nothing worse than reading couples, I tell myself. A reading couple - what an absurdity! Ignoring each other - to read! Or pretending to ignore each other, and not being able really to ignore each other! It's the worst of images: the reading couple, or worse, the scholarly couple, a couple who each have a separate study, who study alongside one another in separate rooms - what horror! The scholarly couple who agree to do a couple of hours' work on a Saturday morning and then meet for lunch in the living room!

Perhaps reading requires for more solitude than that, and to read must be to read alone, drawing the night around you turning pages in a cone of light before the drawn curtains. You would read as Kafka said he would write: in a room underground, far below the earth and the everyday to which he might be occasionally brought meals, but in which he was alone, essentially alone. To read - really to read! But it would be as impossible as what Kafka called writing. In the end, reading is always on the way to Reading, whether sitting alongside another or reading alone (and at the end, didn't Kafka write in the same room as Dora Diamant, alongside her? Only at the end - what cruelty!). Reading - impossible; but still there is reading, and if there is another alongside whom you can read - all the better ...

Perhaps this all seems absurd. Why read? Who reads, and who, really, looks for Reading in reading? Perhaps Reading is never about the books themselves, but of what it means to read when no one reads, when reading is losing importance, and a vast world of culture is slowly retreating from our reach.

Laughter. Is that it - the sense of a vanishing culture, of an Old Europe or an Old America? The sense that to keep reading is to protect it, to watch over it, carrying it along like the holy of holies, as it would watch over you? The great names of Europe! The great poets! The arch novelists! To carry it all on your back, like Nietzsche's camel! - poor you! ...

What a sham! As though you had any essential relation to Proust, whom you only read in translation! Or Musil - or Broch! Or Woolf, say, or Green - or Conrad! You came to late for any of them, you tell yourself. Too late - and these are already late books, books of the end. The last of a wave that broke upon old Europe - no, that was old Europe, or what we imagine Europe, from our distance, might have been. Those names now shaken free of their contemporaries, separate from the others, detached from their constellations and shining like remote, solitary stars, each seemingly sufficient unto themselves ... what have they to do with you? What connection do they have to you, who were born long after their writers died?

Old Europe - isn't this the most laughable of fantasies? Perhaps this is why I liked Montano's Malady, a book written after the end of the end, when literature - absurd word - became a kind of sickness, a sickness of literature, a fantasy sickness of a world that seems to have withdrawn but that never held the unity of a world, and never belonged to Old Europe.

Too many books. You should give them away, neglect them. Bag them up and leave them in an old cupboard. Leave them for someone else to find - as I found, once, a novel by Lawrence, not knowing who he was or what he wrote. A novel by Lawrence, read when I'd finished all my other novels (McIntyre's Dreamsnake, Kiteworld by Keith Roberts), read before I knew who he was. Was it the 'bright book of life'? Something like that. And I remember reading The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man my back against the warmed wood at Winnerish Triangle station, just after I'd finished the Mammoth Book of Fantasy. And The Magic Mountain, ordered after I saw a section dramatised by Malcolm Bradbury on TV - The Modern World, was that it? - The Magic Mountain, pompous and overblown, and yet, and yet ...

They'd found their way to me, these books - is that it? The classics selected me and called me forward? I think almost any of those bright books of Life would have done back then. Any book - anything of modernism, any questioning book that questioned style and itself and wrote in a new way and asked for writing in a new way. As though you could continue the experiment on the pages of your own life. As though art could cross over to life - no wonder there was a great politics mingled with the great gesture of writing. And wasn't it that that I sought and that that I wanted? A new life, or a life counterposed to the company where I worked and to the hi-tech computer park to which I commuted every day?

Soon, I'd discovered the Surrealists, the Situationists ... and it would be Life itself that I dreamed of - Life as it lay in the depths of Reading. Wasn't it there like a fish - Another Life, Another Way of Living? And isn't this why I like to like reading still - in memory of the Life that flashed at the bottom of reading - a Life that I could have reared myself up to want back then, when I was young? Life as the opposite of the everyday of the company and the hi tech park?

There is always something egoistic about couples - a withdrawal, a separation from the business of life but also for the hope of a great politics and a great overturning. The egoism of two - how is a reading possible that lets Life quiver at its base? It is enclosed by domesticity, by the happy familiarity of a way of living insulated from jobs and companies. Reading is another way of inhabiting a home, of enclosing what lives outside and flashes with the hope of another life, another way of living.

A page has been turned - or is it the last page that has turned. The last one - already turned, then when you didn't know it was the last, when it became the least important page of all. As in that Abba song, 'The Day Before You Came' that lists the last, insignificant actions before the Beloved arrives. The day before - old Europe. Or the last modernist Europe that you know only by its withdrawal, when the great conjoining of Life and Art has vanished into the air.

My Beloved is reading Nina Simone's autobiography. I read it too, on the train going South. Of the Civil Rights movement, and of a life Simone recalls that was lived in common, that had no room for privacy. A Life that tolerated no domestic enclosure - that threw wide every house, every dinner party. That's what Duras's house on the rue Saint Benoit became too, in the campaign against French colonialism in Algeria. Where Blanchot and others drafted the 'Manifesto of the 121'; where Schuster and Mascolo put together the periodical le 14 Julliet.

Has reading - but I'm not reading much - become a retreat? Has reading lost Reading by losing Life, and the dancing promise of another world? But I wonder from my new domesticity whether I can encounter books as what they only ever were: books, fictions and non-fictions and poems. Books to be boxed up and given away - just books, books and only books, and no longer part of the great dream, of a great politics? As they only ever were ...

Now I think of Smog's 'Held', used for an advert for one car or another. 'Held' and Bob Dylan driving along. Why did Dylan do the advert? Why did Bill Callahan sell the song? Because a song is only a song ... is that it? A song is just a song, and he's a jobbing song writer, and Dylan a jobbing icon who needs to make a buck? A car driving along needs a song, and why not this one, which nestles next to 'River Guard' on Knock Knock? And didn't Dylan long sell 'The Times They Are a-Changing' for the adverts for some accountancy firm?

As they only ever were ... but literature, old Europe could never be anything other than a promise, another life. A promise ... for whom? For us - but who were we? The few who read, and for whom reading was - what? A colleague read Genet: wasn't that something? I lent him Breton: wasn't that something? Breton in the corridors of Digital Electronics? Genet in the open plan offices of Hewlett Packard? Who were we? The few who read, and for whom Reading was always more than reading (and weren't there Listeners, too - and Seers? but we were Seers and Listeners too).

A page is turning - or it has already turned. Turned and the book is closed, the book that was never open. There was no old Europe. Reading looked for what it could not find. Life was never but what it was here, in the open plan offices, in the carparks of Winnersh Triangle - is that it? Life was never elsewhere, but here, and nowhere else but here - is that it?

How Are We to Disappear?

I never liked hoarders of books: old men and women who would never lend or give me, when I was young, what I wanted from their bookshelves. Hoarders, collectors, saving books - from what? for what? - and hence depriving them from me. How unreasonable I was (and am), but now I must turn my prejudice on myself. Have I not replaced old editions of my books with new, hardbacked ones? Am I not able to afford 3 or 4 pounds to buy a book out of curiosity? Have I not a row of unread books and that I might not read for many years - editions of Gaddis, Canetti, Milosz, Perec; and even Lydia Davis' Swann's Way, in the American edition? How deplorable!

I wonder whether I buy these books, and replace order ones in order to satisfy the victim of literary deprivation I once thought I was - and whether I've missed out on that kind of reading where a book can really be everything. But this, too, is absurd: how foolish to look for a Reading behind reading, and to think it lay there when I was young. I was as foolish a reader then as I am today - as distracted, as frivolous: then and now I felt I never really read a book, but only grazed its surface: that beneath, say, the printed pages of The Sleepwalkers, in that old, handsome Quartet Encounters edition, there was an experience of reading that I'd missed, as though the real book lurked there like a kraken.

I read it again, The Sleepwalkers - or almost all of it, and felt I'd missed it yet, and that I'd always missed my appointment with this, and other books. Maybe there was a time when reading was possible, I told myself, when my readerly ancestors in an older Europe were able to give such books the total attention they deserved. A Europe in which books were rarer, perhaps; a stiller Europe, without television and films and computer games. The Europe, perhaps, of the old Chamberlain who dies in Rilke's Malte Lauridds Brigge, and from whom the narrator of that poem-novel feels himself to be cut off.

And then reassurance: perhaps the books that I treasure because I want to treasure something - because I want to protect, if only my dream of a reading that was once and might be again possible - are those deprived of that unitary culture in which they might have been read. The books are on my side, and old Europe is on another, and both of us dream of the reading they might have welcomed, had they been written by those who lived more deeply in the nineteenth century and the centuries before them. But I think this, too is a dream, and Cervantes' was already a book written in the wake of a disappearance: this time of a world of heroes, of knights and quests and grails.

There is a tradition that says art, the creative is a sign of what is missing from our lives, and that we might fight to find it again, that old unity where life and creation are one. But when was that time, and how might it be refound? I think of the Greeks for the Romantic Germans. And I think of Hoelderlin dreaming of throwing down his pen to fight for some cause or another. Life is always on the other side of art. That's so for Kafka too - for him above all, with his dreams of Palestine, of becoming a manual labourer and forgetting the world of books. Art is only counter-life, its shadow ... but that, too is a myth.

Just as reading was never Reading, so life was never Life. All readings only graze the surface of their books. Every reading is a tangent, a way of touching. And every reading is complete, adequate to itself. There is nothing beneath the surface of the text ... Is this why there is something disgusting about the collector, the one who is surrounded by the substantiality of a library? Reading is light. It is inconsequential. What is less important than fiction, and especially that fiction that wants to be more than fiction, or that wants to speak fictionally of something greater, but of what it can only touch as fiction?

I would like to brush the books from my table. Or to put them outside, neglect them, until, water-damaged, sun-faded, they assume the modesty of rocks and lichen. Or I would like to lose each one of my books, as I left one behind on a plane the other day, in the pocket in front of me, along with a notebook and some in-flight magazines and entertainment guides. I had Swann's Way with me on that flight, but I watched Juno instead, and then No Country For Old Men. It was too dark to read, I told myself, and my neighbour didn't want to be awakened.

Hadn't I spent an hour in Barbara's bookshop at Chicago O'Hear, looking for a book? An hour ... there was Bataille, Accursed Share vols. 2 and 3 and The Tears of Eros in the Inspiration section. There was popular science, books of history. Novels ... including the newly translated Bolano, in a big, American edition. But I wanted a book written in the first person, I told myself. A book I imagined speaking softly to itself between its covers. I wanted to surprise, by reading, a kind of intimacy, a relation the book had to itself and that it would keep, like a secret.

Was it speaking, there in the pocket in front of me, between the safety card and the sickbag? Could I hear it beneath Juno and the Coen Brothers' film? Swann's Way now sits on the window sill in my living room, its pages being slowly beached by the sun. Swann's Way, with its floral spine, puce, and its fake cut pages. Haven't I read it before? The train from Guildford to ... where? And when? I was training as a teacher - wasn't it then?

I had the Moncrieff translation, amended by someone or another. I still have it, a pale green Penguin Modern Classic, now twisted out of shape. It's in the cupboard, back there. In the darkness, half forgotten. I should throw it away. There's something disgusting about it, like a half-crushed insect. I read it, I loved long passages of it, I put it aside, let its spine become twisted - when? how? - but I know, too, that I failed the book as I've failed every book. As I will fail the new Swann's Way on my sill, a book that will keep its secret as its surface, the fake cut pages I may never turn.

In my living room, I let my Beloved's books mingle with mine carelessly on the bookshelf she bought. There's no order on the shelves - only books I've read or will read soon; books on the Blues, books of philosophy and commentaries on philosophy. Novels - by V. S. Naipaul (my own edition of The Enigma of Arrival, I having only read the first third of the library edition), Janet Frame's Scented Gardens For The Blind (two pounds in our new secondhand shop. A Women's Press edition, an ironing board on the spine) ... my hardback The Last Man by Blanchot ... a few more.

My Beloved has her Austens and Trollopes in tiny, close printed editions - what, the whole of the Last Chronicle of Barset in there? - the little Dickens Christmas books ... I've an Everyman hardback of Rabelais, too - like my hardback Sentimental Journey I keep in the office (I'll never line them up, these Everymans, I promise myself that). Expensive enough (four pounds each) to demand I read them. Substantial enough to mock me for not having read them, and I feel the ghost of these books, and all the books I have read or wanted to read.

And now I imagine it is I who am too substantial, too real, and that, like Blanchot's narrator, their margins will widen when I disappear. Aren't they waiting for my body to become sun-bleached and broken-spined? - foxed as they say on secondhand book websites ... Foxed, what a word, a handsome edition, what a phrase, a reading copy, what horror! And now I want every line in my books to be part of an exorcism. How are we to disappear?, says Blanchot in the quotation that begins Montano's Malady. How indeed? How are we to allow our books to dazzle all along their surfaces, to join up into a great sphere like a planet of ice? How to let reading read only itself, turning in itself, obscure star?

Good Friday, afternoon. Weather changeable. I've written a long, stupid post. Instead of what? And for what? To find new words to same the same, and the Same of the same. What am I missing on the other side of writing? Life? Is that it? And what is lived if I press on with writing (but I'll finish this post soon; I'm running out of wind)? What do I want, and by way of reading, of writing? To give up reading, to give up writing, but only by way of reading, of writing.

Above

There are necessary writers, closer to you in some way than yourself. That you confront them in your solitude, there where only you should be. And that you cannot speak of, not ordinarily. You lack the means. How can you speak of what allows you to speak? How to separate their rhythm from your own - their style from what passes as your own (your own and what is least your own. Nietzsche knew this when he signed his work Dionysos, or the Crucified. Because to write, to speak, is to do so with a million voices.)

Style - and that is the word. Style, stylus - written across you. Within you, so that what you find in your solitude belongs outside of you. Written within the writing that you are. There, on the bookshelf - there in that author, or that one. Or in that book which you bought - when?; which was given to you ... by whom? Here is Tsvetayeva: 'It is always the same me that does not come toward the same self that is waiting for it, always'. Marina Tsvetayeva: one of the necessary writers for me.

Laughter: but you can't read Russian. Laughter: you only have her work as it's quoted by others. And it is her letters - scraps of letters, quoted - that you love, and not her poems. Isn't it? Isn't it? It is as if I want first of all the evidence of writing in a life. A writing that evidences writing, that testifies to what it has meant, to its risks, its dangers.

Tsvetayeva abandoned herself to writing, I want to write that. In some way, she abandoned herself to it. And now I remember the anecdote from quotation Mandelstam about M.T.'s rudeness ... she was a tyrant, wasn't she? She was half-mad, wasn't she? M.T.: but when I abbreviate her name thus there's something else I discover: that she is also more than the one Nadezhda Mandelstam met. More and other, beyond. As though, to remember the quotation again, one only meets her above, looking upward ...

I do not like meetings in real life. Foreheads knocking together. Two walls. You just cannot penetrate. A meeting should be an arch. Then the meeting is above. Foreheads tilted back!

A Reading Biography

However I would tell it, my 'reading biography' would lead only to the point where reading fell into itself like a waterfall: where I met books whose surface lacked the left-right and top-down direction that drew the eye across the pages. It was not that my eyes stopped scanning, or that the pages stopped turning, but rather that reading was in some vital sense suspended - that meaning, as it would be born from the page, was turned into a kind of wandering, across the same pages that drew my eyes across them.

Reading and non-reading, both at once - I read, now, in response to what fascinated me in the interval into which reading, meaning seemed to plunge. It was books in which I'd find that same plunging that I sought - books as they were ringed around a waterfall, the fall of reading into itself. A reading-adventure that has continued to this day, with sudden openings - the discovery of the work of an author new to me (Ford, McCarthy) and blockages - say, my recent reading of Handke's Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, about which I wholly concur with Steve, or the bloated circus-tent of Sebald's Austerlitz: books gone wrong somehow - in each case, an author parodies himself; he has become grand, indulged, a prominent man of letters writing his magnum opus ... What boredom! Bernhard, say always had the sense never to fall into that trap, and Blanchot never relaxed his vigilance. And think of Duras, writing all the way up to death ...

Still, there is the surprise that I would never involve myself in the clash between what is called literary and what is called genre fiction (I was always a reader of science fiction) - or feel a proud vindication, seeing Ballard revered, or Dick; or Crowley receiving his due, or Wolfe (the early Wolfe, up to 1983 or so ...) But also a kind of reassurance - a reading-confidence that allows me to pick up and put down a book forever whose first page I find disagreeable. Do I know what I want? I know, rather what I don't want and can happily lead myself by my own hand past the walls of books in a bookshop.

Still, there is no question but that I should have abandoned the Handke earlier - and have given up Austerlitz almost at once. Misplaced faith - an author can go wrong, can take a wrong turn, and the worst one is into the magnum opus, the massive book, the authoratitive book, that would draw all the strands of an authorship together. Laughter: Mishima was right to make his magnum opus, if that was what it was, from four separate novels; or perhaps he'd learnt his lesson from Kyoto's House, as I understand that book from his biographer's accounts.

Many of my admired authors have a small pallette of concerns, of moods, of characterisation, of plot. A small palette, painting dark grey on black - but that is enough, for it is in the wearing away of plot, of character, in the exacerbation of mood that I find I can discover that kind of non-reading, the inward waterfall that draws me to its edge.

Bergman complained Tarkovsky came to make Tarkovsky films - but then the same can be said of Bergman, whose characters often have the same surname and run uneasily into one another. Bernhard writes Bernhard books, and Duras, and Blanchot ... they may seem to concentrate themselves into an idiom, making themselves dense, but it is rather a wearing away that they accomplish and that is their accomplishment: idioms worn out, idioms stretched finely over nothing.

Duras characters, say, weep too much; Bernhard's intellectuals are all exactly the same, and write the same way; and with Blanchot - like Beckett - the sense that the books, lined up, constitute one long line of research, an exercise - but in a kind of authorial disappearance. To say, 'I'm not here'; to let writing be present, to present itself; to let language thicken and congeal there where plot and characterisation seem to wear themselves away to nothing.

A reader's biography. Regret as I read Kundera's The Curtain, and know the books he commends are too rich for my tastes; they show too much, these epics, these big narratives. I want the door of fiction to open only a chink; I do not want a fictional world, but only a portion thereof. Green's Concluding, say. Echinoz's Ravel. I don't think much of my taste, which seems to have become obsessional. How did I lead myself into this dead end?, I ask myself. How did I come up against this closed door? But then I am glad for my obsessive's confidence - that a bookshop, a library, is something I can navigate, that I have a faculty of judgement by which I can claim or dismiss a book, even it sometimes goes awry.

What am I looking for as I read?, I ask myself. The opposite of a mirror. A surface that refuses me. A page written as though under glass. Can I read? Am I reading? But sentences, nevertheless, that draw me with them - a kind of suspense even in the absence of intrigue. A suspended reading - not boredom, but - what? A wandering of reading in itself. A kind of plunge, Niagra's horseshoe of water plunging, roaring. 

Dying in Death

To give life to a book - to render it vivid, exciting; to let reading rush quickly over its pages, and run breathless to its end. A book is made of words, dead things, or things that depend on a kind of death - negation, the departure from its referents. Then its life is only a simulacrum of living; its vivacity is borrowed.

The writer-virtuoso can let a fictional world quiver into life. Above the book like a hologram: a world, a plot, characters. But what of the non-virtuoso for whom nothing quivers up? What of the writer who would plunge death into a dying that never permits of the making of a fictional world?

Dying lays down in death. The words no longer speak of the world, and the book is a surface. You can read, but what is it that you read? You eyes pass over a surface, but what is it over which they pass? A frozen space; a glass. Reading suspended in reading. Reading lost in reading. Where has your attention wandered? Over what blind surface is it lost?

The Doorway

The page as a doorway. The page the gate that swings the book open. Walk with me, says the book. A rich and fleshed-out fictional world is conjured; a plot that excites you; characters about whom you care. The book is a path.

But what, now, when the doorway opens onto another door? Or is it the door that you read - the page as the door, that forbids you access? And now imagine the narrative, a fictional world, a plot, characters, that are written as against that door, who are only as real as your bright room reflected in a night-black mirror: turn off the light, and they are gone. Turn it off, and there is only the night.

Wanting-to-Say

A sentence wants to be written. Which sentence? 'A sentence wants to be written'. What does it mean to invoke the wanting-to-say of words? 'I would like you to write me', say that. 'I would like to be written' - who speaks? Language - but as it turns from what you would want it to say. Language, now, without the 'I' at its centre. Unoccupied, murmuring, concerned with itself - but it asks, still to be written.

'Write me. Let me be written, so that I can return to myself on the page'. Why does language ask for this detour? Why must it exist in order to suspend itself from existence? 'I want to disappear. Write me so that I can disappear'.

Disappearance - there are words, to be sure. One sentence, another, that you can read, and that make sense. But is there a way of letting their meaning fall from itself? A way of turning meaning aside, of sending it on a detour? Then reading and not-reading would exist both at once.

'Read me; but you cannot read me. Draw close to me, and I will retreat'. I would like to come close to you, say that. I would like to be able to read you. Why is it, as I read, that the page seems to turn its face away from me? Why does the page turn, gazing only into itself? 'I am not here', says the page. I am here and not here, both at once.

Solitude and Communion

Intimate writing. The small bound book, a cool blue - Swedish blue rather than porcelain - that I took because of its smallness, its colour as much as its title: Solitude and Communion, written by a nun in an enclosed order. I imagined it as the quintessence of a life; ten thousand days compacted. The secrets of all these days lying down like the skeletons of sea creatures that give us coral. Day after day, sheet after sheet until something was made. Or like the rarest of whiskies, distilled and double- and tripled distilled. Or like a paneer pushed through muslin and pushed over and again through muslin. Until there was nothing left - or just that, itself. Itself - the spirit of ten thousand days.