Spurious

Day 10

My Visitor and I are on the high seas of philosophy, our table a galley, with her at one end, reading Kant, and I at the other, reading Virno. We've agreed on Prince as the music perfect to accompany us on our voyage. My Visitor reads the following passage from the Anthropology:

Changing forms set in motion, which in themselves really have no significance that could arouse our attention - things like flickering flames in a fireplace, or the many twists and bubble movements of a brook rippling over stones - entertain the power of imagination with a host of representations of an entirely different sort ... they play in the mind and it becomes absorbed in thought. Even music, for one who does not listen as a connoisseur, can put a poet or philosopher into a mood in which he can snatch and even master thoughts agreeable to his vocation or avocation, which he would not have caught so luckily had been sitting alone in his room.

I read Bernhard felt the same way (about Prince).

The Aesthetic Egoist

The table, that was once up against the window, one leaf folded, the other up to hold the monitor and keyboard, has been pulled out. Both leaves up, the other to accommodate my Kant reading Visitor. We work together in the living room, face to face over the table - trouble, however: I work with music playing, and she does not; and I like to listen to Jandek, which she definitely does not. She reads me this passage:

The aesthetic egoist is satisfied with his own taste, even if others find his verses, paintings, music, and similar things ever so bad, and criticise or even laugh at them. He deprives himself of progress toward that which is better when he isolates himself with his own judgement; he applauds himself and seeks the touchstone of artistic beauty only in himself.

I laugh. 'Oh that's priceless'. 'It's not meant as praise of the egoist', says my Visitor.

Amor Fati

Pessoa's heteronym, Alvaro Coehlo de Athayde, the 20th Baron of Tieve takes his life, leaving a manuscript in a desk drawer.

These pages are not my confession; they're my definition. And I feel, as I began to write it, that I can write with some semblance of truth.

And who is the Baron more than what is defined, enacted by the text Pessoa has him write? A text that is, with respect to the Baron, posthumous - the remnant of that literary ambition burned up when he threw his other fragmentary manuscripts onto the fire.

In the past the loss of my manuscripts - of my life's fragmentary but carefully wrought oeuvre - would have driven me mad, but now I viewed the prospect as a casual incident of my fate, not as a fatal blow that would annihilate my personality by annihilating its manifestations.

But the he still needs, does he not, the manifestation of The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive, as Pessoa subtitles it ...? Burning up literature, he is still dependent upon it - upon its remnants, upon what still attests to its demand.

To think that I considered this incoherent leap of half written scraps a literary work! To think, in this decisive moment, that I believed myself capable of organising all these pieces into a finished, visible whole!

So now the Baron throws it all into the fire. Honour and silence, he says, are left to him; this is what his reason confirms, this 'millimetric' thinker. A thinker who also says that it is by thinking that he remains like Buridan's ass 'at the mathematical midpoint between the water of emotion and the hay of action'; and that 'temperament is a philosophy'. Then thinking cannot think past temperament; the Baron's character is his fate; what remains is the Stoic amor fati, that acceptance of the order of the world as it measures out our destinies. Whence, I suppose, the title The Education of a Stoic Pessoa gives these pages.

Amor fati? Was it the Baron's fate to burn his manuscripts and take his own life? Or was his suicide a fatal leap towards action, his last chance, his rebellion? Ah, The Impossibility of Producing Superior Art (another of Pessoa's subtitles) ...! but it is impossible only for one who prefers, he says, to suffer alone 'without metaphysics or sociology' what led Leopardi, de Vigny and de Quental - 'three great pessimistic poets' to make 'universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes'. Perhaps it is only the Baron's discretion, his sense of honour that leads him to the impossibility of realising his works and - short step - to suicide.

Richard Zenith, editor of the volume, quotes an excerpt from another text by a Pessoa heteronym, Bernardo Soares:

I weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them, they will be more touched by my weeping than by any perfection I might have achieved, since perfection would have kept me from weeping and, therefore, from writing. Perfection never materialises.

Soares weeps, but the Baron does not. No consolation for him in readers who were touched sufficiently to forget the imperfection of his work. And yet there's this book, The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive ... How are we supposed to read it? We are not to be touched. It is a monument to the absence of weeping, to the Baron's honour. He saved us, he says in these pages, from an oeuvre born of a sublimated suffering.

Compare Soares, author of The Book of Disquiet happy with his tears and happy to write of his suffering. Soares who produced a manuscript far larger than that left by the Baron of Teive. Neither author produced a book that was published in Pessoa's lifetime. And yet I wonder whether The Education of the Stoic was a way of short circuiting Soares' sprawling The Book of Disquiet - of delimiting that impulse that led Pessoa to produce so many fragments. To die honourably, discretely; to die like an aristocrat: was this what Pessoa wanted in the Baron of Teive? As, meanwhile, the bookkeeper Soares, prolix and weeping survived in him, and The Book of Disquiet grew longer and less manageable still ...

The Reptile Brain

My Visitor does not have a high opinion of Jandek; I heard her wince just now from the kitchen, where she's waiting for rye bread to rise in the oven. Early on in her visit, we had the Jandek conversation. It's about microtones, I told her. A non-tempered scale. A guitar detuned from Western tonality. And a voice that, if it seems gloomy, is in fact stretched and supple and explores an idiom, a mood, rather like a raag. And the lyrics, too, are interesting, I said. Oblique - fragmentary: don't they belong alongside - say, late Scott Walker?

That's what I said, and then I put on the music and she looked - horrified. But in the spirit of generosity, as she bakes she said to put it on again - she wouldn't notice. But I heard her wince in the kitchen. The CDs are lined up on the shelf, her copy of Clarissa on top of them. Clarissa trumps Jandek, she says.

'What music would you normally put on when you come home from work?', she asked just now. 'You don't have to ask', I said, and especially today. 'Put some on then. I won't notice'. I put some on. She winced. 'It's the reptile brain', says W. - 'it knows there's something deeply wrong with this music. It protests'. And he reminded me of our passed out friend, dead to the world and our entreaties. We threw things at him; he hardly stirred. And then - my idea - Jandek. We played it and then his arm rose into the air. He wasn't conscious, but - his arm. It's his reptile brain, said W. His reptile brain protesting.

For his part, W. admires Jandek. He plays the CDs, but he can't be in the same room as them. I either go up, or down, he says. Up to the bedroom and study, or down to the kitchen. It's involuntary, says W. It's his reptile brain, he says.

Markings

On the office bookshelves, by chance my fingers, running along the book tops, finds one an old friend, now dead gave me because he saw I liked it. It must have been bought secondhand, for it has a name other than his on the inside cover: Helen Mills 1965, it reads. A long introduction by a famous poet, then the epigraph, which my friend, reading this book perhaps in the late 1960s, has boxed with his pen: 'Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.' Eckhardt, of course. And a pages later, a star by a sentence which reads: 'We carry our nemesis within us: yesterday's self-admiration is the legitimate father of today's feeling of guilt'. And by a star at the bottom of the page -written as paraphrase or commentary? - 'Everyone carries within him the seeds of his own undoing'.

A couple of pages later, in 'The Middle Years' of the diarist-poet, 'What is necessary? - to wrestle with your problem until its emotional discomfort is clearly conceived in an intellectual form - and then act accordingly', and the words 'God! Yes!' written emphatically in the margins. 'God! Yes': then my friend the annotator must have recognised himself in these underlined lines (and from the same page, also underlined: 'And only he who listens can speak'. A few pages later, and we find my friend in dialogue with the author of Markings. The commentary is vigorous, and occupies half of each page (since the editors of the volume have set out the text quite sparingly, and make room for this).

'At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose your self?' That's how the author's reflections begin. 'No - he is wrong', writes the annotator, and I can remember the vigorous turn of his thought in our many dialogues. Dialogues in which I was always comfortable, never liking the give and take of intellectual conversation. Preferable simply to listen, to take notes, to mull on what was said and then to respond in time. I had always suspected my friend never quite read books through, and so it is with this volume.

After a few more pages of passionate commetary, the text around the printed verse and prose is blank again. My friend's footprints vanished, and I am reading farther in the text than he, and unaccompanied. 'We never reach out towards the other. In vain - because we have never dared to give ourselves', reads the text, and the last comment, on page 53: 'Fear of emotional commitment. Result - Dry and arid desert of a man'. And then a little further down, 'Poor man!' Of course my friend was the opposite of a dry and arid desert, and he feared no such commitment. But what of the one who reads?

Reading on, I discovered I must have read it before. My own handwriting, so different from my friend's. No flourishes, I discover. The trace of a few pencilled underlinings, I discover, remaining after my efforts to erase them. Underlining what? Sentences I now find banal. Did I ever admire this book? Perhaps only because of its form, and of what seemed possible in the aim of writing not a book of excerpts from a diary - kept through a lifetime, that seem to attest to a spiritual development, the ripening of a life - but of one made purposely as the text is presented here, in fragments.

The penultimate lines I underlined are quoted from Faulkner: 'Our final wish is to have scribbled on the wall our "Kilroy was here"'. Was that what was intended in the markings of my friend? And what did I intend in rubbing mine away?

All of us compose our works in a dream, even if we compose them while awake. And 'the man from Porlock', the inevitable interrupter, inwardly visits all of us, even if we never have visitors. All that we truly think or feel, all that we truly are - as soon as we try to express it, even if only to ourselves - suffers the fatal interruption of that visitor who we also are, that person from the outside who is inside us all, more real in life than we ourselves, than the living summation of all we've learned, all we think we are, and all we'd like to be.

Reading Pessoa's essay 'The Man From Porlock' reflecting on the visitor who, Coleridge records, interrupted the composition of 'Kubla Kahn', but caused it to break off, I was interrupted myself by my Visitor, but in an eminently pleasant way ...

A Slice of Chaos

Hypermnesis

The French literary genre called the récit typically bears upon an event that happened in the past, meditating upon its significance, a roman [novel] as events unfold in the present, the perpetual present of the novel. For the récit, in a sense, the event in question has not quite happened, not yet unfolded (like the wings, Ellis notices, via Nabokov, on Samsa's back); the act of interpretation that belongs to its narration actualises different aspects of it, considering it first from this and then from that perspective. The narrator has not had done with the event; it has not yet been worked through; the récit is a search for that narrative form that is adequate to it, which witnesses what happened without betraying it.

The roman, on this schematic account, is at home with events and their unfolding; if something is worked through, it is according to the measure of cultivation, Bildung. The roman is a Bildungsroman, and captures what is told from the perspective of a wise middle age. The follies of youth, the struggles of young man- and womanhood, and then achievement, security and comfort in the world: these are told by one who is older still, looking back. But perhaps we should say that that same author is never assured; looking back over her life, Gillian Rose still affirms the necessity of love's work - a labour that will not be completed even now, as she endures the death sentence of terminal cancer. Love's work - that's what's reaffirmed, and against those who would suppose that events cannot be worked through, can alter the same reflecting subject who would turn her gaze back over what happened.

In Blanchot's hands, the récit narrates something else; it keeps memory of what seems to defeat the measure of memory - of that hypermnesis that returns even when one thinks one has had done with it. The telling of a récit is a struggle with this revenant, a way of finding and failing to find a form adequate to its recurrence, since it happens so as to render every form inadequate, or rather to disclose form as part of what Sinthome has called in-formation, that process by which it is broken and remade in a labour very different to the mourning which, with Rose, becomes law. Who is quite sure, reading Blanchot's récits, what is happening? Who, upon finishing them, can say what has happened? Something does not come to completion, that withdraws itself from that struggle which is part of sense (of one account of sense).

The interminable, the incessant - a kind of dying, Blanchot calls it, in contrast it to that negation, that death which, for Hegel, drives the dialectic. A dying - or the perpetual rebirth of what will forces form open, and more, the very form of form, if it is still to be understood on the basis of a subject who endures what befalls it. The form of form - for it is in the third person that the self - the narrator, other 'characters' - endures what happens in a Blanchotian récit. 'No one here wants to be linked to a récit', says one of those characters; 'no more recits ever again' says the narrator of another. No more récits, but this said in a récit, by way of it. A telling, then, that remembers what cannot be told, since it is not endured in the first person. A telling of that dying that cannot be made to die, of the haunting of a narrative with what cannot be told directly, and that alters it constantly, sending it off course. Until the récit, even as it rounds itself off, completes itself, is also the story of that wandering without form, or that is only that chaos from which form is only ever a slice.

Aesthesis and Aesthetics

With great elegance, Sinthome speaks of an aesthesis that is very openness to affect - that receptivity passive beyond our usual conception of passivity. Aesthesis as a sensing and as what doubles itself up into a production of form - an aesthetic process that emerges out of what, for Kant, is the aesthetic of intuition. Aesthesis is joined to the aesthetic before the production of any particular artwork. It is there already, at the level of a passivity beyond passivity, in that openness which does not dictate in advance the certainty of its measure. No dictare here, remembering its etymological link to repetition, and to the speech of the insistent dictator, Hitler on the radio. No dictare, but only that murmuring, that chaos which doubles itself up into an experienced form. And that lets that experience be experience (experiment, openness to the new) insofar as form is only ever in-formed, emergent, born as a slice of chaos.

The new, the perpetual return of the interminable, the incessant: isn't there a contradiction here? How can the new be the old? How can it return, the old - the older than older - such that there can be novelity? Because the old has not yielded up its sense. Because there burns at its edges that nonsense that is sense's genesis, from which it emerges and that means it is always more than it is. The old - since it has never happened - can give birth to the new as this non-happening, as that eventfulness with which we cannot have done. And so the récit, as it names not only a particular literary genre, but that mode of recounting that can attend to what does not happen and bring it about. For this, indeed, is what Blanchot claims of the récit: it is what brings about what it reports, no longer representing it from a distance. Brings it about, allows it to happen, selecting and making salient that slice of chaos to which it gives consistency. And this is why Blanchot will suggest the récit encompasses a kind of theorising, that theory is itself, in some important way, a kind of fiction (perhaps that's what Deleuze's Logic of Sense is: a fiction).

What is the récit? A slice of chaos wherein each term - artist, medium, thinker, what is to be thought, is altered. Where the excessive unity of the self is called into question. That engages what can only feebly be called old or new, since it refers to that hubbub of events that cannot be determined. But with what is the récit engaged? With another order of time (the absence of time, Blanchot calls it): where what happens does so without subjects or substantives. It would be easy to present Blanchot (or the early Levinas to whom he is close; or Bataille) as a proto-Deleuzian, who speaks negatively of what the later thinking will be able to speak postively, affirmatively. Too easy, for this would be to pass over the necessity of Hegel for Blanchot, who names (with Heidegger) a thought that must be struggled against in its own terms. That prevents a leap outside that vocabulary, that theoretical lexicon.

The Scramble Suit

But let me wonder out loud about the insistence, in Blanchot's work on the importance of the interhuman relation, of community. For isn't his theoretical, practical endeavour also a way of affirming the relation to the Other as it is also a slice of chaos? An experience of Eurydice not as the figure for what he calls the work, but as the Other whom we cannot face directly lest she disappear. Or the Other as that Lazarus who does not rise from death, but as dying - the undead one who comes towards us as a rotting corpse in his winding sheet. The relation to the Other is with a kind of dying, with the interminable, the incessant, that cannot find its form. And that exceeds, thereby the plastic form the Other takes, and is more than the qualities the Other presents.

The Other, now, is the one I do not know. The words friendship and community, for Blanchot, are ways of naming this experience non-knowing, this in-formation the Other presents. The latter, especially, is a name for that doubly dissymmetrial relation wherein each becomes Other for the other person in turn, and is perhaps figured in Blanchot's remarks about his friendship with Bataille where it was always the unknown that is at issue, always the Other as a presentation of that in between, that slice of chaos that alters thought and the measure of thinking.

When Blanchot thinks responsibility - be it literary or, if I can use this word, 'ethical' - it is in terms of this alteration. It is a way of naming that aesthesis, that affect that is formed aesthetically (in Sinthome's sense of the word) into an experience. But that is perpetually in-forming, altering its sensible presentation, so that the Other becomes any Other at all, in the manner of the scramble suit in Dick's A Scanner Darkly. It is a responsibility that must be presented in terms of a passivity beyond passivity.

I Will Not Believe It

Here, we must remember Gillian Rose's reading of Blanchot, and in so doing, proceed to the darkest passages of The Writing of the Disaster. I quote at length:

Concentration camps, annihliation camps, figures where the invisible is forever made visible. All the features of a civilisation laid bare ... The meaning of work [travail] is the destruction of work in and through work/ work ceasing to be [the] manner of living and becoming [the] manner of dying. Knowledge which goes so far as to accept the horrible in order to know it reveals the horror of knowledge, the squalor of coming to know, the discrete complicity which maintains it in a relation with what is unsupportable in power.

I think of this young prisoner of Auschwitz (he suffered the worst, led his family to the crematorium, hanged himself; saved - how can one say: saved? - at the last moment - he was exempted from contact with dead bodies, but when the SS shot someone, he was obliged to hold the head of the victim so that the bullet could be more easily lodged in the neck). When asked how he had been able to bear it, he is said to have answered that he 'had observed the bearing of men before death'. I will not believe it. As Lewenthal wrote to us whose notes were found buried near a crematorium: 'The truth was always more atrocious, more tragic than what will be said about it'. saved at the last instant that young man of whom I speak was every time forced to live and relive, each time frustrated of his own death exchanging it for the death of everyone. His response ('I observed the bearing of men ...') was not a response; he could not respond.

What remains is that, constrained by an impossible question, he could find no other alibi than the search for knowledge, the claimed dignity of knowledge: that ultimate propriety which we believe will be accorded us by knowledge. And how, in effect, can one accept not to know? We read books on Auschwitz. The wish of all in the camps, the last wish: know what has happened, do not forget, and at the same time, never will you know.

And now Rose:

I will not believe it[....] knowledge is said to have been offered in the place of response, in place of responsibility. The dignity of knowledge is thereby shown to be obscene. Firstly, Blanchot blames the victim: [...] Secondly, the statement, 'I observed the bearing of men before death', can be heard as the pathos of an unbearable witness. 'Observing' is the pure passivity which is pure activity; 'the bearing' is the one moment of possible dignity witnessed before that dying: how the men held themselves, mind and body and soul, in the fact of certain destruction. Thirdly, the last wish of the victims, 'know what has happened, do not forget, and at the same time, never will you know,' does not command a contradiction, but it requires a work, a working through, that combination of self-knowledge and action which will not blanch before its complicities in power - activity beyond activity, not passivity beyond passivity. For power is not necessarily tyranny, but that can only be discovered by taking the risk of coming to learn it - by acting, reflecting on the outcome, and then initiating further action.

No more récits, ever again. What Blanchot seeks is the impossible récit, the récit that tells of the impossible as it names, now, not a literary genre, but a practice of theorising, a theorising practice - a mode of narration adequate to a perpetual inadequacy. There can be no fiction about Auschwitz, he says; the happiness of speaking has been extinguished.

No more récits - except for that récit that narrates the impossible. But isn't this to avoid that work, that activity beyond activity that allows for what seems to be impossible to be integrated into the possible. What seems to be impossible, for in the end it is all too possible, and it is only by understanding how it belongs to the economy of the possible that we might understand our complicity with tyranny and then act to change the world. Power cannot be simply contrasted with non-power, work with worklessness; responsibility must be linked to that reforming activity that remakes our institutions. Friendship and community must be exposed, as in Hegel's Spiritual Animal Kingdom, to the Good of the whole, to the Truth of ethical life; it is the Absolute which matters, not its negative double. What does it mean to affirm a communism without work? What is friendship about, or love, but the attempt to work together, to strive and struggle to remake your boundaries?

But without speech, without narration - what? How to learn from what happened, resisting the attempt of the oppressors to wipe out all memory of what had been done? How to resist the revisionists? How to stop making a myth of what happened? Aren't study centres necessary? Mustn't the worst be studied in schools and universities, and be the subject of films and novels?

The Burden of Hope

Blanchot's answer seems thin:

Humanity as a whole had to die through the trial of some of its members, (those who incarnate life itself, almost an entire people, a people that has been promised an eternal presence). This death still endures. And from this comes the obligaion never again to die only once, without however allowing repetition to inure us to the always essential ending.

Never to die only once. Never, that is to work, to negate without remembering worklessness, the 'other' death. A memory that can be kept only by way of an impossible narration, which draws the worst close to what happens in the Blanchotian récit. No surprise, then, that The Writing of the Disaster is concerned with the most terrible of afflictions as well as the peculiar joy of writing; that disaster, for Blanchot, names the stars torn out, the black, blank sky as it seems to give itself in a kind of nihilism - there is nothing - and the hope that, black in black, presents itself at that moment nihilism seems to complete itself.

For the first third of that book, a negotiation of the work of Levinas to present a kind of ethics of the disaster - an account of that relation to the Other that not merely survives the disaster, but reveals itself at that moment. No redemption, and no theodicy, but hope still, 'the burden of hope'. The Other 'close to death, to the night' to whom I address words borne by a kind of testimony [le dire], a saying [le dire]. Words, as they belong to the said, that testify to my singularising exposure to the Other: to saying as it subjects me, as I undergo what Blanchot calls le subissement [from subir, to undergo] ('which is simply a variation of subitement [suddenly], or the same word crushed'), as it is names a passivity beyond pasivity, as that dispossession in which the self is wrested from itself - 'the fall (neither chosen nor accepted) outside the self'.

This is how to read those remarks in Deleuze and Guattari where they speak of Blanchot in connection to a friendship after the catastrophe - of a changed notion of friendship as burns darkly alongside the horrors of the last century, and the horrors of this one. Never again to die only once - a dying, then, that is borne in common. The relation to the Other, that Blanchot insistently pushes towards a thought of amity - not peace, but a kind of vigilance, sleep disturbed, repose troubled by vast and frightening dreams.

Never to die only once - and perhaps this involves a kind of work, in a sense Sinthome, following Deleuze allows us to understand. That what matters is to think the opposed terms work and worklessness, death and dying, possibility and impossibility (the possibility of impossibility and the impossibility of possibility) together. Politics that depends upon what Blanchot calls community, ethics upon friendship, all works, all positive forms upon remembering the play of worklessness. Remembering it, attesting to it, letting work be interrupted by what fails work. Letting even that great attempt to think the proletariat as the truth of our time be drawn back to the abject, the verminous, the cockroaches who fall beneath the level of work (as Marx never forgot them).

Note, then, that what is named by the neuter for Blanchot is not a neither nor, a relation between two constituted terms, but a name (as good as any, which is to say, as good as none) for the given as it permits of emergence (of the subject, of substantives as emergent). The neuter that is the relation between these terms insofar as it absolves itself of its status as a relation, being measured by neither term in the relation in question.

And this is the way I would like to name Sinthome's 'slice of chaos', to speak of relation instead, but only insofar as it becomes (as it does in The Logic of Sense) a relation without constituted terms, a perpetual double alteration. A relation without relation, as it has been called (by Levinas, Blanchot, Deleuze, Derrida, and how carefully we must think the role of relation for each of these thinkers ...).

Crises of History

Swimming in the Real

'As he swam, he pursued a sort of reverie in which he confused himself with the sea. The intoxication of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himself in the thought of water, made him forget every discomfort ...' What kind of sea is this, and what kind of swimmer? Blanchot's Thomas swims in an ideal sea - a sea that he can pass through because of his capacity to think. Is he really swimming? Is he really risking himself? He reminds me of Scholasticus, who was said to have learnt to swim from books, on dry land, and when he swam drowned at once. But Thomas's ideal sea quickly becomes real; he nearly drowns ... What, then, of Blanchot's account of narrative, and its risks for writers, for readers, as they attempt to tell by way of a récit of that becoming impersonal that is also implied by our relation to language? I would like to consider this question alongside a recent post of Sinthome's.

For Blanchot, we relate to the world symbolically, through language. But this is scarcely a relation, for it is set so deeply enough within us it no longer we no longer constitute a subject that would stand over and above an object (the referent, the state of affairs) - what then? It is the condition of relation; the medium that allows us to open our eyes and see. As theorised and practiced by Blanchot (the two, in this case, are not so different), the récit (tale, narrative) pertains to that telling in which this condition breaks down - in which relation, by way of the text (the récit as a literary genre, relating a particular event in the past) is broken from its object and from its subject too. No relation between them, no condition of relation, except for what he calls the 'relation without relation' as it points to the 'there is' of language as it is broken from teller and what is to be told. Unless what is to be told is only that breaking - only language as it attains itself, its own being, its thickness, its density. But note this 'there is' is reached by way of language. That it depends upon a certain experience of meaning and happens by way of it.

Some writers are unafraid to let the narrative voice speak in place of a narrator's voice, where this names now language telling of itself. Writers who, by way of the events they report, by way of them, also tell of this other telling, this non-pulsed return of the itself of language. In Blanchot's récits, a kind of fascination seizes you (if it does) and carries you through the pages. Until it is what is told by way of the story that fascinates - by way, for example, of the insect of Kafka's story as it hovers, as Steve says, between the symbolic and the non-symbolic (between language and the fact that there is language). Perhaps it is a cockroach. But it is also more than an insect, for it speaks of a belonging to the same 'there is', to language as it flees in the opposite direction to the reader and seems to lead her into the page. Reading becomes a risk.

After the Fact

The French après coup can be translated as 'after the fact'; after - a little too late; regretfully. Something has happened over which we are helpless. Hyphenate après coup and you have the French translation of Nachträglichkeit, that deferred action that presents what was not evident the first time. It is thus that for Freud a primal scene reveals itself - after the fact, not at once; it can be discerned and deduced from its effects: it is the task of psychoanalysis to uncover that primordial event.

The author who adds a preface to his récit risks defusing what happened in it by linking it too strongly to his name. The narrative voice risks being confused with the narrating voice, and that with the author's own, who has forgotten the risk he took in writing the récit that made him no longer a subject and the referent no longer that object he could communicate through prose.

He has usurped the no one who wrote in his place - that absence of self considered in relation to the experience of language, to that writing without power, that writing without being able to (sans pouvoir). A paradoxical expression - for isn't there precisely a text, a written text that produces a writer, an author?

Certainly, but there is another experience that belongs to writing, and it is this the notion of the récit captures - that beside any telling, any roman (novel) there is also a récit, that secret tale of how language became opaque, how it withdrew into itself, how a relation unravelled itself from its terms and unravelled them, its terms, subject and object.

A récit within the roman, accompanying it, that the reader senses, and the critic - Blanchot - would expose. A secret story, a secret telling wherein language is concerned only with itself, and this by way of the surface of the text, its meaning. As the details of the telling - the glass of water the narrator would fetch, the snowflakes that brush against the window - are part of something massively dense, something unreal. As they point beyond themselves as to the plinth upon which the artwork rests. A plinth that is greater than the work and dwarfs it, as it sometimes does with Giacometti. The material support of an artwork that exceeds it, engulfs it and thickens itself into infinity.

The Idyllic Law

What is the significance of the reference to events on the historical stage in Blanchot's récits - to the Munich accords in Death Sentence, for example, or the bombed synagogue on the rue de la Victoire mentioned in passing in When the Time Comes? Here is Leslie Hill:

Blanchot's récits do not recount historical events, even when those events correspond to crucial turning points in modern history, like the ill-fated signature of the Munich accords that forms the political backdrop to Death Sentence, or the bombing of the synagogue in the rue de la Victorie in Paris in October 1941, recalled almost exactly half-way through When the Time Comes. Such events are nevertheless present in the margins of Blanchot's texts, but not as episodes in a completed narrative sequence. Events like these are not just crises in history, Blanchot suggests; they are crises of history, and they challenge the possibility of narrative itself.

Crises of history: is this a name for what happens in the récits? Is crisis the word, with its etymological links to the idea of division, of a cut? A break in history, in the order of history - is this the equivalent of what happens in the récit to narration? Is a crisis, a division, already marked in the récit with respect to that narration that is the possibility of history?

Questions Blanchot seems to address himself in his short essay 'After the Fact' when he reflects on his early story 'The Idyll' that seems so strangely to anticipate what was to come. Eerie scenes of work without purpose, where prisoners take stones dug out of a mountain in the heat of the day, and rebury them from where they have been dug. Executions assured by a sense of absolute justice, with kindness, even, but with a sense that it must be done.

'The Idyll', Blanchot says, cannot be read as an augur of the terrible events to come. The story of the stranger, the exile, cannot be read allegorically; the story, to this extent, remains 'a stranger to itself'; it must not be reduced to its ostensible contents, 'to anything that can be expressed in any other way'. It remains obdurately itself; happy in itself without reference to historical events. '[I]t itself is the idyll', Blanchot writes, and a little further on, recalls the arguments from The Infinite Conversation that come together to constitute his theory of the récit.

... before all distinctions between form and content, between signifier and signified, even before the division between utterance and the uttered, there is the unqualifiable Saying, the glory of a 'narrative voice' that speaks clearly, without ever being obscured by the opacity or the enigma or the terrible horror of what it communicates.

A dense passage. Saying, the to-say, is Levinas's expression for the relation to the Other that is marked and remembered in all speech in writing, in the order of what is said. Marked so that it sets itself back from what is communication, from the contents of the said, but also from what can be said, insofar as this capacity rests upon the capacity of the 'I' to speak and write in its own name, to pull together past, present and future, synthesising them in the present of enunciation.

It is to this extent saying breaks with the economy of signs, with the distinction between signifier and signified, marking not to what can be said, but that it is said by the very fact that is addressed to another. This 'that' is saying as it accompanies and bears the said, even as the said seems analysable into signifier and signified. But of course, to remember Levinas, it is also what attests to the Other, the addressee, who escapes the order of being, insofar as the order is predicated on the form of the 'I', its subjectivity.

It is the Other who gives speech a direction and orientation - who calls speech from 'I' such that it reveals the play of the Other in the Same, the prior investment of the 'I' by the Other. As such, speech may be said to be responsible, and from the first - or, as Levinas says, from before the first; responsibility is pre-originary, to the extent that it precedes the interiority of the subject. Saying is that 'passivity beyond passivity' in which subjectivity is subjected to the Other.

The narrative voice is Blanchot's own expression, and to be contrasted to the voice of a particular narrator in literary fiction. It belongs, rather, to language itself - to that experience of language which, in the récit, doubles what is said, accompanying it with a narrative that bears upon the materiality of language itself, its heaviness or density as the words of which it is comprised are understood not as they lend themselves to the construction of a fictional world, but as they reveal their own stolid indifference to reference, their own withdrawal from sense (from a certain account of the measure of sense).

Language becomes imaginary, to use another Blanchotian word - that is, it pertains to the material substrate of language, to the impersonal grammatical forms and the heavy particularity of words in a natural language as they give themselves to be animated by speakers and writers, but also resist that animation, being themselves dead. Or rather, remembering Hegel's use of the word death as a synonym for that act of negation by which, through language the 'real' world is taken up into the 'ideal' world of language, those words remain in a dying that exceed death, and cannot be captured by negation.

Dying exceeds the measure of death, of negation. The imaginary exceeds the reality of the world that language, on Hegel's conception, makes possible: it is of this the narrative voice speaks, figuring dying and the imaginary in the episodes of the récit. Characters no longer quite coincide with themselves; events do not happen punctually; strange moods drift like fog through the events; what remain of dialogue seems to fall away from verisimilitude: the strangeness of the récits is due to that narrative voice that would allow its episodes to indicate a certain experience of language.

This is the law of the récit, as Blanchot identifies it. Its idyll, even as what is narrated is the idyllic law of the house reinforced by punishment, by absurd labour and beatings, administered with a smile, for this is what is supposed by its inhabitants to maintain its comfort and happiness.

Then the idyllic law of the récit - or perhaps what is usually called a récit - answers to a faith in the comfort, the luxury, the happiness of telling. That telling is possible, that hope will follow despair, and, as with the end of Kafka's story, after Gregor Samsa's death, his sister will leap up and stretch her young body in the sun.

Crises of History

In his essay on the récit in 'The Sirens' Song' (an essay that is also a récit, as perhaps all Blanchot's are), he will separate récit and roman, allowing the latter to name the bright book of life that bears the confidence of telling, that has confidence in its ability to speak of all, of everything. And the récit? It names, now the impossibility of telling, of narration, and of the sense of what is usually meant by récit. It names, that is, what bears fidelity to what cannot be told.

The roman, then, answers to the order of the possible, of the voice of a narrator, of the said, the récit to the impossible, to the narrative voice, to saying ... as does, of course, Blanchot's by turns creative, literary critical and philosophical oeuvre, all of which can be read, as he commented on the oeuvre of Paulhan, as a récit, as a series of récits. Then we must distinguish what is usually called the récit, a literary genre, and Blanchot's theoretical practice, which attempts to tell what it cannot. To run up against the impossible, and more than that - to indicate and remember it.

'[T]here can be no fiction story about Auschwitz', Blanchot writes; what happened there can be recounted only 'by the impossible witnesses, witnesses of the impossible' who can speak of what happened only singularly, 'in the singularity of each individual'. And Kofman, commenting on Blanchot: 'About Auschwitz and after Auschwitz no story is possible, if by a story one means: to tell a story of events which makes sense.'

Antelme only wrote one book, The Human Race, that tells unforgettably of his experiences in Ganderscheim and Dachau. If he had written another, he wrote to a friend, it would have been like a récit of Blanchot. One of those récits that spoke of the impossible in its own way. The récit, then, not only concerns an experience of language. Or it concerns that experience insofar as it is also bound up with what happened in the camps, in those crises of history that tore history in two. And it is peculiarly able to do so because of the way in which it works, because of its form.

In what sense can a récit witness an event? Think of the moods from which the recits' characters seem to emerge (and into which they often return), in the repeated actions that seem to break into a weird kind of eternity (Louise combing Claudia's hair in When the Time Comes); and think, alongside them, of the bombed Synagogue on the rue de la Victoire, the Munich peace accords. The récit is obsessed with what returns as the indeterminable, the incessant - with what cannot be integrated by the order of narration that characterises the roman (even if every roman, as Blanchot shows, harbours a secret récit). Roman versus récit, the possible versus the impossible, death versus dying, saying versus the said ... how is the relationship between these coupled terms, these crises of history to be thought?

Saying Sense

Sinthome quotes from Blanchot's Thomas. 'As he swam, he pursued a sort of reverie in which he confused himself with the sea. The intoxication of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himself in the thought of water, made him forget every discomfort ...' Thomas enters an ideal sea, which quickly becomes real. He nearly drowns, but this does not disturb him as it should.

Sinthome comments that Thomas becomes impersonal, 'as he and the sea become the same. The sea within which he swims shifts from being the "ideal sea" to the "real sea". He fades as a distinct subject, carried along as he is by the tide'. This as part of Sinthome's discussion of receptivity where, he emphasises, world and the agent who acts must be thought together.

'[W]orld and agent are both precipitated out of this process like by-products, introducing a bit of order into the infinitely complex bramble of chaos'. This is Sinthome's 'slice within chaos' that marks 'the space of an engagement', which happens 'in between'. The relation, here, alters its terms; it is a question neither of agent nor world by themselves, but their interaction; information, understood as noun and a verb, marks the emergence of information from chaos. Information that is, as Sinthome says, 'always in-form-ation; or more simply, it is in formation. It is something perpetually coming-to-be'. And this, I think is how we can see the first term in the apparently binarisms I have drawn from Blanchot's oeuvre.

Sinthome goes further, showing how information, as verb, as noun, is that site in which we cannot distinguish the active from the passive as, for example, Kant does in the distinction between the spontaneity of the understanding and the passive receptivity of the aesthetic of intuition. This passivity beyond passivity, to borrow Blanchot's phrase involves both an aesthesis, understood etymologically as a sensing and that production of form that might be thought in terms of an aesthetic making. Sinthome gives us the example of the artist who gives form to the medium which in turn gives form to the artist, joining both aesthesis and what we know as aesthetics. The artist who in-forms and is herself in formation; a slice within chaos where each term - artist, medium is altered.

What does Blanchot's récit accomplish? The narration of this encounter, this slice within chaos. Of that passivity beyond passivity that recalls the originary production that is always at work in our receptivity. A production, however, that has to be understood differently from what Hegel calls work, since it is conceived on the basis of negation, which is insufficiently nuanced to understand the process of emergence that the récit narrates.

Mourning and Melancholy

In her beautiful book Mourning Becomes Law, which The Young Hegelian (his blog has gone!) inspired me to reread, Gillian Rose claims we need an activity beyond activity rather than Blanchot's passivity beyond passivity. Blanchot refuses, says Rose, the work of mourning - the labour of entering into that learning process through which one accepts one's complicity in structure of power, in tyranny without turning entirely away from them, remaking thereby my sense of myself, 'the bonding and boundaries between me and me, subject and subjectivity, singular and individual, non-conscious and conscious'. It is not that all wounds will be healed and the dead rise again, but that others can learn of their complicity in what happened, so that they can mourn and reintegrate what occurred - not all at once, but over time, and with difficulty. A necessary labour.

Then it is the integrity of the subject that must be kept - its subjectivity, its personhood, will and resoluteness; its capacity for reflective and involuntary action - its positing, its self-positing: this is what must be reachieved by that work that does not dissever the impossible from the possible, but thinks them together. The singular must become the particular, an instance; the nonsensical must be brought into the light of meaning so that melancholy is not infinite.

And here we might remember the Hegel Zizek presents in For They Know Not What They Do - not the strawman for whom the onroll of the dialectic sweeps up the totality, but the figure for whom history is about what is learned painfully and through terrible trials, who describes that Bildungsroman through which substance becomes subject, through which ever more complex self-positings succeed one another until ... until what? Zizek's Hegel never finds rest in Absolute Knowledge. History as Nachträglichkeit, a learning what was already there. The Bildungsroman that speaks of the whole of the past?

The Re-ject

A necessary labour, work? A long time ago, Sinthome wrote with great candour of his frustration (here I am understanding it in my own way) of those who are theoretically committed to x or y without living that same commitment, without their lives being risked by their 'work'. This is what being a psychoanalyst means for Sinthome. Risky work, work without quotation marks: a suffering person to be diagnosed and, if not 'cured', then led to that point at which life is once again possible. Work, however, that implicates those who are part of analysis, changing them in a manner very similar to what Sinthome describes as a 'space of an engagement', or the 'in between': '[W]e always want to treat the object of analysis as independent of our analysis of it and ourselves as independent of the object we engage with, not seeing the manner in which our engagement with that object produces it while it produces us.'

What kind of work does Blanchot's récit permit? It is not a Bildungsroman, to be sure. In another post, Sinthome tells us how he recoils in horror when he is asked what is philosophy, or what his research is about. 'To ask what someone's research or philosophy is, is to ask them to simultaneously formulate a proposition and state the sense of that proposition. Yet I can say what I mean or mean what I say, but I cannot say what I mean and mean what I say.' Then I only know what I'm working on once I've finished work; the preface to a book, making sense of the project as a whole, comes after the fact, after the book is complete. I can only know the pro-ject as a re-ject, as Sinthome says; which means Nachträglichkeit is the law of the work.

This might remind us of Hegel, and the adventure of reading The Phenomenology of Spirit: the course of the dialectic is not given in advance; its onroll, totalising as it may appear does not emerge into clarity except as its particular phases come to an end. Can Hegel ever say the sense of what he says (language and that there is language)? Zizek's Hegel can; to say the sense of what he says means the dialectic is kept perpetually open. This is what means to say with Sinthome that all philosophies are lived - that thinking is experiential and experimental, a projection into a future whose course is unknown.

Philosophy discovers what it is as it proceeds. In this sense, is it so different from the Blanchotian récit? For the Blanchotian writer it is language itself that is of concern. It is the image of language which fascinates the writer - its material presence, its rhythms and sonorities, its grain, and perhaps every writer has something in her of the poet, for whom every word must also sound.

'As he swam, he pursued a sort of reverie in which he confused himself with the sea. The intoxication of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himself in the thought of water, made him forget every discomfort ...' This passage from Blanchot is also an account of the experience of writing, of experience the reality of words, as it is indistinguishable from what he calls the imaginary. Words' reality, words become imaginary paralysing the movement of sense, idling every word, and joining every work to worklessness.

What can Blanchot offer in the face of Rose's argument? What risk? Language broken, the world in fragments, worklessness ... a woeful vocabulary, that speaks only of failure. But perhaps, each time, these are way of naming another kind of work, one which, like philosophy (Hegelian philosophy) is ruled by Nachträglichkeit, and discovers itself only after the fact; one that is experiential and experimental. And one that speaks negatively of what Sinthome affirms as a 'space of engagement', the 'in between' or that 'slice of chaos' which, in the récit - naming a practice of fiction, but also, perhaps, a kind of theorising which keeps memory of the real conditions of production (of information as verb) - achieves a marriage of aesthesis and aesthetics. But what, then, is the relation of this kind of work to Hegelian work, or to what Rose, after Freud, calls the work of mourning? Do the récits, remembering the crises of history, accomplish their own kind of work?

7 Plagues

The room seems so big now; the kitchen furniture that was here has been returned to its rightful place, and the damp? Gone now, apparently. Or gone enough to put the kitchen back. But the walls are fully 9" thick and being soaked for years will take years to let the water out. With the cabinets and shelves on the wall, and with rendering on outside against the rain how can it breathe? It cannot, and I can smell, in the kitchen the unmistakable smell. Perhaps the dehumidifier can keep it at bay. It is working now, as it has done for 6 months. Patient, humble, but persistent, drawing the water from the air and into the transparent container it holds like a pouch on its squat body.

Yes, the room seems large; all the rooms do, and I go from room to room, tidying up, hoovering and then polishing the floors. All this for my Visitor, who will summer here (summer as a verb, how nice - as they do in old novels), this being my last Jandek-filled night before one comes who does not like that music. I've bought her Clarissa to read, 1600 pages long; it waits with the other books in the bedroom. And I've halved the clothes in the wardrobe, taking some to Oxfam, and the chest of drawers - three now, for her (she would call them 'presses' as they do in her country).

Large and so is time, as term comes to an end and, after a few more meetings, conferences (a couple of weeks ...), spreads out into the indefinite. I give every summer a name; what will I call this one? Or rather, every summer finds a name for itself, two years ago, for example, the Summer of Going Out, and last year - the Summer of Jazz. Wasn't I going to do another book? I don't think I can be bothered. Let time open itself out instead. Let it open, day after day like a waterwheel in the steady openness of summer. Day after day - and what is to be done made up each day, as befits the weather, as befits who is about and who is doing what.

I've bought headphones for Jandek, and to listen with if I get up earlier than my Visitor, this room separated from the other in part by an internal window through which sound passes. And I wonder if I'll get up later now, and rise like other people at the brink of the work day and not long before? These early, very early mornings are trying. And it's not that I get anything done. Exhaustion. I try to work out where I've gone wrong, I cut this and that from my diet, I stop drinking at night, and start again. I stay in to calm down, I go out, neither makes any difference ...

Limes and pears in the fruitbowl (it was a loose change bowl before today), a fridge full of food that is normally bare of food. I cleared out the understairs cupboard and hoovered beneath the boiler. The sound of rocky particles rattling up the hose ... I see for the first time the space beneath the water tank, cobwebbed and full of broken bricks.... This is my equivalent of Abba's 'The Day Before You Came.'

The space in the room is full of time, potential. Full of the summer to come, gravid with it. Space like a spread sail to catch the wind. At first, tonight, I was bored. I finished a big bottle of beer, read the paper and willed my mind to settle. Evening begins with The Simpsons. Slices of meat out of a packet ... rice cakes ... I'd been eating all day, too much, as always, gluttony as always ... and too many things to do, to remember. Errands. Work tasks, emails to send. A correspondence to catch up on.

Focus, I told myself. Gather yourself together; aim in one direction. And so after a bit, Jandek. Another Jandek CD from the row of 50. One I haven't listened to often. I'll sit and listen to it, I thought, just as Bill Callahan is said to sit and listen. I'll take my shoes off and sit, and do nothing but listen, I thought. But the temptation to move from room to room in the new space. To polish a bit of the bathroom floor I'd missed; to move the fig tree from one corner to another. To bag up more clothes for Oxfam - those too tight shirts ...

But I listened as I moved and tidied. Listened, and was gradually gathered at the brink of myself, listening. Raining Down Diamonds. A devotional album, I thought. Prayerful. In its way. In Jandek's strange way. And then wondered whether that run of albums from which it comes is his 'Song of Songs'. Love songs of eros and agape. The erotic ascent, all the way to heaven. And blamed the conference upcoming for an inability to write, and especially on Jandek. I shouldn't write, I told myself. Save your energies, I thought. But gradually my listening let me fall. Gradually, and all the way down so I could lie down as I move. Resting, even as I moved and tidied.

At such times, it is fitting to meditate upon life as a whole, upon the whole of one's life. I sat on the chair and remembered, I let memory work. Conversations 20 years old. Events only I could remember - or rather, that I take myself to be able to remember directly, and not part of that great settling down, as coral reefs are built, the skeleton of one tiny creature lying upon another. That settling down out of which a more general, thicker memory accretes; a sense of a time, of a period in one's life.

Through how many such periods have I passed? Nearly 5 years in this flat. 5 - 5 years ringing out in eternity. And those 5 years spreading around me like a beach. This flat with its still rooms a beach and I on the brink of - what? The past is here. General memories, moods that belong to long periods in time, phases, and out of which particular memories come, determinate ones.

Curious to be such an archive. Curious to have watched that archiving occur and to have watched memories settle. I will not call it introspection. There's a way of discovering what is outside inside. Anecdote doesn't matter so much as ... what can I call them? Great impersonal mechanisms. The water wheel that is turned by time. A time wheel turned by its streaming. But then time doesn't stream, not always. Sometimes a sense of return, of a coming back, or a retrieval. As if I'd lived this day before - this evening, or now, this writing moment. Lived it before, and as if knowing it was to come again.

What is the opposite of deja vu? Do you remember when Ignat drops something in Mirror and sits down with his mother on the wooden floor. It has happened before, he says. But what of the sense that it will happen again? Again - and in 10 years, or 20? Once I was foolish enough to write a message to myself in a journal. Foolish with youth, for only a young person would think they were braced against time so that such a message could be sent. Sent to reach - whom? And from - whom? From one who imagined himself affixed to a moment, a date. That a journal might be kept chronologically, not in eternity. That the journal was also a way of ringing bells out in eternity, or hearing them ring. And that that is what returns, that ringing, that inside to find what is outside. No journals, then. No day that does not unfold itself in the eternal Day, in the event that does not come as itself, but in every other guise.

The other day, in the office, I chanced upon Sculpting in Time and remembered the quotation that set off this theme, the day. From memory: we've come to the end of a day, Tarkovsky says. And what retain of it is not an event, firm and clear, but a kind of nimbus, a faint aureole. That smudges the line of the event like a Redon painting ... I think it's there I find the outside: there, in the smudge. As it burns around the image like the soft light of a candle around its flame. There are candles here, in this room, which I never light except when my Visitor is here. Thick church candles on the wooden mantlepiece. Standing unnoticed and gathering dust until - today. 'The day before you came'.

After the damp came rats. I didn't write about that here; it would have made a good category: Rats. I thought there was a nest of them, a mother and babies in the space outside under the stairs. Thought I heard rustling, and that the rat I saw, nose slightly in the air, stopping still for a moment and then moving quickly, was female. But there was nothing there in that space, save for the feathers and bits of nest from the blackbirds that nested there. The few pale blue eggs, deserted after we scared the mother, the plumber and I, disappeared one by one. Was it a cat?, asked one of the workmen doing the rendering. No cats here, I said. Must have been a rat, I thought, who had dislocated itself to crawl under the door to the lane. To take the untended eggs one by one.

It's a wasted night, I tell myself. I should be working. There's secondary literature on Rosenzweig to read. But my ears are hot - a sign I'm tired, too tired but to do ... what? To write negliently. To write in that neglience that means I should not publish what is here. Thick cloud above, and in my head. I'm not really here, I tell myself. No-one is. Mist over the floorboards as in one of the rooms in Baldander's castle (The Book of the New Sun). I would like to read a book like that again, I tell myself. To follow the story across the nights ...

I still miss Frank Bascombe's voice. How long ago did I finish The Lay of the Land, which I read following The Sportswriter (which I bought as consolation for myself after my Visitor's first visit) and Independence Day? I'm in mourning for that voice, that book. I'd let a few days pass, and then tried Henderson the Rain King. This will be my year for the American novel, I thought to myself. After that, all of Faulkner, I thought. But I put it down; I returned it to the bookshelf. If only I had my lost copy of Mrs Dalloway, I thought, that'd do. Frost arrived, Bernhard's Frost, and saved me, with the rough edges of its pages and calm storytelling, with spaces between paragraphs. That's what I wanted: space. Space after the great space of The Lay of the Land ...

What will I read now, in the days of my Visitor? How are we to read - side by side? Will she read Clarissa in a sofa and I Frost in a chair? We have films to watch - the whole of Satantango, that I've kept specially. Terrence Malick. The Singing Detective. And what will we listen to, I who am used to putting on one album after another, whenever there's time. I have my John Coltrane boxset, the first quartet, everything presented in order of chronology (the better to hear eternity); I've Ayler's Holy Ghost, all 9 CDs ...

After the rats came ants. The outhouse was cleared; the yard skept clean: nothing for rats here. And I'll keep an eye on the gap under the door. Watch for her returning, the she-rat on her rounds. But ants instead, and in every room. Exploring, sending out scouting parties. Even at night, they're working. By the light of the monitor, or by the bed lamp. Working, searching for tiny grains of food. So I swept the floors and hoovered, and polished the floorboards until the varnish shone. No chemical trails for ants to follow. No paths through dust. And now it's rained for two days, no ants came. What next in the sequence of 7 plagues?

The workmen thought we should leave the rendering until the blackbird was done with her eggs and chicks. Until she'd toppled the fledglings from the nest and into the air, and they'd gone out in search of nests of their own. I said, she's not been back since we scared her. 5 blue eggs - then 4, then 3: what was taking them? cats? - No cats here, I said.

Am I focused now? Have I gathered myself up? And if so, for what task? What good is this? What use, except to blur the contours of my life? To blur them and to let burn that nimbus that blurs the determinate into indeterminacy. The sky vanishes into cloud; the wall crumbles into damp, the ants are crawling about as in a Dali painting. 'It means seedless' said X., a million years ago. 'That's what it symbolised, for him - he was seedless.' But what did that mean, seedless - impotent? infertile?, I thought as I heard X. speak: I'll remember this conversation. This one, and for no particular reason.

The walls are 9" thick; how long will it take for the water to come through? Sometimes I go out to touch the rendering. It's wet in patches, despite the fillet. Is that's how it's spelt - fillet? And in the rain, I watch the walls closely. Is water getting in? Does it run down the inside edge of the pipes and into the gaps in the wall?

Ill Together

We had illness in common, was that it? Or it was illness that filled that space between us, that absence of possibility. I was unemployed, and you - you'd dropped out of employment. You'd had an operation, and then it came, the illness; you didn't return to work.

I met him once, your business partner. He was half in love with you. He said he'd run the business, and what mattered was that you got better. You said you wanted no phonecalls from him, nothing. Just a monthly cheque. Taken out of the accounts so it wouldn't alert the benefit people, from whom she also recieved a monthly cheque.

I was impressed: you were ready to be seriously ill. To see it through to the end. You said it had been brewing a long time. You'd worked hard, you said, you'd built up the business, you and your partner. But it was waiting all along, you thought, and from your teenage years. You showed me a photo. You as a teenager, long haired and made up. You played keyboards in a band. You toured the workingman's clubs.

But you were ill then, you said; it had already begun. Staying with your uncle and aunt, you said. They didn't want you there, you could feel it. Down by the sea - Brighton, it was. And then you'd come back up North, got a job. Went out with a gangster, you said, who told you how to fiddle the banks. You had a whole secret identity, another you, with another account. And bought two houses, and received two lots of benefits.

Very clever, the whole thing. But now the illness had come. You were ready to be ill, there was no avoiding it. A serious business. You had to wait for illness to pass through you and away. Had to lie down and wait, to welcome it in your own way, to affirm it in its passage. And then you'd rise, one day, ready for the world. Ready as you'd never been, knowing the illness was in you, you said.

And I was ill too, you said. You saw it in me. There was a kind of vacancy, a void. You knew it there. It was what we had in common, you said. We had to let ourselves be ill, you said. You knew the lingo, you'd visited counsellors. And didn't he say, your counsellor, that he thought you were a saint. What you'd put up with, he said. You were saintly, he said, and that he was in love with you.

Because you were pretty, you always had that - your looks, of which you were neglectful, and marvellously so. Because you could neglect them. No make up, no fancy clothes. You smoked rollies and your voice was deep. At night you'd pick at your face for hours, you told me. Smoking rollies and surfing the net (you'd just got connected).

It was illness that drew us together, you decided. The illness in each of us recognised the other. It was time to be ill. To let ourselves be ill, you believed in that. For illness to work through us. That was the summer, you said. Our summer would see our illnesses sprawl. We would be ill together, she could see that. We had to be ready to be ill, to let ourselves be ill. For it to pass through us.

Very well, I thought. For I was feeling ill. Tired, too tired. Thick headed (as I am today, once again on the brink of summer), and that wasn't right, was it? She agreed; it wasn't right. We were ill, the pair of us. And ready to go inside and wait. Ready for the room with blue and pink wallpaper. Ready for the futon. We would have to pace ourselves. I was not to write and she was to take no phonecalls. Days would pass, weeks, and it would be good for both of us, to let ourselves be ill.

You had another ill friend. She'd got sheltered accommodation, not far from the room. We visited her there, in the darkness, a traffic jam outside. It was still and calm in the flat. The rooms were dark. What did she do all day?, we asked her. Watch TV, she said. Read. Catch up on her reading. Clever people like us always get ill, she said. She'd been a businesswoman, she'd worked in the world. Now it was her time. Her time to be ill.

Just as it was our time, you said later. We'd been tough on ourselves, you said. And now we had to be kind. We'd probably be ill all summer, you said, and then we'd see.