Spurious

A Secret Collision

India continues to collide with Southern Asia, I read; the Himalayas are still being forced upwards and their folded roots downwards; the earth's crust thickens there where two tectonic plates are forced against one another. And now I remind myself of those collisions in life that have not ceased - of the secret movement that complicates the surface of the body, that keeps inside and outside apart, into a soul. The soul, I tell myself is made, not given, and as a complication, a folding where inside and outside are lost each inside the other.

When I try to select a novel to buy in a bookshop, it is for evidence of this strange origami that I look. I want to read of the folding of a life, its secret blossoming, not outwards to the sun, but inwards to that dark recess that loses itself in itself. To a find a prose that speaks of an involution, an event that has continued to happen as one plate rams against the other, lifting and deepening itself into thickness.

And what kind of prose? One that not only reports the event in question, but speaks from it and is nothing apart from it. That finds its origin in that same confusion that opens the dimension of what is too quickly called interiority. And that redoubles the origin in the surprise of its own birth, so that to write of the event is to re-enact it again, to let it bloom into a narrative.

How to reach what folded the soul into itself? I don't think it can be reached. It hides itself, there on the other side of the narrative. It was lost straightaway, as soon as you began to write, but also as soon as you began to live - as soon as a soul opened as the locus of life, a place that was yours. All narratives are detours, I tell myself; writing is always on the way to an Origin it cannot reach.

In this sense, all plots are arbitrary. When I find the novel on the bookshelf, I want the sense from it that all plots are arbitrary, and what matters is to begin, to set out. To begin writing and then to follow through this beginning, being loyal to it, letting the narrative reverberate with the Origin it cannot reach. I want to know that it is no plot that matters, but another kind of intrigue, in which Writing has been caught by Writing; in which the Origin is allowed to speak in what is only the beginning of a story, an arbitrary story.

That is why I welcomed Nooteboom's The Following Story when I found it a few months ago, saving it for a long journey when I could read it all in one go. On the opening page, a mystery - what was it? a Dutchman awakens in the Portugal he visited many years ago. Last night, he fell asleep in Amsterdam (was that it?), and this morning he is in Portugal in another body, another life, such as has become familiar from David Lynch's recent films. I think I could tell at once this was an arbitary way of beginning, a way for Noteboom to engage the Origin. It gave the appearance of a plot, it set a narrative on the way, and that is all.

I can't remember much of the story because I lost the book almost as soon as I read it (this happened before with Sebald's Vertigo). Perhaps it is still in the Lost and Found in Chicago O'Hare. I remember a few barely sketched characters, figures from the narrator's life. I remember long, very boring passages, particularly in the second half of the story. And I remember discovering that everyone in the novel was dead, or the narrator was, and that the incident with which it began dissolved in this greater mystery. The narrator was dead and being rowed across the river familiar from Greek mythology - was that it?

In a sense, the story did not matter. In another sense, only the story could matter; a plot - the semblance of a plot - was necessary for something to get underway ... and it had to be sporadically absorbing, even - had to give some measure of narrative suspense in order to keep moving (a suspense which, for me, INLAND EMPIRE lacked, and was certainly absent from Kis' Hourglass, which I tried to read more recently). But that it kept moving was the thing, or it kept track of that secret movement that meant Nooteboom had to write and has, each time, to hang his writing on a plot only to dissolve that plot entirely. A plot indifferent to itself, that is somehow in lieu of itself, a novel that writes and erases what is written even as it is written. A novel whose pages are as though blank or that let that blankness shine through....

Necessity

Almost any post at This Space is, for me, like a drink of cool water. With almost any new post, my hope returns of a writing specific to this new genre of blogging - fragmentary, near anonymous (names might be given, but not the clue that would allow us to situate the named), sometimes occasional (a post prompted by a contingent event, to be sure, but that engages some measure of necessity thereby. Necessity: the law this new kind of writing near-anonymous and fragmentary might discover), or sometimes more direct, speaking only of a desire to write, or that to write is to somehow to fall short of writing; that there is a Writing beyond writing; that writing lives only as the hope of that other Writing which is also the hope of another Life.

The Pulley

What day is it? Monday afternoon. But which one, which Monday afternoon? Any one, any Monday at all. Stolen time in the office. An empty desire to - what? Write? Is that it?

Begin by quoting someone else, I tell myself. By making an occasion for writing, I tell myself. Writing needs that - an occasion, and particularly when one Monday afternoon is like any other. But who should I quote? A book by Bolano on my desk - I haven't opened it yet. A daunting book by X. ... shouldn't I be writing in the direction of something like that?

The inescapable feeling that it all went wrong somewhere. That writing turned a corner and ran into a swamp. And what is this afternoon but that, that swamp? Begin with an observation, I tell myself. Test your powers by observing the world. A hazy blue sky through the row of office windows. A view of the suburbs from the sixth floor. What should I write about them, the suburbs? And what of the sky?

If I was writing on a horizontal surface I could say I wanted the page to mirror the sky. A page written without occasion, lost in the mirror play of Mondays all exactly the same would lose itself in a sky that belongs to no particular day. A Monday sky like any other; a Monday page like any other. But the page (it's not a page, but a monitor, exactly like every other monitor) is vertical, and I'm typing, not writing.

There's no notebook here. No handwriting. Words appear letter by letter behind the vertical line of a cursor. There's no occasion, nothing to mark by writing, and no reason to write. But it's Monday, and I would like to begin. It's Monday afternoon and I would like to mark a new phase by beginning. I suppose you should have projects, something that you're working on. I suppose that is the way it's done, a way to bind day to day, to assemble them in a single chain and pull yourself up through the weeks and months. The project as pulley; the task that turns the swamp of Monday afternoons into a cliff face.

Climb, then; haul yourself up. By the task you will continue to be born. I'm working on ... I'm writing ... And when you're without projects? When your task has come apart and there's no movement through the day? You've failed the beginning; you've failed the test of beginning. Writing, that would need an occasion, has none. Even the poorest writing has that, an occasion. The poorest part of an oeuvre: occasional writing, merely occasional writing, still has that, an occasion, which you so signally lack.

Monday afternoon. One hour, that's what I'll allow myself. One hour ... I want the wheel of the day to turn. It's Spring, the days are lengthening, and therefore it's more important than ever to get the wheel of the day to turn. Nothing worse than the sense of being stranded in the middle of the day, when it becomes eternal.

It's the indifference of the day that's frightening. At least you can huddle against the night. At least close the curtains and turn on the light ... The sky's not as wide, the day's not everywhere. At night, a kind of beginning is made by switching on a light; in the day, the eternal day, the light was already on, and will always be on.

No beginning, then. No occasion when the day's back is turned. It'll drive you mad, the day. There's a kind of claustrophobia in its sheer breadth. Light falls upon all, equally. Light upon everyone, and eroding everyone. We're all dying, and I'm like anyone else and, I tell myself, especially similar to everyone else, though it makes no sense.

There is something terribly alluring to me about the past. I'm hardly interested in the future. I don't think it will hold many good things. But at least about the past you can have certain illusions.

Conversations with W.G. Sebald

Kafka wrote, 'A cage went in search of a bird'. What does this aphorism mean?[....] All the bird's movements, all the freedom it knows, are seen from another perspective as only flighty divagations from impending capture. The bird belongs to another's project: it is the cage that is determining.

Corngold, Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form

Martyrs

Things are bad. We should kill ourselves, I tell W. For his part, W. says he's thought of setting himself on fire before a crowd like Domenico in Nostalghia. 'Not that it would do any good', he says.

The Lion of Judah

W.'s hair is very long now. It's a year since he last had it cut. Some of it falls in ringlets. It's his Jewishness, he tells me. He looks leonine, I tell him, like the lion of Judah.

Why don't you grow your hair long?, says W. I tell him I'll never grow my hair long. I like to be sleek and streamlined like a swimmer.

W.'s street. The houses at the bottom are no longer derelict, he says. You used to be able to see the faces of children behind the cracked windows like ghosts, but now developers have moved in. Flats are still popular in Plymouth, despite the housing slump. Once we toured the new developments at the Royal William Victualling Yard, where they took us for affluent lovers, we remember. The wide boulevards and the military grey of the buildings calmed us. W.'s street is all flats now, except for his house. We stand outside and admire its storeys.

W. and I are supposed to be thinking about Messianism, but our minds are blank.

What are your thoughts on Messianism?, asks W. I don't have any thoughts on Messianism, I tell him. What about you? W. isn't able to think about Messianism, he says. He's not capable of it, and neither am I.

This is how proper people think, says W., his arms held behind his back and his head raised. Do I look as though I'm having lofty thoughts?

He's reading Cohen's Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism at the moment, W. says, and there are whole stretches that he doesn't understand. I don't know what he's on about, W. says, but it's got something to do with maths.

W's studying differential calculus again. He's got a textbook and doing an online course. No matter how hard he tries, he only gets as far as the chapter, What is a Number? It's like parallel lines running to infinity but which never meet, W. comments of his relationship to maths.

The End Times

Sand beneath an exposed cobblestone. 'Under the paving stones, the beach', I say to W., who's showing me old Plymouth. Not much of the old city survives, W. comments. We pass through a walled medieval garden, with a low maze and a fountain. Alcoholics drink beneath a portico, listening to a radio. There's no one to move them on, W. says. He approves of that.

These are the end times, we both agree. It's enough to be left alone like the alcoholics, but our time will come just as their time will come. We'll be rounded up and shot, W. says.

A Pointing Tour

A tour of Plymouth, which was blitzed by the German airforce during the war. We compare the pictures of the city to those from before war in the books on the local history stand at Waterstones. In Germany, they would have rebuilt the city brick by brick, W. observes. That's what happened in Freiburg. Not here, though.

W. admires modern Plymouth, with its elegant lines and wide streets. We read about Abercrombie's Plan for Plymouth, published during the war, which saw the city organised in long boulevards, transected by the avenue that runs from the station to the Hoe. The building that houses Watertones was one of the few to survive the Luftwaffe, W. says. It was the quarters for the Plymouth Herald, and journalists went out onto the roof to kick the incendiaries away. Later I take a picture of him pointing to Waterstones, and we go on a 'pointing tour' of the buildings that survived the war in the city.

Mountbatten

The water taxi to Mountbatten. We're in choppy water, but we sit out on the exposed part of the deck. Poseidon must be angry, says W. Homerically. W.'s learning Greek again. Is the fifth time he's begun? the sixth? It's always the aorist that defeats him, he notes. Every time!

It's choppy! We should libate the sea, says W. Then he asks me if I know why the sea is salty. I tell him I don't. It's because mountains are salty, and the sea is full of broken up rocks, he says. The sea makes him happy, W. says. It's the ozone. A choppy sea releases ozone into the air, which makes everyone happy. What are your feelings about the sea?, asks W. Oh it makes me happy, I tell him. It's majestic.

The round, stubby tower at Mountbatten Point. W. seemed rueful the last we were here, two years ago or so, reading the plaque as he does this time. He must have been hungry, W. says. Hunger makes him very depressed. First his nose aches, then his teeth ache then he gets depressed, he says. What do you feel when you're hungry?, asks W. I never get hungry, I tell him. I'm careful about that. I think it was more than hunger, though, I tell W. That wasn't why you were rueful. For his part, W. is sure that I was the one who was rueful. I have no memory of that, I tell him. Either way, it would have had nothing to do with my being hungry.

W. cherishes my special love for the town of Turnchapel, near Mountbatten. I become gentler when I'm there, he notes, kinder. He likes my tender side. In another life, I would have lived here, I tell W. We muse wistfully on what I might have been like. A better person, W. thinks. Taller, with some nobility of character. I think I would have been gracious and other-oriented. I'm not other-orientated at all, I tell W. It's because I'm a troubled person. W. finds this very amusing. What are you troubled about? - Oh everything, life in general. - Well, you wouldn't have been troubled if you'd lived in Turnchapel, W. says.

At Jennycliff, high on the promotory, we find concrete sockets sunk into the ground, besides an abandoned bunker. There were guns here once, pointing out to sea from Plymouth Sound. We remember similar unoccupied sockets at Tynemouth Priory. W., who has a keen interest in military history, is intrigued. He thinks they date from World War One. The tower at Mountbatten was itself a Tudor fortification, W. remembers from the plaque. Then there was the construction of the Royal Citadel after the Civil War, which we can see from the promotory, with its cannon pointing both out to sea and into town, to remind its citizens not to rebel against the crown, W. says, Plymouth being a Parliamentarian city. Then the forts built in the early nineteenth century to defend the country against Napoleon, W. says, and notes that Napoleon himself spent two weeks in the city in the HMS Bellerophon before being shipped to St Helena. Now of course the forts are being converted into flats and leisure complexes, says W.

On our way back to the city, W. finds a plaque near Jennycliff which explains that the Sound is a flooded estuary or rea. 10,000 years, after the last ice age, the water must have broken in. Drake's Island was once a hillock, and the breakwater must have been built atop an existing ridge, to keep ships from running aground, we muse. Rea means estuary in Spanish, W. tells me.