I always thought of you under the sign of neglect. Who watched out for you? Who appreciated you? No one at all; and what could I do from a distance? I was always too far away. Still, I always wonder about distance. Is there a kind of attention which can only reach you from afar - that is necessarily distant?
I was always in the North, and you in the South. But wasn't that same distance carried in the letters that used to criss-cross the country? Just as our friendship was never really a friendship, and our relationship never a relationship, I imagine the distance rising into a kind of plateau, a way that can only be crossed when you could lift yourself to that height. As, perhaps, we lifted one another.
Distance: we barely saw one another - did that matter? We barely spoke - did it matter? Perhaps there is a kind of speech that can reach you only by way of distance, by a kind of neglect.
I am with you, I am not with you. Or: I am with you, but also far away, living my own life. Or: with you, but something else is happening here, many things are happening, of which you will not know; with you - and despite what happens here, despite what happens from day to day, and isn't this the testimony to my love? A neglectful love - but is it love? - that would reach you only because of distance, for the reason of distance.
There must be a threshold, a space. No instantaneous communication, no telephone - except very occasionally, and unexpectedly (the rule: keep each other's numbers). None of the temptations that would allow a kind of camaradarie to our friendship. For isn't the danger, despite the many joys sharing a day to day life might bring, that that distance would disappear which was always the third term in our friendship?
Distance - and in relation to which each of us could meditate upon the whole of our lives. The whole - wasn't that at issue each time we wrote? Wasn't it a question, each time, of meditating upon our lives and before the threshold, before distance? When we met - rarely then, and now almost never - it was always by way of what separated each of us from our daily lives.
It was a rare event, an exception. Did I want to see you sometimes, more than you me? And were you sometimes frustrated by a distance that always kept us apart? But over the years, it was the distance that kept us; we reached each other by way of its strangeness. Letters - emails - in which we would each report musingly on the whole of our lives.
Such relationships as these - where you meet very rarely, and writing only occasionally - amidst some crisis or another, perhaps, or simply because there gathers in you the need for distance, and to write, to speak, by way of that distance - are too rare. How often I think of friends with whom I am no longer in contact! Women, exclusively. Women - and I have no idea what has happened to them, nor how I can get in contact, nor, if I do, whether it will be welcome.
What does it matter now? I suppose I want to learn of the shape of a life, and to speak to others of the shape of mine. To write, to speak, by way of separation. I suppose I have a good memory, or that I spend too much time alone. The past is alive for me; I remember, I like to remember, not to press myself against the details of a vanished world, but to experience it by way of the temporal distance that separates me from it, diffusing event from event, insinuating itself into what happened then, even as it seems to suspend the order of completion.
Nothing will complete itself; we are still walking through the woods in the dark, as we used to do. Still meeting on occasion in the town centre on Sunday afternoon, you speaking of a new boyfriend. Do not keep memories - neglect them. Do not impose continuity on what has gone before, but neglect them, let events be incomplete, let sentences trail off into nothing.
Isn't this the wonder of Tarkovsky's Mirror? Neglected memories, events freed from themselves and rising into the air. 'I can speak now' says the cured stutterer at the beginning of the film. But isn't it better to say, 'I cannot speak'? I cannot speak; speech has neglected itself in me. Speech lies down. Writing lies out beneath the stars. 'I cannot speak': what neglects itself in me? What neglects itself as the past, in me?
This is the joy of being alone: never having to recount, for another, the order of the day, of a passage of weeks, of a life. And then letting the day return, and those weeks, and that life as if from afar. Letting them come, by neglecting them, as they neglect you. Freud said we had to kill His-Majesty-The-Baby in each of us: the imperious child who is the centre of the world. Kill him by neglect. A kind murder.
Neglect that lets the world turn away from you, and welcome you in its turning. That allows you to relate to others without seeking attention from them - to be one among many, a walker among walkers, conversation lightening itself of anything in particular. Happy neglect! Life without contour! What do you want? Nothing in particular. What do you require? No more than anyone else. The tyranny of the question, How are you? The lightness of the answer, Not too bad.
I suppose this is how I understand my relationship to other bloggers, by way of their blogs. How is it I've come to know something of the lives of those whom I have barely met, if I've met them at all? And isn't it the more beautiful when a blogger writes under a pseudonym that is rigorously enforced (as mine is not, alas): then anyone at all could have written the blog you read. And couldn't you speak to anyone as though they were that writer (it could be him, or her - or him - or her -)?
Do I want to know who you are? Or do I prefer the gentle neglect of your anonymity, the way it falls peacefully around me like snow? Foolishly, stupidly, I wonder if the world of blogs isn't that world Handke is said to open in a book forthcoming in translation next year (via This Space)?
... 'a greater age' in which contemplation, love, goodness, beauty and peace are not only construed as utopian possibilities, but can be generated and made viable propositions by telling stories.
And isn't that a reason not to have comments on the blog? To neglect my readers (are there any?), and to ask for neglect in turn, which is to say, start your own blog (if you haven't started one), or carry your comment to your own blog, and let it bloom there in solitude. A gorgeous, generous solitude that can give of itself only because of this solitude; that will reach me by way of its separation. I am close to you; I am not close to you. I can hear you breathing; I can hear nothing.