Samuel Beckett Is Closed

by Michael Coffey

  —The camera destroys space. It invades it. Radio makes it disappear, but the camera moves through it.

  —And can recreate it, wouldn’t you say. Potemkin?

  —Constitutes it somehow. Moving collage. Montage. Take space and ravage it and then put it on a wall, on a screen. The possibilities are not endless, but far beyond the stage set.

  —Liberating?

  From the unpublished “Long Observation of the Ray”:

  More than with the weakness itself the struggle is with the constant degree of weakness. Latent early this adversary could not fully emerge till late. Before the mind even weaker then than before and knowing it. Weakened by struggle with other adversaries earlier to emerge. The eye strains henceforward for greater weakness however little or less. And so perhaps fails to see what but for this preoccupation it might have seen.

  So faint that in less utter darkness it might pass unseen it grows no fainter! Colourless no trace of yellow white faint white. Ashen waver through the air ending in ashen blur. Jaggedness as though the dark opaque in patches. Whether faintness due to that of inexhaustible source. Or to nursing some finite blaze.

  Make it funny, you said. Let’s be light, you said. The light in our future. You make me Narcissus. Narcissus, you say. Tell me a story, we say. Tell me about the dog that ran away. Tell me about the family dog that ran away, that ran away. Ha-ha-ha how to write laughter. You can’t write laughter you can only run away. You ran away. I fell for it.

  Dad took me home. On the way, Dad got money out of the ATM on Christopher Street, which took quite a while. Dad seemed proud of himself to have thought of getting some cash, like the banks were gonna run out. Then we went to our apartment, where Dad got on the phone again. He reached Mom, who was on her way—on foot, to get Alison up at Dalton. We watched TV for the rest of the day. We ate spaghetti that night. The Yankee game was canceled. After dinner we watched O Brother, Where Art Thou? in the den, although Dad and Mom went to the kitchen a lot. Mom drank a lot of wine; Dad drank beer. They had the radio on in there.

  —I wouldn’t go that far. Haven’t you read your Sartre? Come now . . .

  —Mais oui.

  —It’s a figment, Dick.

  —Freedom, you mean?

  —Mean? Let’s stick to the match. That man is bowling fast.

  How else explain the fluctuant structure and pulse of “Long Observation of the Ray”—that regular increase and decrease in the size of sentence units equally distributed across a set of nine themes, a kind of metabolic rhythm approaching a steady-state—than to say it is intended as a model for eternal being, at whatever the cost. That is, not an accretive narrative that resolves itself, not at all; and not a system that winds itself down to an end; but a sort of machine, with its intensities, exposures, and frequencies set in such a way as to pertain forever, defeating entropy. Is this what failed Beckett, this machine he had built? Or did the prospect of its succeeding horrify him? Endless system survival, a horror show? I don’t know. David Houston-Jones called the abandoned work, its mere six pages, “a monument to extinction.” But I believe Beckett said no to this once he faced it. A monument to extinction Beckett never built, even if he’d drawn up the plan. But this is provisional.

  I said to her, it doesn’t matter, whether we are interred or burned or buried at sea. Light is our future. Rising. Show me the light, tell us of the light, I said to her. I said to her, my beloved, we’ve only so many sentences left, we might start to savor them a little bit, conserve, conserve. Suddenly—no!—at last, at long last, you begin to speak. You are good at this. Go on. Change my tune.

  I went to bed late, knowing school was canceled for the next day. Nothing was moving, no work for the grownups. In the morning, Dad had to run—I mean jog—up to 14th Street to find a newspaper. “US ATTACKED” it said on the front page of the Times. Dad said, “Nothing will ever be the same.” So did Mom. So did everyone, so I guess they knew. The next day, everyone was on the phone all day. The city had a horrible smell.

  —Pop to shortstop! That should do it. Macmillan . . . game over, Mets win.

  —[Clapping] No ninth try for the . . . Metropolitans?

  —The home team doesn’t bat if it’s ahead in the ninth inning.

  —A mercy.

  For the record, the nine themes: observation, chamber, inlet-outlet, constant intensity (inexhaustible source), faintness, cross-section (lantern), constant length, saltatoriality, extinction-occultation. The noun “saltatoriality” is not a word, though Beckett glossed it as “erratic transfer from one blank to another.” “Saltatorially” is a word, an adverb, describing how active processes are ensured in sodium channels in the nervous system. Had Beckett’s narrative interest brought him here, to neuronal salt transfers? These are dark workings indeed, in which the “Long Observation of the Ray” takes place within a spherical chamber with an inner light source of no dimension. And yet none of this can be seen, as the sphere is closed.

  Someone said, you cannot stay here. None could stay there and could not continue. Describe the site, it is not important. A flat plain, then a mountain, no, a hill, wild, so wild. Enough. The summit a kind of marsh, with heath to the knee, sheep paths, mud tracks, my life, a scribble, a scramble barely visible, ruts deepened by rains, effaced by rains.

  Dad always said I had a great nose for smells and for describing them. Tar and floor polish for the skunk smell in Connecticut. That was a good one. For the Ground Zero smell—they were calling it ground zero—it was harder. I tried but I’d never smelled these smells before, except maybe for a wet campfire like we made once in the Adirondacks. But it also smelled like when Oliver and I once lit a plastic straw with a match.

  —Curtain, then. Now what, Dick?

  —There’s a second act, game two, in about twenty minutes. So what do you think?

  Traffic is slow. Traffic is stop and go. Be prepared to stop.

  Or best not to stay the wanderer even if. Worse yet to wander on, even if. For better or worse, wander on.

  At the bottom of one of these I was lying, out of the wind. Couldn’t see shit, didn’t want to—the valleys, distant lakes like blue coins out there, the sea on its shelf. I should not have begun so, but as it goes, I had to start.

  We weren’t supposed to go outside much, because of the air. And lots of people thought there might be follow-up attacks, since they couldn’t tell how many “cells” were in the country. It was like they were talking about a sickness.

  —[Lighting a small cigar] We’ll stay on.

  Be prepared to go.

  Someone said so, perhaps the same person who made you come.

  Everywhere looking for cells.

  PART TWO

  I.

  The other window.

  All the same, so as not to have entered the room with trepidation, I might have reminded myself that there were various old friends of my family who bore the same sophistication as the Greenes; companions of my early days who were just as fond of the arts, and, as well, as fond of those who patronized the arts; but I did not.

  The other window. I meant the other window. The other window.

  If indeed I had fortified my confidence by recollection of former acquaintances of some artistic taste and standing, I might have entered the rooms with a swagger and not the hunched terror of one about to be sentenced, or summarily lashed; consequently, I would not have ventured, by way of introducing myself, a word game. Feigning, by dint of a studied distraction, to have arrived at the Greenes already far along in some intricate chain of calculations, I condescended to share my exploratory musings, having come down to earth, as it were. “I am trying to determine the most beautiful and pleasing two-word phrase in the English language, just now, and I am quite sure I have found it,” I announced, tricking my eyes to brim brightly and quiver at the lids, as if intellectual jet fuel were still sloshing in my tanks. />
  No. The other window. Not that one, not this one or that other one. Yes, the other window. That one. The other one.

  “Autumn sunlight,” I offered. This was received in such a manner as would be the announcement of my name, with which there is nothing to quibble or even judge, since we were not, say, at a salon of high snobbery, such as the Verdurins’. Still, a tough crowd. “Autumn,” I went on, undaunted, as proudly as if explaining my home province. Being inherently diachronic, one in a familiar series of terms defined by tempus, and, of course, as it comes in the wake of summer’s cooling and antecedent to winter’s icy chill, “autumn” is capable of a warm welcome in most rooms, so I tried. “It is resplendent,” I glossed, repeating the entire phrase, “with a mixture of tones and colors, of different temperatures, like, say ‘sea-green dress.’”

  Sam, where shall I look while I’m rocking? Where. Shall. I. Look? Inward, he said. Billie Whitelaw tells us this. Look through the other window. The other window is inward.

  “Autumn sunlight,” I went on, “chills with its warmth, such as when, after a swim in a cold mountain lake, one stretches upon the sunbaked basalt of the shore and shivers.” I immediately regretted the false intonation, the artificial sonority of my own voice and hints of tourism, whereas I would have done just as well, perhaps even better, to abandon myself to invective rather than strive for the touch of Wordsworth. I understood in a painful instant that there was probably not, in the whole of the Greene circle, even one of the “faithful” who loved me, or believed in me, as dearly as I did love and believe in myself. I don’t mean belief in the sense of an acolyte to his God but, say, as a gambler to his play in the fifth at Chantilly. Of course I did favor myself, no matter the field, for I was raised well. So, despite committing my missteps barely past the threshold of the Greenes, before any refreshment taken or formal introductions hazarded, I kept swinging, as my father most heartily advised no matter the occasion, as if life could be counted upon, like a mechanical pitching arm, to autonomically hurl opportunities toward the plate, and you there, bat in hand while at bat you were, beholden only to stand in and “take a rip.” My word game having dribbled to little notice on the carpet, I determined to express yet another sentiment. But first, for preparation is not a foolish habit, I assessed the room, and there I saw the painter, the pianist, the host and hostess and their charming daughter. This quintet arrayed before me—oh, to be mired in a metaphor—like an infield, is what I came for, why I was there, why I am anywhere, looking for art and family.

  Sit at the window, the other window. When the skies are clear she sees Venus rise. Followed by the sun. At evening, at the other window, rigid in her old spindle-backed chair, when the skies are clear, she sees Venus emerge from the growing dark before it, too, disappears into the gloom. She sits on in her own deepening dark. For what purpose.

  There was that change in atmospheric pressure, like the wind dropping to gather itself elsewhere, or for another go at a spent willow; a break in intentionality that is either a brief respite or a permanent rescue, time will tell. And indeed, we moved on—that is to say, I was absorbed, as a socius, into the sodality of the room, and I could breathe. A respite, at least, I would wager, but no rescue: offered a drink from a passing salver, a silly concoction called a Sayonara, favored by the host in favor of the artist, I am told, and, as a guest, one has no choice but to indulge in the sponsor’s enthusiasm, and therefore, after extracting the miniature paper coolie hat, I quaffed the saccharine cocktail. Presently, hard upon me, was the artist, swirling his Sayanora like Grace Kelly her martini in Rear Window, nervously, conspiratorially, flirtatiously, one Peter Swan, best described thus: long face, a pate fibered like a kiwi, not regularly good-looking altogether but exuding an intelligence; a thin sprawl of fine fuzz across the cheek also, eyeglasses glinting over tired eyes that slouch toward the orbital as in those bad portraits found on velvet in thrift shops, and that smile, meant to make you weep—if you were a six-year-old. But the rheumy eyes are sizing me, and I see his mandibles twitch, as if eager to begin the slow, deadly efficient ingestion of plankton.

  Some version of this we read, in university rooms, a small group, a shred of text. Four walls, twelve windows, but one I chose. I read my portion, over and over as directed—“the other window.”

  I stumbled again, boldly asking if he were any relation to a one-time ballplayer named Swan. At once, Peter Swan looked with amused astonishment, over his right shoulder, toward an invisible third, whom he seemed to call to witness that he had never, in fact, authorized such an inquiry into relations. “Oh, aren’t you on a roll,” he said, his gaze returned to me with a nearly audible click.

  At another window.

  “Yes,” I said to him—“like butter”—and he flinched ever so slightly, as if I had tapped his kneepad with a hammer.

  II.

  Where is this place?

  My mind was filled with other things, I had a trove of them.

  Can there be an inexistent center in a formless place? Can there be other? Can the center be simply the search for an imagined center, the imagined center itself being the search, after Blanchot?

  I skipped past His Annoyance as if he were a channel buoy and I only too happy to fulfill his message to steer clear—Aye-aye! I headed for deeper waters, toward the host’s only daughter, just visible beyond the gleaming black of the piano, she of the long red locks of my imagination and the face of Van Eyck’s Mary, oval, sad, resigned. I plotted a course to cheer her, to be taken on board, as it were.

  But I am in Antwerp, this day, appearing as fact. My wife is drawing. We are surrounded by 600-year-old buildings, art just as old, and there’s old Rubens’s house, in a place of perfect May sunshine. Something has happened in this place. Space carved by stone, by water flows, the Scheldt, look. No, the other window.

  Despite the current philosophy of the day, in which one’s intelligence is understood to increase with the strength of one’s disbelief in everything, I determined to regale her with my recent reading of Proust, with which, naturally, I was saturated like a biscuit abandoned on a teacup saucer. I quite knew that the following literary anecdote, once unfolded and made manifest for inspection, would charm her, so I proceeded. After an exchange of pleasantries of indescribable banality, I told her of how Marcel considers great art, such as the petite phrase of the Vinteuil Sonata, to be something that, before you are exposed to it you are one person and after you are quite another, and remain so, till the end of your time. Proust concludes a gorgeous thought with this: Et la mort avec elles a quelque chose de moins amer, de moins inglorieux, peut-être de moins probable. Mademoiselle does not know her Proust very well but does know French, and asks, a puzzled wrinkle through her brow, “Avec elles? And death with them? With whom?” And I am ready with the translation. “With beauty, my dear. Here is Moncrieff, in his great Edwardian English: ‘And death in their company is something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain.’”

  Inward there is no center. There is no form. There is history but a flash, a mockery of the concept of duration. We teeter on the edge of unbecoming, having just left it, soon to return. This is where we live, not in Antwerp, but in unbecoming, at which we are old hands. What else is here, in this “nonexistent formless place?” Beckett took a long look around. Through the other window. No, the other window, to another place, flashes of place, maybe, and measures of music, maybe, or giving on an outer dark.

  Milady made to catch her breath! “In their company,” she marveled, thinking, marveling more, “death is perhaps less certain?” I was delighted at her delight. What an improvement upon the French—“avec elles,” she scoffed. And further: “moins probable, less certain!” I told her directly, closing the space between us, that “in their company” was the key to the intimacy of the entire construction in English. It was not merely an association with the traces, in the mind, of a work of art, but a dialogue with that a
rt, a visitation, which then believably makes—perhaps!—death something other than we had thought. “Yes,” she said, with green gaze, “company.” Suddenly, no, alas, one long alas, we had some.

  Blue sky over the open port, no doubt blue elsewhere, too, that again. Bring the blue sky inward. Can one? What to bring? Bring in no less. Now look around—within, not without.

  It was the artist again, now suppressing a cough, or a laugh. He knew his French and his Proust, and his hearing was apparently very keen. “Everyone knows that the Scott Moncrieff is outdated, a period piece.” But she cut him off with a rapier’s glance. “Monsieur and I were talking about compagnie, we were not requesting it.” Touché. And I moved in: “I am interested in Samuel Beckett’s use of the word company as the title of a most remarkable piece.”

  To restore silence is the role of objects, Sam said. Restore silence to what, to whom? Tell now.

  Je ne suis pas amusant plus un cercle quelconque. I am not amusing, anymore, in any circle. In any company.

  Objects may not be silent, but they may be made of silence. They are not even objects, but they may be made of objects.

  Yes, I made it to the end, the final volume, where Proust writes “un livre est un grande cimetière,” lines underscored by Beckett in his 1929 copy of Le Temps retrouvé, volume 2, page 59.

  III.

  Let’s look around, within, not without.

  Death of the book, by the book, in the book—un grande cimetière—it happens.

  Amid emptied spaces, Spartan interiors, vast vacancies, wasted landscapes, bare ruin’d choirs, there are objects, yes. And though characters, such as they are, seeming sentient, may stand mutely before them (unless forced out of silence, by a constable, say, or a playwright), the narrator is far from silent. If you can imagine him speaking.