Intimate Stranger

by Breyten Breytenbach

  Only the Tao (tracing /uncovering /writing /walking the flow) can obviate or wipe out the Dharma (the Law, Teaching).

  WRITING IS FISHING

  Writing is fishing for memory in time. Viscous. Time black. Sometimes you see it flitting just below surface — memory — miming time. Memory takes on the blackness of time. Memory will be time surfacing. Use word as bait. Beat the water. Beat the weird beat of baited words. Boated. Wounds. The bleeding words like wounded boats on a black sea. Let the fleet wash up. The coast is the beginning of the sea’s wisdom. It comes with the territory.

  Words have their own territory, they return home as in a song. The fish only discovers the water once it is removed from it. This land a memotory.

  But not peaceful. Memory as trigger for territory and tongue. The mind is full of bloody pieces staked out by tongue. Is there room enough? Memory killing memory.

  Vicious. Terrortory. Territory comes from terre just as memory flows from mère.

  And the sea. Sea is the beginning of the metamorphosis of the coast.

  Let slip. It will all come out in the red wash of remembering. Invent roominess. Invent, vent, wind. Wind winding up mind with bated words.

  Mind is dream coming home. Coming to mind. Mindcoming. Mindcome all over page. Mind coming to mind, minding itself and mending, muttering matter.

  Book the writing. Make of book a dormitory full of time water. A dreamotory.

  Wisdom of vices, virgins and vixens. The bloated bumping of drowned bodies just below the purpose. Terrier smelling fox barking at porpoises populating the Middle World just beyond moon. Shitty sheet. Copulating corpses.

  Just over the lip.

  WRITE TO THE TRUTH!

  Enough of that! Write to the truth! But writing is not truth. Or is it? Does it make any sense to put the two, writing and truth, in opposition? What is truth? I have never quite understood why there should be this quest for absolute truth. Surely we know that we will never ‘know’ fully? We live in the flame of the consumption of our ignorance. We know — we can experience — a beginning and an end, and yet know nothing of before or after. ‘Truth,’ for me, I’d equate with satisfaction, a deep experience of beauty, a physical and mental well-being.

  This needs to be teased out some more. What is it that brings satisfaction? Is it the contentment of understanding or accepting that there’s nothing to understand? The peace that comes after a job well done? Why is it important that a job should be well done? Is this a cultural reflex? And why and how do I experience beauty? Was this taught to me? Are there certain forms and manifestations of beauty that will be experienced alike by all humans whatever their conditioning? Surely there must be a number of inherent characteristics, ‘presences’ that we are sensitive to, that will provoke similar reactions wherever we may be?

  Harmony I’d say is one. Balance may be a clearer approach: the experience (and the acceptance) of coming and going, ups and downs, light and dark, cycles beyond good and bad. Shape may be one such satisfaction-giving ‘presence,’ because it helps me to situate myself and thus promote consciousness. Pattern too (and of course the breaks), because it reminds me that there is on-going, there is resonance — we sometimes incestuously confuse these with ‘sense.’ Texture must be another: the joy of the feel, the pleasure of experiencing the state of being alive.

  Will that be ‘truth’ then — accepting (knowing) that you don’t understand, that you’re only part of an ongoing process, that there is no good or evil or reason, no origin and no finality, no final form and no definitive content, and then the superb pleasure of experiencing being?

  Writing is neither an explanation nor an expiation of our condition. Should it try to convey ‘certainties’ it would be like weighing our food down with stones. Writing is an extrapolation of the reality of not-knowing — some would say an excommunication thereof! It is a reflection (and a refraction) of being, of becoming, of consuming, of a process. It is the preening of wings with which we will not fly. (This does not mean that we cannot fly. .) It constitutes the weaving of the skin of being which will carry the signs and the stigmata of our ‘truth’ of inconclusiveness.

  We inscribe ourselves in a text in progress since all time. We pick up tunes and try to carry the rhythm. We chime with the ancestors. Kafka, in a letter to Max Brod: “Kleist breathes in me like an old pig’s bladder.” (Important then, not to be kicked around or to burst inadvertently.)

  Maybe I prefer writing — the ongoing un-search with its innate impulse toward manifestation, and its own laws (due to its nature and origin and history), the knocking against the tomb’s walls — maybe I prefer this knocking about to a scratching around for truth because I sense that the latter will be final and fatal, a full stop, le point mort. Who says one has any choice in the matter? Perhaps one should just feign truth the way a politician would, and live as if you knew that life was worth living. Perhaps the fantasy (and the fancy) of who and what we think we are is just the fleshing out of the reality of what we already and since always have been. “Reality is frighteningly superior to all fiction. All you need is the genius to know how to interpret it” (Antonin Artaud). Still, part of the joy of writing beyond interpretation must surely be the possibility (or the illusion) of passing into ‘the other world’, of writing oneself into the extinction of reality.

  In Poble Gran there’s a Museum of the Cinema, an interior consisting of mirrors and thus, curiously, without walls. The limitless enclosure. On a partition I saw this note: “The mirror reflects the human mask, it creates a new awareness of identity and leads to vanity, but it also provides a link between truth and appearance, awakening our desire for an unreal world.” From one room to another illusory space, as in a labyrinth, we come upon the dream-making machines, camera obscura or camera lucida, lenses and projections and animations that man invented to fool the illusion of reality. Deeper inside the museum there is an exhibition of texts and photos from a movie shot on the Costa Brava during the early fifties: Ava Gardner — luminous and tall and shapely and American — and opposite her Mario Cabré the poet bullfighter, his back braced and his hair oiled down, his eyes flashing the pride of the poor hidalgo. The way they looked at one another was a lark’s mirror neither of them could resist. In a glass case you can see the volume of poems he wrote for her. Frank Sinatra had to fly in to protect his relationship with Ms Gardner — a photo shows his fashionable wide pants, the florid tie, the cigarette dangling nonchalantly, the scowl on his face. Perhaps he lured her back ‘home’ to Hollywood with whisky and money and tinsel fame. She wouldn’t have lasted here. Her mother-in-law would have been dressed in black; sooner or later her lover would have been gored in a ring flooded and blinded by light, blood as a fountain of red carnations flowering from his groin.

  I write the above on a blue day outside Poble Gran, making notes for the book I’m working on, to be called On The Art Of Being Intimate With Strangers. I’m sitting in front of the ancient stone-walled house of Can Ocells, still in the shade of the cloak of night. August 15th is always the moment of turning, around the Mediterranean the air becomes cooler. It will be as if everything comes to its senses after the folly and the heat of summer. Your ears still sing with the intensity of flames. Now there’s withdrawal, rethinking. Nights are getting longer. Plants — the laurel shrubs, some rosebushes — take heart and go into a second and more gentle blooming. The rosemary bush and the patch of mint are in flower: bees are busy and multi-hued butterflies are at work like fluttering handkerchiefs from scent to scent — goodbye, goodbye. Over the distant volcanic mountain range toward Banyoles and Olot a white cloud has unfurled its sails and a pink hot-air balloon (a mongolfière) drifts along on its flame. Swallows dart and swerve, sharply outlined against the sky. Other birds are twittering and chirruping their morning prayers. Yesterday I spent cutting back an overgrown climber, pulling up weeds and nettles, hacking at bramble bushes, training the honeysuckle, stacking cut branches for the winter. I watered the vines, the olive and th
e palms. The weeds will all grow back and the nurtured plants come to naught as if nothing had happened. Man’s hand is ineffectual. The pruning and shaping will have to be recommenced eternally. Some plants will die and others will survive our prolonged absence to suddenly spurt flowers and sweet odors.

  As a friend of mine once said: “Those who live will see; the dead will have to peep through closed eyelids as if looking into the mirror.” They are twin brothers under the skin, breath and death. Why does it all make me feel so good?

  WHAT IS IT ABOUT?

  1. A young person writes (could it be you, Reader?), asking what poetry is for. “What is it about?”

  How must I answer the question? A verse of Czeslaw Milosz rises to the surface:

  The purpose of poetry is to remind us

  how difficult it is to remain just one person,

  for our house is always open,

  there are no keys in the door

  and invisible guests come in and out at will

  Implicit in these lines is the argument that ‘one’ should try to remain one. I will counter that poetry is ‘about’ our multiplicity, our un-fixedness, our fluidity. About how we are modified by the ancestors and the ghosts, taken possession of by the invisible guests. Voices also need a house to sleep in.

  But how to approach such a vast subject? Historically? Ideologically? Within its present permutations? Or perhaps, creatively? In the same way that a notion acquires meaning in the search for it, the reader will form the perception. I have no idea what you wish to hear. Besides, do you, as readers in the plural form also, have any cohesiveness? Can I say anything worthwhile to fit the listening where expectations and experiences diverge?

  Let me try. This is what I’ll convey to her (to you):

  First we must speak of the surroundings in which our exchanges take place, for all of us are subject to what may be called the ambient discourse, even if only in our angry rejection of the fuzziness of the lexicon. In this post-colonial world where we dwell, our cultural composition of many parts accentuates an excessive vagueness and nicey-niceness when we meet (for we all lean backward over our shadows in order to be ‘tolerant’ in respecting differences): perhaps that is why we have settled, publicly at least, for a corrupt, cliché-infested sociology-speak. Is it the ultimate expression of self-indulgence not to be ‘personal’? Or are we masking in this way our profound indifference to the other? The post-modernist discourse with its facile moral feel-good spin-off, has led to a wallowing in the troughs of the self. We think it is intellectually challenging to be fucking flies. (Thank God for the right to abort.)

  Whoa, you say. Hold your horses and pigs before they trample our contract of decent intercourse at the trough! Who is this ‘we’ you’re passing, hoping that we won’t notice the unbuttoned flies?

  I’ll tell you. For the purposes of my argument it is the public figure with the many mouths, the responsible and deeply concerned citizen who thinks he or she (still) has a contribution to make toward redrafting a better world, who may want to cling to stalwart concepts of economic and social justice, equal opportunities, decency, dignity and grace and elegance and humanism and responsibility as opposed to that ‘cutting-edge’ claptrap of a devalued vocabulary promoting lazy thinking and cynicism — and thus a morbid value system — in which we all have to live with awesome cool. You could say the ‘we’ is the rebellious multiple mouth with no correct mind-mindedness of its own. But it happens to be the me-we you addressed your question to.

  Language, you see, is terribly important. It must be rectified incessantly. “All wisdom is rooted in learning to call things by the right name” (Confucius). Depriving people, however insidiously, of the possibility to use the fiery route between thought (or emotion) and expression, the mother tongue of texture and color, the unambiguously inhabited language which allows you to fight and fold the matter, perhaps even accede to the authentic echo of origin embedded in the word — is to draw them out onto the shallow terrain of hollow demagoguery, of convoluted qualifications and empty statements, of fly-fucking in other words, and ultimately to that alienation where the borrowed language of modernity becomes devalued.

  2. “To idealize [here I’m quoting Martin Amis from a recent essay in The Guardian]: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart. When I dispraise, I am usually quoting clichés. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed values of freshness, energy and reverberation of voice.”

  Sounds admirably pure. But is the language of creativeness really all that different from the learned porridge we serve in the academy? Well, yes and no. No, as every creative linguistic expression should obviously always be an inventive effort at using the known or the understood to propose more applicable or transforming concepts. Yes, since poetry is a precise and tactile tongue, even though it can be called ‘universal’ because it always speaks poetry, irrespective of the language it inhabits or hides in. “Poetry is my mother tongue.” (Yang Liang)

  Visual art is a language with its own alphabet. Music is a language replete with intent and with meaning and yet without words. These and other forms of artistic expression are the primary or original languages. They differ from our everyday working verbal tools — philosophy, science, theology, sociology and politics — in that they’re not dependent on a consensus of lexical or contextual meaning. The languages of creativeness certainly also mean (they may even make sense and sentences), but the meaning is carried by the totality of means at their disposal: color, texture, echo, absence, shape, etc. They are both non-elusive and endlessly allusive. More than that, these languages are bound to forge new meanings, to transform perception in the real sense of the term. Ideally they don’t carry meaning but become as many meanings as there are minds. A poem is not just a statement or a lining or limping up of words; it is also the actualization of metamorphosis in process. You may say it is thought on its way to the unthinkable.

  So, my first answer is: poetry is for writing straight, skinning the words so that they may shine as primary manifestations. Or, as second first answer: poetry is for writing over because we have been crooked out of a close communication / communion with the world in us and the world outside us, and we have to cheat our way back to paradise.

  3. You say you are a beginner. How lucky you are! You don’t say, but I take this to imply that you have already indulged in verse, or else you wouldn’t be asking me these questions.

  I’ll let you in on the secret everybody knows: Writing poetry is one of the most general forms of crying and communication that we humans attempt! We all write poetry at some point. Why? I think it is because we instinctively reach out for more powerful and perhaps more sincere ways of trying to access the essential (at that moment) or the unsayable, through words that are more than mere concepts; this is when we use a sharpened awareness of sound and rhythm and texture and spacing, of silences and omissions. . In other words, we attempt to capture what is beyond or around the words and their meanings by chiming with the ‘non-verbal’ components of communication.

  In Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels said: “I became obsessed by the palpable edge of sound. The moment when language at last surrenders to what it’s describing: the subtlest differentials of light or temperature or sorrow. I’m a Kabbalist only in that I believe in the power of incantation. A poem is as neural as love; the rut of rhythm that veers the mind. . This hunger for sound is almost as sharp as desire, as if one could honor every inch of flesh in words; and so, suspend time. A word is at home in desire. No station of the heart is more full of solitude than desire which keeps the world poised, poisoned with beauty, whose only permanence is loss.”

  My attempted explanation, young lady, should be expanded: in the light of the above quote I further believe that we experience the need to merge or identify with primal movement in gestures and rituals shared by all of us since the very beginning of time. For, although creativeness breaks new ground, eroding
or extending consciousness, it is also always recalling the underlying earth (ageless and timeless) of deep-sound, exorcism, incantation, the primeval gestures and movements outlining the ebb and flow of awareness. And although this may recall the original shared memory, essentially of our mortality, the manifestation will not only be ‘public’ but also, private and idiosyncratic.

  Let me reiterate: Creativeness is both intensely individual (the lines of recognition and fashioning produced by one hand) and profoundly universal. ‘Universal’ by using a means of expression (in this instance writing) and, to an extent, a field of references shared generally. But universal, as well, because the major themes according to which we live our lives have been common to the species since the first dim glimmer of consciousness: death (or non-being), the urge to go beyond and thus the need to project (imagination, creating utopias), the desire to suspend decomposition by remembering (and remembering is a forgetting hand), the paranoia which comes with the fall between understanding and not understanding, building the face of presentable survival and then ‘facing’ the mirror of the other. It would appear that we need this recognition and affirmation of our shared rhythms of birth, growth, love and loneliness, maturing, fall, death and decay. Following the lines of the known will liberate the hand; sometimes, decay comes before death and the hand will be devoured by the maggots of words.

  From this unfinishing business of passing from thought to dust will flow, I think, ethics and social responsibility (but also the urge to destroy), the sense of family, the pursuit of power. Power is the abuse of pain in the forlorn hope of extinguishing it. Even if we only do so vicariously by entering writing through reading. The first act of poetry is always a read: deciphering the stars, observing stick-like people shuffling over a horizon of shifting mirages in Africa, plunging into the dark heart of love. . And as we move, so we repeat. You will have noticed how one keeps on unearthing the bone of a favorite poem — surely because we want to recreate the instant, that identification with the original moment of feeling, and not because of the information encapsulated. The dog of time would have gnawed white the bare meaning of words. You will also know by now that the open process or proposition of a poem is only completed once it has been taken possession of and integrated by the reader. Each poem is unique and never finished. And there are as many poems as there are moments of reading, as many moments awakening the puckered mind of beginning. You are the dog, the poem the bone.