Intimate Stranger
Page 4
How do we write such a summer? What is writing? Maybe life is the answer. Life happens (“while you’re crossing the street,” as the songwriter said).
I must not proceed too quickly. So much gets left behind, perhaps forever. Allow me to return. I remember a scene from Tarifa. 15,000 ‘illegals’ from Africa had been intercepted last year. Now on this bright summer morning 33 more had been caught in one roundup, the majority of them young women. When asked where they’re from, in several languages (each person crossing the Straits like the soul crossing River Styx to the other shore where nightingales sing, destroys her or his identity papers so as not to be returned to the country of origin), they smile very sweetly but do not answer. Then, as if hearkening some invisible signal, they all start singing a very sad song to the bewildered Guardia Civil. Was this a spontaneous recognition of identity? Are they appealing to a shared humanity? Or do they believe they can in this way ‘put a spell’ on the miscreant but powerful whites? Later, I visited the piece of land where the many who wash up drowned are buried. Ah, to die nameless and be hidden away in some no man’s land where the bones as are shadows! The gravestones are anonymous, bearing just a date and a serial number.
Still later, in a few years’ time, it will become nearly impossible to cross the Straits. Then thousands of desperate would-be emigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa will throw themselves on the barbed enclosures around the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco, try to scale these barriers using rudimentary ladders made in the forest, believing that if they could only make it onto Spanish soil they’d be allowed into Europe, and cut themselves to ribbons, and get shot. And later still tens of thousands will flock to Nouadhibou in Mauritania, having walked and hitched from Senegal and Mali and Guinea and Guinea-Bissau and Gambia and Sierra Leone and Nigeria, and pay a minimum of 150,000 ouguiyas each to a passeur (about 500 euros), they’ll live like animals under rudimentary shelters while waiting to embark on a crude cayuco for the Canary Islands. The embarkations will be smashed on reefs and treacherous shores or turn turtle on the high seas; the clandestine passengers will drown; when they wash up somewhere they will be put in the earth anonymously.
Writing remains the surfacing of a sense of being alive, of living and experiencing the only ‘world’ we know — which is life. Wanting to change it too. Being petrified, sometimes, by the cracks in the sidewalk and the slips and slopes of the mind. Frustrated by the restrictions and exhilarated by the challenges and the unforeseen discoveries of ‘surfacing.’ In that sense then, writing is always against death, obliteration, extinction and non-writing. But writing is also a way of situating yourself in the one world we inhabit.
In The Witness of Poetry, Milosz remarks: “Through the mass media poets of all languages receive information on what is occurring across the surface of the whole earth, on the tortures inflicted by man on man, on starvation, misery, humiliation. At one time when their knowledge of reality was limited to one village or district, poets had no such burden to bear. Is it surprising that they are always morally indignant, that they feel responsible, that no promise of the further triumphs of science and technology can veil these images of chaos and human folly? And when they try to visualize the near future, they find nothing there except the probability of economic crisis and war?”
I’m not suggesting for a moment that you ought to be writing about ‘the big issues.’ Your only authority (and authorship) lies after all in exercising and presenting consciousness located by the experiences and apprehensions of your own heart-mind. From the effort at extending consciousness — through invention, imagination, structure, detail, texture — a conscience about the implications and perhaps even the imperatives of being alive at a particular time among specific people may or may not flow. This exercise need not be universal to be effective; it can be personal, private and apparently intimate. It will, however, imply a choice of position and approach. The writer can, I think, through her words and images and characters and stories, transmit and translate many of the tensions we live with. The writer is giving voice to the inchoate and the incoherent, even when only in an idiosyncratic and partial way. That voice is not an antidote to violence and madness and idiocy, but it may help us turn around and see the terror as also the beauty.
Is a story a slice of life, a raw slab of meat on the counter still seeping blood that can be equated with words? Or is it a construct consisting of condensations and cadences, patterns and artifacts that will give it the verisimilitude and veneer of life and the slightly metallic odor of blood? Must the ‘imitation’ exercise choices of ellipses and repetitions, shifts and breaks, in order to be like the ‘original’? Isn’t awareness brought to the surface of self-telling already the establishment of a text? Is it at all possible for reflection to present itself other than as narrative? Do we not, the moment we stop to think about ‘life,’ fictionalize ourselves irredeemably? I suspect we do. In fact, I don’t imagine one can locate and identify ‘self’ except through narrating, and thus at least partly inventing it to the self. And as you mark, so you rub out. That is why I prefer to talk of the fiction of self.
On the other hand, can we propose that life is (only) a story? We tend to assume that a story is less determinate and more innocuous than life. Is this true? Robert Alter, in a discussion of Nabokov’s novel Invitation to a Beheading, saw the author’s crucial point as: “it is life rather than art alone that is inexhaustible, and that art’s ability to renew itself, to be infinitely various and captivating, finally depends on its necessary inadequacy in the face of the inexhaustible enigma of conscious life.” Of course, the story of life is larger than the story of words, but we can only appropriate the first (if such should be our goal) by means of the second, by endorsing their twinness. And look at how extensively we inflect our lives by the narrative structuring of our daily existence, exactly as we’d do in fiction through plotting, directing, anticipating character development!
The word-web we spin is as close to life as a hide — hide as in skin, but also as a place of dissimulation and protection. The process of apprehending life (imitating it, recreating it) through telling must surely correspond to the very profound human urge and need to visualize, imagine, project, direct or re-direct, disarm, obfuscate, empower, delete, escape, exorcize, destroy even.
To move and be moved. By re-living and re-inventing we hope to take the fear out of the unknown and break down the unacceptable.
Where do these deep impulses originate? It must be survival instinct, but also the visceral need to go beyond our limitations. Projecting ourselves beyond our limits is a survival strategy, even though we know it to be foolish and that there can be no prolongation or birth on the other side of demise. Those will remain unwritten pages. In the meantime, we understand ourselves in terms of what we want to be. Perhaps we know all things — and then the telling, the creation of beauty and the allaying of fears will be ways of dissimulating the fact that we have already come to terms with the mysterious absurdity of our mortality and /or the modalities of our immortality, which includes effacement and dissolution of the self.
Maybe, at heart, we are at ease with the untold! Are we just going through the motions, Reader? With such passion?
We measure the world — or what we can experience of it, that which we call ‘life’ — by the reach and limitations of ‘self,’ which is consciousness in process. Which is word. And when that self disappears, will life be one endlessly unfolding but invisible text with neither head nor tail? For now we know that the elements and mechanisms of life and writing (mirage and mirror) are alike: a patternmaking of understanding, recognizing that textures and colors as surfaces of awareness are needed to make reflexability tactile. Thus are we tied to living. We cannot let go (if such should be our intention) until and unless we know how inextricably we are tied to continuation by our senses, by the breath of shaping through structure and rhythm, by this long dialectical dance of completion / extinction.
So, the link (the s
ameness of process) between ‘story’ and ‘life’ (or fiction and fact if you prefer) is in the telling: self-telling, telling the time and the temperature, telling it on the mountain. The self as transit point of awareness is a tale. To recount a fact — or advance an opinion, as in an essay, and we mostly take our opinions to be facts, particularly when they figure in an essay! — is to be entering a process of fictionalization. Not only because the contours of ‘facts’ are delineated by our situation and approach, depending on who we are and from what culture, and not only because the hardest fact must still be put in its historical relativity and will then be seen to be evolving — but also, as I suggested earlier, because the tools of apprehension are means of creativity and thus of metamorphosis. The first location of a thought, as carried through the essay, for example, is after all language. Seeing is shaping.
This way of looking (defined by the modalities of perception and the traditions of understanding) will constitute its own presence. That is why I prefer to talk of the self of fiction. The discourse has a face that will start pulling faces. This may well be what we mean by ‘voice.’ And so, without blurring the demarcations any further, but in recognition of the many ways in which fact and fiction interact and temper one another, I wonder whether we shouldn’t modify the categorization to fictionality and factionation: ‘fictionality’ with its echoes of ‘finality’ and ‘rationality’ and even ‘nationality’; ‘factionation’ with its associations of ‘fascination’ and ‘imagination’? Thereby allowing fiction to be more fixed and fact to be more fluctuating or factitious, maybe facetious, to be the de facto nation (or station) of fictions?
What remains of the differences between fact and fiction? Certainly there’s much less of a contradiction between these two ‘opposites’ than we’re led to assume. For starters, we need to imagine (visualize, format, relate and situate) even the simplest fact in order to grasp it. Making sense necessitates a constant telling to self of the observed phenomena, and thereby it becomes a story. Furthermore, the fiction will establish a presence, leave an imprint, act as fact with its surroundings. It is nevertheless useful to keep the two poles alive so that we may, in the process of teasing out differences and incompatibilities and similitude and sameness, hone our skills of perception and interpretation.
Skill can be vitally important. And so is the ability to distinguish between ‘reality’ and ‘story’: operating on a human being or piloting a passenger aircraft, say — there is surely no room here for suggesting that “all observations and interpretations are equally truthful.” The example often used is of the hunter depending for a livelihood on his ability to correctly ‘read’ the prints of his prey, and thus of making distinctions between fancy and fabrication. It is a fact that he needs to know this so as to bring home to family and affiliates the fat and the meat. They may not care a fig for his flights of imagination! Still, his reading of the traces will be informed not only by acquired knowledge and discernment, but also by the invisibles, by imaginings. Even a deduction based upon experience will still have a measure of imagination as locking device. We imagine in order to understand. By writing we enter a dialogue between fact and its fictions.
We know now that writing will change us and therefore modify our relationship to the world. We also know that it will be like throwing stones in the river in an effort to get across. This is a singular journey. There are dangers along the way: the stones may turn into crocodiles or they may have dissolved, or we may be side-lined into dreaming of just going with the flow as we study the patterns of swirl and froth and (mirror) nothing more.
What we are hopefully going to learn about is how to find passages through our fear of writing/change. We’ll look at strategies for wording the spaces between I and You. In so doing we shall be studying, as we always must, in close and critical reading of our diverse and multifarious stories, looking at both sides of the avenues of reflection, the concrete exigencies of composing a text: theme and its formulation, the choices the writer makes when he creates characters, techniques of representation and angles of intervention, structuring and texturing, rhythm and rupture and repetition, the tension between thought and image, etc. Particularly the etceteras. It may even help us identify the stones we’ll be eating.
NEW YORK, 12 SEPTEMBER 2001
“Then it went dark. Real dark. Like snow.”
words of a survivor
will the hand endure moving over this paper
will any poem have enough weight
to leave a flight-line above the desolate landscape
ever enough face to lift against death’s dark silence
who will tell today
the huge anthill of people remains quiet
somber and shrill, bright and obscure
as if the brown effluvium of sputtering towers
sweeps still the skyline with a filthy flag
who will weep today
today images wail for voice behind the eyes
planes as bombs stuffed with shrapnel of soft bodies
then the fire inferno flame-flowers from skyscrapers
human flares like falling angels from the highest floor
down, down all along shimmering buildings of glass and steel
fluted in abandoned beauty and fluttering
weightless and willowy and flame-winged to streamline
fleeting reflections in the fugitive language of forgetting
the hell-hound of destruction has a red tongue of laughter
who will tell and who will count
gouged eyes do not understand the blue of sky
through a dismal and chilly nuclear winter
people stumble people shuffle
stumble-people shuffle-people worm-white-people
where lie the faces
old before their end or their wedding
grayed in ashes from head to toe
as if clothed in coats of the snowing knowing of ages
beneath rummage and debris rosy corpses move and mumble
and in East River confidential files and folders float
with shreds and feathers lacerated human meat
scorched confetti for the dog’s feast
who will tell tomorrow tomorrow
where are the faces
will the tongue still think
still pulse its dark lair
with flamed memory of bliss
will words still drink oblivion
will any poem some day ever carry sufficient weight
to leave the script of scraps recalling fall and forgetting
will death remain quivering in the paper
I SIT HERE
I sit here with bent shoulders, eyes smarting from looking at the screen as if searching for the truth. The screen is a lit funnel giving onto darkness. Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Writing this as a diary, slithery snake, knowing I will never be able to cover the days or foresee the nights. Writing is such a contradictory process.