Intimate Stranger

by Breyten Breytenbach

  Why do we do it? And why do we continue doing so, or have to do it over and over again? One knows there are many easier ways of drawing attention, of parading the self with its paradoxes and its pain. There are certainly more effective means of conveying information (though there seems to be ‘existential information’ embedded exclusively in the primordial need for making words). One also knows that the practice is not remunerative: given the effort and time consumed (for even at best one doesn’t produce more than two good pages a day) it is a singularly inept way for the human to make a living.

  So then, why?

  Ancient Chinese lore has it that writing evolved from magical signs, from runes and the ‘symbols’ or ‘depictions’ of the bones cast by diviners. It is said that on the day man started to codify the signs and their meanings by repeating them at will, and thus losing him / herself by beginning to trace the openings to the unknown, gods and demons wept because now there was no longer only Heaven and Earth. Man had manifested herself, interjected herself between reality and dream, and bared the cunt of creation. Now there was a go-between straddling the known and the unknowable and something autonomous (writing, conscious becoming) came into being with its own realness, if not ‘reality.’ A twin emerged. An intimate stranger.

  Writing is a conscious attempt by the human to participate in his fate, that ‘story’ written from birth to death. Casting spells, exorcizing, whistling in the dark, inventing the textures and the structures of consciousness, keeping a backdoor open to memory, getting to know who and what we are, both reflecting what is and shaping the new. Memory is nothing but dead time, but death seeds the soil: from forgetting new shapes sprout. .

  For writing is a means to transformation: using words and their interacting combinations — the meanings, the feel, the sounds and the shadows — to broaden our scope of apprehending and understanding ourselves and others, and in the process creating new spaces and references. Sometimes looking down into hell.

  REMEMBERING IMAGINATION

  We will of course continue our discussions — looking at structure, point of view, voice, texture, etc. — always with our identical twin lode stars of ‘truth’ and ‘invention’ or ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in sight; we shall track the fictionalization of experience and the infactuation with story. How reality is invaginated by imagination, and thus seeded by understanding. Let the holy spirit do its duty. I suggested that it is inevitable for truth to be turned into fiction from the very moment that you start writing (or telling), that it is innate to the act of telling (perhaps even to language itself) to transform what is told — because of the techniques we use in order to fix consciousness: structure (selecting, discarding, shaping) and texture (using sounds and images and rhythms to convey emotions or thoughts), and these take on a life of their own. Perception of ‘pure facts’ linked to ‘instant recall’ gets slotted away in memory for later use (we do not write as is immediately), and there the material will be selected, discarded and shaped. Information and experience structure memory; memory structures experience and information. Only fiction can unveil reality.

  In April 1966 Vladimir Nabokov stated to Alfred Appel: “I would say that imagination is a form of memory. . An image depends on the power of association, and association is supplied and prompted by memory. When we speak of a vivid individual recollection we are paying a compliment not to our capacity of retention but to Mnemosyne’s mysterious foresight in having stored up this or that element which creative imagination may use when combining it with later recollections and inventions. In this sense, both memory and imagination are a negation of time.”

  A fact remembered will be a fact imagined, and the ‘imagined’ fact preserved and culled from a selective memory may well be as close as we will ever get to the rubble of truthfulness. In other words, it will be fiction. Nabokov: “Bare facts do not exist in a state of nature, for they are never really quite bare. I tend more and more to regard the objective existence of all events as a form of impure imagination. Whatever the mind grasps, it does so with the assistance of creative fancy.”

  This holds for any passage from the observed to the expressed. The human mind, in its desperate quest for understanding and procreating survival (perhaps understanding is survival) will ‘order’ perceptions and information, highlight some and repress that which is not useful to the purpose or may be too disturbing. Memory is a source, not a neutral receptacle. To put it in the terms of another writer, R. Scholes: poïesis is not about mimesis, but on the contrary about “all writing, all composition, (being) construction. We do not imitate the world, we construct versions of it.”

  From this inadequacy to reflect the totality of our experiences and thus from the choices we make in transmission, and from the fact that verbal communication (particularly in its written expression) is a structuring of versions of the world, arises what we may call ‘false consciousness’ — ‘false’ in that it is neither complete nor totally instinctive. But this is not the same as ‘bad faith,’ where we bamboozle and lie to ourselves and to others whilst earnestly believing we are in the true!

  To the extent that we can show a mind working at full stretch (is the mind not a mirror to the universe?), and if we can empathize sufficiently with the characters and objects and situations depicted so that the story has both a directed fluidity and an autonomy outside the teller, we will bring about a truthfulness apparently as full-fledged (and fulsome!) as ‘reality.’ The more the story lives up to its own laws and realness, the more it will be (like) life. Charles Olson, the Black Mountain poet, claimed: “Art is the only twin life has.”

  I have suggested already that fiction will become true in the relating. First of all, because every creation exists and therefore it constitutes a fact, even if only on paper available to a limited number of eyes. Too, because anything written will take on a given authority. The present war between different parts of the world is a conflict of texts — more precisely, the unquestioned value ascribed to the Word in some cultures where it is fanatically believed that altering the text will be like defacing God and spitting on his tongue — so that, as somebody remarked, “this war will be won by words.” And then in any case, because you have to ground fiction — factor in a life-like unfolding and logic true to the story, where voice and form sound right, making it resemble a plausible reality — to make it work.

  One can therefore say that the act of telling, however sober and close to the facts, is a process of invention, but also that the very symbols and signs we use (language) root the telling in ‘reality.’ Language is (a) reality; each word corresponding to a concept or an action is a fact, and the bringing together of three words or more inevitably engenders fiction because of the relations established. Words talk to one another whether you want it or not; they tell stories. Hear them at night! Maybe it is due to the unstoppable fictionalization coming to mouth in the very act of telling, the process of self-invention, that some cultures prefer to leave their gods nameless.

  It would seem to be a primary human instinct to want to be reassured /reminded that one is. Memory invisibly threads the substance of reassurance, suggesting that there is continuation and accumulation. Let’s reduce it to a simple equation: I was therefore I am. Furthermore: to the extent that I remember who and where I was, I can situate and recognize this “I.” And if I can recognize it, it must have autonomous existence. “That is me in the photo.” (It is interesting that there can be no recognition of “I” as essence except through being or doing — being is doing.) By remembering we shape and modify and imagine the memory, we bring about continuity. Perhaps we fill in the blanks. We need continuity to make sense of our existence and to have a purpose.

  To take it further: this need for reassurance of being — in the face of total unknowingness, the absolutely opaque mystery of ‘before’ and ‘after’ — is normally satisfied through interaction with the ‘other’ (mother, brother, fother, sother. . the family, the species, hence the importance of ‘grooming’)
, the mirror, or the non-I (things, events, ideas, the environment. .). Or it could be assuaged by an interaction with the imaginary: the projection of self, the memory of self. We fictionalize also to have somebody to speak to and this interlocutor could be an imagination or a memory of the self. This brings about a twinning. You will have ‘yourself’ as doppelgänger. Inside you there is this demanding reader as skeptical observer, a lost soul hungry with anger. You write to placate the fear and to impress the unbeliever. Ultimately to seduce yourself. (Of course the ‘other self,’ the sother, is infinitely more seductive than you are: attractive, intelligent, proud and strong, and panting to be seduced. .)

  AN APOLOGY

  Reader, I owe you an apology. “Why do you want to be a writer?” was of course a silly question, and in your answer I sensed that you were irked by it. After all, the mere fact of your being here with me in the writing should be an answer, not so?

  This note is written a few days after the two towers of the World Trade Center were brought down — but I also want to jump into the future and refer now to an obituary of the poet, Czeslaw Milosz, who will die nearly exactly three years later, written by Leon Wieseltier. In that essay, to be published in The New York Times Book Review of September 12, 2004, Wieseltier will say of his dead friend: “All that he required for a justification of existence was a description of existence.” And then to quote the poet: “Description demands intense observation, so intense that the veil of everyday habit falls away and what we paid no attention to, because it struck us as so ordinary, is revealed as miraculous.”

  It might have been more useful had I been more specific, like asking: “How do you want to be a writer?” Or: “Why do you want to be a writer?” (As opposed to just writing as you go along.) Or: “Why do you want to be a writer?” (As opposed to, let’s jump, a dancer like that nimble black guy in the park, or painter or architect, for example.) Even: “Why do you want to be a writer?” Like, why me? Is there something wrong with me?

  My excuse? I wanted to get some sense of you. Since we are working together.

  I thought the best way of getting to know you would be through your writing. (Writing is a recognizable gesture of conscious/unconscious expression, unique to each person.) Presumably, the assignment I gave you might have been about describing a cherry or discussing Dostoevsky’s soul — he’s one of the few authors who knowingly had one, as you’ll remember, and he guessed that it was an internal excretion brought about by repression and punishment, the unhealed wound of the break-off point between animal and human, causing him endless pain and discomfort, but it was also his easel to ecstasy. Didn’t he mount his soul? And didn’t it talk to him, conveying truths in donkey-talk that he didn’t understand?

  I’m reminded of a beautiful tale — it may not be apposite here, or even appropriate, but so what? It is recounted in the Talmud, if I’m not mistaken. A rabbi bought a big carp in the market and is taking it home for dinner. The fish is still alive and to keep it fresh (or warm, or hidden from concupiscent eyes) the rabbi carries it under his coat with just the tail sticking out at the top. The thrashing fish slaps the rabbi in the face with its tail. This was inadvertent, one would like to think. The townspeople are outraged by the insult to their beloved spiritual leader. So a trial is organized on the spot and the verdict is that the culprit (the fish) must be drowned for his effrontery.

  Part of writing consists of this self-reflective/reflexive meditation on writing — on the interaction between you and the materials you use, on the nature and the purpose of words (they are remarkably resilient mutants), on the role of imagination (only fiction can reveal reality), etc. As it should. Wieseltier will note that Milosz showed a preference for poems that “honored the object, not the subject.” And I was reminded of something Einstein is reputed to have said, along the lines of: Everything must be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. (He also said ‘time’ only exists so that everything does not happen all at once.) This too, I wanted to hear from you. Because, however general the relationship to words and images may be, each writer approaches the tools in an individual way. No two hands fit around the haft of the hammer in exactly the same fashion. Your tools are simple words.

  Nevertheless, a further part of being a writer that I might have wanted you to respond to consists of asking what a writer does in this world of shit and smoke. Anything special? If I eschew concepts like ‘task’ or ‘duty’ or even ‘function,’ when the wings are resolutely folded, then there’s still an ongoing process of interaction between pen-pusher and word-sucker. How? To what purpose or effect? Does it change either? Is there an ethical component to what one produces? Do people need writing? Do societies need writers? I noticed that your answer to this implied query purposefully kept the sights low, in a somewhat self-deprecatory way. Was this to keep the expectations realistic, or does it denote a deflation of the writer’s ambition in the community?

  Mary Catherine Bateson wrote in Composing a Life: “Why do you suppose you want to write, to tell stories? For others, of course, for fun, for glory, for the game and the endlessly fascinating puzzle of it, but also always to rewrite and restage your own inner dramas. Any writer who denies that aspect of her work is lying to herself. True works of art happen, I suspect, only when inner and outer come together. That’s an important reason they’re so rare.”

  This still doesn’t add up to a motivation for being-with-word-in-the-world, but it is a beginning toward constituting a mode of reaction to life. (The mode, as I suggested earlier, may well reflect an affliction: it is not easy to dissimulate a live fish under your coat.)

  You will keep on asking yourself these questions as you continue, and the answers you come up with will not be the same at different stages of your trajectory. Indeed, they will be shaped by the stage, the station and the situation your life finds itself in at the time of asking. In the article which Wieseltier is going to write in three years’ time he will report on how it was said at the time of Heine’s funeral that there would appear to have been two possible answers to the questions about the writer’s ‘purpose’ or ‘sense’ — that of Goethe who was “destined to work and to live,” and that of Heine whose way was “only to laugh and to die.” Wieseltier will then extol the virtues of his deceased friend Milosz who “had come to work and to laugh and to live and to die.”

  In my own lifetime, with much living and little work, my tentative answers changed (at moments they were quite adamant!); even my questions were modified several times.

  I wouldn’t be dogmatic about this if I were you: cometh the moment cometh the attitude, and perhaps the conviction. By which I don’t wish to convey that one should comply and bend with the prevailing wind. Rather, my own inclination is always to arc against whatever wind may be blowing out of some hellhole of history. I don’t like to be pushed. I also often get blown over. But we all live through cycles. Outside events shatter our certainties. Who will now think of herself, and thus of her work, exactly the way she did a bare month ago when those ugly towers still stabbed at the sky? Besides, what is the use of a mind if you can’t even change it?

  Writing still is the existential game of amusing ourselves and others through the magic of inventing the known and hence the surprises of seeing it new; it is still also a process of digesting our lives, transforming perceptions, drawing the boundaries of our comfort and shaping the contours of our discomfort; it is, as ever, an ageless event and need, bigger and more mysterious than any of us, through which we may be crystallized. (Or cremated.)

  Ultimately, the mode of apprehension may become a way of life defined by the culture or the time you come from. In ancient China, as I pointed out elsewhere, one had to be proficient at painting, poetry and calligraphy, with a smattering of music and philosophy added, in order to be a fully aware citizen — and then you were likely to be commandeered for political and administrative service unless you ran away to the monastery or the mountain. ‘Renaissance man’ could be another example of how arti
stic creativity became a life discipline. In this, perhaps, lies the difference between being ‘a writer’ and only writing. This need not imply that you play unnecessary roles or go dressed in obsolete attitudes as in a long dark coat for carrying fish around, but it does suggest that you make of writing your angle to life and the spectrum through which you translate your surroundings.

  ‘To be a writer’ could be good and it could be bad. What it ought to lead to is greater empathy and insight, the ability to quarter the meat of existence, deeper questioning, developing the practice of doubt without reifying it to a doctrine, more objectivity, finer compassion, perhaps some understanding of what it’s all about. That is, if you do not get mummified by the paint coming with the role and the personage; if you do not choke on the bad fish meat of words. But if you can hold on to the sheer magic of being a first-timer, the footlights blinding you, even when knowledgeable and cynical, you would have won the day and earned the night. And maybe have the pleasure of seeing the cheeky fish swim away in the water of oblivion.

  (But I also need to go down on my knees before you, Reader. Please don’t ever indulge in writing just because you’ve been taught the craft as some do-it-yourself technique, like fishing, and now you have something momentous to convey to the world, like fish knowledge; and please don’t ever write just to mourn the fading in the water of Narcissus. I don’t want to hear of your achievements, prizes, grants, grunts and groans. Please don’t show your soul to me. Help us keep banality down by regularly, quietly and undramatically eliminating a creative-writing-course-produced or academy-embedded poet. Through drowning, if possible; as a boat put to water. . It’s a matter of moral hygiene, of conserving the merits of madness.)