LIFE WORK
I’m not certain about the extent to which life — the ‘ordinary’ or ‘living’ life one is leading — enters or impinges upon the work. (By ‘work’ I mean writing and painting, making films or plays, etc.: that activity of the mind and the hand which purports to metamorph matter into art and imagination into memory, that is, into the substance of consciousness-making.) Of course, your life can be the gray matter of your writing if that’s what you set out to reflect, and even when you don’t do so on purpose it is more than likely still seeping through.
In any event, what is ‘world’ and what ‘word’? Geoff Bennington, who advanced many insightful ideas about The New Modernism, wrote: “Referral is not referenced in the linguistic sense. Deconstruction does not have a place for language over here and a world over there to which it refers [my italics]. Elements in the language refer to one another for their identity, and refer to non-linguistic marks which refer in turn for their identity and difference. There is no essential difference between language and the world, the one as subject, the other as object. There are traces.” (But not to be different does not mean that one is the same. .)
One’s own experiences, emotions and relationships, constitute the most readily available material: however broadly and distantly one may imagine and project the stories, they still must come from the mind, and mind — I believe — is both the origin, the originator and the product of all the above, or at least of our translation and interpretation of those experiences. The mind is also the imitator of outside reality, the way the markings on a moth’s wings will imitate the eyes of a predator. We paint our faces to ward off homicidal spirits, we write to capture (and captivate) reality in a living mirror. This lies at the heart of what writers do. (By the way, I think a possible definition of ‘heart’ can be mind plus hand — in other words, mind being able to help itself, including imagining the mind and the I and killing it and ‘self’ if necessary; ‘heart’ is an agent of activity, it only exists when it is manifest, when it leaves traces, as in writing.)
(I’m not now talking about ‘me-ism’: the seemingly inexhaustible fascination with the self — its history and manifestations and consumation, its aches and joys and glories, its strangeness and the smells of its gases. We so often dote on ourselves as on long-lost children. Obviously, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with exploring the self; it is even a necessary point of departure for the knowledge of others — the philosopher Levinas claimed that the Subject is both the host and the hostage of the Other — but narcissism, the closed-in mirror, the capitalist and consumerist entitled self-referent, is very meager ground indeed upon which to engage the reader. The domestic ‘self’ is not exactly a transport toward more exciting insights: it eventually pales into insipid indifference through masturbation. Fish need water to breathe. Why get stuck in the known? The point is not to ignore the ‘self’ but to avoid becoming blinded. Buddha advised us to take care of the ‘body’ as of a person with nine wounds, with great care and compassion but without attachment.)
Writing is a necessary form/expression of schizophrenia: it implicates the observer and the doer. It demarcates the joints and ruptures between the ineffable fullness of being and the full autarchy — nearly an autism! — of a system that captures perception and expression within its own history and horizons. I don’t think one should attempt to ‘resolve’ the problem of duality or even imagine to ‘understand’ oneself better through creativity. Writing is not therapy. Forget the sloppy self-indulgence of ‘healing.’ If one has to be ‘sick’ and ‘healthy’ enough in order to write (naive and cynical, innocent and manipulative) the purpose is not to be cured but to write better. In other words, to transform better and more effectively in the work, into narration, the ambiguities and imperfections and impossibilities thrown up by the process.
(The ‘better’ and ‘more effectively’ I allude to here have to do with clarity of communication and affect. And by ‘clarity’ I don’t necessarily mean intelligibility: we all know by now that a shadow will be obscure, or that a flock of words can be without cognizable connotations, while still being ‘clear’ if there is texture, and still expressing ‘saying’ if it hangs together in contexture (conjecture/context).
“The higher he ascends/the darker is the wood;/it is the shadowy cloud/that clarified the night,/and so the one who understood/remains always unknowing/. . This knowledge by unknowing / is such a soaring force/that scholars argue long/but never leave the ground/. .” (St. John of the Cross, I Came Into the Unknown)
I sat down at the table
and the poem descended like a mantle
upon my shoulders. The rain was outside.
Out there was such a rush and rattle of rain
that no footsteps could be heard on the roof.
My window was open to the waterfall of sky
but I at bay in my moth-whispered cloak,
wrapped in wings with no memory of flying
The act of creativity is the beginning of unleashing metamorphosis, of putting something out there, of starting a process. We become aware of the implications of tangling with matter, of engaging others. In the ‘making of things’ (stories, poems) we shape identities, we forge links between aesthetics and ethics, we learn about the importance of an environment within which rhythms and resonance can take on meaning, we begin to understand about embellishing the existent, we reach out to the supposed non-existent, we bring new light to known objects. It makes it possible for us to imagine transitions and bring together the discrete in a plausible bounded mirage of purport. After all, the collection comes into being because of the collector. On condition that you remember the fact that your vision is only one possible way of seeing, collecting, and thus of making. One must not confuse the finger with the moon.
It was painting that made me aware of the thingness of creations, of the object’s ‘own language,’ with logic and internal references and therefore history, of the similarly explosive functions of metaphor and image, and that meaning will be secreted from the dialectical game of look-alike-alive components which, when drawing in the reader or onlooker or listener, provoke the illusion of movement and thus become process: rhythm, pattern, space, reference, harmony, dissonance, repetition, obliteration, the color underneath, texture, structure, jump, break, fuck-up. . (Thing as process and not as product, now that’s democracy for you as opposed to the fascism of making of everything a commodity!) For ultimately this: the process (and its mirror — poem, painting) is the matter of awareness for both maker and taker. Montaigne says: “Je ne peins pas l’être, je peins le passage.” I don’t paint the being, but the going.
Meaning (if we reduce it to its regular orotund ontogenesis, if we search only for its semantic delimitations) is the thin sop of communication, of ‘lay there and don’t move’; it is old Mister Unum, the One-God in whose name we fly into towers or drop bombs from dizzying heights; it is language as authoritarian structure. Monotheism as avatar of Meaning must by its essential and founding premise be jealous, totalitarian and intolerant. .
To be looking at the thing or the group of words though, as they get a move on, is to be aware of an image (a presence) behind the interacting combination and composition of components, a kind of hole in the mirror. It is to become two, onlooker and doer, because it is a self-confrontation. Since most of us do not have access to Chinese ideograms with their radicals (roots) and word-pictures where the dichotomy I’m referring to is both more evident and nullified, and as we no longer practice the arabesques and humming thinking and word-for-every-thing-and-dream and image-for-each-thought of oral traditions, we risk walking into the abstract, into the trap of the written word. As the convention of meaning became the supreme norm, the autonomous movements of the means to expression faded in the eye; we forgot that ‘meaning’ can only offer us the appearances of preserving perception and keeping awareness. Reality however (and the words impregnated by it), is different: it is rot, chewing gum, the implosion of sing
ular meaning, the multiplication of loaves and fishes. Meaning made it impossible for us to sleep with truth, where we twin to be one fugacious orgasm.
Writing is an acquisition (of words, understanding, attitudes); ideally it is also a process of skinning and of dismantling (of attitudes, understanding, words). Because possessions can be inhibiting. To take leave of that which forms attachments leads to a progressive reduction of the I, and this will allow the mind to expand and become more vacuous. You need to be involved simultaneously with the walking and the final destination. That is why the Zen master Dōgen suggested we should live as if we were the Buddhas we already are: to sit and listen to the uninterrupted news of silence, part of the imageless action, and thus experience all-ness. And, because one is anyway part of it, to reach immobility within movement and play inside immobility. Our whole being should be as a lung: when breathing out you open and become emptied and the interior flows away and perishes so that you are at one with the totality, the void; when inhaling everything around you and outside you enters to become part of you. There are thus two movements, a duality, a come and a go — both integrated in the coming-and-going, so that there can be movement without movement, an un-danced dance, quietness without stopping. Everything/reality is a lung and you are being inhaled and exhaled.
It is truly a dance. You and your ultimate opponent, the shadow-self, move together like water in the wind. Keep the neck straight; it must be as if the crown of your head were attached to a navel string from heaven; and when you lift your hands, like this, feel then the wrists hoisted by threads: when you open your palms upward you must be holding twin birds, which can neither stay nor fly away. Relax the belly, particularly the hip joints, straighten your back without stiffening: the chi should circulate freely — when it is not hindered you will experience the palms of your hands becoming warm as if a mild breath blew against them, ruffling the birds’ feathers.
In the mind also, you become aware of space when it is suggested neither by the presence nor the absence of objects but by their ending (nirodha). A triangle is not circumscribed by three lines but by the three edges where triangularity breaks off.
Like this you are unconsciously concentrated, on your guard and ready without any rigidity. And like this too, in your writing, you will obtain the ‘relaxed tension’ of a flowing alertness. You will need it as you see your text taking body, in order not to take fear. Because you are finally your own enemy.
Writing through the ‘self,’ whoever she may be, need not be a limitation (and I have suggested elsewhere that one is always walking the road of “writing the self and rewriting the world” — that is, you invent the self and reshape the observed outside and other out there to some form of understanding). We are writing from nothingness, at best through ‘self’ as conduit of consciousness, while we all carry within us an infinity of characters and mutations and stories. The mind-hand combination — here I again equate ‘hand’ with ‘writing’ — operates like a mirror, which can be held up to all kinds of situations and to all four faces of the earth.
A beautiful woman I once knew (her name was Leah), who lived the pain of not writing her life, referred to this infinity of openings as “the nation of images.” (I bring her into this unmade text as into my soiled bed because movement knows no hierarchy.) You may be reticent about what to use, sensitive about impairing your relations with people close to you, of staining the sheets of paper, but for all practical purposes you are quite an unscrupulous magpie, filching whatever shiny object attracts the attention. What goes into the word-grinder is, as well, the writing itself — I mean, the fact (or fiction) of leading a writing life. As you use your senses to mediate the world in which you move, so you employ writing as a further sense — both to correlate the physical ones and to negotiate some kind of peace process between your fortified experiences or prejudices and the nascent ‘self’ as liberation movement.
Does exploring (and exploiting) the ‘coming-to-self’ as means and as material imply that one has only the ego to go by? No, I certainly don’t think so. Writing has enough of an ‘outside-ness’ to it — its own volition and laws, its desire to come about — for you not to be confined to fumbling (for) yourself in a self-reflecting darkroom. In any event, as I’m suggesting, the ego is but a repository for an ongoing process of coming to consciousness informed by both outside and inner events, a station hall for many selves and shouts, a shard of that big mirror we call life.
(mirror note 2)
Slowly now, what about the counter-arguments? Ernest Gellner wrote a book, Language and Solitude, in which he challenges many of the assumptions of Malinowski and particularly Wittgenstein on language. There’s a chapter, “The case of the disappearing self,” where he quotes David Hume: “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other. . I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. . I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” Kant as well (we’re told) held that there is nothing abiding except the “I,” which is simple solely because its representation has no content. . All of this preceded and influenced Wittgenstein, who wrote in his Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus: “If I write a book called The World As I Found It, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book.” And thus: “The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-coordinate with it.” Gellner then observes (and I quote snippets): “It is quite obvious what has happened. The empiricist insistence on refraining from trespass beyond the immediate data ends up by eliminating both an independent world and an independent, persisting self. Both dissolve and, moreover, flow into each other, and both disappear. The solitude is total. This surely was the problem, and not a solution, for Wittgenstein. He was not seeking a bolt hole from Kakania, he was looking for an escape from the bolt hole. . The one and only alternative theory of meaning, by contrast, promised and provided liberation from this solitude, and a kind of guaranteed gregariousness. Language as a mirror of reality led to loneliness; language as a cultural function led to community. . [But] Wittgenstein never pointed to any actual historically existing culture, such as Kakania. Examples continued to be conspicuous by their absence. . In the end, culture was treated as ultimate, as a kind of new ultimate visual field. So the solitude of the visual field (co-extensive with both self and world) is replaced by the solitude of culture. .”
WRITERS WANDER
Writers are the scattered or lost tribe of the world. They originated from one belief — even the tenets have since been lost — shared rituals and music, and the same place, which was an oasis port on the edge of dark badlands. Because of a history of roaming and Diaspora long, long ago, the individual members became stultified in separate languages and they took on as protective coloring the customs and the beliefs of the populations among whom they lived. They may have given their hearts to the people. But when they meet they recognize one another by a look in the eyes as if squinting against the sun, and by the clumsy gestures of hands. Their hands are uncertainly looking for sugar signs of sharedness. This they will see, maybe with mortification, remorse and shame: that they are indelibly marked by the same stubborn illusions, the same shortcomings making their fit into life an awkward one, the same yearning for projecting connectedness and for initiating transformation. As they go about their business of assessing ass (this is a slight sleight of hand, I’m sorry) they have the same timid desire for transgression. Speak not of transcendence, friend. They’re not sure how they relate to the other tribes of the Book, and perhaps they do
n’t really care. And they intermarried over generations and ages and seasons to the point of becoming mongrels and bastards mistaking themselves for dogs when they see a mirror. All they do know is that despite the distances of exile and fusion, they have the same phantom aches and passions that put them apart from the preoccupations of their environment to start with. Does the dog ever consider losing its dog-ness? This tribal condition can be isolated as a genetic weakness that one is unaware of but which will rise like a cloud of flies in your face the day you open a book — it is the first day it is the last day — to obscure your self as in a mirror or a sunken Atlantis. So this is where I belong? This is where I will become whole? Of course, it doesn’t work out that way. Once inside, you’re lost for good. And for bad. The consolation, friend, comes from recognizing your affinity with the other lost souls flailing around for purpose and for meaning. With those barking at the stars in the night. Ah, the pleasure comes from realizing that the sicker you get the better you will feel; the more isolated and alienated you are the more you are tied to others of your kind.
THE ASHES AND US
it is the tree coolness by day
like a robe of grace
draped around the trunk
it is the fire by night
burning holes in the dark
it is where sun and moon perish
and the answerableness
of identity
Intimate Stranger Page 6