Intimate Stranger

by Breyten Breytenbach

  is weighed slaked shifted

  to all evil things worded away

  not-us is the fulcrum of rancor

  in squatting together for solace

  memory is leisurely fumbled

  folded fashioned

  measure for measure

  and fitted to words

  do we know who we are

  one by one

  for you and one

  for me the blood and the clay

  the rememberer’s song

  but when the tree is chopped down

  so that sun burns a stain in the eye

  and fire goes to ashes

  to a scorched blot of absence

  we are strewn to four winds

  do I not know who I am

  wandering through the flame-fed day

  and night’s shivering articulations

  looking for you as if for mirror

  NIETZSCHE’S HORSE

  I have been mulling over in my perambulating or peregrinating (or percolating) thoughts the notion of ‘the function of writing.’ In the light of the September 11 parting of the waters and the ensuing war. Note: not necessarily ‘the role of the writer,’ for that chestnut has for some time already been a horse drowned in many a shallow ford (in a manner of speaking); and no wonder the beast expired screaming and frothing at the bit, because numerous self-aggrandizing scoundrels, standing in the stirrups to look tall, had been flogging it to death. In my mind and memory I try to avoid the trap. Nietzsche, it is told, finally lost the remnants of his clear mind when he saw a horse being whipped in the street, and he went up to it and threw his arms around its neck and wept. But I’m not Nietzsche. And then, if I wish to hold to my tenet that “writing is an awareness-enhancing process,” I have to engage the question of how the above events affect our writing. And what our consciousness implies.

  How are we all dealing with the aftershocks of incomprehensible death from the skies torching the skittles of our Western vanity? (Incomprehensible because carried out by humans like us.) Are we more or less alive than before? Has it modified our concerns? Did it change our writing? Is there any other perceptible smell except for the whiffs of decomposing flesh? Do revulsion and sadness and anguished anger smell? Rather — did only the flesh perish (and with it our glittering conceit of invulnerability, the ostensibly endless triumph of human ambition and ingenuity tumbling in a cloud of gray glory), or did some conceptions and values also fall away? How do we come to terms with naked terror? You were too shy or intimidated to talk back at me, other than saying you perhaps sleep less soundly and are more skittish. I respect your timidity, or possibly it is reserve, but at the same time I have to insist that you are a writer, that all our discussions around technique (arc, voice, tense, sense, angle and character) will be hot air unless we also think about how this activity fits in with larger social and ethical concerns. (I might as well say existential — you have been generous and patient enough to listen to me claiming that words are the original breath of awareness, and not just hot air.)

  And how do we handle the spectacle of seeing the world’s only super-power using the awesome might of its air superiority to attack forces which, give or take a few caves and anti-aircraft artillery, can be compared to the New York Police Department? How do we come to terms with naked terror?

  Talking about caves. . If it is true that the US and its allies occupy the overground it also implies that there is a vast underground out there. Portions of the population right here in America belong to this ‘underground.’ At least that is where they operate, even when they don’t know it. For it is not true that the word is too weak or insignificant or jaded to reflect the enormity of what happened, nor that it cannot digest and ultimately regurgitate the implications of what’s going on now. We will be producing notes from the underground, as has always happened on these occasions, and they will consist partly of the personal and partly of the public because this is the way we are and this is the duality in which writing always presents itself.

  Take it further. There is an international conflict of interests. (Nobody is talking very much about the geo-political economic interests underpinning the conflict where vested multinational corporate privileges, the ‘right’ to strategic resources, are at stake.) Mr. Bush feigns genuine perplexity when he querulously asks why America is so much hated out there; to suggest that it is a misunderstanding “because I know how good we are” is either a fable or a fib. Same glib fish. He should consult his colleagues and his father. The world is a bitter and a hungry place for most people. It is also very angry. The rulers are seen to be the USA and its Northern allies (the other ex-colonial powers) and the gentlemen’s club of corrupt manikin regimes bolstered and fattened to fatuousness by these vested interests. Slowly an international ‘underclass’ is filling in the dots between their condition and their situation. Of course, it is silly to suggest that the dichotomy is simply a black-and-white one — peasants in Africa are not at war for the same reasons as those in Asia or Latin America and among the ranks of the ‘underclass’ you will find many bourgeois intellectuals. A well-off filmmaker like Jean-Luc Goddard is as fiercely angry about globalization squeezing his works out of the arena of public awareness and ruining his food and his certainties, and his colleague Wim Wenders is as anguished by the deceptions of the American dream he idolized and tried to emulate, as the Senegalese groundnut farmer obliged to buy his genetically modified grains from an American multinational company will be. And it is true, as well, that much of the humiliation is fed and compounded by the sight of unattainable consumer society products being dangled on TV screens worldwide (the way flashers expose their danglers), creating for the poor viewer the ambivalence of wanting to imitate as well as to vomit, and leading to the self-disgust which breeds fanaticism. We gag on this factitious Western paradise shoved down our throats. But this is also a tragedy, because our Manichean vision of Babylon is based on ignorance.

  The world would benefit from knowing more about the diverse textures of American life, the dissidence and the solidarity and the tenderness, and the fears of many ordinary wonderful cussed human beings. And the fact that it will be the poor and the struggling and the half-alienated, including many immigrant would-be Americans, who are going to pay with their lives for the greed and the folly of the cowardly and corrupt masters of war. The world ought to be introduced to America, and vice versa, but not through the good offices of the present administration, because the only Americans they want us to meet are the interrogators and the spooks and presumably the oil executives.

  Maybe we can then together dispatch Unum One-God, be He called Word or Profit.

  And live happily ever after? The states screwed us. I mean, the construct of ‘state.’ After all, injustice originated with the protection of the privileges and the property of the powerful few (king, church, pure revolution — all ‘anointed’ by what could be termed the One-God), and it still does. In most parts of the world State has become a thing, an organism conflating its interests and prerogatives with those of the ‘country’ or the ‘nation’ or the ‘people.’ If however, you believe with me that (wo)man naturally strives for freedom, you will also agree that (s)he will aspire toward being a ‘free agent.’ And that you cannot be a writer except as free agent. Which does not mean that you do not have the same responsibilities as everybody else. Only that this is it, this is your charge and responsibility to society, as also to time and place and history: free agency. It is only ‘natural’ that the State should wish jealously to control perceptions of what it is doing, and why — telling us that now is the time to sacrifice some ‘individuality’ (indivi-duality) for the sake of the common weal and purpose draped in the patriotism of flag and anthem. ‘Superior interests’ always do, and patriotism in an environment where so many people have made a basic commitment to trying to be American is a potent prescription for making parrots of the population.

  So it is going to be a tough ride for the searching spirit: free
agency will be curtailed, accused of being a wanking cop-out at best. Or betrayal. But believe me: to compromise your right to be wrong is to irrevocably blunt your writing tools. Honesty in trusting your doubts and burrowing for the pain is not a value, it is a tool you cannot do without.

  I repeat what I said before, that consciousness is ultimately a personal discovery, but it is also partly at least communal belonging. The word may be a tamed and color-crafted scandaroon, yet you ultimately have to let it fly so that other eyes may follow the whirring in the sky. Events like September 11 and the ensuing war (or blind man’s buff) bring home to us the challenges of our craft. We are lucky to have had this catalyst to shake our values, sharpen our perceptions, reshape our priorities, remind us of our inadequacies, reaffirm our conviction that the word — fashioned and used with patience, humility, grace, perseverance and dignity, and with the awareness of its discouraging obduracy — can reach out to mirror the terror and the complexities of reality.

  (mirror note 3)

  Talking about caves. . Chuck Wachtel, to whom I show the above entry, reminds me that there is another ‘cave’: resistance from within against the dumbing down of the public discourse, the apparent obtuseness of this (his) country’s foreign policies, the manipulation of sentimentality and fears kept vivid by ignorance. More to the point: there has always been resistance from writers. Maybe from shamans painting the animals and the trances on the walls of the cave. I must agree. (And admit that it may be hurtful not to point out the existence of these ‘counter-voices’ more consistently.) In class we looked at a section of Kenneth Patchen’s Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer. The man had been shamefully forgotten, and with him the struggles of his time. In preparing for the session I came across an essay written by Henry Miller about Patchen, maybe as an introduction to a book: “Patchen: Man of Anger and Light.” Miller found Patchen a powerful, sensitive being who moved on velvet pads. “A sort of sincere assassin. . He is American through and through, and Americans, despite their talkiness, are fundamentally silent creatures. They talk in order to conceal their innate reticence. . It’s always because we love that we are rebellious; it takes a great deal of love to care a damn one way or another what happens from now on: I still do. . No one in his senses wishes to admit being a voluntary part of this world, so thoroughly inhuman, so intolerable has it become. We are all (whether we admit it or not) waiting for the end of the world, as though it were not a world of our own making but a hell into which we had been thrust by a malevolent fate.” Every incipient artist in America, with the misfortune of being an artist and a human being, working away in the waiting rooms of sleep, will once again have to rise up in the revolt of the angels. The time is 1946. Atomic bombs had shaken the world and loosened the stays of morality; the nuclear race was on. “If through indifference and inertia we can create human as well as atomic bombs, then it seems to me that the poet has the right to explode in his own fashion at his own appointed time. . When men deliberately create instruments of destruction to be used against the innocent as well as the guilty, […] the sick, the halt, the maimed, the blind, the insane, when their targets embrace whole populations. . then we know that the heart and the imagination of man is no longer capable of being stirred.”

  ON USING THE NOTEBOOK

  When you wake you may still have echoing in the deep ear a last shout of the night’s trip. Immediately the images fade, coherence crumples as in a photo negative turning glasse-yed and glossy with whiteness in the fire of exposure. That whiteness which is totally dark. Similarly, when slipping into sleep, the jumble of images coagulate, cohere, rising from an exposed negative being dipped in the acid bath of what you always knew without knowing it. And you dream away.

  This is why your notebook is important. It is a portable keyboard for exercising the fingers of the eye, ear and nose. You jot down the impressions, note the riffs, run the words until you can see the sinews and the curve of muscles oiling the light. You draw instant portraits. You encapsulate a whole novel in one clear vision of fifty words; it will be obscure by the time you re-read it. A notebook is not a place of drafts, but of draughts. It is a seedbed. Of course, many seeds just die and others are eaten by birds, but birds are not bad at being dream messengers with night-colored wings. You could do worse. (You could be an Afghani waiting for the terrible birds of destruction to rain over your land at night. .)

  The notebook is a word-camera. You move through the city and gather the pickings of the senses. Extremes come together on a page. A pavement of fugacious feet has inscribed in the cement a timeless relic of love in the shape of crude initials carving up (and caving) a heart. Or you see inscribed in one such stone: I love Chicago. This is New York. You will become aware not only of the visual collage of impressions but also the auditory, all those throwaway phrases of raw indiscretion on the wind. The tiny and the extravagant blend: your eye tries to spell the infinitesimal squashed insects pretending to be numbers on a phone card, and you look up to have skyscraper-high electronic Times Square letters in blaring colors smash your retinas. In Mulberry Street, a discarded door on a rubble pile has scrawled over it: So long, Scheck, you won’t be missed. A young lady pushes her fully clothed cello before her down the street. From time to time she stops to wait patiently, holding the bloated-bellied instrument now sagging over its one small wheel. Then she bends down to carefully collect the droppings in a plastic bag. As you cross her path you hear the cavernous groans; she must have a bag full of dark notes by now. When it is the annual festival of San Gennaro you will wend your way through the dense crowd of sausage-gobbling bulky humans and off the main thoroughfare find a side-show proposing the smallest woman in the world, Little Lena, twenty-nine inches high with hands barely two inches across and wearing size two shoes, and a billboard announcing: West Indies cultural export. Don’t you see there’s a miniaturized world to be peeped at in there? In the Metropolitan the Ingres drawings are an afternoon’s worth of eternity scribbles snared in one sitting. On Union Square market where one can buy a minuscule tot of snake-green cat grass juice guaranteed to make you meow, you see a hand-scribbled note: If you get to it and you can’t do it — there you jolly well are! Lord Buckley. In a run-down rotting area of the ‘Loaisaida’ an outer lives with all his junk in a battered ‘Oldsmobooger’ splattered with stickers: Never play leapfrog with a Unicorn; We don’t give a damn how you did it up north; Out of my way! My kids need to pee; A clear conscience is nothing else than poor memory; If you’re not calling Dr. Kevordian, keep smiling. .

  Writing is life in progress. And your notebook is there to remember it.

  BERNARD

  This in-between season when it is not clear whether one is still in autumn or already in winter, but already it is dark, can be bitter. Some days are balmy, the late afternoons in the park may be warm with an orange glow staining the brick facades of the buildings around. But the sun dies earlier, the nights are longer, they may even seem endless when one is poor and homeless. Often, there’s a dirty wetness in the air billowing from the two rivers on either side of the city and from the opaque ocean further out. The tops of buildings are obscured, swathed in ragged fog. Everything is hard. The sidewalk under one’s feet is hard and cold.

  Bernard’s only hope is to last out another year. By now he doesn’t remember how long he’s been in this city. He came here many years ago to pursue a career as a writer. He knew he had his twin brother Simon somewhere in one of the boroughs, they’d lost contact long ago when they still wanted to study medicine and both dropped out, mostly because they couldn’t afford the tuition and had nothing against which to borrow. They went their different ways. Bernard already had this problem with drink. It made him smell bad and caused him to be sour company. Once, in the shop of a man framing prints, he heard it said that Simon was married and living somewhere in the anthill; he wouldn’t know where to start if he wanted to find him. He did not linger to ask for further information because the framer’s vicious dog attacked him, ripping a w
ound in his leg, maybe because he smelt of dirty streets and old vomit. He didn’t particularly wish to find his brother either. By now, if they crossed one another in the street, they wouldn’t recognize each other. And if they did, what would they have to talk about? It is a city filled with strangers, some of them mumbling, each with her or his own anger or despair or illness. People are nicer to dogs than to one another. When they come upon a pooch on a leash they go down on their hunkers and purse their lips to baby-talk to the animal. They cannot help but fondle the animal’s ears to show what clean lives they’re living.

  In earlier years Bernard managed to find lodging with other bohemians, people with bright but dirty shirts — and in the beginning there was a woman, older than him and with rolls of puckered cellulite around her thighs, the relationship did not weather well — but since many seasons now he has been shuffling from cheap boarding house to asylum to vacant lot or the porch of a derelict building. He knows some of the other vagrants — the little old Chinese woman in baggy clothes transporting a mountain of collected empty cans, the mysterious lady with the long overcoat reaching to the ground, the gloves, the dark glasses and the broad hat pulled deep over her face, pushing a pram with all her earthly belongings, the old men with their stiff movements and their hand-printed cardboard signs imploring help — but he seldom speaks to any of them. In a duffel bag slung over his shoulder he has some clothes and a wad of manuscripts. Lately, particularly now with the cold coming, a cold wind blows from hell, he has started using a push-carriage to keep two blankets and some unfolded boxes upon which he sleeps at night. He will be an isolated animal entering its burrow, safe in its own smell.