Tonight he has returned to a sidewalk on the Lower East Side where weeds grow from the cracks. A broken awning offers some protection against the inclement weather. The police don’t patrol here too often and mostly they let him be. It is going to be a long night and he knows already that his leg will be aching again.
He lays the cardboard strips flat on the cement and then wraps himself in the blankets before lying down. He has covered his head but is not yet asleep when he feels somebody or something, it could be a stray dog, gently nuzzling or prodding him. He folds the blanket away from his face and looks up with a disgruntled squint. A very old man is bending awkwardly over him.
It is immediately clear to Bernard that this old-timer is a bum. The clothes are reasonably clean and a soft cap partially shadows his features but the air of indigence is unmistakable. When one is at the end of the road you always recognize the fellow travelers. You mutter a curse and you look away, but you can’t help seeing them.
What do you want, I have nothing, Bernard says. The old man shakes his head. It looks as if he has difficulty speaking. Then he says: Warmth. All I want is some warmth. Why come to me? Bernard asks. There’s a flophouse on Bowery. Why don’t you go there? No, no — the old one protests — my legs won’t get me that far. People steal your underwear. I just need some warmth. I won’t bother you. Tomorrow, I’ll move along tomorrow, promise. Can I lie down here with you?
With an expletive and a grunt Bernard covers his face again. But now he can’t find the relief of dark sleep. After about ten minutes he lifts the blanket. The old man is sitting on his haunches some five yards away, arms wrapped around his knees, staring at the ground. Hey you, you old-timer! — what’s your problem? Bernard asks. Are you sick?
The old man smiles and repeats that there’s nothing wrong with him, he’s just tired and looking for some warmth. That he intends moving along first thing in the morning. Look, he says, and opens one hand to show a coin.
Bernard sighs and scratches himself. Then he reluctantly motions to the old man to come over. In another faraway place, a lifetime ago, an ancient one once said to him with a toothless complicit and wet smile: Us sinking rats don’t abandon one another. He moves closer to the wall, lifts the blankets and tells the old man to get down but not to try any funny tricks or else he’ll smother him with his own cap. I’m not that kind. The old man snuggles up as close to Bernard as he dares and pulls the blankets over him. He says thank you several times. After a while he announces: My name is Jesus Smoke. Bernard says he’s not interested, didn’t ask, and in any case it is a silly fucking name. He can feel the slow heat of the old man seeping in under their shared covering and finally it is not unpleasant to drift off to sleep in this brooding, enhanced warmth.
It must have been well past midnight when he wakes up to a low monologue interspersed by sobs. The old man is addressing some absent person, perhaps a forgotten god, alternately telling what his life has been like and urgently attempting to convey a message. Tell Lilac I didn’t mean it, I just got lost, he says. He seems agitated. I got the money, Lord — he says loud and clear. The coin glistens in his open palm. Bernard angrily jabs the old man in the ribs, curses, tells him to shut up and let decent folk get some well-deserved rest. Jesus Smoke shudders as if his frail frame is rent by a suppressed groan, falls silent, rolls over on his back. He has taken off his cap, which he now clutches to his chest. The lips quiver as if from the backwash of the earlier speech. There is a silver tear in one of his wide-open eyes. I got the money, Lord — he says again, a little softer now.
When Bernard wakes up the next morning it takes him some time to remember where the unfamiliar weight of another person next to him comes from. Wake up, he says and prods the old man. Jesus Smoke — what fucking kind of name is that? Are you a freak, or what? When the old man doesn’t respond Bernard struggles out of the blankets and sits up. The old man is lying on his back, the hands crossed on his chest, the coin just protruding from his closed lips, and his open eyes, opaque and grey now, are still wet. The dark face, though very old, is remarkably smooth.
MIND SHADOWS
“Poetry is about repetition,” Karen Blixen wrote. And when we repeat, as long as it is not just empty patternmaking, we bring about space because the ‘super-structure’ of meaning is weakened and other aspects of writing are foregrounded. In a similar vein, I already suggested several times that writing is a consciousness-expanding activity for both writer and reader, if only because it brings sharpened awareness of what we cannot say or would have liked to say better. After all, the more you expand the greater the space of the unsaid and the unsayable around you; the more we know about the horrors of warfare, for instance, the greater will be our sense of inadequacy at expressing it. The matter of consciousness (not that which we are conscious of — people, places, situations, desires, even thoughts) is, for lack of a better concept, a mind-picture. But it remains that only: a fleeting glimpse, a dream and an unconscious perception, a negative space, unless and until it materializes in writing, painting, music or other forms of expression / creation. We have to create in order to know. The word and its world will be the secreted gray presence of awareness.
Where do these mind-pictures that we work with originate? An easier question may be: what sets them off? (For who says the pictures don’t pre-exist?) Obviously, there is a sensory stimulus at the outset, a perception. The field of reception / transformation of the impulse, I’d suggest, consists of memory and imagination, immediately prismating (prison-mating) into combinations and cross-breeding of the two, giving way to invention, intuition, knowledge, experience, analysis. . What we can ‘know’ of the ‘outside’ world also comes to us through imagination (apprehending) and memory (relating and situating). In fact, I think memory and imagination so closely shade one another that they may as well be two faces of the same mirror.
Who looks into the mirror? Why, the face looking out! Or the face remembered by a connection of imaging. That is imagination (or image-generation). That is, the face imagined by memory.
But this matter (the mind-picture), because of its specific consistency made up of becoming, when passing into the flesh of words ‘takes on a life of its own.’ It ‘re-members’ through patterns of references and repetitions which exist independently of the intention of the rememberer; what would seem to be an autonomous consciousness ‘breathes’ through the rhythms and is ‘grounded’ in textures; it ‘invents’ or imagines or colonizes by allusions to the ‘known,’ presenting new variations, stretching the expected meanings of the material by breaks and jumps that arise from the core or the nature or the history of the words; and thus it ‘presents’ (presences) itself in some ‘sense-making’ (presence-making) manifestation of its own. You could say the mind-picture has its own past, which you can only guess at.
Could we be chiming with rhythms and sounds coming from way beyond? Do the ancestors, going back all the way to dust, speak through us? Are we just receptors? What if the Unknowable were just the (provisionally?) Unsaid? And what if we all knew the Unsaid which, potentially at least, is just waiting to be pictured by mind? Could it be that we are giving shape (pre-sence) to the Unknowable in the process of translating mind-pictures into material modified by its (own) consciousness? Creation is repeating the known — as exorcism and transformation — and making the unknown familiar; writing then a pealing silence. .
Let us approach it from another angle.
Manuel Rivas, a Galician writer (in an interview with Libération, 26 October 2000) claims that he started writing short fiction because it is the most popular genre in Galicia. It is popular because it descends from oral literature. And one can see how the short story has been shaped in contents and form by oral transmission. To hold the listener’s attention the storyteller must not go on for too long; he (and in many cultures it was more likely a ‘she’) should not make it too difficult; at the same time there must be enough flesh to engage the audience, the intrigue (or the lesson) must be kep
t alive and carried to the very end, and style (vocabulary, rhythms, tenses, voice) must not come between narrator and listener. (Or, one could say, between teller and told.)
The material must be allowed to stand on its own.
But you don’t want it to go awry. How does one make of writing an honest woman, or a presentable kept man? You walk her or him on your arm down the street and you pretend she’s virtuous, maybe even virginal (and he honorable in his intentions and scrupulous in his thrusts). When you take her or him into your usual haunts you hope she won’t be indecently flashing her charms and her wares at the regulars, or he won’t go ogling and pawing the other dames.
Manuel Rivas makes the further point that fiction-writing often renders the unacceptable sayable. This task or effect, he suggests, is a form of public engagement. He refers to this function as la curación de sombras (the healing of shadows). He says that it habitually happened in his country that somebody in perfectly good health would go to the curandero (the healer) to complain that “I’m fine but I feel bad.”
The healer would answer that the malo (the illness) is in his shadow.
The historical story doesn’t interest him, Manuel Rivas says, since literature is in the camp of life, not that of History. He’d only be interested to check if that history was still present — alive or applicable. Two things worry him: the mechanisms of producing hate and the suspension of consciousness (or the conscience — in French ‘la conscience’ could mean both or either). History is a succession of things that ought never to have happened, and the writing act is a kind of revenge against this. Literature allows you to get closer to the real than you could through history or sociology since it reaches where witnesses cannot touch. Dreams and the imagination of what might have happened (or should have happened) will incarnate or say reality. The carpenter’s pencil speaking to the ear of the soldier about designing the scaffold brings about a link between the victim and the executioner, and this way of writing is more real than that which we denote as ‘realism.’ The real consists of concentric circles. Reality is but the first circle, the only visible one, and the most interesting parts can be found in the other circles. “To write is to be weaving in and out of the circle, as if one were invisibly stitching a cloth.”
Then he says: “It is ridiculous to believe that writing can change the world, but it may help you survive another night, one more night after the thousand and one nights, so as not to be cold.”
(mirror note 4)
Is the mirror the memory? Is it not true that memory is always in the present tense, with the tenseness of the unpassed present? In his Imaginative Horizons the anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano quotes Saint Augustine famously claiming that memory “is like a great field or a spacious palace, a storehouse for countless images of all kinds which are conveyed to it by the senses. In it are stored away all the thoughts by which we enlarge upon or diminish or modify in any way the perceptions at which we arrive through the senses, and it also contains everything else that has been entrusted to it for safe keeping, until such times as these things are swallowed up and buried in forgetfulness.” And later on he has Augustine suggesting that it is “a sort of stomach of the mind.” Which brings one by the ways of nature to digestion and to reflections on flatulence (a tautology, surely). To excretion. That which has not been absorbed, “buried in forgetfulness” (the mind), will be shat in words. And how are we to preserve the crap? Never before in the history of mankind has so much memory been created so effortlessly, odorlessly saved in electronic files, disseminated in blogs; never before have we been able to access and to log on so broadly. All together, in pealing silence, we establish an all-inclusive virtual consciousness. We could say God. How to stock it in time though? Soon we will not be able to access it — support, software, programs, the machines themselves will be nullified by time and become obsolete. As we forge and spread and imagine we wipe out. We will know everything and remember nothing. There will be no origin, only process. We will be the immaculately conceived offspring of Narcissus. The stomach will be a forgotten myth, the ass a dry mouth.
THE LONG AND THE SHORT
Ought we to apply a hierarchy of values to writing other than those, which emerge from and are embedded in the text itself? Is ‘long’ better than ‘short’? Is ‘reality’ more important than ‘imagination’? Should one adapt one’s imagination to reality? Why? To be more believable? And how? By allowing the lived experience (le vécu) or the biographical to become fictionalized?
The example of Pier Paolo Pasolini comes to mind: his private life subsumed his essays and his poems and thus became public — his ‘deviation’ as gay and communist (in Italy at that time still considered ‘abnormal’ for a young man of good provincial stock) became ideologically argued positions and certainly also shaped the themes and the intentions of his films. Often, he himself would enact a role in these works. Did he end up confusing his life with his creations? Was he, in a manner of speaking, sodomized by his own invented and nurtured existence, by the rough and tumble of his positions? He showed an enduring interest for the stories of the marginalized poor living on the outskirts of Rome, particularly the young men who were often part juvenile delinquent and part pimp. For him they had revolutionary potential. To be ‘without class,’ young and virile and rebellious, cruel and tender and still tied in a gory and mocking way to the rituals of Christian superstitions, was to be primed for revolution. And that’s how he dies, battered to death by one such occasional lover on a strip of vacant land near one of the grimy and gruesome ‘developments.’
Silvina Ocampo, the lady who worked so close to Jorge Luís Borges, transgresses the accepted writing norms in another way. She does not strive for the ‘unity of effect’ that E. A. Poe prescribed, nor is there often any logical, linear structure to her stories. Rather, what we get is a voluntary deconstruction. There is nearly never any singular discernable referent that could calm the play by excluding other angles of perception. For Silvina Ocampo, existence is unintelligible, and so she renounces logic and reason. For her, stories (to be found in Los días de la noche and La furia y otros cuentos, and I’d also recommend her novella, El amor es una droga dura) must be like life, ambiguous and with neither rhyme nor reason. What fascinates her (and it transpires in her work) is the dark dimension of everyday existence. She will convey this fascination by her attention to detail, to the incongruous, to the disorderly. This focus without any meaning makes for a very powerful and present voice. Some may call the sort of product she delivers ‘fantastical,’ but it is neither arbitrary in its presentation of events nor marvelous in its reach for the supernatural; what she does bring along is the disorder of the occult, of the other side of the mirror, the sinkholes and the hollows we normally pretend not to see. As a critic pointed out: “Hers are the tales of an adult Alice.”
We are talking about form, and a little bit about movement.
Quite apart from ‘long’ and ‘short’ in fiction there are to my mind (and in general when we speak about writing) two kinds of form. The one is ‘formal,’ recognized and classified, which we’ll find pegged as novel, etc. — and within the same long form, say, we may then encounter a variety of genres such as the ‘picaresque’ or the ‘epic.’ I’m here of course referring to fixed forms like the sonnet or the ballad in poetry. In terms of this approach we’ll think of the novel as having more or less a given length and structured differently compared to the essay or short fiction.
Then there is the other kind of form, perhaps more aptly called shape, which emerges or becomes apparent as a necessity of contents, enhancing or amplifying the latter, giving the impression of inventing itself as it goes along. Recognizable as form, it is itself an element in establishing the authority, the totality and the reach of the work.
One could submit that the first form is ‘formalistic’ and arbitrary (which does not imply that it cannot be a powerful pole against which to play and set off tensions, and in so doing open other spaces); the seco
nd is more unexpected and organic.
Form, whichever way we want to look at it, is expressed in space and length of time. Thereafter it is given face by the way it is textured, stretched or cut up or made hollow.
Can one move from the short story to the novel by just adding chapters and scenes as one goes along? Garcia Marquez wrote somewhere: “The effort in writing a short story is as intense as beginning a novel. . But a short story has no beginning, no end; either it works or it doesn’t.” What he’s saying is that the short story, like the beginning of a novel, will be dense and allusive; it must show its tricks over much more condensed ground. It will still be read sequentially, but the ends are so close together that the impression will be one of simultaneousness: a swallow in time, like a gulp, not the furry animal of the mind squirreling away acorns of information for later delectation as it would when reading a novel. Richard Rhodes comments (and I took the Marquez quote above from Rhodes’ manual, How To Write): “(It) helps explain why the short story is such a resonant form: all that follows in a novel, all the elaboration of story and character — the long middle and the brief, resolving end — is held latent in a good short story, left for the reader to fill in from imagination and from personal experience.”
Maybe the reader’s mind has to be more active and participating when dealing with shorter texts, for brief fiction does not have the space or the length to take its leisure in fleshing out a totally autonomous world and then to populate it the way the novel can. It depends for its effects on a stronger and more immediate presence of the building blocks of narration. We normally experience the short story as a whole (and we want no loose ends), whereas we’re willing to accept duller or less interesting parts in the novel, to give it time and head, to even let it be for a while. Time is not always of the same intensity — in the novel, as in life, there will be times of forgetting. The bigger the canvas the more you need ‘gray areas’ (plains, emptiness) to highlight the aspects you wish to bring forward. The main characters, for example, will be less pertinent if all the subsidiary characters are as fully and sharply delineated. A novel is also ‘easier’ on the mind because the division in chapters, to name one option, allows for those major breaks in the narrative that will jump out painfully in a short story unless you can handle the transitions.
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