Intimate Stranger

by Breyten Breytenbach

  Death can be sidestepped by imitating life. (This is another of Picaro’s fond wishes.) For that you have to camouflage yourself so as not to be noticed — you have to become one with the surroundings. Don’t watch too overtly what’s going on: an open eye is a sign of fear and “an eye is a hard thing to disguise in nature.” (The Book of Angels and Dogs, Simon Snow)

  To be believable/invisible you have to learn not only the tricks of blending but also the art of the rupture. “Now you see it, now you don’t” — this is the craft of the bird-catcher. “Now you are part of it and now you are different.”

  Picaro reminds his students of how he suggested that a tentative ‘approach to ethics in writing’ might contain the following elements:

  Ethics inform aesthetics when there is exactitude in telling. The ‘exactitude’ I’m referring to, he explains, the clarity, is not necessarily brought about by linear narration or even precise description: a big part of establishing clarity is induced by the spaces left to the reader to invest and participate in. How else is he going to snare her? Ruptures and discordances can be strategically important. The fuckup remains a creative principle. That was my rule of thumb in writing the dying days of Simon Snow, he now claims.

  The painting out of self helps. The ‘I’ is a fiction, a construct — imagined in part by culture and history and theology. It is, however, also a necessity of consciousness as point of passage for observations. And again, the ‘ways’ of seeing will be defined in part by culture, history. . Ah yes, the ‘I’ is the dark glass through which we look.

  The less ‘I,’ Picaro proposes, the more neutrality, the less self-indulgence, the less we are obsessed by our ‘right’ to happiness and to ‘private space,’ the less we think of ourselves as ‘victims,’ the less infantile we are in our needs for ‘understanding’ and for ‘healing,’ the less judgmental and moralistic we are — the more there is room for things and events to ‘speak for themselves.’ The authority of the narrative will be enhanced by obscuring or obliterating authorship. (He knows he may be whistling in the dark here, but refrains from saying so.) “Mehr Licht!” These were Goethe’s dying words.

  But don’t get hung up on the importance of the self, even negatively, he advises. (Here, Picaro reminds his students, you will remember that Reader objected vigorously and vociferously to the drift of his argument. She said: “You may be right, sir, and put that way it sounds attractive even if it may not mean much. For writing grows out of a self that takes itself — or at least its own questions and vision of the world — seriously; a self that opts to talk rather than listen, at least momentarily. And one depends on the other, of course. . Is writing or voicing the self a symptom of insecurity or a path toward clarity? Isn’t thinking enough? Are words necessary bricks of, or toward, original thought, or do they limit it, since they are created, borrowed, worn out by others? How can we invent a private language that can communicate to others? Is that what love is? Private and shared emotion or vision or experience beyond words? Do words break its unspoken power or allow it another dimension? What do silence and inner calm reveal? Strength, death, inhibition, fear, implosion, wonder, honesty, patience, faith, deception, all, nothing? Are true silence and peace possible, or are they horizons?”)

  These were a whole bushel of questions. Picaro knows he did not respond in adequate depth, although he appreciated her talking back. He did admonish Reader, and the others as well, not to reify individual words. Words are like ants and will ruthlessly climb over one another to get at the food, but they only really make sense when they are subsumed by the whole, by the anthill. Sense or ‘meaning’ is a labyrinth in the apparition of an anthill.

  As regards Self, it is only one of a pair. God or Void (to give the Unknown a name) begins wherever the I stops. Whatever you cannot conceive of is God. (Again Reader interrupted: “But isn’t it possible for our conceptions to embrace the Void — the ineffable — the untouchable? Horizons without lines, the rise/drift/erosion of an intuition, silence in a minor key. . And there must be a few things we can’t articulate that aren’t godlike.”)

  The two of you are separate, contingent, perhaps interacting agencies. In any event, dependent on one another. It may be said that you (the I) are God’s imagination, its dog, since you will begin where his I-ness stops. The void is bound to imagine /inhale substance. This ‘cannibalism’ and confusion may well have been the intimate and ultimately alienated relationship between the narrator Sebald and his protagonist Austerlitz, where, according to Picaro’s reading, we have a take-over of the one by the other, a displacement or perhaps a confiscation of voice. Who flows into whom? Who barks? “Shut up! Have you ever heard me bark?” the blind man asked his dog who was barking at strange passers-by.

  “The self is an imitation of the imagination of self” (On the Art of Meeting Strangers, Picaro Wordfool). He feels it legitimate to bring himself into the text, especially because he likes the sound of the formula.

  Michael Fried in his Courbet’s Realism writes about the phenomenon of narcissism that may arise, and then quotes from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Aesthetics: “The universal and absolute need from which art. . springs has its origin in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness, i.e., that man draws out of himself and puts before himself what he is and whatever else is. . This consciousness of himself man acquires in a two-fold way: first, theoretically, in so far as inwardly he must bring himself into his own consciousness, along with whatever moves, stirs, and presses in the human breast; and in general he must see himself, represent himself to himself, fix before himself what thinking finds as his essence, and recognize himself alone alike in what is summoned out of himself and in what is accepted from without. Secondly, man brings himself before himself by practical activity, since he has the impulse, in whatever is directly given to him, in what is present to him externally, to produce himself and therein equally to recognize himself. This aim he achieves by altering external things whereon he impresses the seal of his inner being and in which he now finds again his own characteristics. Man does this in order, as a free subject, to strip the external world of its inflexible foreignness and to enjoy in the shape of things only an external realization of himself. Even a child’s first impulse involves this practical alteration of external things; a boy throws stones into the river and now marvels at the circles drawn in the water as an effect in which he gains an intuition of something that is his own doing. This need runs through the most diversi-form phenomena up to that mode of self-production in external things which is present in the work of art.”

  Fried argues that for Hegel artistic production is at bottom a form of self-representation — or self-production, a notion that would be developed by Marx and enthusiastically endorsed by Picaro. “The effacement of the very conditions of resemblance (the breaking of the mirror-surface of the river) also means that the boy’s relation to the spreading circles in the water might be described in Flaubertian language as one in which he is ‘present everywhere but visible nowhere.’” (Picaro likes being part of the chain quoting a recognized thinker like Hegel. He hopes the proximity may bestow some weight of reflection.)

  When you conceptualize a subject you define a space between the recognized and the environment, and that tension between ‘full’ and ‘empty’ gives rise to movement. The space may be duplicitous: it may be nothing more than the clearing where the shaman moves between shadow and substance.

  Then Picaro proceeds to what he considers to be the practical application of his thoughts. Stylistically, he says, it will help if there’s willingness to let language come into its own, through rhythm and texture: you will promote textual ‘space,’ he says — and no creativity without space, and no hope for ‘conscience’ without the creativeness of awareness.

  The surface of fiction will bring about its own ‘non-fiction’: by focusing on the materiality of the means the illusion of veracity, which is mirrored by fiction will be destroyed. An experience of corporeality — the act
of writing — will suspend the demarcation between ‘subject’ and ‘material world’ (in this instance, words). Writing — the production or clarification of consciousness, Picaro claims — is the mediating movement between fact and fiction.

  It depends how you situate yourself to language. You are the ‘initiator’ and the ‘companion,’ not the ‘controller.’ (“As with love,” Reader interjected.) Be neither bully nor expert. There can be no Homeland Security in language or, for that matter, in writing narratives. Cervantes left room for both Quijote and Sancho Panza, and then for everybody and everything else as well — time, history, debunking, a multiplicity of lives, imitation, substitution. .

  Ethics/neutrality demands that one leaves room for a certain ‘moral imagination’ — that is, the promotion of fragmented spaces for doubt and for the unexpected, even and perhaps especially for what you as writer did not expect to find. And who will take you to the underworld except the processes of creativity? How are you to cut your veins other than with the shards of the smashed dark glass? he asks rhetorically.

  If you write ‘down’ to your readers, Picaro warns his students — because that is ‘what they want’ or may ‘understand’ — you are putting yourself up as authority and judge of intelligence (worse, judge of the heart) inside your own text, and this will influence your attitude to your tools. Because of obtuseness your tools will abandon you. Self-effacement is not a moral stance; it is a survival trick. (“Unless it is genuine.” [Reader])

  Authenticity should not be confused with ‘authority,’ Picaro finally concludes. Authenticity (the integrity of the voice, not its coherence or its homogeneity) goes beyond reliance on “verifiable facts or information.” Ms Reader, he hopes, will sense whether he can be trusted or not as ‘search party’ into the thickets of existence. She may well be enticed out of the bush. Will she snort and hoot? Authority, on the other dirty hand, is a construct shaped by perceptions about reality (the way the media do about war); it draws its sustenance from collective prejudices and preferences — patriotism, nationalism, religion, racism. .

  For a poet, there is terror in the dust.

  Wen Fu

  OF PENISES AND PENINSULAS

  the cento as dirge

  Nonetheless,

  it was too late.

  By that time,

  we had all been royally fucked.

  (Clary Stopes)

  I spent all night dreaming about god

  as though some blank bird called

  (There were) scuff marks where I

  have been running from the shadows

  the barbed wire

  the bloody bodies the naked women

  crawling in the hope of

  staying alive

  Alone at dawn, alone watching

  the rotting face of the grinning thing

  The open window means little

  to the disheartened dreamer –

  the world is empty as a song

  and we lose the place where we belong

  Alone at dawn, alone watching

  the shadow dunes washing their black

  back into a green sea of grass

  the vertebrae of gulls aglow

  and now as how blood

  clots to black its platelets

  of newspaper ink

  splashing the banks of the river

  so some other ass could drink it all up

  Alone at dawn alone watching

  the rotting face of the grinning thing

  the hint of lips

  held flush with papier-mâché and masking tape

  walking on top of words so soft

  (the memory of these passing breasts)

  who fiercely guard the empty spaces between us

  A gray horse looks into empty windows

  The world is empty as a song –

  the open window means little

  to the disheartened dreamer

  but we lose the place where we belong

  Time is slow and moves at

  a slackening rate as the fog floods

  your valley with a frail sea

  Don’t be afraid to open your eyes

  though the rolling-calf

  draws its chain in the wet grass

  Why should our bodies

  not steal from dreams?

  I’ll deliver all the lands for the chosen in a single night

  and what will I do with shoes, clothes, underwear?

  Those kinds of things fell to men

  who had the barbed wire

  the bloody bodies, the naked women

  clawing in the hope of

  staying alive,

  girls who were fourteen but looked legal enough

  to the Dakotas’ drinking eyes

  If death were a field of sugarcane

  I am the mongoose’s tail burning a trail

  through its snake ridden heart her

  tan crust of skin roasting

  in our smoke turning black

  The open window means little

  but we lost the place where we belong

  to the disheartened dreamer

  and the world is empty as a song –

  you feel this most in our eye, the love

  the torturous going their own way, sparks

  in dying embers:

  they all left

  except the wineskin whore

  People pull out their dead graves singing

  these bedazzled beings dressed like foreigners

  and in the street

  a piano and the winter evening smells

  of wine and roasted garlic

  carbolic skin

  and that silent slow smoke

  from a cold coal stove

  Not our abused gods but old wifeless

  men in a procession that

  precedes us immemorially with their dying

  walking on tops of words so soft thought

  that everything is burning everything

  I spend all night dreaming about god

  as though some blank bird calls:

  Painted sparrows carry

  my body to Elysium one

  glittering bit at a time:

  how slowly I say goodbye

  How slowly I say goodbye

  Don’t go without ringing

  The boy’s ossified heart

  And dance even when

  You the only music

  Putting on the cold shoes

  Of a man leaving with certainty

  Listen late, and you might hear the bark:

  some things aren’t needed

  some things aren’t said

  and guide us to a calm in spite of ourselves

  I can’t listen anymore

  I’d like to die

  in my poem a little while –

  show me where

  and go away

  or face the rot of the grinning thing

  looking into empty windows

  That’s what you meant. Right, Bro?

  New York, Sept. — Dec. 2006

  With thanks. And dedicated to: Scott Bear Don’t Walk, Mercer Bufter, Brian Chung, Ishion Hutchinson, Brian Kalkbrenner, Dante Micheaux, James Miller, Mrigaa Sethi, Adam Wiedewitsch, Ron Villanueva, Ronnie Yates, and John Murillo.

  WRITE AND WRONG

  One plunders the notebook again and again. I don’t know whether I’ve written this before.

  I find: “The past is the ink with which we write the present — and in the process and the flow of writing words, concepts and ideas, the images, the flights become. . just ink. Whereas, what we’d probably like to write would be an open hand wherein time, which is the future of the present movement of surfacing, could find its fit and its fist.” (One also remembers that there is lamp-black in ink.)

  A little further I find: “You must polish the word — not to have it shiny or smooth, but to make it as clear as the mirror or the pebble in which you can read your face, and may see that your face is death.” And then: “The recogn
ition and the acceptance of the Other’s humanity (or humanness) is a maiming of self. You have to wound the self, cut it in strips, in order to know that you are as similar and of the same substance of shadows.”

  These reflections surface during the visit to Weimar where I’m to be a member of the jury tasked with deciding which philosophical essay best answers the question of how to free the future from the past and the past from the future.