Panel discussions were to follow, pitting intellectual luminaries of the likes of Svetlana Alpers and Keith Christiansen and Jonathan Crary and James Elkins and Susan Sontag and Martin Kemp against one another. Fur and spittle were certainly going to fly. But I’d had my fill. Besides, I had far better nourishment in mind — a meal and some wine in a restaurant on Thompson Street with friends, including a fine painter from down under now working at Yale.
Over wine we thought about how man has since the beginning tried to imitate or reconstruct the ‘real’ (why? to appropriate the power of the image and the creative act, or to deny it its potency?), about how this activity was kept secret in dark caves, exactly the way movies are still projected in dark rooms — and does this not mean that man must go inside himself in order to see the light, and too, that he knows obscurely he has to ‘reproduce’ but also ‘invent’ an image which, exactly, should not be an exact replica of the model? Then the conversation turned to the similarities between painting and writing, at least in approach. There is painting in writing and a lot of writing in painting. Both present us with human constructs about the nature of reality. More precisely, they make us aware of the nature of seeing — that is, the mystery, the wobbles and approximations and limitations and interpretations — and alert us to the fumbling mounting of consciousness by words. (With hose-clad legs sticking out comically below the black cloth.)
Florence saw the ‘invention’ of perspective in representation, with apparently converging lines and diminishing sizes as observed and operated from a single-point position. Bruges and Ghent developed the Flemish approach, where successive ‘squares’ of a painting would receive the same intensity of attention to closeness and to detail, creating the effect of a collage, ‘flattening’ the surface. The same differences between closeness and distance can be observed in writing; it is defined by one’s interpretation of or need for verisimilitude. Is seeing and rendering life a process of parsing and discarding, separating the important from the ‘supporting’ and the drivel — or is it a dissolution, a way of entering the rhythms of creation?
‘Voice’ has to do with point of view. If you wish to maintain a certain distance and an objective, authorial authority, you’d want the omniscient voice, or at least the singular awareness, which relates to the fixed point of perception from where everything is put in perspective. In foregrounding that which you consider to be important, you’d inevitably ‘distort’ or ‘blur’ the rest, the surroundings. What is out of focus in painting would correspond, in writing, to that which needs to be kept in mind but is not momentarily present in the line of telling. In writing we refer to this as providing ‘setting’ and sketching ‘secondary characters.’ To maintain the illusion of life-likeness — nothing exists in isolation — you have to make the setting believable and, to a certain extent, alive, without it becoming intrusive. In a painting the looker will graze his eye over the surface, taking in both the essential and the ‘background’ and putting each in its place instinctively; in writing this relates to rendering the description of the ‘background’ vivacious enough for it to be kept in mind (or memory) for long enough to still be operative. The living memory of the text must be kept immediate. As writer you have to develop and establish the bird’s-eye view while still recognizing and accommodating the fact that the reader will read sequentially. How do you keep that which is out of sight as alive as aftertaste or as an echo? Writers have, of course, developed various techniques for doing so — mainly by creating resonance through patterns, flashbacks and metaphors. The time / totality of conception in painting and writing may be the same, but the reader will be handicapped by the obligatory linearity in apprehending the text. Can it be different? Can it not be argued that, so as to hook the reader, a story should have thrust and not just be thrashing about?
The ‘collage’ approach will depend on how close you want to be to the words. By breaking down the fixed or singular point of view, you actually get inside the painting or text. You may merge, may even become matter.
The two different approaches have interesting implications. One could argue that ‘perspective’ denotes a choice for coherence of vision and for a hierarchy of images, where some figures and motifs will be more important than others. It would suggest that you subscribe to the notion of conveying a ‘message’ or ‘meaning’ since you are bringing forward a central narrative. You are the master of your domain, in charge of your fate, a reasoning man facing the chaos of creation. This sense of purpose and order, an expression of our need to understand, can only be achieved through illusions. ‘Reality’ in a work of art is there because of the contrast with what is not real.
One approaches and appropriates ‘reality’ through imagination. The human needs to invent himself and his circumstances, and identifies through projection. Understanding is a leap of the imagination. Writing, for instance, is moving forward through imagination. Writing is imagination projection. The reader/onlooker will be involved because he/she moves with the ongoing or unfolding observations setting off linkages and creating patterns. Movement, which includes turning back to where one has already been, is an attribute of consciousness. So is the establishment of a periphery because it creates the illusion of being centered.
‘Collage,’ on the other hand, will imply a more diffused vision, you could almost say a more democratic attitude; one accepts the ostensibly more natural and pragmatic assessment of two-dimensionality (this is a picture on a flat surface, not ‘reality’; this is a story, not ‘life’) as contrasted to the illusion of three dimensions suggested by perspective (this is an evocation or mimicry of ‘out there,’ which in your mind will become a reconstruction of ‘real life’). In ‘collage’ you are allowing, implicitly at least, for the autonomy of the means. Attention is sucked into the very surface of the text and to the material used. In painting, the ‘background’ as colors, contours and textures — not necessarily being anything more than paint — will be the environment contrasting or chiming with the ‘figures’ which stand out in the looking. In writing this environment will be language itself. You will work more with the text-ure and the immediacy of words as living organisms.
One may perhaps wish to go further by suggesting that these two ways of making, of engaging consciousness, have ethical repercussions. Certainly ‘perspective’ implies more authority, a stronger sense of generally accepted moral conventions, and a clearer conviction of what ‘identity’ is all about. ‘Collage’ could be interpreted as anarchistic, where one is not looking for Truth but for connections, and Reality would then be a point of view, a passage continually reinvented, recast, questioned, mediated and discarded.
TOWARDS THE END
Towards the end of the semester a nightmare pushes me back in time. I have managed to wing my way through class so far, sounding suitably knowledgeable without getting bogged down in the matter at hand. The trick is to keep the pace, the pose and the pitch, and use your age advantage like dead weight.
Now we meet for the last time. The school is built on the mountain slope looking down to the gray winter sea. The cold in New York can freeze off your cojones. I have asked for the windows to be opened so that the fresh smell of damp fynbos may fill the classroom. (Fynbos is the collective name for a number of odiferous shrubs indigenous only to the Western Cape.) Clouds and fog roll up the flanks, closing our view of the city. Low cover, alive and boiling, obscures distance.
I have my black teacher’s jacket on. Class has been running for a while when my old friend M walks in with a companion. I have known M for years. He is an agile go-between when it comes to bringing the paw of writing to the ear of public presentation. He is, forever, Mr. Fixit. Even when nothing is broken. Especially then. The gentleman with him is thickset with short hair of faded straw. M sucks his big front teeth, looks at me over the dirty eye-glasses perched on the tip of his nose, and announces with a gesture: “This is the inspector.” And he says, gesturing equally amiably in my direction: “Inspector, this is
Mister D.”
The inspector, I understand, is to check and verify the groundedness of my teaching craft. I bow. He bows, rustling under his arm the sheaf of forms that must be completed. You’re welcome, you’re welcome. And so are you, sir. He then goes to the other end of the room where there’s a table covered with a black cloth reaching down to the floor. He will crouch under the table, out of sight except perhaps for a leg of hose sticking out. How will he see to do his work? Can darkness be penetrated? Does he have a pocket lamp? Or a secret lens? From there his voice is muffled when he asks the occasional question. “Life is a terrible business,” his choked voice says at a certain point. “It embraces the terror of territory.”
Oh, we manage to get to the end of class. It was no easy feat. I can tell you I was nervous as hell. The words in my mouth suddenly had another taste, awkward and of a faded chalkiness like that of pebbles, making the spittle flow copiously. I now took scant pleasure in the spiky gelled hair of the men and the youthful curves of the women. M watches the proceedings, grinning, the hands in front of his bulbous belly held fingertip to fingertip. This is his affable way of weighing words, particularly when they are slippery with saliva.
The final assignment was a story submitted by C, a good one as it turned out, culminating in a wedding ceremony with the couple of protagonists pronounced mistress and man.
But no, I’m lying again. C’s contribution was about the fable of the blackbird. It goes back all the way to the beginning of remembering when everything was still sung. Originally the future blackbird appeared in the Braytobook family coat of arms as a hand held out in some kind of protection. Later depictions showed it, black already but not yet gloved, plucking a harp. Times were unsettled and potentates thirsted for blood. The motif turned up as a clenched fist of war, smiting infidels. Then later still, in a country of full moon and fragrant nights, the hand, by now liberated from the shield, was recorded as writing songs of illicit love. It got itself arrested by the sultan’s goons, jealousy and intrigues were rife, and in due time it was sentenced to be amputated. His beloved in the alcove, peeping through the latticed window, fainted with a melodious moan when the blood started spurting. Ever since it has been this bird, balancing on the chimneypots and TV antennae of the city, and filling the air with its plaintive song. Since it took to roosting in the city of the dead it has also started looking after the corpses. In fact, it may now be seen as the incarnation of death, singing death’s songs to a dying sun.
And when it is over the inspector emerges from under the table with some fluff in his straw hair. We go outside on the balcony overlooking the city, but there’s not much to be seen: the clouds are even thicker at present and white, blinding the eyes.
“Ah,” says the inspector as he breathes in the wonderful smell of fresh mountain earth and plants. “We must love life more than the meaning of it. That’s from The Brothers Karamazov. Your arguments in there were compelling (he waves back to the classroom where M is now holding the floor, telling impenetrable jokes), but your underlying thinking is both bloated and flaccid. Your demagoguery is morbid. . That story about the singing hand. . What do we really want? We want for them (back there), man and mistress, to be des mordus de l’imaginaire, carrying with them on the road in the muttering and murmuring book in the pocket the mother and the moon.”
GOING
To start from the distinct and tangible and attain full-blown emptiness — that is not within reach of the beginner.
Huang Pin-Hung
There is always the moment of going. All too soon. Rain moved in from the sea — or wherever rain comes from in these parts — the tops of the tall challenges to the force of gravity, built by man in steel and glass and chrome, reaching for the sky, are wreathed in invisibility, the trees on the square below our apartment house are spent so that one can see the paved red walkways shining wet, and hear a dog barking. Now is the hour; it is time to move on. And as ever, before leaving on a long journey, one wants to drop some advice, some reminders in order not to be forgotten, the blown leaves one used as hand-maps to dreams, a few left-over insights. .
1. Emptiness or Void promotes interaction, transaction, transmutation even, between Heaven and Earth, and thus between Space and Time. Time may be seen as the actualization of vital space. Emptiness introduces a discontinuance into the process and so doing assures rhythm and breathing. Time sucked into breath becomes space. The only way we can live with this Time /Space dichotomy is by having the “empty heart” (hsü-hsin). In this fashion — the way, too, of being in the right receptive posture, and with neither interests nor judgments nor even expectations — we can interiorize, perhaps by imitation, the processes of mutation. This play and interplay of empty /full will modify the meaning of the reach of your words (or brushstrokes), and impart to the writing (or painting) its own consciousness or ‘image.’ (Remember — ‘image’ is the anagram of magie, ‘magic.’) And so the relationship between writer /reader and the world mediated by the work — this breathed unit of timed space — will be changed. There will be interaction between the “inner feeling” and the “exterior landscape.” Try to suscitate the void needed for movement by deleting the subject, the I. (Shehe is a dead squirrel at the best of times.) It is not unlike sucking. The resultant emptiness will evoke other absences and create further resonance: you could mistake this movement of emptiness for ‘thinking.’ By being rubbed out or “underheard,” the subject interiorizes the exterior. Other becomes I. (Hello, Dolly. .) Through empty I the landscape comes into the writing. Writing becomes instant land scaping itself. (And landscape is memory, and memory is passage. . or resistance.)
2. Be aware of things within themselves, of words also outside themselves, of surfaces, the laws and by-laws and in-laws of meaning and how to transgress these, the face of the Real, movement, the invisible and the void pulsating below the surface, birth and death and other cycles and bicycles, writing as boat in which you row at night through the cornfields of crackling stars, the relationship between writer and writing and writer and reader and writing and history and the seen and the said. . Why? Because you don’t want to die an idiot, your drool will sully the sheets; because it is one of writing’s functions to raise consciousness the way one raises chickens to have eggs in the house (apart from also exorcizing pain and dulling the sharp cut of knowing); because transformation of self and of thing and of context — ‘writing’ is finally the presumptuous business of creating the existing — is predicated upon a mastery of the components and the interactions among these; because this is what the reader hungers for and recognizes as something that. . works, that sounds right. How so? How now, multi-hued cow? Awareness is to be dancing to a tune of meaning, memory, forgetting, invention. It is about movement — becoming other, shifting perspectives, making the landscape shake. It is to be movement. But also the reassurance of repeating the known steps to cover old frozen ground with the sounds of a new sweetness. It has to do with camouflage — hiding in the black light of writing, feinting being, making false bottoms, weaving to blend with the background, catching a you with the word, shifting the pea under the cup. It is about disguising a mountain in the metaphor and making of the writing a mask and a cardinal frock to dance and die in the shadow of that mountain. Awareness is about elimination and displacement — not only recognizing live from dead material, but knowing too that ‘leaving out’ is a way of situating what’s left in, of entering upon a dialogue with the absent, of saying and showing that the absent is in the present, of having the shadow of the concept peering through the hole burnt by the word. It has to do with autonomy — the thingness of text and its parallel life unlinked from the personal diary. And texture: to have appearance run over the surface through color and glitter. What you see is what you get. Word-stones are the washed-up measure of the dance, irrespective of the ‘meanings’ they may carry. Play with the colors and the constituent parts of words and phrases, make patterns and cross-references and riffs, let them weigh (in) with th
eir own existence — this, all together, will be your texture. The taste of writing is in the texture. The skin is the surface of eternity. Through texture is awareness awakened and bonded. And by striking the jarring note, by rubbing dulled expectations the other or ‘wrong’ way, you can make of awareness the line of living the present, of moving in the possible tense where dream and reality merge dynamically.
3. Writing is not an art form, it is a life discipline. Write from the totality of your being, not only from the confessional or the ache of unrequited love. It must as much come from the loins as it emerges from memory (this is surely a tautology!). Love is not a technique, it is a secret. Explore that secret continent creatively and assiduously. Change it; allow yourself to be changed. Truth and falsehood have nothing to do with fact. A fact is but a finished act. Or a fucked one. The fact is that some act as if fattened by fucking. Writing is the intelligent but unbiased heart living in its own beating. The only way to gain detachment, also from that heart, is to remain intimately involved with its ebb and its flow.
4. Traveling is a moment of creation. By moving you make. The identity is crystallized or re-configured by confrontation and by change; you hold the mirror up as compass and the Other is flushed out or seen in a new light; the point of view shifts; you bring something more to the landscape (if only your shadow); you rewrite the world. Because you are not only crossing over into the unknown — you are also unraveling the line of (your)self and singing the topography. And memory then becomes a place of resonance, a gland secreting the digestive fluids of comprehension. You are living perpetual change against a backdrop of the unchanging. You continue journeying to keep one step ahead of death. But it is through traveling that you ultimately ripen for death, when your shadow comes to sit on your lap. You will die from having eaten too much time — and then you will be time. (There’s a time for everything. .) You have to empty the mountain first, though. Wisdom is when you gradually discover (or uncover, from emptying the mountain) what you’d known all along.
Intimate Stranger Page 14