Red Thread(s)

"I am sitting on a bench in the park, next to myself, whatever that means."
--Robert Ashley, Private Parts

voice; constant shifting of voices... writing 'you' as a form of address -- to oneself, to the text, to the reader, or the language itself in its juddering, twisting trail; writing of 'one' -- as if to a particular or imagined 'one,' or the general, wch is no 'one' in particular -- it's a form of distancing. Or an effect of distance; merely the echo of a voice, its over- or undertones. There is some degree of ambiguity. To write to no 'one' out of doubt -- but perhaps a sense of respect? Respect for time, for effort. For trying to span that distance, or simply sharing space. There's a bench in the park. sheltered from the wind. Let's sit there awhile.

Fretting over a beginning, or a new beginning, one pasues to realize that the worry is not over a beginning, but rather that some process has already started, yet remains inexpressible, unidentified.

Once the draft has been consigned to the fire, the inevitable question -- novel, film, opera, or play -- hangs; a small weight at one's side, a stone in the pocket. Possibly, even, a poem. The leaves are turning, the light is golden, it tapers off, the night falls early. Slowly, you always said, slowly. But now you are wracked with a sort of spasm, the hand judders along the page, one opens one's mouth only to stammer. Crossing out. Crossing out again. Scraping of the pen on the leaf of the page, the scraping of the leaf on the pavement.

After each match has been consumed, you check the head against your fingertip and return it to the box. The box is labelled SWAN. The sticks rattle in the chamber, and you place it in your pocket, next to the stone, a set of keys, three coins and a paperclip. You wash your hands; four, almost five hours' worth of light yet. Llight. Llanguage. You close your mouth against your stammer and you step out into the day, the stars above drowned in light. Orion and the Pleiades have set.

The bells of the chapel ring out noon; this is not a metaphor, it occurs and you note it as you do the date, an arbitrary marker, an anchor. Note what you can verify in hope determining what falls between. You listen unti it stops and you continue to listen. And you walk. Steps. One following another.

In 1939, Giacometti chose, for a while, to make figures from memory rather than from life, but no matter how hard he tried, the figures kept turning out smaller than he wanted. The problem persisted two years later when he decided to visit his mother, who was then in Geneva, promising friends and also his brother Diego that he would return to Paris with works of a less absurd size.

But with one exception, the figures he made in Switzerland came out tiny, too. He would start over and over again on the same one. It was a sculpture of his friend Isabel standing one evening on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. The memory stuck in his head. ''It isn't the lack of a visa that's stopping me coming back,'' he wrote to her. ''I can come back when I like. It's my sculpture that's keeping me.''

It kept him in Geneva from 1941 through 1945. When he finally boarded the train back to France, he took with him three and a half years' worth of work in six matchboxes. [source]

There's a prefatory note in the holograph edition of of Woolf's The Waves, wch remarks that the manuscript was originally written in purple ink, or black ink that had faded to purple.

"Come into the garden, Maud
And blossom in purple and red."

Spurious offers a quote from WG Sebald:

Flaubert was in a sense the forerunner of writing scruples. I do believe that in the eighteenth century, say, Voltaire or Rousseau wrote much more naturally than people did from the nineteenth century onwards. Flaubert sensed this more than any other writer. If you look at Rousseau's letters, for instance, they're beautifully written. He dashed off 23 in a day if necessary, and they're all balanced, they're all beautiful prose. Flaubert's letters are already quite haphazard; they're no longer literary in that sense. He swears, he makes exclamations, sometimes they're very funny. But he was one of the first to realise that there was appearing in front of him some form of impasse. And I think nowadays it's getting increasingly difficult because writing is no longer a natural thing for us.
--W. G. Sebald, in an interview

I think I know the source for this, but I'm mistaken; what I do recollect is a selection of Sebaldian "maxims" from an issue of Five Dials. "Veils of ash" and "veils of rain" are cited in the following essay, wch mentions After Nature, a book I've read once & haven't touched in years. I take it off the shelf, and there's a slip of paper inside the front cover, a receipt -- but it's almost entirely blank; it's only the dimensions and texture that make me recognize it as such. The ink hasn't ghosted onto the endpapers, it's merely faded almost entirely away; odd, as it's been sealed up away from the light and air for some time. I can make out enough to see that it's from the University Book Store, and the date 2004. That seems about right, chronologically speaking -- likely picked up off the mark-down table. Slowly, though, more ink appears: I can fully discern "University Book Store | 2004-2005" and "Retain this receipt." All that identifies my purchase(s)? are some numbers, stock codes at the margin.
Pondering loss lately, it's strange how things come back.

faded almost entirely away, slowly almost everything comes back to me

4.

doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;
killers exist, and doves, and doves;
haze, dioxin, and days; days
exist, days and death; and poems
exist; poems, days, death


5.

early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought;
seclusion and angels exist;
widows and elk exist; every
detail exists; memory, memory's light;
afterglow exists; oaks, elms,
junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;
eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar
exist, and the future, the future


-- Inger Christensen, from Alphabet

No posts for July. Seems I didn't do much. The sentences come slowly, when they come. Crawling, broken waves. Seems I didn't say much, either. Kind of a hollow. I worked. I fretted. I went from smoking a pack of cigarettes in a week to one in four days. I began to feel that my use of a computer was an invasion of my own privacy. I ignored emails. I paced. I curtailed long walks due to laziness and the heat. I slept odd hours, waking in the middle of the night to go outside and look at the stars. Cigarettes at 3am. Slow sentences. I catch a glimpse of myself in the glass and wonder how this came to be. A phrase occurs, it sounds good, I roll it around in my head, I don't write it down. This aids in the delusion of writing. Yet there's a cheap paper notepad, corners creased, half-way written through; it's in the bookstack next to this table, its first few dozen pages dogged & curled back. These I can dispose of with no ill will, regard. I saw J. tonight, who asked are you still blogging. Fits and starts. No talk of writing, thank god. It was late. I get through most days with a shrug and a half-smile. "Every thought sholud recall the debris of a smile." - Jean-Luc Godard, Eloge de l'amour. I digress.
I saw that the first of the dahlias are starting to bloom. I read Janice Galloway's first novel, and she's correct: The Trick Is To Keep Breathing. Crawling, broken waves. Sometimes a phrase comes.

"THERE IS NO NEW WORK. It is the old work rotting and I can't recognise it anymore. It is the old world rotting and I see it for what it is. For the first time maybe. It is departing slowly from me. Waving gently and nodding as though it will all be OK in the end, that it's just nature, just the way of things. The things that made me are in themselves becoming unmade. What appeared permanent and solid and outside of time is coming apart and falling behind itself.

Memory becomes as unreliable as forgetting. Reality lacks the poetry of melting into air. The familiar falls beyond use and lies in the way. I carry within myself an older man. His illness slows me, his dried mouth robs me of speech, his amnesia forces me to live in the today. But after all this I still cannot come to terms with the simple fact that life slips away and time is called everywhere everyday. What some may call a subject or an idea or an answer to the question what is your work about? is only an act of holding on." -- George Shaw, via wood s lot

In what he writes, there are two texts. Text I is reactive, moved by indignations, fears, unspoken rejoinders, minor paranoias, defenses, scenes. Text II is active, moved by pleasure. But as it is written, corrected, accommodated to the fiction of Style, Text I becomes active too, whereupon it loses its reactive skin, which subsists only in patches (mere parentheses).
-- Roland Barthes

*

I'm writing in two identical Chinese notebooks, cheap, hardbound, essentially disposable. A strip of blue tape on the spine of one distinguishes it from the other; they're internally differentiated by the use of either blue or black ink. One is desk-bound, the other I sometimes carry with me. Tending to work mornings in one, nights in the other but this is hardly a rule, just a tendency. The story, as such, is happening between them -- a writing that dictates its own terms, a story that is neither here nor there. At a certain point, the scissors may come out and a third text will show itself, or, having failed that, something may be fashioned from the remains. Or the books, having served their purpose, will be discarded, & something may follow this duration of writing: a shade of faulty memories, Chinese whispers. As I note this I realize I'm writing what it's not, that it's somewhere behind me, left on a park bench, it remains to be seen, neither here nor there. Parallax: one looks at an object too closely and it cleaves into two. Cleave, a word that's a blade with two sides: cleave to, cleave from.

"Not to be forgotten: the adjective is a commodity."
-- Roland Barthes, The Neutral

"Barthes himself had dreams of writing a novel, but was brought up short by the first obstacle he encountered -- namely, the difficulty of inventing proper names for all his characters and then believing in them." -- Nancy Huston, Losing North

You're going to say I'm straying off topic, that I shouldn't digress, but it reminds me of something at the Sorbonne, Aragon giving a lecture on Petrarch.
To digress, everyone despises Aragon. I love him. End of digression.
So, Louis Aragon lectures on Petrarch. He starts off with terrific tribute to Matisse. He goes on for at least 45 minutes. Finally, a student in the back shouts, "Get back to the subject!" And Aragon, magnificent, after finishing the phrase which had been interrupted, said, "The originality of Petrarch lies precisely in the art of digression."
I'm the same. I'm not straying from the subject, and if I do, that's my real subject, exactly like a car that strays from its usual path because a flood forces it to drive across fields to reach the road to Paris.
-- Jean-Luc Godard / Francois Truffaut, Une Histoire d'Eau

*
This is the 501st post at Red Threads (the count may include posts left behind or relegated as drafts, wch I never review). So what am I to say - that this beautiful excerpt, arbitrarily numbered, marks a new beginning? --Only as far as each post is a new beginning. If I had not encountered the Blanchot quote that remains as this blog's motto, this notebook might not exist. So today, on the cusp of the solstice, I repeat:

"I have never found the phrase. I elaborate with many erasures." -- Virginia Woolf

"The search says more than the discovery." -- St. Augustine

Tir-aux-pigeons has what I find to be an invigorating & inspiring approach to publishing: their impeccably designed chapbooks are available for free download as PDFs, but if you want the physical, actual paper object in your hand, they can be ordered. I particularly enjoyed Drew Kunz’s Terminals; it limns a space between poetry and fiction. Condensed, but lyrical. Lyrical? I rarely use the word. But it reminds me that Webern wrote songs. Contra Euclid, these are points that have a part.

There are a few blogs that make me glad for internet access. This Space is one. It’s a rare occasion I see something in the review press that raises questions, makes a claim, is devoted not to a market, but writing -- not selling a personality or a product, but to the work. In a post last month, Steve writes a little about blogging and recaps a few years of posts. His review of The Kindly Ones was the most perceptive one I’ve read. Perhaps more from me later; Littell’s book was the most striking read of my spring, but I’m sitting here with a new home computer after scrambling for a few months between staying late at work and using public computers with their attendant distractions and I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. Technology. Damn. Excuses. Damn again.

S. wants to make things other than what they are; H. wants things exactly -- precisely -- as they are. S. dreams of the depths and shadows of a subject; H. dreams of the hardness and clarity of objects. Sometimes it is enough that they both dream, that they engage on some plane, and in these engagement they interrelate. But there is a tension, a separation between them: they stand back to back, spines a centimeter apart, seeing other landscapes, and while they sense each other, nothing can narrow the chasm that separates them.

a point. to clarify:
S. is based on someone I know and some others I knew, with a few characteristics & events of other friends thrown in. It’s a shorthand way of writing about something and not writing about something at the same time; no one can say “I didn’t say that” because they didn’t. Unless they did. H., wch is silent in French, the letter itself pronounced as ash, features principally in a long prose work I’ve been adding to and deleting from for a few years now. Some, not much, of it appearing in translation here. So when I write about a relationship, I’m writing about writing. And when I’m writing about writing, I’m writing.

What happened to that hunger?-- To laugh over sushi, breath deeply of the scent of night? -- To walk for hours, to talk until the light changed? To walk alone, all the time taking notes, or stopping, simply to be. To pick up a book in the afternoon and read against the fading light, telling oneself “just one more page, then I will get up and turn on the light.” And then, that sweet stiffness as one stands, recovering their height and their body. A cigarette would be good, a walk around the block...

I bought a book today. There was a time when I couldn’t wait -- I’d dash off to the nearest coffee shop or park and delve into it. Tonight it seems enough that I managed to get it out of my bag. But I did have sushi, and I will go and have that cigarette.

*

A new computer, finally. It’s so 21st century, shiny. An alien object, it repulses the clutter & dust of my apartment. Paper generates dust; this polycarbonate and metal shell, mercurial screen-- it comes from a world without dust. It smells like a gleaming future world. But it changes nothing. It’s like desire; it quickens the heart, promises something, but it’s really just grabbing at ether / or an ethernet connection.

Tuesday, I got the the internet connection turned on and the modem connected. Wednesday, I bought new fountain pen ink went to a movie.

"One does not find solitude, one creates it. Solitude is created alone. I have created it. Because I decided that here was where I should be alone, that I would be alone to write books. It happened in this way. I was alone in the house. I shut myself in - of course, I was afraid. And then I began to love it. This house became the house of writing. My books come from this house. From this light as well, and from the garden. From the light reflecting off the pond. It has taken me twenty years to write what I just said.

Still, in Trouville there was the beach, the sea, the vastness of the sky and sands. That's what solitude was here. It was in Trouville that I stared at the sea until nothing was left. Trouville was the solitude of my entire life. I still have that solitude around me, impregnable. Sometimes I close the doors, shut off the telephone, shut off my voice, don't want anything.

Write all the same, in spite of despair. No: with despair. I don't know what to call that despair. Writing to one side of what precedes writing is always to ruin it. And yet we must accept this: ruining the failure means coming back toward another book, toward another possibility of the same book."

-- Marguerite Duras, from Writing [via Spurious]