So we persisted, Jon, Jesse, and I, and the deceased Beckett, with perhaps thousands of others, unbeknownst any to each around some mythical innermost.
“Fail better.” The worst times are the ones in which one simply wants to quit failing altogether. Unfortunately (literally) that necessarily entails a kind of “end of the world as one ‘knows’ [perceives, participates, experiences, or imagines] it” – either suicide, tragedy, ‘terminal’ illness – death of some sort. Maybe silence, but that’s not certain.
The game table is always already laid, you’re always simply ‘entering’ it (LW points out this fallacy in his collections of numbered critiques of anything anyone writes or says or claims) actually (as far as we know) always already there (where you ‘find’ – what?!? – your ‘self’ – what?!?) and (again, perhaps, literally, unfortunately – or at the very least extremely limitedly) you can only occupy one position at the table (or wherever the action happens to be) at a time, that, unfortunately, always involves the very delimited…well, YOU. These are the arrangements as they transpire.
Language can (and does), we surmised, go anywhere. I try to record, invent, notate, mark, initiate. It all seems unnameable. Or of far too many names, references, usages, subtexts and connotations, inferences and denotations, already implemented in order to represent anything undone, reconstructed, deconstructed, novel or ‘new.’ “There’s nothing new under the sun” was already a cliché at the beginning / in the earliest phases.
Fires and voids all imagined early. [Apeiron. Chora/Khora. Clinamen. Flux. Infinity. ABSENCE. The ‘Other.’]. I begin. Again. GWFH and Freud refer to this as “repetition.” A hopeless hope of emergence. As different or unique as it may seem, ever a plenitude of the pre-existing. The already-there.
Been there, done that, Beckett exhausts from his grave alongside. “He was found lying on the ground…a voice comes to one in the dark” Imagine. Imagine. Everything is already there. The table set and set again, arranged. Already there when you wake to it. World.
It hasn’t…apparently…been given up. Perhaps it is inexhaustible. Limited though we be, we seem to be teeming with it/them… efforts at the unsayable. Unnameable. How it is. What is the what. Lost in the labyrinth of the occurrence, experience, now with shoddy, partial, biased and over-specified or eccentrically particular maps, guides, or rulebooks. Ourselves.
Jesse’s working up something, so is Jon. I’ve begun working again. Beckett is still dead. Or dead, still – either way he has not concluded.
There was plenty of talk – banter, chatter, fulminations, really – to the contrary, to the effect that the ‘working up’ had ceased, had dwindled, long since dissipated or been simply forgotten…not so. Now I’ve heard from Jon and Jesse, piecemeal though it be, and my own ‘working-on’ (or UNWORKING, as MB always referred to it) is near to its inception.
Something is going to emerge. Jon repeats and repeats that “Someone is going to come” and Jesse appears to have passed beyond the silence once begun, through all his notes of suicide, toward fire and conflagration and some bewildered youthfulness. Nohow On become a MUST. And all of it inconclusive, i.e. not concluded.
I work in, on, up, and ever forward, toward – ‘toward the what?’ Jon keeps asking while Jesse scrawls on napkins – figures like cartoons, clowns and foxes, masters, slaves, and mysteries – our locations go unmarked, our whereabouts unknown. This is How It Is, according to Beckett and MB. FK in the burrow. Plato in a cave. JD taking apart each domicile, meticulously.
We are looking for a place to work at our unworking, the time and space to be for what is not. Beckett named it The Unnameable.
I took to the books and letters, while apparently the others wrote, made messages and codes, secreted the symbols into texts and silences, plays and fictions full of pause. GWFH, another spell of YHWH, foretold this long ago: “the ends are reached and reached beyond, folding under, folding through, reached again, again, and…”
For years now Jon is melancholy and therefore quite abbreviated, unable to go on, full of stutters, repetitions, and always the questions, questioning, questing, the undone. Jesse through his trials and papered rooms, sometimes near and sometimes foreign, never-know, never-mind, never-where, scraping geography and clouds in search of where No Where and Now Here meet. I’ve thus far been unable to locate him. As for Ivan, Ivan and Enrique both stopped working after the library of loss – assembling detectives, interviewing the dumb and victimized, missals here and there, mostly filled of snow and jungle.
I think: crows spread across the overcast, charred ash sprinkling fields, nothing rooted, nothing grown.
The unworking. Almost a throw of the dice. Half of each sentence erased. The subtle coterie of literate mathematicians. Reports from elsewhere. WG’s layered travelogue… in search of… The work of unworking goes on.
“Splitting on difference,” he said, the passage from mayhem to insight – WG described as “Vertigo,” the verge, the swerve, the swoon. You reach an edge or limit, what cannot be undone, begin unworking. Begin unworking there.
At the grave “I can’t go on. I must go on. I’ll go on,” Beckett decries. It’s not at understanding – “splitting on difference” – but in the going-on, turning over/under, inexhaustibly or ad infinitum – convergences coming undone.
From JD Jesse gets a Post Carte, leaves it somewhere in the margins, but we know. We know we have heard, even if we can’t re-member. All variations of death, Jon thinks, Jon writes, Jon says…assembling the book of questions…the interior distance of this fierce and beautiful world filled with women, fire, and dangerous things…keeping MB in infinite conversation.
Some things don’t make sense yet seem imperative. As if there were a realm of the unsayable, a set of stanzas wedding language and death – signifying nothing – that is to say, a world of unspeakable silence that works like clamor.
Exhausting voice and nothing more. The trouble with pleasure, with suffer, with become. None of us trust ideas and yet we generate and respond.
“He was found lying on the ground. No one had missed him. No one was looking for him… An old woman found him.” (Beckett). We somehow set out to search. “That seems to hang together.” Jon, Jesse, WG, myself, scouring the globe for more – who, what…- “But finally I asked if I knew exactly what the man – what exactly was required of the man, what it was he could or could not say. No, was the answer, after some little hesitation, no, I did not know…” and so we keep on.
“A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.” JD post carte. Beckett’s own death, still. GWFH, WG, FK and MB’s left messages, notes, recordings. “Only a small part of what is said can be verified”…if any. We are left, bereft, full of fragments, thoughts concluded, forgotten, ignored, but still unworking – in journeys, in dramas, in fire. Hanging at the limits of ropes. To strangle or drop, and what then? What next? Splitting on difference. It comes apart, what holds together. No one knows. Nowhere, now here, very difficult to say. Meticulous dismantling, decode – recode – Unicode – uncode.
…Jesse’s working up something, as is Jon. I’ve begun working again. Beckett is still dead. Or dead, still – either way he has not concluded. Piecemeal as it may be, we are all working on (or UNWORKING, as MB liked to refer to it)…and nearing some inception.
It has been a long time since I’ve participated in the stellar Friday Fictioneers writing challenge and consortium, hosted and enabled by Rochelle Wisoff-Fields.
In many times of my life, this simple challenge has kept my creative writing inertia active when seemingly the rest of my life-world was mitigating against it (such as currently). I am happy to join this group again, and hopefully contribute small pieces of worth… and ensure my pen stays active. Thank you Friday Fictioneers!
The Empties
For ages, they spoke about ‘the Empties.’ Of everything, they said. No emotion, no perception, no experience, or meaning. No one would know. Even absence would be left behind. We imagined, but really hadn’t. It must have come. If/then occurred. This be ‘the Empties.’ There is no knowing. There is no happens. There is no history or time. Perhaps no space. A strange again of Only Things.
“To bring a work to ‘a conclusion,’ as Picasso said, is like putting an end to a bull – to kill it.”
-Francois Jullien-
from the diaries…
Woke this morning with a particular feeling. I’ve never been one to believe people could name their emotions or feelings. The best we can say are parts.
Words like a parts catalog: indicating pieces and components, but never the working, not the operative whole. Machines are full of mystery. What’s hidden.
They say you cannot know. As you age. Cannot know if it’s the end, exactly. Perhaps they’re right – I’ve surely been surprised in middle age, believing everything was lost, doomed, downhill and erosive, some slow and steady depleting – and then WOW! Who could have known or imagined! This luck, this place, this woman or experience! Perhaps. Perhaps. But maybe we do. Maybe we really know, once twilight settles. I’ve never trusted “them” – the “experts,” the “scholars” and “scientists,” “politicians” or “leaders” or “doctors,” the “speakers for” and “authorities”…i.e. privileged observers (an illusion or delusion or both – no one ever gets to be ‘outside’ existence, any more than any other).
What with Laramie gone, and a birthday round the corner, and language just a parts catalog – my experience.
I woke with a particular feeling. That things were near their ends. That I am nearing ends. Work, love, breathing, will. That the stories I’m involved with are dwindling in pages, thin and wearing out. These ‘particular feelings,’ “somehow we just know,” kinds of things: lay down, close your eyes, cross your hands over your chest and hope things are in order. Or not. Depends on inclination and values, I suppose. What one cares about, or for. Perhaps. “They” say you cannot know.
I’ve been surprised. Even wildly. Much I’ve never been able to believe and yet it seems: my children – engendered by me and of such promise; this beautiful woman that loves me; that I’m still alive. One never knows (is what they say). So who knows what? And how do “they” know that?
I think I do, what with Laramie gone, and my faulty parts catalog, and this particular way that I feel. I’ve worked too long and too much. Tried too failingly. Never quite trusted or believed. Never found my worth. Maybe now I know. Maybe now I’m certain of something.
The end is coming – for me – always concerned and consternated by beginnings – how to start, where to set out – and now, here (nowhere) the path, it dwindles away. What have I done? What did I mean to? What did I wish? Why didn’t I?
I wanted to write a scholarly work about something that truly obsessed me. Something I’d spent my life searching. Something that likely doesn’t even exist, but no matter – because Scrabble, because poems, because science. Unscramble (by scrambling) the letters – you’ll see: it can almost be said, almost anything – existent or not – almost. Parts constructing strange wholes and plugged in, eventual malfunctions, repairs – and yet “no matter, try again, fail again, fail better” (Sam Beckett – I’ve read and I’ve taught far too long).
And one solid work of fiction and some poems. That’s all. That’s what I wanted to do.
So I studied, and traveled and loved. Raised children, made music, pushed learning and literature publicly, worked and worked, and drank and drank. Took in stragglers and strays, made it work where I could, doubted and doubted, desired. Everything but what I wanted – that’s how you perpetuate desire.
I woke today with a particular feeling, though “they” say you cannot know. Cannot know for certain, that things are yet to surprise you, yet to get better. I will not argue. Perhaps. But what with Laramie gone, and all that’s undone, maybe I know, maybe we do. Maybe we’re aware when our endings are coming. Who could know? Who could tell us?
At times unbearable. At times a satisfaction of “all we have” and the effort of maximizing it. At times re-solve (for x?). At times a re-linguishing abandonment: despair.
I study her, hair splitting and spreading, trailing inky-green over the vein-passages, delicately swollen, along the backs of her hands, superfluous and jewelry-like wrist-bones, concatenation and symphony of muscled, cartilage-limned lineations from thigh to knee-bend to calf, turning into sun-drenched marble of ankle, tendon, toes…painted, dusted, perfection…
The beauty will not hold to term. Will never be contained. It was impossible before it began. Eventuated, erupted, but was not “meant” or realized for any capture. It’s irreducible and indescribable, and I always already knew that – thus a torment, self-torture, a suicide term-inating – necessary failures I will elect to die trying: inconceivable, yet experienced; an incalculable worthless worth because unshared and uncommon. Just perception, experience, singular…impossible. Not factual. Incommunicable. HER.
To simply see (receive, perceive, conceive) – non-transferable, i.e. ‘unreal,’ unrepeatable, or ‘not the same’ as that. Untranslatable.
Yes, it starts to map. A conjecture of imaginary spaces, places, locations. Lines drawn wobbly and around, surround, what mystery? To dialogue and dream – hypothesize, surmise, polygraphy. I.e. to fail.
Ends in its begins, becoming something ‘else,’ as self might with each other – between showing new unknowns.
Not sure its believed in any more: “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
The map began as a scribble, a doodle. Begins as a failure to write, to “compose.”
In lieu of a word there’s a wiggle of pen wandering aimless in search. Cartography-graphology-psychology – a loitering for logos.
Begins this way – in hope of words, a sort of squiggle. A body desiring a mind. To show up, to take over, provoke or convince – to appear, make a meaning, disclose – to figure toward sign. Some unconcealing.
The signal’s not there, so it moves: the hand, the instrument, the breath and the heart – are they tools? And for what? A cartographer’s dream. Of no training, no knowledge, even reason is lacking.
A pen making marks on a page, mapping none. Tracing nonsense. It begins in this way, and it leads, so he hopes (it hopes, is hope, is desire).
The scrawl travels over the page – given borders and boundaries, arbitrary and set – 6”x9” and lined with a soft viscous grey. He (it) slows down. Just a hand and an arm and a shoulder – in motion – holding a technical device filled with fluid – black, yes, like bile, but less tacky, diluted – it flows, threading lines – it’s con-fusion – yet taking, biting, inscribed. Something happens. Drawings are locked to a medium stock. Incomprehensibles stained on a page.
It crawls on.
*
This mapping begins in a loss. He is lost. It is lost. Doesn’t “know.” Just beginning, because – with desire. It is driven, compelled, WRITER WANTS (for to write) with “nothing to write, and no means to write it” yet constrained to keep writing, to expunge merely SOMEthing, some THING. Which is NO thing, no THING, but to mark. It goes on.
Makes a map, a map-ping, tangled series of lines meaning nothing, no THING, but creating TO-WARD. Ward off absence, off void, ward off death, this is to – .
It (he) is tired. Is forlorn. Is an absence and loss, a re-mission, re-cursion, re-morse. And not even that clear.
Scribbles on. NOT a map. NOT directions. For NO where to go – NOW here, now HERE, no-where. Which begins all the longing, for “he’s” heard it said, found it written – in signs, in-scribed, sign-i-fied: but NOT HERE. Not in him or this body. NOT THIS. No sense. Non-sense. “It’s” not “working.”
Trail dwindles along cross the page. It’s a map. Just of being. NOW here. Now. HERE. Looks like this – some electrocardiomusculoskeletalpsycognilinguadigital-gram. From this angle, this tool, these techniques. As a Ouija. No meaning. Saussurating. Arbitrary. Mediate. Only markings.
It falters.
And so it begins – as a failure to write – as a scribble – an assay – a tribute to write – that cannot, that will not, that does not…quite occur.
Marc hasn’t approached such things in a very long time, having left ranches for cities decades ago. He’s never perceived his father this way – a sodden, curled lump, a heavy heap of human – laying not far from a dissolving and evaporating campsite. Still.
Alias ponders “still as stasis or persistence or both/and?” in his notebook in his study. “Most often I use ‘still’ with some indication of both – stubborn, persistent, continual, unmoving – obstacles.”
Son standing over his father. Father, fallen, humped, underfoot of son. A stubborn statue, status, state. Something resilient, resolute, apparently ineradicable and permanent – as far as permanence goes.
“Sons stumped by their fathers. Fathers blocking their sons.” Alias wrote as Lucy re-entered their provisional home (what “home” is not?).
Laramie lay still, sopping, weighing more than any many should, it seemed to Marc. Now fathering the labor of his unfortunate offspring, hovering over it/him like a bent tree, not quite as strong, but still stuck and rooted.
“The child is father to the man…still,” Alias jotted, telling Lucy that he’s stuck in the awful muddling middle of things, still wanting several things to be possible at once, believing they ought appropriately have right to be – including (but not limited to) both of their happinesses and satisfaction… fulfillments… but unable to see quite how, and for some strange reason thinking acutely of Laramie, wondering about him today – where he is and how – and all of their good, promising, talented grown children, and why they all increasingly feel alone, distant, farther from one another with age, in spite or in direct conflict with his feeling of the relative, mandatory, even necessary import and significance of these very few – very few consistent, momentous, continual and crucial relations – one another, their some sort of shared offspring or circumstanced charges, numbered friends, one another… handful of humans they ‘trust’ ‘still’ – and the vagaried ambiguity of all of these terms.
Marc stares: his father: a persistent stasis: there, still. His mother. What now? Himself? His wife, sister, the children? And there… here… Laramie Paul Backstagger… still. Present. Here. Present. Still.
Lucy, in annoyed concern – Alias inebriated, anxious, composing, fantastical, undone – suggests they simply call Anna or Marc, Maribel or Laramie his own self, and check in if he’s so concerned, so (“apparently”) troubled and unsettled about them. But Alias, of course, of matter-of-course, of persistent stubborn stasis, replies, sighing: “Whatever. I’m overwhelmed. Over-reacting, under-developed, undone… Forget about it. Sorry. How was your walk – your outsiding?”
Marc prods the body with his boot. His father weighs too much. Too heavy. Too absent. Too still. Sensei had startled his mother Maribel, returning to the ranch stables alone. Who startled his sister Anna, startling Marc via telephone, still. And now here, miles from anywhere, hating, prodding, regretting, wishing this sodden, sullen lump of heavy matter wasn’t his lifeless father, Laramie, his mother’s errant husband, his sister’s rugged hero, the persistent stasis of his dad.
Tension reigns, still. Vitality. Forces working upon and with forces. Matter and space and energy and time, perhaps. At the very least a conflicted Alias in tangled tango with his beloved antagonist Lucy, unaware, intuitive, confused and undone, while Marc is shoving his inert father, Maribel quivers, Anna waits, and Lucy huffs down the hall. Life keeps pressing on and stopping, still.
I would find it difficult to praise this work enough and urge you to engage it if you share a deep love of creating and participating in literature and works of art.
All my Words are Silent 