Interesting: it will come, whispering in your imagination that the English interest comes from the Latin inter esse, literally “in-between-being.” – Gunnar Olsson, Abysmal
“something must have changed” – Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies
I guess I just decided to let something else happen…
I suppose I decided
insofar as we do
to let something else
become…
“This is what I’ve decided. I see no other solution. It is the best I can do…
…that little space of time, filled with drama, between the message received and the piteous response…
…Of myself I could never tell, any more than live or tell of others…”
..does the pleasure of writing exist? I don’t know. One thing I feel certain of is that there’s a tremendous obligation to write. This obligation to write, I don’t really know where it comes from. As long as we haven’t started writing, it seems to be the most gratuitous, the most improbable thing, almost the most impossible, and one to which, in any case, we’ll never feel bound. Then, at some point – is it the first page, the thousandth, the middle of the first book, or later? I have no idea – we realize that we’re absolutely obligated to write. This obligation is revealed to you, indicated in various ways. For example, by the fact that we experience so much anxiety, so much tension if we haven’t finished that little page of writing, as we do each day. By writing that page, you give yourself, you give to your existence, a form of absolution. That absolution is essential for the day’s happiness. It’s not the writing that’s happy, it’s the joy of existing that’s attached to writing, which is slightly different. This is very paradoxical, very enigmatic, because how is it that the gesture – so vain, so fictive, so narcissistic, so self-involved – of sitting down at a table in the morning and covering a certain number of blank pages can have this effect of benediction for the remainder of the day? How is the reality of things – our concerns, hunger, desire, love, sexuality, work – transfigured because we did that in the morning, or because we were able to do it during the day? That’s very enigmatic. For me, in any case, it’s one of the ways the obligation to write is manifested.
This obligation is also indicated by something else. Ultimately, we always write not only to write the last book we will write, but, in some truly frenzied way – and this frenzy is present even in the most minimal gesture of writing – to write the last book in the world. In truth, what we write at the moment of writing, the final sentence of the work we’re completing, is also the final sentence of the world, in that, afterward, there’s nothing more to say. There’s a paroxysmal intent to exhaust language in the most insignificant sentence. No doubt this is associated with the disequilibrium that exists between speech and language. Language is what we use to construct an absolutely infinite number of sentences and utterances. Speech, on the contrary, no matter how long or how diffuse, how supple, how atmospheric, how protoplasmic, how tethered to its future, is always finite, always limited. We can never reach the end of language through speech, no matter how long we imagine it to be. This inexhaustibility of language, which always holds speech in suspense in terms of a future that will never be completed, is another way of experiencing the obligation to write. We write to reach the end of language, to reach the end of any possible language, to finally encompass the empty infinity of language through the plenitude of speech.
Another reason why writing is different from speaking is that we write to hide our face, to bury ourselves in our own writing. We write so that the life around us, alongside us, outside, far from the sheet of paper, this life that’s not very funny but tiresome and filled with worry, exposed to others, is absorbed in that small rectangle of paper before our eyes and which we control. Writing is a way of trying to evacuate, through the mysterious channels of pen and ink, the substance, not just of existence, but of the body, in those minuscule marks we make on paper. To be nothing more, in terms of life, than this dead and jabbering scribbling that we’ve put on the white sheet of paper is what we dream about when we write. But we never succeed in absorbing all that teeming life in the motionless swarm of letters. Life always goes on outside the sheet of paper, continues to proliferate, keeps going, and is never pinned down to that small rectangle; the heavy volume of the body never succeeds in spreading itself across the surface of paper, we can never pass into that two-dimensional universe, that pure line of speech; we never succeed in becoming thin enough or adroit enough to be nothing more than the linearity of a text, and yet that’s what we hope to achieve. So we keep trying, we continue to restrain ourselves, to take control of ourselves, to slip into the funnel of pen and ink, an infinite task, but the task to which we’ve dedicated ourselves. We would feel justified if we no longer existed except in that minuscule shudder, that infinitesimal scratching that grows still and becomes, between the tip of the pen and the white surface of the paper, the point, the fragile site, the immediately vanished moment when a stationary mark appears once and for all, definitively established, legible only for others and which has lost any possibility of being aware of itself. This type of suppression, of self-mortification in the transition to signs is, I believe, what also gives writing its character of obligation. It’s an obligation without pleasure, you see, but, after all, when escaping an obligation leads to anxiety, when breaking the law leaves you so apprehensive and in such great disarray, isn’t obeying the law the greatest form of pleasure? To obey an obligation whose origin is unknown, and the source of whose authority over us is equally unknown, to obey that – certainly narcissistic – law that weighs down on you, that hangs over you wherever you are, that, I think, is the pleasure of writing…
…I’m not an author. First of all, I have no imagination. I’m completely uninventive. I’ve never even been able to conceive of something like the subject of a novel…I place myself resolutely on the side of the writers [in distinction – Roland Barthes – from authors] those for whom writing is transitive. By that I mean those for whom writing is intended to designate, to show, to manifest outside itself something that, without it, would have remained if not hidden at least invisible. For me, that’s where, in spite of everything, the enchantment of writing lies…I’m simply trying to make apparent what is very immediately present and at the same time invisible…I’d like to reveal something that’s too close for us to see, something right here, alongside us, but which we look through to something else…to define the proximity around us that orients the general field of our gaze and our knowledge…
So, for me, the role of writing is essentially one of distancing and of measuring distance. To write is to position oneself in that distance that separates us from death and from what is dead…I’m in the distance between the speech of others and my own…In exercising my language, I’m measuring the difference with what we are not, and that’s why I said to you earlier that writing means losing one’s own face, one’s own existence. I don’t write to give my existence the solidity of a monument. I’m trying to absorb my own existence into the distance that separates it from death and, probably, by that same gesture, guides it toward death…
I’dd add that, in one sense, my head is empty when I begin to write, even though my mind is always directed toward a specific object. Obviously, that means that, for me, writing is an exhausting activity, very difficult, filled with anxiety. I’m always afraid of messing up; naturally, I mess up, I fail all the time. This means that what encourages me to write isn’t so much the discovery or certainty of a certain relationship, of a certain truth, but rather the feeling I have of a certain kind of writing, a certain mode of operation of my writing, a certain style that will bring that distance into focus…
To swirl. There. He said it, stated intention, directly. To be lost, languishing (anguish is in there), full of lose and seeking, squirming, rutting, snuffling about. Scent search of what? Or not what quite, but how, now? The unknowable, uncertain, which lies beyond perhaps, inaccessible, indeterminate, resistant to decipher, discretion, or decode. He plies. Ruin of movement, beyond conceit and loosely bound, tearing terror of graspage. An infinity of words, or if not, many disordered magnitudes more compossibly complex than he –wrecked in kind with troubles of time, reductions of selection. What means, all knotted in already-known. A scumble then, without, arms treading, legs a-flutter, cognition confused in the mass, mess, unaccommodated, arranged re-arranging, affective and effecting, assaying never fully, nor enough, insufficient temporals and scope, shortfall of finitude, unbecoming, irrealized, incomputable surround. To swirl or swoon perhaps – intends eccentric excentricity, without with-in, within outside and othering. Immersed, submerged, tumbling almost-struggle, almost-drift, thoroughfare and passaging, limning swaths of runnels, channels, margins. Copiously coping, how would he go? What are the motions lesser than stir and more absorptive? And what of the when? Who now, where now, how when? Confusion, then – confusion, swooning and swirl. A wriggling receipt, some commingling transference transmitting, attention intending undoing, origins ever receding, irremediable in rot and excess, dismembered invention – begin – excise and evince, glide of erasure and uncover, indiscernible activity of process, waving particles, particular waves, currents and tropes, passively permeable patterning passageways [not that!] imperceptible part-i-cipatory breakage and shatter, dispersion deconstructing refusal. He ruins, inevitably. That stands – there. Unworking integration every angle or approach, from inside, decay, a desiccate and undone doing. Mismade by allowance, a scribbling palimpsest or correction – be cognized, be written, be spoken, transcribed – he wails into unruly, disruptive, erupting fluid floodings of voiding, of nothing. Not afloat, asail, aswim. Neither drowning nor submerged. Nearly saturate with swallow and exhale, a lineament on empty, some faulty trace.
What the whispers, wreathing wraithwords, wisp-whooshing ways, weave-unweaving willful wreckage. Watery-unwound wrapping-about while unwrapping wishful rending renderings. Wronged construals in warped wrestlings – reachings, wrenchings – resiliently resisting. Wranglage, wronguage, writ.
Remains for re(sign)ation. Re-as(sign)ment. Relinquishing rest or rectitude. Repentant writing. Riddled and recoiling, recombinantly removeable recklessness. A raucous rancor irregular, irrational, and ever ill-advised in its deviant devising.
Devastating detour: devouring the decrepit, dissimulate, divisable devisor of description. Descry the dilettante, the decayed decoding at diminish.
Wrest a return: remandering mayhem, maladaptive remainder. Roping radicals round reason – irrational redescription in rascally remorse. Mismade and mismanaged. Wranglage, wronguage, writ.
This constitutes a “free-write” – as I understand the phrase it is an allowance one gives oneself to just make language, unedited, unplanned, in a “spirit” of ex-pression…i.e. a “press(ur)ing- out.”[see suspend]
Spillage, in other words.
And…”in other words,” always, from the first word.
At its release – like an arm movement; a choice of caress, breath, or handhold; a motivation to swerve, or bend, sit, or rise; nigh-automated intention to breathe… a beating of heart, or functioning of organ; lighting a match; attention.
Release a word. Some oddly shaped sound, emitted complexly from the nerves, the brain, the belly. Bellowed air up the windpipe, wending the throat, curling the cavity of mouth, (you can almost feel air in the eyes – perhaps you can!), a scent is involved, a tongue roving weirdly, a tapping of teeth and positioning of jaw…
Or… the combination of organs and neurons, plasma and plastics, rutting a body in accord with a world, activating…firing and sliding, acting re-acting, trans-mitting… and a tension in shouldered muscle begins to stir, roiling down “arm,” triggering the delicate tendons and tissue of “hand,” fingering pencil…and con-script-ed together, they “write…”
And from the first word it is other.
EX-press-ion.
Pressed into and out of the body. Im-pression, re-sponse, and in-tension. (You see the looping?). Out of, into, and back out without measure.
Mathematically speaking, the first term, generates an uncomputable, undecidable, indeterminate and infinite universe of possibilities. Simultaneously foreclosing the same.
Which is why the Moment’s of import. And why statistically, it is inane.
“Spillage” set into motion. “, in other words.” For this organism, now.
Out of infinite potential, a violent reduction to that: “Spillage, in other words.”
In other words, from the first word, an infinity ruled out. By my finitude.
In other words, from the first word, an infinity opened up. By language, and you, all the times, and the spaces.
Pressed in, it moves out. Pressed out, moving in. Always moving.
A “moment” cannot exist.
We switch on. (We do not.)
***
Then what are we “meaning” by “free”?
A “free-write” I inscribed, but it’s not – bound by me, my experience, education, now here. By my body-environment mesh. By this medium, this sign-system (language), this trial.
And why do then? Why mingle, behave, interact, or respond? Why continue?
continue (v.)mid-14c., contynuen, from Old French continuer (13c.), from Latin continuare “join together, connect, make or be continuous,” from continuus “uninterrupted,” from continere (intransitive) “to be uninterrupted,” literally “to hang together” (see contain). Related: Continued; continuing.
(“Online Etymology Dictionary,” 2016)
How could I “make continuous” what is never discrete? And why are our actions and terms bent on negation / separation (discretion)?
What do we wish to “clarify” by pulling-apart, setting-forth, ripping of context, of living?
We humans have so many re-‘s. As if we do it again, and ourselves (WHAT is THAT?) we might own it or know it, or even come cause. How absurd.
We’re participant. To speak is to join. To move is WITH-IN. To think and to act are to fuse with surround. As much caused as its causing, ground and ideal, this is living. To be fluidly unidentifiable, continuously as such.
What IS (chasing ‘essence’) is futile. What IS (what’s ‘existing’) is all.
How might I write in this way? Write to join? Say to be? The mouth and the ass as the same? I breathe and I shit; I grab and release; take in and give out…unrestrained. Without end or cessation (as far as we know at our miniature range)…
I am an ocean of signs. Of a womby surround – undulate, viscous, discombobulate, obscure. Tremulous quarks of murky markings and inference, connotative particles, confused, ill-defined, and indifferent. Instigative convolutions, a potentia of concatenation and combine, cations and anions, dispersive attract.
Filled with words. Prescriptive, disruptive, chaotic, coherent. A turbulence transposing subjects, predicatively morphing, an aqueous slurrage of verb, vim and weave. Compositive, foreign, constitutive terms. Not-I. Of Other. As shapes and colors, sounds, concepts, any all perceived – no idgit of me, all permeable outside – Otherness, environ, cocoon – borrowed, received (or rejected?), an elusive collude.
Signifiers swarm me. Inherited meanings, genetic loom of semiotic loops and swirls. Who begins? No ex nihilo. All arrange, revise, adapt. We’re composed. I of an ocean of signs. Language and impulses, instincts and codes. Ellipses and notions imposed. Undifferentiate, senseless, stirred by experience – a cacophonous chorus of bones to my suture.
Oral, aural, textured and gestured, I swim and I sink, flux in the float. Fragments and fractures, compounds and bonds, links and erasures. Malformations. Dis-ease. Some viral, some blocked, unusable and ill-conceived, undone, or aborted. Indisposition. Swim on, slurry substance, amalgam of shreds, resist and desist, copy and swallow. I choke. I chortle. What makes “mine”? Just a word, (yet another), from whence and from where we don’t know, but not “us” (neither that, nor this keystroke, this breathy design, dasein, without ownmost). Even a name is built upon countless. Other.
Epi-, meta-, arche-, unknown and unknowing, interpreted through mediated mattery fracas, encompassing commotion, tempestuous din, innately ordained. But not-I, freak iota, insignificant smallest, author of none. No one. No thing. No not-I.
Quavery, wavering, components of signs, my birth-sea and umwelt, disjoiner and fabricate mush.
This become, in this swelter, this wrap and unravel. Efface and inveigle a ubiquitous unique. I am drowning, a seaway of signs.
[from a crumpled writing found under a car seat among additional trash, transposed to typing as a record of a mind’s mayhem and mistakes]
“Deliver me, prays the haunted man. Therefore…”
Gunnar Olsson, Abysmal
I am Dostoevsky and I am Beckett. I am Hegel and Heidegger and Holderlin. I am Kafka.
I am not good enough for any of you. I do not merit your time nor your attention, affection, sensibilities, your human talents, or your care… no conceivable reason to mention “love.”
But I love you. I am the one who loves you. The one who writes. Who writes these words. The haunted one, the Reader, the Librarian; the Lover, Scholar, I am me. I love you. I am haunted. Words runnel through me, and with them thoughts, and with them feelings, and with them meanings, which means…nothing. No matter, no space, no time.
The “haunted man” is a passage, a passing, a ‘type.’ Of no import, little reality, barely occurrence.
*
I am Blanchot, am Homer, am divine Scriptures, and Shakespeare. Simply, small-ly, in my own way, this very general way, I am what humans do with language. For one another, with one another, to one another, as.
*
Yards and houses, flesh and voices, signs and symbols, marks and sounds, music and rhythyms and gestures, as attempts to conjoin – join and connect – survive, discover, endure, be, become, in-volve… With no idea. Or ideas that continually prove false and faulty. Elaborate records of revision, perhaps better inscribed as simple songs of effort. Urges only TO BE, and that, TO BE CONNECTED.
But what do I know? I’m Pythagoras, call me Ishmael or Ahab, Everyman or Whatever. I’m out-dated. Assign me a number. I don’t really care. I really care. I am here, and I, (at least) re-present, or present again, or presence, a sort of being. Such as it is… with no “REAL” way to evaluate, estimate, “tell,” or “express.”
*
Satan, then, Jesus, Joyce, Proust, Alexander. No matter, no space, no time, only IS.
A “tradition” (as it were, in our own words). We. Its + That + This. US. Humans strangely (apparently) in environments. These ways of thinking, of being, of behaving and operating, of supposedly surviving (but with what evidence? WHO or WHAT might know?).
How might elements arranged thus & so, survive? I am Nebuchadnezzar, Mohammed, Hammurabi and Ishtar. I am ab-original.
I am Nothing. Everything. No one. Me.
Each time.
Each press of the pen: “Hello – ‘here’”
*
As simply as I can construct it (all of it, any of “it”) it goes something like this: accidents occur, accidents are weird, and accidents give way.
I, like all other(s), an accidental novel. Occasional and Whatever.
WHAT HAPPENS TO BE… at any given point-of-measurement (i.e. as far as we have a capacity to render, sunder, and effect – “Reality” (for us)). Some quirky, unlikely, ridiculous, painstaking, odds-massively-against, and over-dramatic assessment of a certain sort of being-in, being-with, co-occurrence, happen-stance, we fabricate “human.”
In many other words (for the sake or ability of ‘them,’ ‘it,’ ‘all’) I may as well be. Be Hallie or Ollie or Aidan or Rhesus. Chief Joseph or Samson or Ghandi or Jordan. Be you or Sara or Maya or Jimmy John.
“no matter. Try again. Fail again…” no matter.
THIS TOO SHALL PASS.
“the venom of the serpents were within him”
Gunnar Olsson, Abysmal
HOW SHOULD I KNOW?
*
And so what if I were Bernhard or Bach, Napoleon, Attila, Montaigne or Dorothy Parker? If I had the ammunition or energy (and weaponry?) – the rhetoric, the nerve, or the madness. L. Sterne, Nagarjuna, Hafiz, JL Borges?
“No matter. Try again. Fail again…”
Titian, Beethoven, Plato/Socrates, Palestrina. Michelangelo, V. van Gogh, and Chuang Tzu. You.
Why not call it magic, this unsettling alloy of grief and anger we experience when shunted by anxiety, disappointment, depression, or loss?
We cannot deny that we crave! That we are struck through – bolted with fervent desire (all that which we experience as, well, unsettlingly – disturbingly – vital, ALIVE, active, possessive, in us) – when we are crushed, smushed, squelched, or helpless, hopeless, dismayed – how else could we be?
Without the vital, fierce passions – the damage is to no effect/affect. Depression must press against something. Must be pressing something down.
“Am I at the right house?” the internet-technology-installer asked from my gate.
“How can I know?” I responded, “it would depend on the future.”
He checked the numbers and moved away.
Now how will we ever know?
Isn’t this what every human encounter re/presents?
So de-pression presses something down in us. Anxiety stirs. Sorrow re-cognizes meanings. No negative without its positive charge. To be noticeable. And what is it that is noticeable? (able-to-be-noticed)? ONLY DIFFERENCE. Only time and space and whatever it is those veil, uncover, hide, or displace.
O-ppressed, DE-pressed, what are these SU-ppressing? Accentuating? Calling to attention, to activity, awareness, task?
Grief, loss, de-tachment and longing: what do these expose in order to occur?
Is anything ever lost?
She passes by with a friendly, perhaps even loving and happy wave. What reality is evoked in the pain of the passed-by, passed-over, un-preferred? What does it render actually present?
Is it possible that in the “missing” nothing is lost? Some present is heightened? Something even added to the present?
In losing a struggle don’t we gain what the effort was for? Clearly?
Does surrender underscore the sub-ject, the value, the relational ob-ject-ive given over? Adding acknowledging import?
Difference demonstrates value. Matter(s). Sign-if-i-can-ce. Without difference nothing would know. Indistinguishable = pure repetition. (Doesn’t matter).
Passed-over, passed-by, passed-on. De-pressed, su-ppressed, o-ppressed. Lost, lossed, re-moved, de-tached, re-apportioned. ALL LOSS ACCENTUATES HAVE. ALL DIS-POSSESSION EXPOSES POSSESS.
Difference de-scribes=in-scribes OURSELVES. What we are constructed from, contain, proffer, offer, obsess, possess, ARE. What we ARE (have and do).
Our com-position, con-stitution, con-struction are most clearly expressed in difference, ex-posure, de-struction, de-pression, o-ppression, loss.
In de-composition, we know and learn what composes us.
The question beggars: what have we to lose? What can we lose that in losing its learning is not gained? What have we to lose? And how do we know without losing?
…Deviser of the voice and of its hearer and of himself. Deviser of himself for company. Leave it at that. He speaks of himself as of another. He says speaking of himself, He speaks of himself as of another. Himself he devises too for company. Leave it at that. Confusion too is company up to a point. Better hope deferred than none. Up to a point. Till the heart starts to sicken. Company too up to a point. Better a sick heart than none. Till it starts to break. So speaking of himself he concludes for the time being, For the time being leave it at that” – Samuel Beckett, Company
“The words spoke by themselves. The silence entered them, an excellent refuge, since I was the only one who noticed it.” – Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day
So, speaking of himself, I only noticed it.
The small furry animal, almost humming in its purr, he had chance, so he thought, to please, to comfort, with a pet, a scratch, an acknowledgment, tender, while it butted and marked itself against him. The illusion. A kind of company in itself (or to).
The ungrammaticality of occurrences. Of happening. What happens to be. Or is not. When speaking to himself. Without voice. I was the only one, as far as I am able to tell – if in fact this is telling – who noticed it. It seems words speak of themselves. From elsewise and through whom. He says, speaking of himself (or to). Without voice.
Devising. Illusion. I devise, he says, speaking to himself, of himself, without voice. Seeking – is he? – Am I? – Seeking…company?
A small child (another illusion, devised) passes by, walking a young dog and waving a nod of sorts – I don’t remember which, he says, but I returned a gesture and obtained a moment of calm in the chilly Autumn breeze. There was a sun full of color due to the leaves in their change, and fall, and flutter (due to the nothing-shaped wind). But what seemed a moment of warmth, of calm, devised by a child with a dog and a friendly (fearful) gesture, he thought (speaking of himself without voice), I was the only one who noticed it.
I take to reading then – others speaking of themselves without voice (or beyond it) – in order to devise… company? he wonders of himself, to himself. For when reading, it surely seems the words are speaking only of themselves, no matter who pens them. Such the character of the texts he chooses (I thought of myself, to myself, or an other I devised as myself, like puppets). And in part read and read for the experience or feeling that I alone notice it. That I might in fact provide the company I devise, yet hardly able to tell since I have not penned the words but merely notice – borrow, listen? (there are no voices) – the words seem to speak of themselves. Without voice. (He said of himself, devising). Something like company. Perhaps.
Even in the color-filled sunlight of Autumn days, I at times experience myself as being quite deeply in dark, he says speaking of himself, myself, devising voices, soundless, out of words that seem to be speaking only of themselves and their variegated histories and usages, and billions of potential speakers and hearers and interpreters – creators and devisers – filled with ambiguity and application. Here with me on shavings of dead trees, providing stark living contrast to Winter’s day-night. I get confused, he says speaking of himself. Confusion too is company devised, up to a point, I suppose. Obviously “fusion-with” implies an other, perhaps enough, I said, speaking to myself, without voice, here on dead leaves in black scars. In mutilation. Transgression. Inscription. Perhaps the words will speak of themselves and some other “I” will claim to be the only one that notices.
A strange delusion of company indeed. He says speaking of himself, devising a voice, its hearer, and an himself as participant and therefore a company to keep.
Reading: “only a detour is adequate” (Agamben), and “in pursuing meaning we are pursuing our limits” (Allen), and was perhaps meaning a synonym or metaphor, simile or metonymy for company he thought, speaking to himself, without voice. But with an illness, diagnosed by doctors – those scientific political powers responsible for providing facts or devising happenings, pronouncing occurrences – so in any case he is not alone, being-with his illness, I thought, speaking to myself in an absence of sound. The words spoke by themselves.
Other things as well: the furry animal, its humming purr, its actions; the trees, the leaves, the wind, the light. The child, the dog, the gestures. The books, the authors, the words themselves. Divisors of voices, of hearers, of selves. Sick hearts, confusion, and company. Am I the only one who notices? he says speaking of himself, speaking of himself as another.
So speaking of himself he concludes for the time being, For the time being leave it at that.” – Samuel Beckett
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.
All my Words are Silent 