22/6/2009
x. Foe, J.M. Coetzee
x. The Emigrants, W. G. Sebald
x. Boyhood, J. M. Coetzee
x. Youth, J. M. Coetzee
5. Age of Iron, J. M. Coetzee
6. Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy (reread)
7. Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
8. Surfacing, Margaret Atwood
9. Written on the Body, Jeanette Winterson
10. Native Son, Richard Wright
11. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
12. Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
other possibilities: Hemingway, Kafka, Borges, more McCarthy, more Coetzee, Marlon James; the poetry of A. R. Ammons, C. D. Wright, Wallace Stevens, Peter Anderson.
21/6/2009
The others have all left now, and he is alone, alone in a house that used to house thirteen. Outside it is raining, finally, after days of unusual winter sunshine. The yard is all bricks and if it were to rain without end, he imagines it would fill with rainwater; the yard would flood, and this house, moldy and broken after six-months’ use, would become his ark.
Even so, there would still be the matter of eating. What did Noah eat? he wonders, realizing how unfamiliar he is with the story beyond its barest outlines. Were there other animals aboard that did not survive the crossing between the old world and the new because Noah, in a fit of hunger, ate the Lord’s creatures? One has to feed one’s self.
But there are no creatures in this house–even the rats have been poisoned, and the flies gripped by the cold–and he could not bring himself to kill them anyway, if there were. Imagine: if this Noah had been filled with such sympathy, had he died on his boat, hungry and starved, a seer whose own apocalypse had finally arrived, given to him by a God whose image he was imperfect in.
What does remain are mere remnants. He tours the empty rooms, finds worn shoes, read and unread books, forgotten wine bottles and shampoo. In the kitchen cabinets, there are only leftovers–a half-finished bag of rice, lasagna noodles, cake flour, honey–and in the refrigerator, only things no one would want or remember: soda water, spoiled chick peas, a half-eaten onion.
So, there is this matter of eating, and another matter of electricity. The meter is clocking down, almost gone now. He will have to walk to the garage and purchase more credits, or the refrigerator will go and the water and the stove. He is glad that he is not Noah; that there are, and will be, at least until all yards are stone, other gardens that are not flooded, whose tiny leaves and sprouts are not on the floor of some new and growing sea.
But all the same, he wonders, making a list of the things he will eat, that spareness that will carry him through these remainder days, how little could he use. So much has been given to him, taken for granted. He knows he has not the slightest idea how rice is grown, or what the leftover soy sauce has in it. Given the dearth that he knows he will face in the not-so-distant future (that maybe we will all face, he thinks), what could he get by on? What if he let the electricity run down? What if he simply did not go to the store? It is not unimaginable that he will be unable to afford these things at some point and it is also not beyond him to imagine a state where they simply no longer existed or existed, but broken somehow, scattershot.
He already knows what hungering is like, how a stomach eats itself past hunger, emptied until it is full only of sickness. So he does not need to be a hunger artist simply to find limits; he knows they exist, he has met them. But could he push up to them again and stop before he got there? He thinks so, though mistakes are easy, and when it really comes down to it, he does not need to know, because he can imagine: he could survive some diminuendo, but he is no good at building fires, and eventually his stomach would shred him, and he would be lying somewhere off to the side with thoughts of vomit. He does not have the fullest capacities as a survivor, though he knows there is some reserve, some distance he could go.
The distance depends on the end, as always: if there were people on the way or ultimately, the life of his mind could go on and he could go on. Those shipwrecked people, those solitary island dwellers–how did they cope with the eternal noise, not a human one, of the ocean against a blank shore? Did they talk to themselves? Did they tell elaborate stories to keep going, fantasies of rescue? Maybe they wrote letters. That would be, will be, what he does, when he becomes an island. Even unsent letters, with their vanishing addressees, the most important part, maintain the impression of dialogue.
That impression, he knows now, is what keeps him alive, what he loves the most. Even with his taste for solitude, he has learned that he is a person of bodies and spirits. That needs touch and life. So, as he is an island now for ten days, what will he do?
Abide, he must abide. It is not a bad waiting, either, though a few on leaving seemed to find it strange that he should wait to leave. There is much still to this place he feels and he knows he will not get it all, not nearly, in this liminal time, deep in the winter, but perhaps some accounts will be settled and new things will come to the fore. And there is a future to imagine, something after this moment, coming from this moment, however unstraightforward a path it may be. So he will write letters from the things he knows here, and live simply for a few days. What he learns of this place could help him in others, could remain with him; people travel, and remember: even islands are always just part of the one land, the deep one beneath the sea, all connected.
10/6/2009
everybody’s guitar
would be a sunburst
our notes
stenciling out
filaments that
tangle strings
and trajectory
with beings
the progression
now of being
projected
until our chords
make worlds.
9/6/2009
three vultures near sunset, kruger national park, south africa.
always in a dead tree.
16/5/2009
my letter, to be read at dinner to-night, to my graduating friends:
Dear Friends,
I hope all of you are enjoying your dinners, have enjoyed your dinners or are going to enjoy your dinners and hope (doubly so) that you don’t mind me interrupting for a few minutes. You see, I would know what stage of dinner-ing you are in right now—anticipation, ingestion, digestion—if I were with you bodily, but instead I come to you in word, so you’ll have to bear with me if the only eyes I can use right now are those that go in sentences, to tell you what I am all about. (I’m sure at least one of you—Asa—will appreciate the pun.) Anyway: forgive me younger and older folks, please, but what I have to say tonight, by way of messenger, is for those of you graduating, those leaving.
In word. I come to you in word. It is a medium I’ll have you know (I’m sure most of you do already) that I have something of a thing for. It is a medium I sometimes feel more comfortable in than my own skin, but it is also one that I find, almost as often, is alien to me. Words so often fail. I feel this keenly now.
I have been thinking about all of you recently: thinking about what I’d say to you if I were with you now, thinking about what I’d write you because I am not, and, most often, turning memories over and over in my head. I have told one of you that sometimes it feels like I am a ghost, haunting America, haunting home. I’ll have you know that sometimes, too, it feels the other way around: that you haunt me.
But your multitude of ghosts is familiar and welcome, even invited, to be seen: I see Mark in the yard across the way gathering leaves and talking on the phone to his beloved. I see gallons of tomatillo salsa. I see X-rays in the next-door window and I see people singing Joanna Newsom in summer and in winter. I see late-night Chanter meetings in the snow and I see the living room in Dayton and Fry falling asleep after a long weekend and I see a girl in a tye-dye jumpsuit going to the airport. I see warm dinners upstairs and people playing in the street and late nights with tea and new kinds of pasta that may or may not have come in the mail from Mark’s mom. I see the drawings you made and the letters you wrote and the houses you homed. I see this place where you sit now and feel almost like I’m there, having a potluck.
Some of you have I known for some time now. Some of you I have lived with, or lived near, we neighbors. And some of you I have known not very long at all. But all of you I would like to know better. The one regret in going so far away this semester, in leaving for this southernmost place, is that I could not share this moment of twilight with you.
Twilight: that time of day that indicates an end, a loss. But the dictionary tells me that twilight is simply crepuscular: that it occurs twice, every day, in the morning evening, between light and dark, or dark and light. In other words, it is a liminal time, one that could indicate an ending, true, but it can also mark a beginning, and does, every day. So mark it today, tomorrow, for me, and let this be an opening. Mark some things down on a paper, a computer, every once in a while.
Today might seem like a change in your life, like one such gloaming, and I assure you, it is, but let me tell you one other thing that I’ve recently felt and realized: that every moment of your waking and dreaming life is life-changing. As it says in Elizabeth Costello, one of strangest and most beautiful novels I’ve ever read, all is allegory: each creature is key to all other creatures. A dog sitting in a patch of sun licking itself is at one moment a dog and at the next a vessel of revelation.
So let me know how you are changing, how things are changing, and what is revealed to you. This is the most important: move along in your lives, but keep in touch! Let us keep together. Words may be strange, and we may be ghosts now, but we are real somewhere, somehow.
I would like to end with a few more lines that don’t belong to me. They seem an appropriate, if a bit strange ending to a letter that I don’t want to end:
Where is it that we were together?
Who were you that l lived with?
Walked with?
The brother.
The sister.
The friend.
Darkness from light.
Strife from love.
Are they the workings of one mind?
The features of the same face?
Oh, my soul,
let me be in you now.
Look out through my eyes.
Look out at the things you made.
All things shining.
Love,
Ben.
P. S. – Reader, listener, I apologize for any tongue twisters in this letter. They were accidents. I have a habit.
14/5/2009
he knows. he knows now, at last, that he will work hard on what he loves, and struggle with what he does not. that life lies between those two things, that sometimes the struggle sharpens or sharpens into love, and that, in the end, things will be perfect in the making the imperfect work that is not work. he knows and now aspires.
12/5/2009
(This is often referred to as “Black on Black” violence, a notion that has as much explanatory force as describing World War II as an example of “white on white” violence.)
aside, from recent readings in feminist scholarship concerning militarized masculinities, particularly referencing transitional violence in South Africa in township areas.
10/5/2009
table mountain from rondebosch common, sunset.
center: in the sloping distance, under the shadow of the peak, the University of Cape Town. where I go to school.
27/4/2009
at the very beginning. wrote the first few lines of a new short story tonight, in the hour before bed. call it, for now, “The Birdsong Yesterday.”
–
The land is sleeping, she said.
The land is sleeping, he said earlier, when we were all walking together in the tall grass. The land is sleeping. Strange that I remember these words now, first. What did he mean by it? What did he understand? He put out a hand in front of him, a long, brown arm, and swept it across the horizon: all this. This was the land that did not grow. Fallow, I think he meant, but he said it straight, without hesitation, as if it were the most normal thing to say in the world. Sometimes he would say these beautiful things, things that stuck with you, without even realizing it.
I think she thought the same, and I think that’s why she said it again, when we were sitting in our room, she on the bed and me on the floor. She looked half-awake in the warm light and long shadows, musing.
Fallow I think he meant, I said, or I think I said.
Yes, she said, eyes closed now. The broken soil.
24/4/2009
1.
my modernism seminar here in Cape Town has had me reading Faulkner–in specific, The Sound and the Fury; Light in August; As I Lay Dying; Absalom, Absalom!; and the short story “The Bear” from Go Down, Moses–and thinking about style and sentence structure, particularly his long sentences, adjectival excess and heightened lyricism, in relation to my own way of writing.
2.
though his style varies from work to work, his grandiloquence finds its furthest limit in Absalom, Absalom! whose dizzying sentences relate stories of the South’s vanished past in strings upwards of one thousand words.
3.
it is my experience of reading Faulkner that the more dramatically (and the more times) he transforms the objects of his writing, his subjects, into figurative language, the more it becomes obvious that he is describing a lack: that he will never describe essentially, the Ideal of what he imagines or sees. the more adjectives he uses, the more obvious this becomes: the more the thing itself escapes, or truly: the more obvious it becomes that he is (merely) gesturing towards something that he will never reach, no matter how lyrical he becomes. his language, the text, is immutably Other from the thing itself. his language (all language?) is the language of trace, of remnants, always descriptive of loss, of what is missing.
4.
the sense of loss his prose engenders reflects Faulkner’s thematic concerns. a longing for the now-vanished Southern past, the past’s interpentration with the present, and indeed, the inaccessibility of the Ideal past, are common strands running through all his work. many characters, Quentin Compson most famous among them, explicitly long for the prior. his motif of paradoxical description, often relayed as a simultaneity of energy or motion and immobility or fixedness (see the first page of Absalom, Absalom! for easy examples), creates a sense of impossible yearning. Faulkner’s fascination with twilight, exemplified by the draft title (”Twilight”) of The Sound and the Fury and the titular Light in August, reinforces the point through the order of visual symbolism, as twilight is so often associated with that yearning or, more pointedly, that nostalgia.
5.
the word ‘nostalgia,’ itself a very pertinent one in terms of Faulkner, comes from the greek nostos, which means homecoming, and algos, which translates to longing or pain. it is, then, literally a longing to return to home. notably, the plural form nostoi was used to describe the greeks’ homeward journeys following the trojan war in the original greek homeric writings. in some sense, the root of our modern word nostalgia can be traced back to odysseus’s melancholic wanderings home.
6.
the Ideal home (is this tautology–is one’s home ever not idealized, in some sense?) Faulkner desires to return can be read foremost as the idealized antebellum South. but his language alone gestures towards the irreconcilable alienation of language from the ‘home’ that it intends to describe–the world, the real. it gestures towards the modernist rupture of referentiality generative of the hopeless chasm between signifier and signified. the anxiety of this separation presents in Faulkner’s paradoxical and hyperbolic rhetoric, a rhetoric always trying to escape (and self-consciously failing to escape) rhetoric, an Ideal trying to recreate the real.
7.
my own (admittedly amateur/ish) writing–as well as countless others of much greater stature in both realist and modernist traditions–has a tendency towards high lyricism, towards outward-blooming rhetoric and, on occasion, overwriting. and reading Faulkner’s prose has crystallized some of the unconscious motivations behind such flights of linguistic fancy.
8.
a creative writing teacher once told me that writing (some) poetry is about the “poetic explosion,” the moment in which the poem’s purpose, its intended conveyance is articulated, dazzlingly.
9.
my moments of greatest lyricism aim at something like that: the ultimate achievement of desired effect. most often, it is some sense of the beautiful–sometimes the sympathetic, selfsame beauty of sadness, but beauty none-the-less.
11.
but couldn’t my own way of writing be critiqued in the same way as Faulkner’s–with its heightened lyricism, it tries to capture some fleeting sense of beauty into language–a language that ultimately only ever displays the trace of that beauty?
12.
in my worse moments, my attempts at lyricism is nostalgia, pure and simple. one writing teacher criticized my writing as “maudlin,” an appropriate charge when one is trying (too hard) to capture an poignant moment in the past.
13.
but even the most economically, well-styled deployment of lyricism–the lyrical “explosion”–still cannot help but draw attention to its own inadequacy. or can it?
14.
(Faulkner’s writing acutely demonstrates the possibility of this critique and has triggered my thinking here. but Zadie Smith’s fantastic essay “Two Paths for the Novel” backgrounds my thinking as well. it locates this problem of lyricism within recent literary history, identifying nostalgia as the central conceit of lyrical Realism, and proffering an alternative, the antirealist novel, in the vein of Robbe-Grillet, Burroughs and Beckett. it is notable, that in her typology, Faulkner could probably fall into both categories; he could be claimed by either vein. He is a novelist burdened simultaneously by time and space.)
15.
Coetzee offers one path: the barest language, the most effect. but he is lyrical sometimes, even if his lyricism is wrapped around irony.
16.
maybe it is not an issue: not lyricism itself, or even nostalgia. no, it is what is buried in that nostalgia: the desire for language to re-create something, for an Ideal language to redo the real. for story to subsume.
17.
(think of poor Quentin: he wants the telling to make it so, to make it have happened. he kills himself for it.)
18.
am I (should I be) using fiction to reach for that impossible home, that house built of language? how do I give up this embedded, deep-down need for nostos?
19.
it must mean new language, new intent. but what could these be?
20.
or should I just not worry: nostalgia, the impossible generative, these failing gestures: should they just not overwhelm? should they just be careful? language itself is real enough–why not surrender to that, and stop worrying about the world. is the answer in the narrow trace, the occasional impossible? why not just be careful in use, sparing.
21.
so: in moderation.
22.
or something else?
