The vigil the night in prison writing on the walls the nameless scratching

names. Writing as a mode of vigilance, a venturing forth into the crypt.

Beguiling the night of its darkness with light, writing of the disaster is the
penultimate impossibility. And yet it is needful, and fitting to do so in spite
of a language that does not suit the task.
“write in the thrall of the impossible real” (38) Blanchot notes, reminding
us that the writing imperative (and language---its medium) is a slavery,
giving rise to the servitude of the scribomaniac. Moreover, language is ever
in thrall to itself, nonetheless constantly disservicing itself. If the vigilance
of language can be said to take place, where can we locate it? Place, an
irrelevancy, is born away by the disaster. In “Writing the Disaster,” Maurice
Blanchot says “there is no future for the disaster, just as there is no time
or space for its accomplishment,” (2) thereby dislocating and de-
temporalizing his text. The disaster reverberates a homelessness---non-
temporal and removed from the most basic of questions: when? Where?
Does Blanchot merely vocalize the explosion of space or time, events for
which we cannot hold him responsible? Or does he actively smash these
concepts? Could we hold his text guilty? Or rather, is it the disaster which
bears the guilt of carrying away our most trusty philosophical notions,
carrying away even their opponents: the skepticism and nihilism which
stood us in good stead, also falling away, falling apart with the disaster?
And the disaster exculpating itself, bearing away the guilt which we would
like to ascribe to it.
“Know what has happened, do not forget, and at the same time never will
you know.” Maurice Blanchot’s “Writing of the Disaster” is devastating,
hard to locate. It does not belong to the body of post WWII literature
composed of easily identifiable memoirs, autobiography or political history.
Ironically it bears similarity to these categories. It is an intensely personal,
spiritual undertaking which becomes a very dark night of the soul, yet
blanchot rarely yields to the temptation of speaking in the first person
voice. It is rooted in historic events, and yet undermines common historical
understanding of these events. It is charged with the question of the
political, but exposes the dangers of reducing events to the purely
mechanical or inevitable function of history. To view it as a work of art,
merely on the basis of the stylistic elegance would pollute blanchot’s
motives. He says, “there is a limit at which the practice of any art becomes
an affront to affliction” (83) to dwell on the text’s artistic merits would be a
grievous insult to suffering. But the art of blanchot beguiles, even to the
point of obscuring its own artfulness. And so, despite its lean burnished
beauty as a work, we cannot respectfully call it anything perhaps, but
writing. And even that is presumptuous. The question stands: is writing
possible after the disaster? “Writing the disaster” further eludes definitive
categories in its very nature as a book. Blanchot does not write about the
disaster in any journalistic sense. He writes of the disaster, and more
oftenof the impossibility of writing of the disaster or even writing anything
at all. WTD constantly undermines its own bokness, its very status as a
literary production at every moment. To speak of it as a work, in any other
sense than the most provisional and hesitant sense, seems to show that we
have missed the point. It is more than a writing, or even an anti-writing.
It’s a text loaded with contradiction, the very paradox of its being as a
text. According to blanchot a book has for its being a “noisy, silent
bursting” (124). This being is always “being violently exceeded and thrust
out of itself” and so “gives no sign for itself save its own explosive
violence” (124). To say blanchot problemetizes his own text is
understatement, or inaccurate. The text problemetizes itself, it outraces
definition, it explodes traditional ways of regarding a book. How can we
avoid falling into “the passive kind of reading which betrays the text while
appearing to submit to it, by giving the illusion that the text exists
objetive” (101)? And so we act as if, as if there were a text, for the sake of
discourse? Or do we do active violence to the text, a violence which creates
text? Indeed productive reading “produces text” (101). Or do we escape
this active/passive problematic, yielding to “passivity’s reading” which is
without joy or comprehension—the “nocturnal vigil” (101)? How could we
possibly read of the disaster with joy? How could we comprehend the
incomprehensible? How as active readers could we re-create the disaster,
an ultimate irreverence? Unify the shards of history, totalize it, name it?
The danger of nomenclature: to name and speak of the disaster already
assumes a false unity and a misprision. How can we allow, as passive
readers, the disaster to assume the false aspect of a unified whole? All
these pitfalls threaten us. We assault the graves of the dead by our banal
attempts to recall horrors we do not cannot know. And what of the life of
the text independent of author? The activity of the text—a degree of
autonomous independence from its author. The detachment of the author
who says “did I write that? What did I mean . . . did I mean anything at
all?” the slavery to writing connects the author too intimately with the text,
yet distances. The text belongs to no one. No one is responsible: no author
chooses to write. But can the extreme political potential of the text, make
such a detached or irresponsible attitude extremely dangerous? Yes, more
fundamentally, the act of writing is violence. Violating all and no one, a
text is fragile and crafty. It can easily burn into nothing, the victim of book
burning or obscurity, vanishing as though nothing had happened. As
though its violence did not occur. Writing
fragments, morcellates, rips: “tearing of the shred—acute singularity,
steely point” (46), skewering thought on its steely barbs. To write on
blanchot is further impeded by the danger in quoting him, ripping
fragments out of their context. And yet the aphorisms can live on their
own, and demand to be read, reread and studied fragmentally. Difficult to
take WTD as a whole. By liberating a quote from the text, I risk severing it
from the whole. But I know no other way to unpack the layered complexity
of each line—not to mention each word—and so, I quote, at the risk of
barbaric manhandling.
Blanchot is ever self-effacing and yet presides as the bearer of bad tidings,
and I could not help wondering who is it that shoves such horror in my
face? Who can I blame? To speak of, or to write on WTD is difficult. So it
should be. We talk to easily of suffering, of events we do not know, can
never know. We bandy about clichés with which we hope to show ourselves
as concerned, deeply sensitive beings. We make a carnival of our
ignorance. Blanchot exposes the utter puzzle of even beginning to talk
about the disaster. His text conjures the most paradoxical of feelings. At
once I was struck. How to describe this lightning? Words like gloom, grim,
dark creep into my head. At first, I could not utter them. To do so would be
to expose the complete inadequacy of these terms. Indeed blanchot
cautions against all words---they carry excessive theoretical freight. But
even silence seems profane, and I yield to shabby phrases composed of
words not my own.
Given the difficulty of writing the disaster, of the disaster, or about
blanchot's work--or the even greater difficulty of remaining silent---i will
try to draw out passages which gripped me by the throat, terrified me,
shook me up. One of the most pervasive themes in WTD is the
degeneration of language after the disaster. it is the "ruin of words" (33)
that assails us. The ruin is further confounded by our lack of any other
medium to express what has happened. Memory relies on words. How do
we respond when the tools of memory become the tools of a lie, a fictive
remembering which dismembers the integrity of what has happened---the
integrity of the disintegration (morbid), so to speak. To want to write: “an
absurdity.” Not to write: “negligence.” In approaching the text stylistically,
we find it appears divorced from all premeditated structure or self-
conscious technique. And yet the style coheres in its simple complexity, it
coheres in its simple complexity; it coheres masterfully. The coherence of
the fragmentary disorder mimics the coherence of the disaster; or rather
the incoherence which sticks adamantly to the psyche, torturing it,
demanding synthesis and comprehension where none is possible. Through
word order reversals,
oxymoronic word juxtapositions, repetition, and deliberate italicization of
certain passages, Blanchot allows WTD to emerge as a naïve yet beguiling
tour de force. And an oddity among books. Its very strangeness as a
philosophical text which refuses to be philosophical, imposing order and
contriving dialectics, emphasizing the disintegration of thought after the
disaster. Indeed, thought is disaster.
Blanchot relies on the trope of word order reversals: demise writing,
writing demise, or “desire of writing, writing of desire” (42) but
immediately discredits the value of these reversals. “let us not believe we
have said anything at all with these reversals” (42). He denies that these
are mere plays on words, or that these terms coincide, but asserts we live
them together “in the obscurity of the interim” (42). Desire is a nondesire,
a “powerless power that traverses writing—just as writing is the desired,
undesired torment which endures everything, even impatience” (42). To
think these aporias is headache inducing. The contradictions massacre our
sense of propriety of logic and simple cause and effect relations. Logic,
limit, causality, place, time---all born away by the disaster. Writing post
mortum. Thinking in this way jars every preconceived notion about
language. The text violates, traumatizes. Blanchot’s syntax has an
interesting effect. The repeated use of the colon carries the impact of
causal relations. This: (therefore) that. Thoughts produce new thoughts
that illustrate,emphasize and restate. But often blanchot’s use of the colon
has the opposite effect. By separating two condradictory thoughts by a
colon, blanchot twists the productivity of thought. It regresses: instead of
spawning new thought, ideas kill off eachother.
How much do these thoughts require, insist on the numbing of sensitivity?
If to think the disaster one would be borne away by it (along with the
chance of putting it into words), is not our thought crystallized imitations,
parodic—a mockery? And so, do we think or write about the disaster at all,
or rather, something else, something horrible no doubt, a crude mock-up,
but not the disaster itself? The disaster is too vast to bear the limit of its
own name. furthermore, how can we say anything at all of the disaster
without exposing a crudity of spirit—a lack of conscience? The knowledge
which demands that we “accept horror in order to know it’ (82) exacts us
from complicity, however reluctant.
Whence the primacy of knowledge? In our acceptance of horror there is the
double assault of totalization and quantification. As though numbers could
delimit a suffering so multiple, so infinite, and so intense. To say so many
millions died does not get at it. Mathematical arrogance: the attempt to
define and delimit the infinite in the attempt to locate origin. To call it pain
is ridiculous understatement. The words expose themselves to be less than
nothing, not even lines, strokes of pen. Page after page of print,
irrelevancies. Less than ink. Blanchot also makes use of contradictory
adjectives in his descriptions. Noisy silence. Possible impossibility.
Unrepresentable representation (118). Mortal, immortal (119). Or such
prescient inanities “daytime insomniac” (121). The words sit on the page in
uncanny marriages. The quirky couplings irritate and jostle the brain. They
grate on the meanings, reduce the defined to splinters. Nothing remains,
but what remains without remains. The disaster’s negative fruition.
Blanchot’s style verges on the epigrammatic, and he never apologizes for
the confusing Confucian fragmentariness of his prose. He writes cryptically,
then writes on the cryptic in fertile moments loaded with irony. He both
undermines and vindicates his text, only to mock his own pretense at
attempting to achieve anything. Blanchot calculatingly undermines any
attempt at interpretation, deciphering, or uncrypting the text, yet
demonstrates how its very cryptic quality is contingent on the confusion of
the reader and his or her resulting attempts to decode. He locates in
cryptic language “cavernous places where words become things” which are
“inaccessible to cryptanalysis” (136)—and yet “deciphering is required to
keep the secret” (136). He injects the infinite into his prose and gives
assent to infinite interpretations: “the translation is infinite” (136). Petrified
language thus makes an offering of itself to our deciphering, and promises
the indecipherable “rich in what it cannot say” (136). That is to say, what
lives, shrivels at the touch of the pen. We are left with always the text
unsaid, the untextable. The disaster—what remains to be said, after all is
said. With irony (and what part of the text is not drenched with irony?),
Blanchot begins “what Plato teaches us about Plato” (34)---and for a
moment I was stirred to mirth. How easy to assume Plato teaches us about
truth, knowledge, something universal, some stony ediface of reality, or at
least the republic. Blanchot reduces Plato to Plato. Plato does not even
teach us about Platonism---that being something entirely different---but
teaches us about Plato. In the cave, death “arrives from the outside into
the words of the philosopher as that which reduces him in advance to
silence” (35). Death penetrates the words, contaminates them. The
philosopher who relied once on the medium of communicable speech, is
struck dumb. To say anything becomes impossible. Writing is what
remains, and perhaps does not remain. “He wrote, whether this is possible
or not, but he did not speak. Such is the silence of writing” (100). The
state of aphasia---the shock renders speechless, yet implores the dumb to
write. Writing that begins with the impossibility of articulation--- perhaps
this is the only writing of the disaster. Again: the shock of the disaster
gives birth to dumb writers who scribble away because of their silence.
The desire to write hides a multiplicity (or an utter lack?) of desires, and
language becomes “a contaminated process” (136). What are those
desires? The desires of the western philosophical tradition which divides
into binaries, the colonization and appropriation of the other in a moment
of ideological blindness? Making the incomprehensible, comprehensible?
Manhandling, manipulating a text? But is not all reading and writing
explosive, destructive? Blanchot is aware, very aware of the violence of his
text. He strips his text of pretension, uncovering the limitless pretension of
writing.
Blanchot reveals his concern for the “dangerous leaning towards the
sanctification of language” (110). A danger of romanticism, and
furthermore of all religions? And quite importantly, a danger of philosophy.
Blanchot indicts Heidegger who sanctimoniously locates language as “the
house of being,” and even levinas who “accords special value to speaking”
(110). This moment of surrender represents a leap of thought which
sanctifies language. Blanchot finds this leap---which even levinas makes---
a dangerous jumping to conclusions. He goes to levinas, in a moment of
accord, agrees that language is “in itself already skepticism” (110).
Skepticism being “gaiety without laughter” (76)---a neutralizing irony
which accomplishes nothing. A sort of religious solemnity which binds the
author to the text and spawns a slavery. Without laughter the thought
sinks in its solemnity. The vigil, the surrender to the night without
darkness. Language, infiltrated by death from the start, as its own
requiem, forever singing its own demise: demise writing, writing demise.
Ever present in his text is an extreme self-awareness and self-depreciation
as a (non)philosophical text. Blanchot’s sense of self-mockery allows the
text to diminish itself. He writes lean, sparse unpretentious (all writing as
pretense, pretending) prose. He is always gesturing away from an
ontological tradition which was carried away with the disaster. It no longer
bears weight. Unlike levinas who overtly states his separation from the
tradition, blanchot is more subtle, or less programmatic about his
divorcement from the tradition, and at once, more emphatic, and more
deeply exiled from the tradition. And while he is entwined in the language
of philosophy, he ties it into knots with concentrated dexterity. His text
moves with an unprecedented gravity. The disaster was heretofore unsaid,
and remains so. Yet in the attempt to say it, he undoes western
philosophy, and furthermore undoes himself. For blanchot, even levinas is
stuck in the tradtition and not radical enough. Blanchot assays the
unthought of thought, necessitated by the disaster. In sweeping away the
philosophical rubble, the very language of discourse must be looked at
critically. The atrophy of western thought; it wastes away leaving
fragmentary writing—emaciated and sickly, perhaps, but finally free of the
weight of the past? Or rather, is fragmentary writing so dense, so
compacted and tight as to create only an illusion of a simple skeleton freed
from the tradition? Ironically, every word blanchot uses, has manifold
resonances from within the very tradition that was borne away by the
disaster. He is very aware of this, and he submits this within the text again
and again as evidence of the text. One might ask, how successful is his
attempt to think away from the tradition? Does he rely too heavily on the
disaster as a moment of inevitable point departure? Is it compelling
enough to be taken seriously? Does he overestimate the political
devastation of language by positing an inextricable degenerative relation
which become absolutist, apriori, or similarly rigid---imitating the very
pontifical attitude of the western tradition he attempts to think against or
beyond? A tradition which he writes to be a no longer valid, possible, or
pertinent mode mode of thought, yet lurks within his own text nonetheless.
Does he fall into the tyrannizing power which he takes as a departing
point? And yet, he is a renegade, self-ostracized and excommunicated from
that schema. His style revolts, demolishes, is demolished; he resists
succumbing to the pitfalls of logic, determinism, binary oppositions. His
concentrated tongue in cheek self-depreciating writing is always very
aware of that danger. It is because of that danger that he must write.
Blanchot undertakes the project of undermining every basis for the
presumption that language has meaning. He goes to the instinctive notion
that the etymology of a word will both locate an ordinary meaning and
endow words with unassailable significance. Double danger: trusting the
vitality of language as a shelter, as something natural, and trusting the
history of language as a “sacred depository of all lost or latent meanings”
(97). and then is "nature" not just another imposition? and language--the
crude tool with which we naturalize that other than nature? he locates "zeal
for etymology" with a "quest for an original secret held by a first lost
language"-- a secret which "handily justifies the writing imperative" (119).
the predominating question of the text: why, how can we write? the writing
imperative operates on the presumption that man must disclose the secret
which he holds separate from all others. but it is precisely his relation to
the other which is the secret (if there is a secret), a secret which "meaning
hides" (120). the secret points to his pre-original primal scene of
disintegration--a cyclonic event which takes place outside of temporality:
anterior (always posterior) to anteriority. it is a cyclone most un-natural;
nature being irrelevant to the disaster. The cyclone swallows meaning. His
writing style is cyclonic. He touches on ideas with whirlwind brevity, moves
on rapidly to another thought, and allows the ideas to contradict, destroy
themselves. Always moving, the multiple fragments of text, the shrapnel of
western thought whiz past leaving no space for elaboration. And yet in his
text mediation prevails. His work is an exercise of refined concentration:
achieving deliberate collapse—fragmenting into millions of discrete
particles, like the pillar of salt which reaches instantaneous disintegration.
The text happens disastrously. A disaster unto itself. Behind the question of
writing and his technique: the disaster. The occulocentricism of our
metaphors, even etymology. Could the atrophy of thought be a movement
away from light, a wasting away in darkness? The materiality of language
is embedded in the most innocuous of words. Which raises the question of
etymology. Are not words guilty? Exculpating themselves, deceiving each
other in webs of meaning.
The disaster is what remains to be said after all is said: it is what “remains
without remains (the fragmentary)” (33). Maurice Blanchot’ phrase carries
the resonance of the ashes, anonymous and desecrated ashes. These
sterile words are all that remains of they who do not remain, who were
denied even their last remains. How wrong it would be to conflate the
disaster with other moments of fragmentation. How impossible not to do
so. Blanchot even speaks of the concurrent Gulag experience as a part of
the disaster (82-3). “How possible is it to read the disaster as synecdoche
for every moment of complete disintegration—pogroms, the inquisition,,
every act of genocide, every death of a starving child? But also how
completely wrong to do so. To lump all horrors into one horror---or allow
one horror to represent all horrors (or one disaster to represent all
disasters)---robs the disaster of its singular (not particular) uniqueness.
Every finite suffering subsumed under the term the disaster also fails to
capture the infinity of pain in the translation of the words, disrespecting
those who have suffered. The disaster—horribly divisible into infinite small
sufferings. Augustinian infinitizing of the disaster could not begin to say it.
Grotesque subdivision—disastrous quantification. The terms self-destruct.
By eclipsing all other words in their momentary pretense of unity and
wholeness, they tyrranize.
He wields the injunction “do not forgive. Forgivenessaccuses before it
forgives” (53). and so does bitterness become the act of utter kindness? If
to forgive is to accuse, and thus to make irredeemable, irreparable—what is
it to refuse to forgive? Does it open up the possibility of redemption or
reparation? Or does it short circuit, and recoil into impossibility? Does not
the very act of refusing to forgive accuse itself, independent of an outside
forgiver-accuser? Yielding something putrid, guilt-laden, nonetheless? So,
we must flee from both forgiving (accusing) and also flee from fleeing?
There is no refuge, no land. The contamination springs from the multiplicity
of self-interested desires which occlude their own self-interest. In not
forgiving do we not merely try to reconfigure our self as the non-
accuser, an a compassion which transcends mercy. At root is an
indefatigable pride---a narcissism which shows itself in every self foiling
attempt at com-passion, suffering with the other?
Suicide looms with the disaster (because of the disaster?) as an ultimate
impossibility. Suicide is where passivity takes action, in the realm of the
forbidden. It is the “faceless secret”---separate from all projects, all
knowledge, all thought. Eloi eloi lama sabachtani? It “warns us that
something rings false in the dialectic, by reminding us that the child still to
be killed is the child already dead and that thus, in suicide—in what we call
suicide—nothing at all happens” (69). Suicide “demonstrates the
undemonstrable: that in death nothing comes to pass” (70).
what does blanchot mean by the disaster? He says it “would be beyond
what we understand by death or abyss” (119). it is the “experience none
can undergo” (120) resonating Nietzsche's untergehen. Blanchot intones
“when all is said what remains to be said is the disaster” (33)---and so this
book is nothing but a skirting around what refuses saying.
Writing as an art. How do we comport ourselves towards writing when the
disaster descends? Blanchot speaks of life in the camps. He notes the
concerts which were sometimes held there, and the numbing forgetfulness
that music has the power to conjure. He goes on: “there is a limit at which
the practice of any art becomes an affront to affliction” (83). how can we
begin to address the burgeoning film, theater, and literary genres which
seek to encapsulate, objectify the disaster as art? To grossly capitalize on
the disaster: make an industry out of Auschwitz? One might argue, is not
art of this sort, the most immediate way of communicating the disaster, so
that it will not be forgotten? Danger of dangers: every (artful, artificial)
word we speak irreverences the unspeakable. Silence becomes
complicitous. And so we stand naked and inept. Notre musique, and the
silent footage of bombs dropping. Hiroshima mon amour and the mangled
children.
Blanchot's discussion of hunger relocates the disaster within the most basic
human needs, reverberating the materiality of language. Hunger is
confounded by futility in the camps. The breakdown occurs when “dull,
extinguished eyes burn suddenly with a savage gleam for a shred of bread”
evn when “there is no longer any point in nourishment” (84). the gleam
“does not illuminate anything living”---not the will to survive, not the
persistence of the human spirit, not the strength of animal need, not
anything. The dying gaze n longer allows hunger “to be related in any way
to nourishment” (84). “in this ultimate moment when dying is exchanged
for the life of bread,” (84) need dies. “and need exalts, it glorifies---by
making it into something inhuman (withdrawn from all satisfaction)--the
need of bread which has become an empty absolute where henceforth we
can all only ever lose ourselves” (84). This passage wrenched my heart—
exposed me, my gluttony, my struggles, my hunger. Blanchot's language
stripped me of my defenses. Unworthy, as kafka's hunger artist.
How can we begin to compare the experience in the camps with our
modern society of waste and hyperconsumption, where nourishment is no
longer? But we have no other frame of reference. Eat from boredom, for
entertainment, socializing, neuroses, never hunger. Throw away so much.
Eat too much. Waste means little to us, abundance less. Likewise, words
cease to nourish. We famish for meaning despite the deluge of words. We
do not understand, cannot undergo.
Blnchot positions pimal scenes towards the end of his book. He adds the
significant syntax. The scene is uncertain, followed by a question mark. It
occurrs (hides) within parentheses a parenthetical primal scene.
Sometimes the scenes occur textually in italics—an effect which distances
and encapsulates them: they happen as a dream separate from the text.
Perhaps the daydream (nightmare?) of the text itself?
The first primal scene occurs in a moment of extreme intimacy between
author and reader. Blanchot seductively beckons us to him in his whispering
italicized print “you who live later, close to a heart that beats no more,
suppose, suppose this: . . . “ (72). He breaks into a description of a child
looking into the sky. The child realizes the nothingness not beyond and is
suffused with such happiness, such a “ravaging joy” (72) that he
forevermore will live in the silence of this secret. The portrait is brief but
real, gripping in its psychological exploration. The child is ravaged by the
nothing. Could this be the first step in the shedding of myth---the
realization of nothing in the darkness of the sky? What is the meaning of
this identifiable child? Is he the child always being killed in the preceeding
passage? Is he the child that we once were, or perhaps will come to be? Is
he the young self-absorbed Narcissus?
In another primal scene, Blanchot glides into the myth of Narcissus with
the preface “what is there that isn't narcissistic?” (125)In language, which
is always self-effacing, narcissism is insidiously abundant. Every act of self-
abasement, asceticism, “absolute withdrawl into the void” (125) abounds
with narcissism. Every attempt at non-being belies an active being.
Narcissus does not recognize himself, but an image. The “surface
proximity” dissolves the “dissolution of the imaginary” which is death. And
death's unstated presence in the water's “shimmering of limpid
enchantment” (126) ravishes him. The myth is signal without significance,
myth of fragility, transparent mystery. And yet blanchot elicits the myth's
(imagined) import to be the possibility of self-creation (destruction) in
regard (or disregard) for the imagined self. An image which does not
pertain to the being ever illusory. No such “I”! Narcissus sees the “visible
in the invisible” (134). And the schism of the self and the imagined self,
unrelated to the being, prevents “sheer visibility” and “drags
everything . . .into a confusion of deire and fear” (135). Much as the
disaster bears away the possibility of communicating the disaster. The self
is submerged in the pool. The discrete appearance of being undoes
being---”undoes this me” (The Step Not Beyond, 69).
the self is borne into confusion, or into a former state of selflessness. Is
this scene—a scene where nothing really happens—a disasterous scene
where the self dissolves, breaks down—a primal reenactment of the
disaster? Is blanchot positing the disaster as pre-temporal? Or does it
annul time, or the possibility of viewing the disaster within a chronology? Is
time borne away, along with selfhood, even in the most ironic sense? He
calls it a primal scene. A rape? Could this be a psychological event, the first
glimpse of the abyss---the disaster within, or the nothing within when the
disaster befalls us? Some kind of terrible mistake embedded in the pattern
of everything, renderring the world un-organizable? A terror written in
every cell, every atom? And a terror terrible in every old testament and
post-genocidal sense? A sort of an original impovrishment echoing the fall
from grace? But an impovrishment beyond volition, a scene of discovery
which is not a sin? But the disaster does not have a future (2), so how
could we be harmed? And yetmaimed by this book, sent to hell.
When Narcissus looks into the pool, and sees the image of self, internalized
self dissolves in the very uncanniness of the unified image. It echoes a
modern and universally experienced uncanny “this is not me, this image
has nothing to do with me” feeling vis-a-vis the mirror the pre- nervous
breakdown moment of self-disintegration. The melancholy solipcist in tears
before the mirror which assaults us with the lie of self, a finite being. The
disintegration occurs ironically at the sight of the strange unicity of the
image. The integrity of the image is a glassy mirage, subject to shattering.
It prompts the primal recognition of the dis-unity of being. The image
alienates being, reduces it to nothing. And yet is not the humanistic
opposite an even greater lie, pretending a unity of beings wedding a utopic
vision of integration with others who are always totally other, not-me either.
And so alienated, there is no peace.
Blanchot's fragmentary writing style is undeniable infectious. The
devastating failure of language implies the inconceivability of ever speaking
in sentences again. The degeneration of language runs throughout
twentieth century literature and philosophy and points to questions about
the functioning of the mind in relation to language.blanchot's primal scene
where self and language fall apart, implies a very fragmented psyche, or
rather, the fragmentary functioning of the mind. Do we think in sentences?
Is thought not often too diverse, too multiple and impressionistic for
sentence structure? Is not sentence structure an imposition, or an
affectation belonging to a mentality which seeks to order and delimit the
world? The disaster has “broken every limit” (1). is not the sentence
frgment and the nonsequitur a more primal mode? But blanchot would be
wary of a naïve optimism seeking to return to an idyllic state fragmentary
thinking. We return, if there is a return, with utmost fragility—vanquished
by the disaster. The return is the imperative of the disaster, but it is the
disaster which prevents a return.
How much does the text rely on the real event of the disaster? How much
are the terms too other-worldly, transcending any physical or ontological
correlations? Blanchot speaks of hunger, of cold, of trembling. How much
language relies on the primal experience, even when claiming to transcend
physical existence. A materiality of language which relies too heavily on the
isolated experience of the individual, so that we will never know. “Never
will you know.” While we cannot know the disaster, how does what we think
we know of the disaster rely on our own personal experience of
devastation, physical or psychological, which we use as a basis for
imagining the disaster?
Jerusalem wanted a political savior. Is it not dangerous to allow language to
become our self-fulfilling politicized messiah? A danger when language
becomes political, but it can never be anything other than intimately
political Blanchot interrogates the messianic hope “which is dread as well”
(142): “if political thinking becomes messianic in turn, this confusion, which
removes seriousness from the search for reason (intelligibilit) inhistory---
and also from the requirement of messianic thought (the realization of
morality)---simply attests to a time so frightful, so dangerous that any
recourse appears justified: can one maintain any distance at all when
auschwitz happens? How is it possible to say auschwitz has happened?” It
happens in the present, and we cannot maintain a distance. It violates us.
When any recourse becomes justified---any slaughter before the messianic
hero (nti-christ?) who comes to save europa, distance becomes impossible.
With messianic political thought, seriousness dissolves in the intoxication of
the melodramatic “enchantment of profundity” (133). Blanchot repeats “the
great audacity in thought consists in daring to be sober” but cautions
against the peril of excessive sobriety: “the tempting rigor of order” (133).
Has not nietzsche taught us that inebriating powers of thought and
language blance on the precipice before insanity's abyss?
Is the disaster natural? Whence nature? Nature was borne away by the
disaster, or was it illusion all along? In Blanchot, death is a backdrop, ever-
present and defying presentation. Death is often described in terms
of nature: it is natural to die: death reunites us with nature. Can we know
this? While death remains problematic: “there is no death now or in the
future” (69)---and is ever a fraud which the fraud of suicide exposes,
cancer which is symbolic of the “refusal to respond” (70) does more. As a
political phenomenon which “destroys the very idea of a program” (86), it
becomes a “derangemnt more threatening than the fact of dying” (87) by
giving back to death the impossibility of its being accounted for.
Blanchot uses repetition with a cunning which exposes repetition to be
impossible---repetition being a stylistic illusion which belongs to the art of
the rhetoricians and logicians. But in reading Blanchot the deja vu feeling is
undeniable. He always seems to be echoing himelf, not to mention the
thoughts of the philosophical past. The question of repetition and its
impossibility recalls kierkegaard's meditation on repetition. Blanchot's text
returns to certain phrases, words, and ideas, but invests those repetative
refrains with a unique power which finds no precedence and does not brook
repeating. The utterance of a word—anditsmeaning--is never the same. It
bears a presence which belongs always to a moment never recapturable.
And would not repetition be emblematic of stagnant thought? Blanchot
asks, if going to the edge of thought is “possible only by changing to
another thought? Whence this injunction: do not change your thought,
repeat it, if you can” (4). And while history is shattered by the disaster,
words nevertheless carry a theoretical cargo in history. Blanchot advises
that this theoretical freight yields resonances potentially dangerous, and so
words to avoid (repeating) include “finally all words” (87).
in writing this paper I scribble a note to myself---advice I aquired in
philosophy 100 class: be wary of the use of every, never, all, and also
always. But with the disaster every rule falls apart, and interestingly
blanchot uses, and repeats, these disturbingly all-inclusive words. They
speak a finality of thought; they close off and limit. The threat of the
disaster has “broken every every limit” (1), but the writing of the disaster
seems at times to reinstate limits at every turn. Could it be that blanchot,
in using such totalizing language at times, is striving to show the emptiness
and futility of those very terms, exposing them as a farce, in its attempts
at seriousness, becomes all the more ridiculous? How are we to take this
seeming contradiction? Could it be that in proliferating limit after limit often
to the point of contradiction, the limits cancel each other, growing and
killing like cancer? And so blanchot in madly erecting limits, turns out to
have built a house of cards which collapses insantaneously.
Exploration of the question of death in Maurice Blanchot's The Step Not
Beyond and Writing the Disaster is always a movement in the inerim---a
place of unceasing motion where all stops still, dies in life. The “still point
(=god) in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, is the centerless point around
which life runs circles, producing a Dante-esque concentric series of rings.
Eliot, as modernism's prophet of oblivion, delineated a paradoxical fixity
without center which bears similarity to the place not a place where the
disaster might be said to occur. Blanchot's expression for this interim “the
circle, uncurled along a straight line rigorously prolonged, reforms the circle
bereft of center” (2) exceeds eliot as the project of writing th disaster
would demand. Blanchot embeds each word with a paradox. The center is
no god. There is no center of chaos---could a center be possible? Could the
centerlessness ever find space for a center—however arbitrary, off- kilter,
de-centered it might be? Would it matter? In the step not beyond, blanchot
meditates on fear in relation to death: “the collapsed center of empty fear.
Fear, that which does not have death as its limit, even the infinite
death of others; nevertheless, I am afraid for the others who are afraid of
dying, who will die without me” (57-8).
Heideggarian being towards death is always in the foreground of Blanchot's
discussion of death. Blanchot quite viciously attacks heidegger at oints
(“the disaster takes care of everything” [3]), but nonetheless heidegger's
encounters with the thoughts of death and dying yield important
discoveries about the difference between thinking death and the actual
dying. Blanchot continues and radicalizes the interrogation of how we think
of death, and moreover how possible is it to think death in the first place.
Blanchot imports death to be the ultimate unknowable.
Simplicity of ignorance: when we speak of death, are we not being, to put
it crudely, presumptuous? Similarly, how can we speak of another's death?
We could say provisionally, with reservation, we speak of death for the sake
of discourse or exploration, but is there not already in the very utterance a
presumption that we know something about it? An appropriation implicit in
the most provisional of discourse which skirts irreverence, not in a christian
sense (however impossible it is to escape)? Is not the utterance of death,
made always and only by the living, a question? Death? Death has told us
nothing of death . . . not in any way to sanctify the word, or make it into a
mantra, or endow it with ultimate unspeakableness. But is not the speaking
of death utterly questionable? Writing as the space where utterance fails
and all writing is writing of death or away from death. The saying does not
defeat the said, but in mutual inadequacy they enter into relation. Relations
being ultimately futile.
Eliot's Unreal City in the wasteland. In The Step Not Beyond the city is
“completely foreign to the idea that one could die in it,” yet blanchot says,
breaking into the first person “i crossed it, as one passes distractedly over
the graves in a cemetary” (83). The city, always living, becomes a site not
of death, but of incessant dying---amass grave where the living are buried,
bury thems. Discussion of location (rare in Blanchot)---the city as the
interim—a da for the disaster. It is crucial not to conflate death with dying.
Ironic: as though the word
dying is any more precise, or any less totalizing. Heidegger draws out the
use of the word death to totalize dying, the corpse, the living person that
was, the memory of the survivors, into a unified concept. Not blanchot's
project but he moves with this in mind always. Never to conflate the corpse
with the person who was living, or my death with the death of any (and
every) other.
Blanchot's discussion of suicide. Pivotal question for this century. A political
act. Suicide as a statement. As not a statement—an attribution which
glorifies it—expands it to a greater meaning. Not a statement but an act.
Or a moment of ultimate inaction, total indecision. Suicide as suicide.
Nothing more, especially not a barometer of anything, but how to resist
imposing meaning on it. To be or not to be, a less important than being
towards the other, (never) a simple act of avoidance which displaces the
primacy of that relation with the narcissistic romance of thanatos. The
question of the da—gas chamber, an unreal city: a place (a there) where
there is not meaning, where meaning exterminates itself. And yet there is
no place for the disaster to take place (2). a place that is a now.
In the step not beyond blanchot describes suicide: “temptation of defiance
so prolonged and so clear (too clear) that it seems difficult— almost
embarassing to resist it” (97). the clear: clarity of the act itself confused
with the result of the act---a clearing away of the conscious “self which
promises too much. A baptismal promise a little too clear, to clarifying?
Limpid, serene to the point of distrustin its seeming transparency? A
transparency which dissembles, obscuring the total impenatrable opacity of
what is involved in the act of dying or the even double-ness of suicide
(simultaneous dying and killing). The transparency dis-assembles the
complexity of what resists dissemblin. Clarifies the unclarifiable. That we
still resort to metaphoric question of clarity. Sight, seeing unrelated---
occulocentric naivite, we see things clearly so to speak. Upon seeing, we
then act---also implying a logical linear temporality of deduction—not an
accurate description. The image of the pool gives narcissus a glimpse of
something clear, while “blurring this clarity limpidly” (134)! and so, is the
thought of suicide similarly limpidly blurry?
The thought of clarity, which wooould require dedeliberation, ignores the
spontaneity of hurling life into the abyss. When blanchot points to the
embarrassing refusal of the temptation to commit suicide, the
embarrassment implies a necessary acting before the other. Suicide
becomes a demonstration vis a vis the other as a form of communication
which relinquishes all communication in its finality. Non-suicide sends
another message. What is it? A stupid aquiescence to a life which is
unjustifiable? Persisting in life carries the import of complacency and
surrender---a submission to life which is altogether embarassing. We
become complicit with life's injustices in our passive submission to life.
The terms are watery and diffuse, too fluid, they resist fixity. Suicide: to
call it meaningless is already to assign it meaning. The meaningless gains
meaning in our quantificcation: by virtue of its lack. The easy and resolute
definition of this century as an age of chaotic meaninglessness. Death as
conceptualized always in physical terms. Deprivationpain or lacking pain.
being/lack of being. The materiality of thought. Thought as disaster. The
disaster which jostles every assumption, confuses and sets every system
askew. It carries away time, place, and language with its cyclonic
devastation.
The language question. In blanchot every word is a question. The infinte
question of the distancing device of the quotation marks which implies
“these are not my words!” in the essay “literature and the right to death” in
“the work of fire,” a work less cryptic but dense nonetheless, blanchot asks,
why write “in words which belong to everyone? Why not withdraw into an
enclosed and secret intimacy without producing anything but an empty
object and a dying echo?” (306).
Amid the chaos and the rubble of thought what is essential is our
comportment towards death, a question which is not easily transversed.
This imperative put forth by heidegger, blanchot sends hurling into the
abyss. We cannot respond. Rushing head first into death—as it would seem
in suicide—could be really a rushing into something entirely different than
(or perhaps all too close to) death qua death. And so suicide could be very
far removed from death. Or rather, while seeming to most actively embrace
death, suicide embraces something else. What? A certain mind frame? An
adolescent vision? A desire for origin? Blanchot locates suicide as the
moment of complete indecision. It occupies a nebulous between land.
Between what? The act which is a refusal to act. A passive resistance which
hurls passivity upon itself. The “decision of impatience” (98) that embraces
eternity in desparate attempt to unify “the eternal repetitions of that which,
dying, does not die” (98). or to enlarge, ennoble “the infinitely small of
death,” its less than nothingness—so miniscule (we die like ants— crushed
under the shoe of whom . . . ?! suicide an ultimate indiscretion, which
covers the indiscretion with fatigue and torment the anguish which begs
sympathy and covers over the killing. The survivors excuse and forgive the
suicide victim (murderer?) and we are reminded of the complexity, the
non-forgiveness of the forgiver. To forgive is to accuse (disaster, 53).
catholicism is not so timid to forgive the suicide—the dead soul goes to hell
as though they'd not enough hell, living hell for a lifetime. The indiscretion
of suicide as a moment when the self is made utterly
discrete, finite—so tangibly bound up in a killable body as to become
negligible. Suicide as a moment of lucidity when one realizes how small one
really is. A clarity which cannot leave one untouched. A clarity which
swallows up whoever gazes gazes straight into it: burns the eyes: sizzles
them to the root, scorches, kills all visions of futurity. A thought which
cannot be thought if you plan to live to tell of it (why our descriptions are
so inaccurate irrelevant) suicide, as Virginia Woolf noted, is an event one
will never live to describe.
What comportment could reverence death most adequately? But why
should it be a question of reverence at all? Does it not deify death? By
reverencing the thought of death, do we vainly hope that it will instill
meaning to our lives in its utter finality. Death being akin to Benjamin's
idea of death as the climactic moment of the novel where meaning is born?
When does our comportment ever become adequate except in the very act
of dying—a culminating moment which nullifies all discourse and answers
every question in terms of absence. We cannot respond. This was the very
crux of the issue. “his response was not a response, he could not respond”
(82).
and furthermore when asked to respond—we proffer our works, our writing
our study as eveidence of our attempts to respond. But the search for
knowledge, according to blanchot, is simply a feeble alibi. We read books
on auschwit, he notes. Can we, do we fulfill the last wish of those in the
camps 'know what has happened, do not forget, and at the same time
never will you know” (82)? if knowledge is a fraud, what can the Writing of
the Disaster possibly convey? Perhaps the failure of language, a secret so
blatantly obvious (performed in every mundane utterance, every day) that
it goes unnoticed and we persist in our belief in knowledge. When blanchot
imparts this unsecret secret, does he give knowledge? Anti-knowledge?
Socratic wisdom? Or rather, disaster?
The question of murder which is the wrong comportment towards death,
but always also a fleeing from death. A sad stab at achieving immortality
through the decimation of others. An active killing which avoids, while
pretending to answer and conquer, the question of death. Complicity as the
passivity which is active, atrociously active. To condemn murder reveals
hidden motives: every accusation seeks self- aggrandification, an atempt to
absolve the self from the complicity, the guilt, we fear to be our birthright.
The trial which accuses from the start: contaminates the process. Blanchot
defies anyone to distinguish between death and murder “which nonetheless
must be separated” (71). how do we take this? Blanchot knowingly grates
on meanings, on accepted values.
He unsettles, disrupts our accepted foolhardy modes of categorizing,
thinking, coping, euphemizing. He ruptures our consciousness with the
“dead eternity” (71) of the child being killed. Life's contingency 'through
death and murder” on the fictive establishment of a relation with the past
which hides the eternal infans.
Death and our tendancy with comedy to lighten that which refuses all en-
lightenment, refuses all metaphoric light or darkness even. A night without
darkness (2). we clear the air with resolute chuckles, with dark humor, with
any morbid joke that will momentaril give the illusion that dying is ever
graspable. Laughter we choke down from fear. Might laughter not be the
best response, though admittedly a shabby a shabby one, to an aporia
which resists our attempts to unravel it? Laughter as a sign of defeat.
Defeat only pretending to know death. Going beyond the skepticism which
cannot laugh, but where to? A place where all is laughter, or rather a place
not beyond, or even anterior, a return, a retrogression to a primal scene, a
pre-original primal clarity? Could blanchot possibly be so naively utopic?
Blanchot utilizes heideggarian language of concealment: “we expose death
hurriedly, we bury it hurriedly” (100 the step not beyond). At this point he
recalls benjamin's description in “the storyteller” of our age as the ageof
the unpublic death: death is shipped away to nursing homes, morgues.
Incapable of dealing with the reality of death. Blanchot says something
very different from benjamin here. Death, for blanchot, is exceedingly
public. We rush to funerals, “these mocking ceremonies” (100) with excess
of mortal agitation—obsequious, grotesque lack of understanding.
Particpating in the rites of death and tricking ourselves into thinking we
bravely face death, know it. A self-enchantment 9an auto- deception?) of
lament—a melodrama which undercuts the gravity, the unknowableness of
death. Pretends to be death. It is the outward public ceremony that dying
becomes death, an event susceptible to finitude, easily compartmentalized,
put in a box and tucked a way. Dying renamed death is hidden, obscured,
buried. The without limit, the transitive of dying is ignored. We try to forget
it, shun the physicality of death, the odor, the tearing away of a beloved.
Hence also we distance ourselves from the ease with which an ill person
into death peacefulness. Could there be something to learn from the dying
of others, something which we ignore? How is it our asceptic attitude
towards dying, we deny important access to a better (though far from
complete) understanding of death. In blanchot's the step not beyond death
becomes the aim of all desire “in order that death, even as the death of
desire, is still the desired death (25). blanchot unites death and the law; he
says that the law is death wearing the face of the law. The law “kills
whoever does not observe it, and to observe it is also already to die” (25).
what does he mean by law---
political or ethical law? Does this correspond to heideggerian being towards
death, responsibility and the call of care or philosophical authority —a law
of western discourse that replaced christianity.
“Dying's difficulty comes in part from the fact that we think it only in the
future” in that thinking of things in the future is really to think them in the
past to come, we are thinking dying in the past. In thinking dying in the
past “we immobilize it in the form of death” (110). rob it of its becoming,
dying in the infinitive, in a present never past but always passing. We
paralyze dying. Does blanchot seek to reinstate or recover from the motion
of his dying in his texts? Or merely ask the question is it possible? Could
dying be said as a movement? The space between where discourse
happens, a necessary still point for the flux to pass? And yet the disaster is
centerless, without place (2).
in the step not beyond the word “morcellating” appears over and over. My
first question would be is that taken by the translator as a synonym for
fragmentary, a word that recurs in the disaster? But morcellating has an
interesting effect---and rather serious implications. We morcellate food into
bits to be eaten to be chewed and assimilated. Do we morcellate ideas with
a similar hope that these thoughts have nutritive value or potential? Do we
not presume too much, in cutting up thought and events into word-
morsels, easily manipulated chunks that violently rip away at the whole---
tearing apart a loaf into chunks which will undergo further destruction by
the mastication of sentences which grind the outside, the other, and hence
the self to a pulpy state of disintegration.
Blanchot's use in the disaster of the word fragment differs by the lack of
purpose and specificity in the fragment. There is no hope for meaning; the
hoped for nutriment of thought. It implies a shattering irreversible. The
pieces will not recohere. Nor do they have any usefulness. Blanchot's texts
have as undercurrent—what use to string together these bits, a collection
of poorly aligned fragments? And which, is founded on a “morcellating
repetitive demand” (88) seems to further destroy that which already comes
to us fragmented under the presumptuous and arrogant assumption that
the morsels will nourish. An assumption which is self- deception. The
morcellating imperative, blanchot calls akin to arepetative knock of the
traditional theater. The knocks, (a reference to the knocking at the gate in
Macbeth?) “that would seem to announce that something is going to
happen, while instead they reverberate in the empty tomb” (88, the step
not beyond). The futile clangor on the bars of a cell. The repetative clamor
of empty tins—the hunger of the unfed sounding in the vacuum silently.
His works function as an echo chamber into which he casts noises, strange
sounds, the unsounds of the text which echo and reverberate in a
continuum of unceasing layered sounds rippling through one another,
contradicting, harmonizing, blending, and then canceling. A negativity
beyond a negative theology. A document of cancellation which is
nonetheless an elegant pool of receding echoes merging and submerging
meaning in the confluence of meaningless sounds. By writing, he gives the
echoes life. They do not die, like the thought unwritten, impeded by a
language not one's own.
Silence, the only response to death. And so inadequate, so paralyzing.
Hence the writing imperative. This aporia—a circular conundrum which
intrigues blanchot as the question. The only sophisticated relevant
question. Is this not replicating the circular ratiocinations of the tradition he
claims was swept away by the disaster? Or rather, does he parody the
tradition and borrow its language in attempts to further dismantle it? Kill it?
The end of all writing being death. Writing which murders life, which
creates and preserves “life,” disastrously. Thought a disaster. The question
arises, what does the disaster have to with the world? Can blanchot's text
in any way coalesce with the “reality” or does it stand too distant, vague,
centerless? Does blanchot's text in any way coalesce with the “reality” or
does it stand too distant, vague, centerless? Does blanchot successfully
escape the binary? Or does he rather opt for passivity's passivity, allowing
the binary to dissolve of it's own accord, even if that gives rise to a long,
long vigil. Patience yields the “pockets” of language “where words
become things” (136). though inaccessible to cryptanalysis, the pockets
give us words that open, and do not open. Frustratingly, revelation hides
itself, disclosure beomes closure. To the question of “reality,” blanchot says,
“write in the thrall of the impossible real, that share of the disaster wherein
every reality, safe and sound, sinks,” (38) goes under.
Written may 1997 mary eng
the following are notes circa 2009:
ideas 20-9-09 to incorporate samuel beckett . . . or blanchot's the work of
fire, or genocides and human rights violations as they occur in present
day . . . kafka, and more writing on writing, the writing on the wall, the
prison etch, firewalls, censorship, legal and economic hurdles to education,
literacy, and expression . . .
march 09
Words like shackles, bleats, cries to be fed, cries for comfort, when
knowledge ever eludes, and love or succor, the last desire, so similar to the
desire for dissolution in death, dissolution in love, in the other. ****
As for words---corridors of lost books, prospero and the last year in
marienbad, and burning words, acid words, names, deciphering decoding
discriminating words, lost burnt, digitized, books alight, illuminated
manuscripts, preserve of the priors, privilege of learned classes, forbidden
to women, or slaves, literacy and genocide, words like blood to support life,
words to aid the dying.
**** as a second part, post trauma, to write, out of emptiness, as head
throbs and angst ties me to my cage, and then to imagine beckett in the
resistance. writing the resistance, mind/body dualisms, colonial ireland,
stupefactions, absurdities, french, and new silences more meaningful than
before, penury, the honest luck of being passed over, undead, the
ungassed, the vegetable smugglers, the certain death no matter whose, a
crony says the lost ones, and i'll wait at the endgame where the rubbish
bin's texts for nothing, good for nothing textes pour rien helped ferry me
across the great wordlessness only language and hunger could bring.
imposters imposition of question and the binary stamp links rechts, off and
now. it was a privilege, in december to wait out the mementos, with
eachother so keenly arraigned, in california, sitting calmly like the dna of
friends lost to other lands. there, and beckett gouged my eyes, or
mitigated the death of academia, which followed a death of god, and
preceded a death of physical safety. so little leave yet now to die, i wonder
what might, but the other in congo, obsession, obsess me, futile
penetrating gazes, the dachau sister last words, last look, critical code. to
ferry me to tomorrow, wherein i might help you out of your pain, the pain
wrapped around you so tightly like a bandage on burnt skin, submission. i
submit, obey, silently, i lie, i believe. i pretend to believe, that you might
give me another day of gulag hunger dysentery, death on an installment
plan, futility and one word on a wall:mute. forever mute to you the way
you'd take me mute and dying, or fighting and screaming, to remind you
that you too are alive in the hiroshima aftermath, and neither of us hang
from trees, in the horror of the blood noon reverie, and copulation's curse
but another pendulum's drift. moon struck us absurdly in the fancy of his
daytime hour, waiting for nothing with ashen words, and good fridays, and
another plath suicide,
matronymic, pater familias. unwrite me all these stories like a ball of yarn
unspun, unsay this mayhem upon us, undo this curse, philosophize beauty
back into existence when art was never a mistake, an affront to the dead
or undead. at finnegan's wake, be we drunk or dreaming clearly the
ameneusis was petered out by syllables and broke away. ev told me he
would walk the cold corners of the montparnasse. beckett, know of more
than blanchot. mysteries, biographies, and biographies die, one every 3.6
seconds of hunger, and get shipped home in body bags, and get written in
surname, name short verse on stone walls by forgetful people. could we
have a wailing wall for the congo, for bosnia, for the minds blasted through
torture in guantanamo, oscar grant oakland. if i wrote your name, might
we carry on another day to hear a song? music, an optimism, i can rarely
fake, a requirement of the new holocausts, soundtracks, machine gins,
killers, killers all. complicity/resistance binaries, ignorance. tales told by
fools, and no man's land, every possible cliche, in every tongue in lieu of i
love you. silence as gift, and there hungry on the mountain intoxicated by
air and wormwood, maniacal egotism gives a behest, encouraged by its
solipcisms, another breath of smoke. in the acid land of a techno rattle
where the good art bakes in the sun on the street and even blindness
cannot hide poverty from me, and what i have read, the telegrams
roosavelt ignored, as he sent ships back to wander the eternal diaspora,
like birds off land, climate refugees, the generations colonial output, health
and wealth of nations, and cleansing of an ethnos. a woman, i loved, as
keenly was to her that nonsense making me worthy of hate and therefrom
the silence of repression did not undo the nazikiss of it all, all i'm saying,
and i some kind of good german with friends speaking hate all over the
marketplace like senile sun-crazed lunatics in the outdoor asylum,
forgiveness welling up like a giant tear, until one day the bestial quality of
it all overtook me, and no more, flee on your donkey anne. herr doctor, i
know why poets put their heads in ovens, if you ask me the homicide is a
slow annihilation beginning with the willful star you sew to my arm's bare
flesh, tagged, tagged, genderized, hated, next in line, with a head on the
block, and furiously running on the hamster wheel to a certain death,
primate torturer, you. when you gave me the diploma,
reading"incomprehensible verbal pollution" and "crass, underhanded,
venomous, vampire" clearly i was wrong. to sit there as you sewed stars to
every corner of me, and told me i was "no fun" for not liking it, or that you
were lonely. how was i to help? forty days, or a year, i'm sickly running
straight into the certain holocausts of unknown era, and my rags, and
civilized poverty, have no meaning towards the evenings
fresh sapporo, and newest applications, and fossil fuels, marriages, money
matters, lipstick crises, etc. emptier than ever before, this word heap
cancelled out all language, and helped me towards a law of light and
sparks, and how i made it through last summer with caleb's barbed wire
arm and star of david, lebanon, and how i was almost human then. so
humanizing to have a friend, through this thicket of packet switchers and
compressed files and deleted numbers, when the friendship willed one
deeply into my mind and heart so that the night sky with diamond stars
promised maybe something better tomorrow, and fatigue, after all.
the animal faces await, so cutely tied up as before. i know i must fight
against the permanent adjustments, as the last came off bad, and surely
dylan thomas and his liver had enough. and we of him? and virginia to
learn greek? and tilda and sally, he would speak of us in our presence as if
we weren't there . . .
yes . . . off now to other wars, and there will be writing after writing and
after wars, and chomskies, and bliskis and spectrials and so stand new
ways to meter out the shortcode momentary reality. genocide. today. in
our hands. texting unicef thirst, texts for nothing, or little, but i love a lad,
and hope for the young, oh but slightly, as a scribe, and kafka's burnt
papers to keep us warm, at night, in sudan, and the fear of rape or death,
which worse?
the first part was written for a class with idit dobbs-weinstein in 1997 april.
i would like to expand it to include mind/body dualism obsessed, and
writing obsessed "texts for nothing" by samuel beckett, and look at both
the works in original french manuscripts. i would like to explore textual
nuances, as well as biographical mythologies of the artists/writers.
as a student of gulag literature and the literature of holocaust, i thought to
update the focus to include an understanding of writing on the web as
interconnected to the immediate atrocities of genocide, war, famine, and
ecocide as we now complicitously permit them to unfold. as a child dies,
how is the luxury of writing a affront to suffering? art, an "affront to
affliction"? is writing crime, or catalyst, irrelevant, or formative as
meditation?