This important 13th century Samaritan Pentateuch – the first five books of the bible and the only books in the Samaritan canon – retains evidence of continual use over centuries including inscriptions by its owners in the 15th and 16th centuries.
This opening shows clear traces of kissing, an act reserved for especially sacred passages, such as the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20.1-17)
Exhibition note for Samaritan Pentateuch, Abi Barakatah 1225, Palestine (historical region) CBL Heb 751 at the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin
Logos: The word he utters, the truth that it contains…
They are not kissing the vellum – the animal skin stretched and scraped, depilated, and boiled of its fat. The needlemarks from the skin, stretched on its frame and scraped, are still visible.
They are not kissing the calligraphy, even though the scribe, Abi Barakatah, was one of the most famous and exquisite calligraphers of the 13th Century.
They are not kissing the words of J, E, P, or D. E in this case – Exodus 20. E, who got their initial because they used ‘El’ for God, and Were Not Concerned with Priestly Matters.
Nor are they kissing R – the Redactor, who filleted and assembled the sections of the Pentateuch with paste and cuttings.
These letters! What visions of politics and power in that distant time and land they conjure!
My thesis is that the redactors of Genesis and Numbers have one overriding concern, that is for the prospects of the priestly corporation which they belong to, and which includes their northern brethren in Samaria.
Mary Douglas, Jacob’s Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation, OUP (2004)
Those sensitive, sensuous and reverent lips are touching and kissing the utterances of Moses, and by extension, for it is stated at the beginning of Exodus 20, God:
And God spake all these words, saying…
And yet they are kissing all. The route of transmission of those words to the reader is the route back for the kiss. Though a magician or theologian might say that the route of knowledge needn’t be the return route of divine intimacy.
When I kiss your lips, and we look at each other as if we could look at each other forever, at least until the next kiss, it is into that farthest, most intimate place we gaze. But it is also the lips we taste, and each other’s body that we hold so closely in that moment, and no other. And the smell of your hair, like grass.
The preservation of matter (or conservation of energy in other terms) and the transfer of information are always essential to get to the bottom of any subject or object or any thing that concerns us whatsoever*.
The connexion between the kissing of the page and God necessitates our entire field of humanities, and more besides.
In Eros and Magic in the Renaissance Ioan P Couliano covers the variety and intellectual history of Classical and Renaissance theories of love. How rays from the eyes communicate the image of the loved one via pneuma into the creation of a phantasm of the beloved, perceptible to the soul.
This leads him to quote 13th Century poet and inventor of the sonnet, Giacomo da Lentino:
HOW A WOMAN, WHO IS SO BIG, PENETRATES THE EYES, WHICH ARE SO SMALL
If we closely examine Bernard of Gordon’s long description of amor hereos, we observe that it deals with a phantasmic infection finding expression in the subject’s melancholic wasting away, except for the eyes. Why are the eyes excepted? Because the very image of the woman has entered the spirit through the eyes and, through the optic nerve, has been transmitted to the sensory spirit that forms common sense. Tranformed into phantasm, the obsessional image has invaded the territory of the three ventricles of the brain, inducing a disordered state of the reasoning faculty (virtus estimativa), which resides in the second cerebral cell. If the eyes do not partake of the organism’s general decay, it is because the spirit uses those corporeal apertures to try to reestablish contact with the object that was converted into the obsessing phantasm: the woman.
Ioan P Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, University of Chicago Press (1987)
Now, we can all laugh about this… but in that description is the recognition that any theory needs to account for the material transmission of information that leads to this object cathexis. And in that transmission are very deep matters indeed, much of science and psychology, and areas more generally that remain unfathomed and are still mysteries.
There are analogous issues in the nature of metaphor, another form of transference, which we can see in complex form in a diary entry by Rilke:
I invented a new form of caress: placing a rose gently on a closed eye until its coolness can no longer be felt: only the gentle petal will continue to rest on the eyelid like sleep just before dawn.
As the heat is transfered to the imperceptible petal, so God’s breath and the kissing of the manuscript intermingle, and somewhere in there, between petal, eyelid and heat transference, among the mysteries still to be resolved, are the kisses I treasure.
*Question: when information is lost in communication as per Shannon etc where does it go? I realise this is the subject of entropy, but I am dumb, and don’t quite get what the equivalent of thermodynamic equilibrium for information would be)
**This reminds me that I must post on the collapsing of distribution chains in media flows
Cycled up to the British Museum in the face of a bit of headwind for The Age of Stonehenge exhibition.
West from Waterloo Bridge
The recent Age of Nero exhibition had been a bit crap but this was excellent. Strong recommend.
The curation was superb. Yes a wall of axe heads can be moving and beautiful. The range of artefacts showed the extraordinary saltatory leaps in technical and cultural innovation in Europe, threaded round the development, domination and eventual desuetude of Stonehenge.
The whole was mysterious and beautiful. Exemplified by the extraordinary Nebra Sky Disk. No I didn’t take a picture. Go see it.
Figures with quartz eyes and detachable penises on a serpentine boat
Detachable penises! Dead beaker folk!
Beaker woman with child in swaddling protected with dog-tooth pattern of bones
Also lol aurochs were massive and scary. Stood another head or so above humans.
hi dere
Then went to the Museum Tavern. I always forget that it’s surprisingly beautiful inside, with a wonderful bar.
The Museum Tavern
So home, on the back of a now glorious tailwind, to a very basic but a very nice chick pea soup that had been cooking in the oven for eight or so hours.
Lowenhaupt Tsing’s use of the concepts of assemblages, time creation and contamination between humans, fauna and the environment contributed significantly to my enjoyment of the exhibition, which after all depicted people carving tools and history and gods and art out of the cosmos. The overlapping assemblages of stone, time, stars, bone and swirling mystic design, transforming to sun worship, bronze and gold should in ALT’s depiction not be seen as progression but a change in the assemblage of elements, and cadences, a new set of lithic, cosmic, and anthropological contaminations and influences.
So, yes, sorry for the bland post. Pepys this is not. But I had a surprisingly nice evening. And that is a thing to be celebrated.
Catching up on unread bookmarks from this year. This observation on Tacitus’ Germania reminds me that I’d like to read something on the origination of the decadence of civilisation trope – here ‘the corrupting influences of modern urban existence.’ – and its mutation and persistence through history:
In perhaps one of the more detailed early instantiations of the myth of the noble savage, the historian tacitly opposes his decadent fellow Romans to the rural, chaste, and freedom-loving Germanians, who — sheltered within their deep, primeval forests — have yet to succumb to the corrupting influences of modern urban existence.
In his book on historiography, History of Histories, Colin Burrow identifies a version of this nexus in Herodotus:
Another aspect of the East–West contrast, with a long future as a historiographical cliché, is attributed to Cyrus the Great, and quoted by Herodotus as almost the last words of the whole work: ‘Soft countries breed soft men,’ and have to suffer the rule of aliens. Warned by Cyrus, the Persians choose for preference to live in a rugged land, but the association in European thought and historiography conveyed by the phrase ‘Asiatic softness’ was to endure down to the nineteenth century. The East-West antithesis was to be highly significant for the Greeks and Romans. Through them it reached a particular pitch of intensity in the European Enlightenment, and it still echoes resonantly in nineteenth-century historiography and the literature of imperialism, and in this long tradition Herodotus is by no means the most biased and unqualified manipulator of it.
Burrow, John. A History of Histories (pp. 19-20). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
To emphasise the point:
Athens became for Herodotus the great protagonist of Greek freedom in opposition to eastern despotism. This contrast – which Herodotus increasingly makes apparent, and in which the other Greek states, and particularly Sparta of course, participate in varying degrees – was to be an immensely enduring one in Western historiography and political thought, setting liberty against servitude, law against the tyrants’ will, frugality, hardihood and valour against luxury and timidity.
Burrow, John. A History of Histories (p. 19). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
To be absolutely clear, this is three different but I think related concepts:
The corrupting influence of the city (something to which it’s hard to imagine the early Greeks with their concept of the polis subscribing, but was surely a live argument in Athenian democracy?) and the converse virtue of the country and hard labour
The corrupting influence of decadence and luxury (being found in the city)
The source of that decadence in the East, specifically the Levant and beyond, being imported to the ‘West’.
As I say, I think this mutatis mutandis persists. To what extent is it deeply psychological and if so why? Most of us live in cities and comparatively speaking in the highest level of historical luxury. To what extent is it determined by a very persistent set of constructs? Pastoral innocence, moral value of hard work and physical labour? What is its persistent environment niche as a framework? Who typically perpetuates and expresses it? And who has no truck with it? It was of course deeply embedded in Romanticism, but after all corrupt city and virtuous country parallels played a significant part in aesthetics, plots and morals well before Romanticism in its full flowering.
It’s probably fair to say that the ‘Eastern’ or ‘Oriental’ element has decreased with globalisation. Who are seen as the sources of that ‘corruption’ now?
when the film High Rise came out, I decided not to see the film but read the book, and then didn't write a blog post on it. then eventually i did. then it sat in my drafts for 3 years. this is the blog post. it's *quite* good and has *some* insight. https://t.co/biVdemlAYY
Since I set this down, some time ago, it’s become slightly outdated even in terms of my own thinking. I’d want to plug in my reading from Seeing Like a State, and how what Scott calls ‘cadastral legibility’ necessitates a structural uniformity, and using the two different imaginative models outlined here, see how that might affect our social psychologies. I’d also want to understand how the rise of data analytics of social and individual behaviour (at a stochastic level) also implies a a data version of that cadastral legibility/mapping of behaviour and the mind.
However, Ballard is frequently quite badly written about, and I think this is halfway decent, even if it could probably do with a bit of refinement and additional structuring.
We must begin with the mistake and transform it into what is true.
Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough – Wittgenstein (original German: Man muß beim Irrtum ansetzen und ihn in die Wahrheit überführen)
I was at Asylum a while ago – @john_self had tweeted a link to some thoughts about High Rise that he’d put down in 2007 after news of JG Ballard’s terminal pancreatic cancer had just come out. The entry notes how Ballard is ‘simultaneously renowned yet overlooked.’ This is still true, despite the imminent release of another film (well it was imminent when i first started writing this); a form of publicity which dials up the notoriety of Ballard as a name, and obscures the qualities that made his writing of interest in the first place. He stands out in sharp relief against the landscape of late 20th Century writing in a way that makes me want to use words like ‘important’ and ‘significant’ although I’m wary of their implications. This despite and to a certain extent inclusive of his late period – I’m one of those who see it as weaker. The collected short stories, spanning 1956 to 1992, are incontrovertible.
I hadn’t read the book, and felt I should do that before seeing the film. I procrastinate like hell though (I see this has recently been linked, in a Ballardian way, with the size of the amygdala, the fight or flight mechanism) and it’s often the case that when I need to do two things – read the book to see the film – I do neither. That might have been the case here as well if it hadn’t been for a passage in Robert Musil’s short story The Blackbird:
The dining rooms are likewise piled up floor on floor, as are the white-tiled baths and the balconies with their red awnings. Love, sleep, birth, digestion, unexpected reunions, troubled and restful nights are vertically aligned in these buildings like the columns of a sandwiches at a vending machine. In middle-class apartments like these your destiny is already waiting for you the moment you move in. You will admit that human freedom essentially consists of where and when we do what we do, for what we do is almost always the same – thus the sinister implications of one uniform blueprint for all.
The Blackbird – Robert Musil (from Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, Penguin.
Exploring that provocative last line led into deep water very quickly, as is often the case with Musil. It is a regular humour or mode of this that his aphorisms have a quality (or lack of quality if you like) where an initial impression of profundity turns upon examination into wondering whether in fact there is any depth there at all. Message without originating meaning, no object upon which to attach itself, variables without values, this conceptual shadow-play in fact being the fundamental hidden point of the statement. A hermeneutics of the ersatz.
It was late at night. I hadn’t been able to sleep and despite the glassy Musil surface my mind was engaged in turning over the words, in that relentless way that comes from the feverish fatigue of insomnia, in an attempt to summarise those ‘sinister implications’ and the assumptions underlying them. I scribbled down notes that came from this process on a scrap of paper by my bedside:
The majority of actions – that is to say the ‘whatness’ or content of our actions – are universal, outside of social construct and historical context (‘what we do is almost always the same’), and therefore belong to the generically ‘human’, and therefore must comprise the organic or animal – eating, shitting, sleeping, fucking – and the base mechanics of the social – meeting, seeing, conversing – with some areas that sit between the two, like labour – the means by which we ‘forage’ for food and shelter within a social context and capitalist infrastructure. This is poetically rendered here as ‘love, sleep, birth, digestion, unexpected reunions, troubled and restful nights’.
The content of our actions has no meaning independent of context: the above behaviours are universally the same and therefore any variation is purely a matter of when and where they take place – how they are constructed if you like. Despite the apparent cynicism of this statement, this is probably not to trivialise: the fractured Whereness of Paris and Helen fucking was of the greatest consequence. Musil might say my choice of restaurant – where I eat – defines my character in a non-trivial way, as does the When-ness of my sleep.
This is a civic, imperial and aristocratic or bourgeois view of human freedom – it reifies* the ability to choose, which is let us say at base a financial power in our society (bourgeois and aristocratic), it is also an imperial or spatial power since it implies large variation of possibility, the goods of the world collected in the metropole (civic and imperial). Though as these terms exactly describe the world of Musil, this is no more than saying his profundity is consistent with his depicted world.
(There’s that vertiginous feeling again – philosophy or truth as contingent upon transitory and variable context: the decadent realisation of the end of an epoch that its truths have become tired, wearisome)
Character (that is to say ’the expression of choice’) is destiny or fate, character and therefore fate or the course of destiny are – from 1 & 2 – defined by time and place.
We humans are peculiarly receptive to our environments in an organic and behavioural way, such that uniform contexts cause uniform behaviour. This means 2 can be restated: 2+3 = The content of our actions has no meaning independent of material context.
In conclusion: our fate is determined by our material, temporal surroundings, hence the sinister implications of a universal &c.
The main unfreedom here seems to me to be existential, that is to say defined by Musil’s conception of existence. There is no life independent of context that can survive material uniformity. This makes the paragraph both anti-Romantic (no independent or extensively mediated inner Self) and Romantic (that which removes choice of individual expression is bad). This paradox is representative of the crumbling wall of Late Romanticism.
Going down this nocturnal rabbit hole made me turn to what might considered a reference book on the subject of vertical living by an artist I admire, which seemed to that it might offer a fruitful comparison to Musil.
My admiration for or, better, the kick I get out of Ballard comes from the way he defamiliarises human behaviour so that it becomes alien. His works do not rely on common sense (eg for believability, character, motive, social interactions). Common sense denies the presence of its intrinsic unspoken component ideologies and habituated mannerisms. Ballard removes the glue of common sense and replaces it with a simplified psychosocial schema, which surfaces the artificiality of those ideologies and habituated mannerisms.
There is no history in Ballard (Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women excepted). There will sometimes be a singular event precipitating the conditions of the story. Modern(ish) psychoanalytical and anthropological theory are the predominant forces. This isn’t just a theoretical or conceptual switching out; it makes his societies think, speak and behave in slightly but noticeably odd and frictionless ways, which gives much of the unique feeling of his books. The reader feels an uneasy sense of alienation.
By way of framing the next bit, I originally put a subtitle here that said ‘Against Reading High Rise as a ‘book that demolishes the argument for tower blocks in our society today’ as one back-jacket quote had it. You know, the Betjeman argument:
There’s a section in the Asylum post that looks at the argument presented by Ballard in High Rise, starting with a quote from the book:
By its very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all. For the first time it removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behaviour, and left them free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses. It was precisely in these areas that the most important and most interesting aspects of their lives would take place. Secure within the shell of the high-rise like passengers on board an automatically piloted airliner, they were free to behave in any way they wished, explore the darkest corners they could find. In many ways, the high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly ‘free’ psychopathology.
Now Ballard clearly wants us to believe the second sentence follows from the first, but I don’t buy it at all. We know his experiences as a child in an internment camp in wartime Shanghai left him acutely aware of how easily the veneer of civilization can slip away, but where’s the evidence that this can – not just equally but more deeply, as he seems to suggest in so many of his novels – apply to particularly comfortable peacetime societies?
Although the observation about the Shanghai internment camp is definitely on point – Ballard is a post-war writer in more ways than just having participated in the chronological category – I don’t agree with the thrust of the observations here. Specifically, I disagree with the idea that we have to ‘buy’ the argument in order to ‘get’ (or enjoy) the book. I’m never enormously keen on the idea of literature being evaluated for the accuracy of its social analysis, which seems to me to be the same category of error where SF is sometimes judged on it oracular or predictive powers. Is the book correct about things? That error is I think characterised by ‘reductive materialism’*, and in its grossest form is therefore quite appropriately exemplified by Margaret Thatcher’s comment to Kingsley Amis, after being told the Communists-take-over-Britain plot of his quite weird and quite not good novel Russian Hide and Seek, where she advised him to ‘get another crystal ball.’
I’d rather go with a parallel reading where it doesn’t particularly matter whether the second sentence follows from the first. Where they’re more of a stated description or precondition of the world he has created. ‘Here is how this world works.’ A bit more than that, the discontinuity between the first and the second sentence indicates that the reader is being presented with a world where this mechanic – structured civilised environments release primal psychopathologies and in fact brutalise rather than civilise – is axiomatic: these are the rules of the game in High Rise.
That a reader might disagree with this view (and I do disagree with it socially or politically speaking) seems as irrelevant as saying as a piece of fiction ‘Well, I simply don’t believe this happened.’
Any examination by High Rise of the society in which the reader exists and indeed the nature of high-rise buildings does not consist of direct social analysis, but comes via circuitous routes: the strange and beautiful images that populate his books, the recurring psychotropic semi-mystical objects of drained pools, broken radios, televisions and cars, objects deprived of their central purpose, rendered esoteric and tribally symbolic. The disjunction-as-syllogism of the two sentences – maintained social structure & the release of repressed impulses, civilisation & barbarism – in fact ensures a form of surrealism, represented by these images drained of material meaning, their latent symbolic force foregrounded. It’s the discontinuity of collage and is part of the reason that Ballard can be as comfortably categorised with the umbrella term ‘artist’ as he can a writer – the implications of the visual and the influences of surrealism are central and, I would argue, comprise the actual argument of his work.
‘Actual’ argument because the surface arguments, in High Rise more evidently than in any other work, are vexed by the sort of issues already described. This is the architect Anthony Royal, v much in authorial mode:
In principle, the mutiny of these well-to-do professional people against the building they had collectively purchased was no different from the dozens of well-documented revolts by working-class tenants against the municipal tower-blocks that had taken place at frequent intervals during the post-war years.
Ballard may think this, and in fact I think he probably does, but that statement of ‘principle,’ which says the failure of high-rise living is nothing to do with money or class and entirely to do with an architectural-psychobiological conjuncture is mendacious in the context of the novel. Royal’s argument here cuts across class distinction; there is something intrinsic to high-rise living and to humans, which, when brought together, leads to social collapse. But the key cause of the social disintegration in High Rise is not anything like that, but rather the artistic and æsthetic instincts and requirements of Ballard.
The garbage-disposal shut Laing shared with the Steeles had jammed again. He tried to telephone the building manager, but the exhausted man had been inundated with complaints and requests for action of every kind. Several members of his staff had resigned and the energies of the remainder were now devoted to keeping the elevators running and trying to restore power to the 9th floor.
Ballard squeezes the resourcing of this building full of well-off people, and contrives to bring about the events that will cause his society to collapse. He deliberately withholds resources from them for technical and æsthetic reasons. It is a tacit admission that in fact it is a matter of resourcing rather than anything intrinsic to high-rise living, contra the arguments rehearsed inside and outside the book, hence my charge of mendacity. He’s done it speed up the action, which is entirely legitimate, and used it as an argument against high rise living, which is not. He is ensuring, with this acceleration, that the playoff of psychologies has dramatic and visual manifestation instead of being repressed or contained in an analysis of manners and conversation. The clutter, ejaculations and material expressions of unrestrained impulse and temporary desire are allowed to accumulate into a landscape, representative of the inner psyche of the residents. The logic of the visible is placed at the service of the invisible as surrealist Odilon Redon put it, in a quote used approvingly by Ballard in a 1966 essay The Coming of the Unconscious.
In other words the meat of the book is not why the collapse happens, but the collapse itself, what it looks like, its effects, its effect.
High Rise is in fact another example of Ballard altering environmental conditions to see how his high-functioning professional humans fall apart or transform. It is, as much as The Drowned World or The Drought, an organic apocalypse:
The huge building he had helped to design was moribund, its vital functions fading one by bye – the water-pressure falling as the pumps faltered, the electrical sub-stations on each floor switching themselves off, the elevators stranded in their shafts.
Transform rather than decline. Despite everything, Wilder’s metamorphosis into sacrificial camera-wielding child ape feels like fulfilment, and as in Crash the brutal bruising efflorescences and transformations represent a new Eden, though one more like Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights than prelapsarian innocence.
Still, we’re well into Lord of the Flies territory – no one in, no one out, seal the doors. And part of the problem with Ballard-as-social-commentary is the aesthetic relish he clearly takes in these situations. In The Drought, the ‘desert island’ environment is inescapable and total, in High Rise this isolation is achieved by no one really wanting to leave; as in so many of Ballard’s stories, the annihilation is desired, and is sexual but the opposite of sensual.
Here the overwhelming environmental feature that will give specific shape to the transforming psychologies of the inhabitants is not drought or inundation, but the vertical axis. The chapter titles alone give the flavour of the book:
The 19th Century colonial novel is present in the cadences of the headings – Rider Haggard, or Conan Doyle’s Lost World. Of course, with cannibals, savage tribes and drained lakes, that comparison extends beyond the chapter markers. It’s another one of those conservative elements to Ballard. I’ll take this moment to point out that although he is much beloved of late 20th century theorists and thinkers, the psychological and anthropological models which inform his writing are late 19th century or early-mid 20th century: Frazer, Freud and Jung (though also Levi-Strauss tbf)*
The adventure template is possible because of that vertical axis. Motions of ascent (Up!) and descent (Into the Dropzone) give High Rise a dynamism uncharacteristic to Ballard. Inner space is given a propulsive aspect, and a sense of purpose, again unusual. As already mentioned, his books can be characterised by purposeless drift, or, if not purposeless, the symptoms of an overall centripetal force, which produces an anaesthetised sense of complicity, growing organically, as its narrative movement.
They’re static for other reasons as well: their pictorial and visual quality, and collage of association of unrelated matter (both things which satire uses to similar static effect), as well as the hypnotic or oppressive repetition of environmental elements. This inertia is as unusual an element as many others in his books. They tend to get slower and slower, approaching ecstatically regressive event horizons beyond which no information can return to the reader. The piece in Asylum is right to point out they can be quite boring. Nevertheless, in his late novels the heavy front-loading of plot or investigation, perhaps an attempt to counteract this characteristic, feels out of place.
In High Rise the 19th century expeditionary layer needs a scenery appropriate to it, and the built environment is fairly consistently mapped to that of a mountain:
In the few seconds that remained before the doors opened he realised that he had already decided to abandon Helen and his sons for good. Only one direction lay before him – up. Like a climber resting a hundred feet from the summit, he had no option but to ascend.
This mountain stuff is strongly reinforced as Wilder nears the climax of his ascent/regression, via a mysteriously-achieved redecoration of the upper floors (Ballard being a busy bee again):
As he moved up the steps everything was silent. The staircase was carpeted, muffing the tread of his boots, and he was too distracted by the sounds of his own breathing to notice that the walls around him had been freshly painted, their white surfaces gleaming in the afternoon sunlight like the entrance to an abattoir.
Wilder climbed to the 37th floor, smelling the icy air moving across his naked body from the open sky. He could hear now, more clearly than ever before, the crying of the gulls. When the dog began to whimper, reluctant to go any further, he turned it loose, and watched it disappear down the stairs.
That turning of the dog loose, an archetypal moment of exploration or adventure lit – turning the donkeys / camels / horses back at the final and most difficult stage of an expedition, only to be attempted by the human hero. Also lol at the peak Ballard of ‘like the entrance to an abattoir.’
The ascent is all leading up to the climax of the central conflict between Royal and Wilder (Ballard’s names yet another example of the enjoyably crude anthropological symbolisms he offers as waymarkers en route to his defamiliarised landscapes – like the Buckfast navigational crucifixes across Dartmoor). This is after all, as much a theological or sacral disaster as an environmental one (the two are obviously entwined), with hubristic architect Royal as the dying, crippled king in Ballard’s favourite sinister colour – white. Those gulls Wilder describes have of course already been reconfigured in the chapter The Predatory Birds. An ‘unfamiliar species of estuarine gull’:
.. Royal liked to think that their real motives for taking over the roof were close to his own, and that they had flown here from some archaic landscape, responding to the same image of the sacred violence to come.
This is a latent suggestion that is revisited in one of my favourite images in the book:
The gulls sidled around him, rolling their heads and wiping their beaks against the concrete. The surface was streaked with blood. For the first time Royal saw that the ledges and balustrades were covered with these bloody notches, the symbols of a mysterious calligraphy.
Again, just hinted at, almost felt as a pressure around the novel, the idea of a sacral intelligence at work, etching marks in blood on the totem, barely proto-linguistic, but aware. High rise as totemic transponder, canalising alien, cosmic, psychic and deep time forces, of which the gulls are emissaries and liminal guardians/fauna – the first sign that you’re entering new territory. (See also: ‘The shrieking of the gulls filled the air, and seemed to tear at the exposed tissues of his brain. They rose from the elevator heads and balustrades in a continuous fountain, soared into the air to form an expanding vortex and dived down again towards the sculpture-garden’ God, I feel like I’m mainlining Ballard just retyping that sentence.) It was around this time that he wrote the short story Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer, about a littoral beset by colossal birds, so they were clearly something of an obsession.
Royal is identified with them in a slightly curious way:
In some way they were attracted by Royal’s white jacket and pale hair, so close in tone to their own vivid plumage. Perhaps they identified him as one of their own, a crippled old albatross who had take refuge on this remote roof-top beside the river? Royal liked this notion and often thought about it.
The albatross is not an insignificant symbol, and although he’s ultimately slain, it’s not I think Coleridge but Moby-Dick that has the greatest relevance to Royal here:
I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king’s ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those forever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that passed through me then.
… I had lost the warping memories of traditions and of towns…
I’ve suggested this is a parallel reading to that at Asylum, not really for modern theoretical reasons of interpretative plurality, but because much the experience of reading Ballard is characterised by reader-wariness at the path through the writing. The central characters are exemplary in this regard. These notoriously characterless characters are, conventionally speaking, vehicles for the reader’s projection into the novel, and as such have a certain objective neutrality – their indifference a sort of guide to a non-partisan narrator-reliability. But they are also something else. As time goes on that indifferent neutrality and lukewarm engagement with events around them is seen to carry the approval of inaction, in part driven by and increasingly expressive of a detached sexual pleasure at the violent collapse. Indifference and neutrality turn out to be ‘weak-argument’ expressions of a desire for annihilation. ‘Here, on the other hand,’ Laing observes right at the beginning of the book, ‘the dimensions of his life were space, light and the pleasures of a subtle kind of anonymity.’ How ready he is to shed his social role. You go along with them, but are continually brought up short by these moments of non-resistance – that frictionless behaviour I noted earlier. Once that desire for annihilation has fully blossomed into a sort of anaesthetised relish at the barbarism, the reader has been brought into a state of partial complicity and participation. Of course neutrality and objectivity are implied characteristics of the author-narrator, as well, and the ‘from outside to inside journey’ is one Ballard and his neutral narrators take the reader on as well as the characters within. Mute inglorious Virgils using narration as reader gateway drug to tribal deathsex. (Yes, I should have deleted that last sentence).
Ballard isn’t interested in humans, or rather he’s not interested in character portraits, or character as motive. He is interested in their composition, and therefore he’s interested in catalysing their decomposition, effectively by draining life from them, and putting them on a slab. High Rise is an autopsy. Here is a passage from The Kindness of Strangers, his (very good) semi-autobiographical novel of a few years later:
Waiting for us, lying face up on the dissection tables, were some twenty cadavers. Steeped in formaldehyde, they were the colour of yellow ivory. More than anything else, the richness of their skins marked out the dead, as if their personalities had migrated hopefully to the surface of their bodies … Each body was an atlas recording the journeys of an entire life.
Here is the relevant section from High-Rise, when Laing visits the medical school where he supposedly teaches:
He let himself into the dissecting rooms of the anatomy department and walked down the lines of glass-topped tables, staring at the partially dissected cadavers. The steady amputation of limbs and thorax, head and abdomen by teams of students, which would reduce each cadaver by term’s end to a clutch of bones and a burial tag, exactly matched the erosion of the world around the high-rise.
This is how people are seen, personalities and lives are only etched like writing on the material of our corpus.
To go back to the beginning, comparing Musil and Ballard is quite difficult. Both are concerned with the effect of the material environment on people. I would say that the probably difference is that for Musil there is a soul to be acted upon, for Ballard, there is a set of animalistic impulses, which responds to its environment. The first is decadent, the second applies decay as analytical method. I’m not sure what I think here and I probably need to be deeper in it than revisiting this after three years allows me to be.
Oh, I still haven’t seen the film. Probably should. Feel if he turns a towerblock of the professional classes into a barbaric abattoir he will have done ok? Benchmark is of course Paradise Towers.
Towards the end of the book, Laing switches on the television:
A racetrack commentator’s voice emerged from the speaker, a gabble of names that sounded like a demented inventory, a list of unrelated objects being recruited to repopulate the high-rise in an emergency transfusion of identity.
That repopulation of unrelated objects reminds me once again of the collage nature of Ballard’s writing. To a degree the material elements of decomposition, their symbolism and anthropological status could be populated from any world, any psychic space – they need not be the totems and trappings with which we have in our modern society surrounded ourselves.
To test this, I clicked at random for one of today’s (2020 update, no idea when I put this bit in) racecards to see what sort of things would come up. This from the 14:15 Montague Inn Novice’s Hurdle at Wincanton:
Uncle Tone
Golden Bird
Knight Watchman
Max Forte
Present Man
Westend Prince
Alottarain
Theatre Goer
Racecards providing elemental synopses of potentially infinite Ballard novels. And how could you not be delighted on seeing that last year’s winner was a horse called Vesperal Dream?
Oh, and, although this was already done by the film adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy the perfect song for High Rise?
*reify is possibly a very bad word to use here, and musing on whether it was or not, a year or so ago, led me to try and decide by reading History and Class Consciousness – this is why my blogposts don’t end up on teh internet. I decided then that it was a bad word to use, but I think now it’s fine. <Steve Jackson Voice> YOU DECIDE </sjv>
*a later footnote on reductive materialism – i originally said ‘materialism’, but my use of that word was getting a bit slippery, between philosophical meaning, colloquial negative meaning, and a generalised analytical sense of ‘material things’, so i’ve tried to refine it a bit by using the phrase ‘reductive materialism’. By this I’m intending to mean the sort of scientism and binary thinking we see in a lot of politics and commentary. materialism in itself here is not intended negatively, things can be abundantlymaterialist. reductive materialism is a moral stance, it wants to reduce the material options to what the person or ideology thinks is the right materialism)
*Ballard’s use of old-fashioned psychological and anthropological modelsI don’t see this as a problem, in fact it’s part of its appeal – the underpinnings to his writing are in some respects quite simple or well assimilated now, the framework is not radical. What he brings to it as a writer is of course his imagination – it’s a simple framework for his truly progressive explorations.
Last year I went through a long period where I couldn’t read. This was nothing new; boredom, laziness, indifference, computer games, have all led to this pass before.
This time it was because reading caused me pain. I was going through a period of emotional trauma – love, grief, the usual – and this meant it was too painful to read anything worthwhile.
Reading anything worthwhile – and I do not at all necessarily mean literature – involves attention. exploration of oneself and with oneself: your thought and your emotions, your body and spirit. If these are not available, or if these cause you pain, then you cannot read with attention. At a basic level I would cite the effect of an acute physical pain on your ability to pay attention to other things.
What actually happens? You attempt to read and then halfway through a sentence, or a paragraph, or an observation, you are brought up short, as if something had tweaked a nerve, and you think you about your own situation, rather than extending yourself to the words you are reading.
There is a fog of attentiveness.
Reading anything too abstracted from those important feelings, pressing in, pushed away, seemed not to have any meaning or point. I simply couldn’t concentrate on them. Braudel on markets, Flann O’Brien’s newspaper pieces, Arthur C Danto on aesthetic transfiguration. Irrelevant, funny but I don’t want funny, irrelevant.
I don’t want to be distracted from myself.
Then I was able to read again. What happened? Did I get over my pain? No. But language and words re-formed, found a way round the problem. As they do.
But I had help.
Text 1: “Imaginary Letters” by Mary Butts
I was lucky enough to be in a pub with Tim Hopkins, the craft, brains and heft behind of The Half Pint Press. He’d brought his latest remarkable creation, “Imaginary Letters” by Mary Butts, and was kind enough to allow us to unpack the vivid object into its component parts.
Yes the first paragraph caught my eye: A cycle of miseries now known by the heart.
But it was the physical words, the tangible imprint of pressure and ink, on the page that caught my attention. Reading those words on that page, made me want to read again. The words themselves seemed to be additionally vivid because of the craft of the page, the care and artistry of the imprint. Words once again seemed to have a value beyond their reference to my pain. (The only value, my Self would belligerently declare, bruising my heart and smashing my chest around, a bundle of tantrum-ing id in its cuttable, bleedable, scarring, bruisable cage.)
I think as I say that it was that the value of the object itself, the care taken over it, which renewed the sense of the word; the words as imprinted objects seemed to have more value because of the context of the artefact.
Those words on that page had partially gained an aura, not of the work’s unique originating existence or authorial motive, but derived from the care and effort put into the new object onto which they had been imprinted. This process had done something to revive in the word* the ‘quality of its presence’, which famously, ‘is always depreciated’ by mechanical reproduction, according to Benjamin. Perhaps there was after all something of ritual about it all, something sacred which suggested meaning outside me. (The unreading me: so narrow, so self-centred, so dull).
(*I had originally said logos here, which I think is wrong, certainly in a neoplatonic sense, which in a relatively uninformed way is my meaning – logos cannot be revived as such, it can only be re-attached, by using word i hope to find a middle ground between logos, the authorial word, the crafted imprint of word on the page, and the word within me. And maybe after all there is a Jungian sense, an attempt to connect logos and eros via the medium of print.)
(Actually logos, inscription, writing, print are not best approached by Benjamin’s essay – there is of course an entirely separate and vast literature of religion and critical theory to deal with the Word and its authority – but it done now, as my brother would say.)
The beauty and care of the object in which the words were contained – tissue paper, envelopes, fine letter paper, the hidden object of the press – helped hoist me back up into a desire to read the printed word, no matter the object in which they were contained. At the time it felt, quite simply, that the words burned more vividly and had more meaning than I had felt the printed word had had for a while. (Again, those words – burning, meaning – words of ritual and the sacral).
This in itself perhaps shows how far I had regressed. An ability to understand, perhaps more importantly to feel the value of the word abstracted from its context seems to me to be a valuable capability developed by the age of print, and more vital and necessary in the age of digital media. Perhaps it was a problem of technology, perhaps I was suffering from some sort of tribal historical regression. And perhaps in some respects it had analogy with the ability to be able to read without forming the words with your mouth, described by Augustine of Bishop Ambrose here:
“When he read,” said Augustine, “his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.”
‘His heart sought out the meaning’. A technological advance. That was the very thing my heart was not able to do, because it didn’t want to. I didn’t want it to.
I went rambling off an unresolved direction here, which I’ve put at the bottom of the post*
I came out wanting not just to read again, but seeing the word in its environment, the word as environment again. It was someone had started shovelling coals again onto the relevant part of my brain, firing up in recognition, having previously been sunk in inattention.
I felt doubly grateful to Tim, because in fact as well as the fire, he was also responsible on that same evening for the focus, by recommending Eley Williams in general, and specifically the collection of short stories Attrib.
Text 2: Attrib. by Eley Williams
Words can be very direct. And direct contact with my heart and feelings was fatal to the words. Indifference to my heart and feelings had been fatal to the words.
A problem.
My first thought when I started the short stories collected in Attrib. was ‘oh, this person is having fun.’ In this respect it reminded me of the sheer stimulating enjoyment of reading Helen deWitt’s collection Some Trick.
The second thing that I noticed, with a sort of growing excitement and relish, was how Williams showed the pressure of emotion on the form of language. There was an indirectness that allowed me to approach the stories. A poet’s sense of something, to use Isaac Rosenberg’s fine words, understandable and yet ungraspable.
The first story The Alphabet is a story about loss – loss of language, loss of memory, loss of awareness, loss of love. It’s also a story that very efficiently and effectively builds up the distilled structure of those things in order to express their loss, in this case largely through the letters of the alphabet, those letters of love: ‘the taut bow of D … an empty workman’s clamp: G‘ and the description of R as ‘a thrown magnifying glass embedded in a wall’ is one of those gifts that will stay with me throughout my life. (Writerly gifts are the best gifts.)
It’s a story that asks the question, what does it actually mean to lose one’s mind? Because it also means the loss of love. Feeling the loss happening as it’s happening. Anticipating the loss and knowing that it’s going to happen.
This is a story of a relationship break-up that happens because of aphasia. It happens in language.
My brain unpinned you without me wanting it to and now you have gone.
It is not necessarily clear if the partner has actually physically gone because what he relished – the shared communication – is gone, whether he is still there but the memory of his face and of what he has meant is lost to the narrator because of their loss of language. Their faces and love fade with the loss of language itself, as if the tale itself evaporates in loss:
I want to be able to tell you that I miss you, and the way you had with me, and the way you had with all the words that – at the time – I had for you.
If I say there is something indirect about the stories, I do not mean that the words are not direct, they are, direct enough to break the heart in the first one, but that the shape of emotions is realised through the shape of language. It allowed me to approach it, where more conventional expressions would have stopped me reading: do not try to speak to me of this, you do not know me, this is not mine, this is not me.
A wonderful example is the second story, Swatch, where two young boys playing hide and seek, hide in a wardrobe together and see how many marshmallows they can stuff in their mouths. It is also a description of pre-sexual-awareness sexual arousal, as full of sugar and close intimacy they gaze into each others’ eyes, and find themselves in ‘tangled, bored tussles for space’.
It is in the eyes that this sexual and emotional pressure of desire is realised, because one of the boys’ fathers runs a paint shop that has produced a deep awareness of the exotic landscape of colours and their names, Peter’s own eyes are variably, strangely coloured, so with the industrial language of colour palettes, they form an entire cosmos of a world reconfigured:
He saw Cocoa Latte in his eyes some days, Truffle Leather 3 during others. There was even a greenish contour of Enchanted Eden 2 to be found if he examined his eye in strong morning light … If Peter stared himself down in bright summer sun he could see a notch of Tangiers Flame in one of his eyes and the shadow of a shadow of Amethyst Falls right beside it.
Williams strongly conveys the material presence of language and communication, and through that material presence, its plasticity (in the sense of the plastic arts – which are a theme); it’s one of the chief pleasures of the volume. (I just saw a line from the first story: ‘Aphasia is now an autocomplete on my laptop’s search field.’) H0w language communication can take place outside the traditional vehicles or contexts for that communication. For example, in Mischief, the intimate communication between a mine-sniffing rat, and the sapper disposing of the mine.
To put this back in the context of Imaginary Letters, here Colours are the book, Letters are the book, sounds are the book which contain the imprint.
Physical things are the book. It was during reading the story Rosette Manufacture: A Catalogue & Spotters’ Guide that the third observation occurred to me (oh and did I say how much I enjoyed the subtitles of the first story, The Alphabet (or Love Letters or Writing Love Letters, Before I Forget How To Use Them or These Miserable Loops Look So Much Better on Paper Than In Practice) – ‘better on paper than in practice’, what a phrase to turn over and consider when applied to writing – it sort of gets at the heart of the business Williams seems to be about).
So, yes, that third observation. After the fun and the indirectness (that still isn’t the right word is it). The rosette story is something of a natural history of manufactured rosettes – the political candidate kind, the dog show kind – out of which an entire system of manufactory and ecology is inferred and condensed (Williams is very good at these condensed systems).
It seems almost written to bring about the extraordinary, dream-like, final paragraph:
We will never resign or leave you. We will go on making our false flowers for non-lovers with the jaguars and monsters for you, in our false garden, in the shade.
But it was a specific phrase that caught my eye:
Sometimes – and not even in very high winds – the plastic false-silk ribbons that depend from a rosette overlap one another and it looks as if a cross or a wavelength or a gene or many other lapel-less things have appeared above your heart.
‘Lapel-less’. This reminded me of two things, the second of which I’ve only just worked out, which is Leigh Hunt’s poem The Fish, the Man and the Spirit, especially in the fish’s description of the man:
Thou that on dry land horribly dost go
With a split body and most ridiculous pace
Prong after prong, disgracer of all grace,
Long-useless-finn'd, haired, upright, unwet, slow!
But at the time the implied ontology reminded me of Wittgenstein’s essential communication system represented by the Slab!, and his depiction of language in Philosophical Investigations:
23. But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question and command? – There are countless kinds; countless different kinds of use of all the things we call “signs”, “words”, “sentences”. And this diversity is not something fixed, given once and for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten …
The word “language-game” is used here to emphasise the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.
Philosophical Investigations – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wiley-Blackwell
Language-game. Sprachspiel. Slab! or Platte! Each of Williams’ stories a constrained system of language and communication, of play and yes, to return to my first observation, of fun.
(Going back through the stories, I saw in Swatch, that the first line is ‘Peter noticed the unspeakable colour during Stuart’s twelfth birthday party’ and later in the same story the school song is remembered, ‘The halting tongue that dare not tell the whole‘, both reminding me of that earlier famous piece of Wittgenstein from the Tractatus, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ Nevertheless, one must add in relation to Williams’ stories, it will find a way to express itself even if the central object remains evasive because it doesn’t exist in the system (the pre-sexual awareness sexuality in Swatch).)
And to return to my second observation – that indirectness – those language systems were not attempting to communicate with me, but were internally coherent worlds expressing emotions and feelings for which I had analogy, but not the same language.
I do not in any way wish to say that Wittgenstein is the ‘solution’ to these wonderfully rich and enjoyable stories, only that this observation helped me explore further into them.
Something about all this reminded me of something once said to me in psychoanalysis. Childhood is the place we learn to survive, to succeed, which is learned within a space of parental, familial (or institutional) rules. When we grow up we can to a certain extent create the environmental rules which will define survival and success – the internal rules by which we find satisfaction no longer need to be the parental rules – but very often these are buried deeply, and we seek to replicate the same moral or emotionally regulatory environments in which to psychologically survive.
Language seems to exist like flora and fauna in the spaces Williams creates.
That was what allowed me to approach this wonderful volume of stories … no, that was what allowed me to let this wonderful volume of stories in.
Text 3: Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge – Empathy, Conjunctions, 1984
Some time at the back of summer last year, I was in the excellent second-hand bookshop The Second Shelf, browsing through the old literary journals, and found a poem in Conjunctions by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, called Entropy. Having scanned more or less carelessly through the other pages, words in Bersenbrugge’s poem caught my attention and I read it through more carefully.
It seemed to speak directly to my heart, albeit in an elliptical way. Elliptically direct.
I made a note in my notebook to return and buy it – for some reason that wasn’t possible at the time.
And I kept on reminding myself and kept on not going, to go back and buy the periodical in question, but only got round to it a few weeks ago, just before the Covid lockdown.
It had been sold, inevitably. The context of the words is now memory. But although the importance or shape of the words burns brightly, I can’t remember any of them specifically. I just know the text had seemed important to me at that point.
I’ve just realised in the course of writing this that I can look it up and find it. At the time I wasn’t sure of the notebook in which I’d put the details, which was some sort of excuse.
I’ve found it now, and yet I’m strangely reluctant to go searching.
The space in which the language is operating is defined, the language itself is undefined. It is all absence. All evasion. Burning meaning, no expression.
Reading, it seems, even when you’ve started again, has its limits.
disjecta membra
*[A desire to return to the word with all one’s being again, regardless of context is not just a matter of being able to consume the word in a mass-produced paperback, nor is it being able to feel the heft and value of the thing you are reading on the internet where packaging and the ‘value’ of packaging needs interpreting differently (how do we value writing on substack, on github’s blogging capability, how do we compare this to the FT’s UI, or the i‘s ‘unreadable’ UI). With regard to twitter the word ‘attentiveness’ seems important again – twitter, for me, seems to yoke itself and foster a wider inattentiveness, other than to itself (that is not to say that I am not led, on a daily basis, to more excellent reading via twitter than most other platforms).]
Oddly, and to stick to the sacred, it allowed a resurgent gnosticism – that is to say an attention to the word where the external casing, shell or context is at its filthiest, ugliest (there are things to do with the glitch aesthetic on the internet here, which I want to explore separately).
This post originally appeared on my old blog, and is reposted here in response to a twitter query: ‘which books have made you cry’.
How I hate this world. I would like to tear it apart with my own two hands if I could. I would like to dismantle the universe star by star, like a treeful of rotten fruit. Nor do I believe in progress.
Peter de Vries was an American humorist and writer of Dutch Calvinist extraction. Anthony Burgess called him ‘one of the great prose virtuosos of modern America’, Kingsley Amis said he was ‘the funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic.’ Absurdly, he is now little known.
At times the pith and wit of his comic novels can to me feel slightly relentless. In The Blood of the Lamb however, this pith and wit is transformed into a biting wisdom. The book deals unsparingly with the limits of faith and the limits of doubt. And it does so without being at all pretentious because of the authority of its grief and the directness of its writing.
Brevity is here not just the soul of wit but the blade of tragedy; suffering is briefly dealt with and lasts as long as life. De Vries does not spare the reader with melodrama and he does not romanticise. It is all the more powerful because the bravery within the book’s covers is the bravery that we will all have to show to greater or lesser degrees in our own lives.
Its briefly lyrical moments are hard earned and are very painful and beautiful. It’s one of the best books I have ever read and the only one I’ve read that’s made me cry, which is, if I may be dry about it, a testament to the care with which it is structured and the skill of the writing.
The clear-eyed sanity with which it is written is at times unbearable. If that comment seems slightly melodramatic itself, I would example the end of Bend, Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov, where the author relieves Adam Krug of his sanity in order to relieve him of his intolerable grief. Peter De Vries cannot, will not do this. Thus the unbearable is shown to be bearable, only by the fact that it is borne.
So The Blood of the Lamb is incredibly sad but it is also, remarkably, often funny. It will not, I suggest, make you depressed, or gloomy. This is because although I said the book deals with the limits of faith and doubt, this is not what it is about. Ultimately it is a hymn of praise, and a memorial to its subject.
A year or so ago I wrote something prompted by reading a 2017 piece by Claire Dederer about the art of ‘Monstrous Men’. The piece focused on Woody Allen, but moved on to talk about the complicity of accusation – how it is a denial of one’s own monstrosity – and how she herself, as a writer who withdrew her time and attention from those she loved, was also in some way ‘monstrous’.
I thought it was too much to place all writing in the same space as the sexually predatory crimes of Monstrous Men, Woody Allen included, but it did make me want to talk about some writers, all of whom I liked very much, all of whom were women, who deal with the need to share writing and love – love partly in the form of the demands of child-rearing – and in doing so shared something of a similar methodology and voice. To the extent it can be called a ‘voice’ (it would be a disservices to constrain to one voice these different writers), it is the sound of the negation of the dominant, dogmatic male line of argument, the assertion of what is true and what is not true, over a course of a project which is the exclusion of doubt.
“It is no wonder, I say often to students, that so much of the canon is about rich white people. Who else, after all, has the time and space to finish a book.” —@lynnsstronghttps://t.co/wK8HelkYdn
This tweet from Jay Owens reminded me I had that unfinished piece sitting in my drafts, but the bit about Dederer was not really relevant to it, so I’ve removed it from here.
I have however taken a quote from her essay as the jumping-off point.
But here’s a thing I have done: written a book. Written another book. Written essays and articles and criticism. And maybe that makes me monstrous, in a very specific kind of way.
…There are many qualities one must possess to be a working writer or artist. Talent, brains, tenacity. Wealthy parents are good. You should definitely try to have those. But first among equals, when it comes to necessary ingredients, is selfishness. A book is made out of small selfishnesses. The selfishness of shutting the door against your family. The selfishness of ignoring the pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one. The selfishness of stealing stories from real people. The selfishness of saving the best of yourself for that blank-faced anonymous paramour, the reader. The selfishness that comes from simply saying what you have to say.
There were a couple of other things in the essay that prompted the thoughts that lead to writing this. One has already been quoted, her reference to Cyril Connolly’s malign phrase, ‘The pram in the hallway’ (‘There is no more sombre enemy of art than the pram in the hallway’). The other, connected, is this:
Does one identity fatally interrupt the other? Is your work making you a less-good mom? That’s the question you ask yourself all the time. But also: Is your motherhood making you a less good writer? That question is a little more uncomfortable.
These questions, that reference, immediately brought to mind two books: The Last Samurai by Helen deWitt, and Little Labors by Rivka Galchen. Both deal, in different but linked ways, with writing and motherhood.
They’re both wonderful books. They show the capacity for interruption that having a child brings. They use it, are defined by it – by the impossibility of single-minded exclusive and exclusionary focus, which ‘the pram in the hallway’ says art requires. And they don’t just deal with it, they are formally shaped by it. In The Last Samurai there are continual, often quite long digressions of nested interruptions. The interruptions themselves become the content, before the original, interrupted voice, resumes. In this sense they are not interruptions, there is no main thread that is being disrupted. The demanding voice of Ludo (the narrator Sibylla’s child) is as much the book as is the narration. It is a partnership. In a sense it is a handing over of voices.
Little Labors formally represents the capacity for interruption of thought and concentration differently. It is a short book comprising very short entries on having a child and being a writer. The suggestion is that the form has been imposed by the demands, the responsibilities of having a child. Yes they are little entries, but they are undoubtedly labors, because of the presence of a child. The labors are also those of the child. The entire book seems to me an explicit riposte to the pram in the hallway point of view. This was represented beautifully in a passage that was excerpted as ‘The Only Thing I Envy Men,’ in The New Yorker:
I now envy men, but for just one thing. What thing? It is true that at the moment the baby is beating a small wooden cutting board against the ground, that the cutting board had at one point had on it an apricot I had sliced into tiny bits for her, she has since sat on some, and smashed some into the ground, she has taken a lengthy interest in my wallet, she has held the supermarket-discount-points card at a distance, then put it in her mouth, then held it at a distance away again, she has not yet learned to crawl but can drag herself across the floor to the edge of a set of stairs I am hoping to keep her from exploring further, she has gathered fuzz from the shag rug here at this rental cabin that has been obtained as a luxuriously imagined Room of One’s Own, she has been interested in having her hand inside of my mouth, and has not been interested in lying down, she is now trying to pull herself up along a ledge and is now trapped in a position from which she can discover no out and so requires rescue by the large being (me) who is always with her, later she needs rescue simply from being on her stomach, and so in brief moments, between these activities, I have one-third of an associative thought, about that story “Pregnancy Diary” by Yoko Ogawa in which a woman’s sister is pregnant and very nauseous throughout the pregnancy and the narrator begins making grapefruit jam for her nauseous sister, and the sister loves it, it’s the only thing she can bear to eat, and so the narrator keeps making it even though she read a sign at the grocery store that the grapefruit was not safe, and so she believes she has ruined the baby … but really I’m insufficiently upset about not being able to think, and then the baby falls asleep. She sleeps on her back, slightly tossed to the side, with both arms in the same direction, like she’s in a boat I can’t see. Her breathing in this moment is making her glow like an amulet. I had been talking about gender envy. The one thing I envy. The first gender-envy thoughts I have had really in my entire life started maybe not immediately following the arrival of the puma in my apartment, but shortly after, when the puma spent a lot of time spinning a wooden cookie on a rod, or maybe shortly after that, when I took her for her first swim in a pool and she persisted uncomplainingly even as it began to rain. The envious thought was simply that a man can have a baby that their romantic partner doesn’t know about.
Little Labors – Rivka Galchen
For a man the pram in the hall is a potential enemy of art, for a mother it must form a part of it.
For me Rivka Galchen and Helen deWitt give a new voice to literature. It is a non-dogmatic voice, it is humorous and vulnerable open (edit: ‘vulnerable’ was poor choice of word); because it is open to interruption it is stronger than a voice which is not open to interruption. And by ‘interruption’ I mean anything that might swerve the argument, the focus, the single-mindedness, the dogma, the ‘this is the way it is’-ness, the dominant interpretation or narrative, the power.
Anything that might baffle the paradigm, to use the translated words of Roland Barthes in The Neutral.
It isn’t really interruption as such – it is the fabric of thought and discovery.
This Little Art by Kate Briggs is an essay on approaching and exploring the ideas and acts of translation, mainly but not at all solely through the act of translating Roland Barthes’ late lectures. In one section she writes about one part of the Barthes lecture course she translated.
In this digressive, excursive teaching, the practice was never to be exhaustive or systematic: to work or walk in a straight line toward some generalising theory, an ultimate grand idea. Instead to set down a fantasy. And then to induce from the fantasy, a research project. The fantasy for this year of a form of living together that would accommodate rather than dictate the individual rhythms of a small-scale community. Allowing for something like solitude, as Barthes puts it, with regular interruptions. What kinds of structures, spatial or temporal, would enable this? Where to look for suggestion and detail, for models and counter-models that could be stimulated, or already find their part-equivalents, in life?
[He then cites works which he proposes to look at]
The inquiry will proceed sketchily, says Barthes. Each lecture will offer just a few lines of approach; open a few possible dossiers. I’ll only be marking out the contours of these zones of interest. Like the squares on a chequerboard, he says, which perhaps one day I’ll fill in. Marking out the spaces, setting the places. A place for animals. Also for bureaucracy, for flowers and food. I see it like a table: seating you next to you and you next to you, anticipating the conversations between topics, the arguments.
This Little Art – Kate Briggs
Although here this method is being used to understand what a community allowing for something like solitude with regular interruptions might look like, to look for examples and reference points, the method he describes is itself perhaps also the method by which this community might be achieved.
Accommodating rather than dictating individual rhythms; this was a notion that came to Barthes when seeing from his window a mother dragging a child along:
In the lecture course titled How to Live Together, the fact that we can go too fast, or indeed too slow, for other people, for the person we are supposed to be accompanying, or is supposed to be keeping company with us, the person you are hoping will stay with you, your listener, your reader, the child you are trying to walk to school, is the central issue: the lecture course’s crystallizing theme. A theme embodied by the sight of a mother glimpsed from Barthes’s window, walking out of step with her son. Too fast. Dragging him along by the hand (so that he is forced to run to keep up). This fact and lived theme of what Barthes calls disrhythmy, and the power dynamics that are in play, and the disturbances it can cause. The question of the lectures, then, will be how to find a way of walking (being, living, also reading, writing and thinking) together that might somehow take account of our different rhythms, not through enforced synchronicity, but allowing for them: you read faster than I do, you get up earlier than I do, and eat later, you race ahead while I walk more slowly, and yet still (in this fantasy that Barthes is hoping to simulate in life) we’ll find ways of coming together, points in the day for companionship, offsetting, modulating, interrupting our competing desire for solitude.
This Little Art – Kate Briggs
Disrhythmy, for Barthes, is caused by different idiorrhythms. Of course, the thing with a baby is that its idiorrhythm must be yours, as a mother. It wants something now. Its not interested in a Barthes chequerboard that allows for accommodation. But writing and composing in that way as a method, a method of accommodating that id as a writer, but also of asking ideas, the paragraphs and words on the page, and the reader themselves, to accommodate it as well.
This is not a group of writers, but they do refer to one another – Rivka Galchen to Helen deWitt’s The Last Samurai because…
..it takes so many pages into the main section before you recognize the narrator’s gender as female, and then so many pages more before you realize that the narrator of that section is a mother, in fact a single mother, who is trying to develop herself as a scholar and who tries to solve the problem of presenting a male role model to her son
Kate Briggs to Maggie Nelson’s section on policing mouth-exploring in This Little Art:
When my youngest son was a baby I had a bright hot technicolour dream that was the picture of him choking. This had the effect of elevating my adequate policing to the levels of nervous (paranoid?) surveillance. I’d hand him a slice of squashy ripe pear at lunch-time and watch as he’d try manoeuvring it delightedly into his mouth. Then suddenly doubt the size of it, the consistency of it, and to his great distress, whisk it away (I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! – don’t cry: I’ll cube it! Let me mash it!).
Looking back, I think what troubled me the most was the thought (the thought and also the reality) that the smallest lapse in my attention, even (even and especially) with respect to the most ordinary everyday things – eating a pear for lunch, sitting out among the dry leaves in the garden – could have consequences on this other, life-or-death scale. The stakes felt everywhere and for that period of time almost unbearably high.
She also insists, via Galchen’s Little Labors, on seeing ‘little’ as meaning ‘small’ not ‘minor’. If we are to allow this sort of writing to have equal worth, we must allow for its smallness. The fact that accomplishing a brief paragraph of thought may be a form of labour, and may need to be accomplished in small periods of time between distractions. Allowing thoughts and observations to be placed on a square and to relate to the things next to them, not in a tightly ordered narrative argument that says if this is true then this must be true, but to communicate, to be suggestive. A series of partnerships, reader and author, both contributing, author and the people and things that demand their time.
A voice to accommodate distraction and disjunction, whether it’s Galchen’s brief chapters and little labors, Maggie Nelson’s stanzas of thought, the cadences of a child’s insatiable desire for learning in The Last Samurai, perhaps these make way for a new way of writing and reading.
On one of the long afternoons that has since bled into the one long afternoon of Iggy’s infancy, I watch him pause on all fours at the threshold to our backyard, as he contemplates which scraggly oak leaf to scrunch toward first with his dogged army crawl. His soft little tongue, always whitened in the centre from milk, nudges out of his mouth in gentle anticipation, a turtle bobbing out of its shell. I want to pause here, maybe forever, and hail the brief moment before I have to jump into action, before I must become the one who eliminates the inappropriate object, or, if I’m too late, who must harvest it from his mouth.
You, reader, are alive today, reading this, because someone once adequately policed your mouth-exploring. In the fact of this fact, Winnicott holds the relatively unsentimental position that we don’t owe these people (often women, but by no means always) anything. But we do owe ourselves “an intellectual recognition of the fact that at first we were (psychologically) absolutely dependent, and that absolutely means absolutely. Luckily we were met by ordinary devotion.
The Argonauts – Maggie Nelson
Absolutely dependent. That absolutely dependence relies on the attention of the person who may also be writing the words you are reading. And therefore our intellectual recognition of that fact should perhaps be allowing the interruptions, relishing the tone of voice and type of writing that allows for them. It may also mean reconfiguring what ‘good’ is, so that Dederer’s question “Is your motherhood making you a less good writer?” – with all the demands on time and concentration and emotion – is not somehow determined by the editorial rejection of that voice: the little, the associative, the interrupted.
