writing matters (3)

I return to it ever so often, because herein lies its imperative, its pleasure, its despair, its endless beauty.

Finding the right words.

To whomever, I will keep on writing thus. Even if at the risk of being misunderstood, distorted, smeared. (As you invariably are.)

Does it matter, anyhow?

Because it is always to a past or to a future friend that you write.

Never here, he or she has already left -- or is as yet to arrive.


My beloved absent.

*       *       *

Nowadays people only write letters to record requests, transactions, and detailed explanations, or to send brief greetings. When they want to make personal contact, they telephone. Conversation by telephone communicates with the tone and warmth of the human voice, but what moved one deeply can only be shared through language when one has found the right words. Finding the right words takes time, and the one to whom they are addressed is no longer the one you thought  he or she was when you wrote. One sends one's letters to an address he or she has left.

--Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. vii.

writing matters (2)

The forms of communicating with the other in his/her absence have multiplied and accelerated beyond belief over the past decades. At once producers and products of our changed, anguished sense of time and of our loss of intimacy, they have brought into disrepute that once quintessential vehicle for defending ourselves against the pain of separation: a painstakingly handwritten letter.

Maybe because your bodily investment into it is so limited (or at least so automatised), maybe because the sense of distance in space & time can be so easily deluded through its apparent immediacy and its lack of physicality, an e-mail can never be a substitute for that fiction of intimate connection which a letter aims to create.

Pace all e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, blog, etc., enthusiasts, no other space of communication gives you so much scope for self-creation and self-discovery than a letter to a friend, a lover, a close relative. In its unabashed physicality - the handwriting, the paper, the textures, the scents - a letter assumes itself as an idealisation, a fantasy of intimacy, and, at the same time, a testimony of distance.

The response it eventually elicits (or not) is beside the point, because the wait, the anticipation itself is part of the movement of creation - that transformation of affect hunger into hallucinatory nourishment, of loneliness into an imaginary communion.

A sustaining fiction, in sum, unlike all the other seemingly more sophisticated yet impoverishing fictions we continue to invent to tackle distance and separation.

writing matters (1)

... Writing matters tremendously for women; ... how we plot ourselves into our fictions has everything to do with how we plot ourselves into our lives.

Writing hurts.


--Ruth Behar, 'Introduction: Out of Exile' in Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon, eds. Women Writing Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 15; 23.

blood

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

            ---F. Nietzsche


Written with your own blood. While it's certainly not the only one, this remains my main yardstick for judging good writing - for judging all literature and art, for that matter.

Thus my intense disliking for that kind of writing which is no more than a by-product of literary criticism: full of witticisms and literary allusions showing what a well-read and well-travelled chap you are, but with no blood running through it. Begging for the self-indulgent applause of a learned coterie, but leaving all the others out in the cold.

It might impress me every now and then, but it doesn't affect me - it doesn't touch my emotions.

Llansol

Tonight, re-reading Clarice Lispector, I suddenly remembered Maria Gabriela Llansol, and couldn't help regretting having resisted her writing for so long, perhaps because I intuitively felt it was too close to the bone for safety (that is, when safety was something I treasured, alas. Not anymore.)

It's no surprise that Llansol's amazing work has remained accessible only to a small, very small readership and to a coterie of academics, who haven't as yet seemed to have found the time nor the will to make her texts more widely available in English, as she deserves - in the same way that Llansol herself beautifully and generously translated - or trans-figured - into her native Portuguese language texts by Rimbaud, Verlaine, Rilke, Apollinaire, Eluard, Emily Dickinson, and many, many others.

Here's a tiny contribution, from a book I read on my last trip to Portugal. I only wish I had the desire to translate more on the trip this summer. Portuguese is such a painful language to me, though...


VIII. under her veil

I very intimately think to those who read __________ the legentes, I desire.

I expose ourselves.

Yet, if you who think do not offer your body,

what will you think?

XLII. nothing

if I don't listen to the leaves' oxygen,
music is blind to me.

[...]

«it is between hammers that our heart survives.»


(translated from Maria Gabriela Llansol, Amigo e Amiga: Curso de silêncio de 2004. Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2005).

tasogare no aji / the taste of twilight

I wonder how many people there are in the world who truly have a sense of taste for twilight? It seems to me that many people have lumped twilight and dusk together. When speaking of "dusk" the sensation of the color of night, the color of darkness, becomes dominant. However, twilight is neither the color of night nor the color of darkness. So saying, it is neither simply a sensation of day, nor of light. In the momentary world of entering night from day, at the momentary boundary of entering darkness from light, is that not where the twilight world lies? Twilight is neither darkness nor light, and nor is it a mixture of light and darkness. I think that twilight is a world of singularly subtle shades that exist solely in that momentary space of entering darkness from light, of entering night from day. Similar to the singularly subtle twilight world, existing in the space of entering darkness from light, there is a world of subtle shades called dawn on the boundary of entering light from darkness, in the momentary interval of moving to day from night. This too is a singularly subtle world that is neither darkness nor light nor a mixture of darkness and light. I consider it a great mistake that people in the world think as though there were no other worlds outside of night and day, darkness and light. It is my belief that there is certainly a singularly subtle world of the in-between outside of sensations that approach the two extremes of dusk and day-break. [...]
This taste for twilight, this taste for dawn, is not something that exists merely in the relation of day with night. I believe that in similar fashion among all things in the universe there are singularly subtle worlds. For example, even when it comes to people, good and evil is something like day and night, but in between this good and evil there is in addition a singularly subtle place that we should not destroy, that we should not extinguish. In the momentary space of moving from good to evil, in the momentary space of moving from evil to good, humans display singularly nuanced shapes and feelings. I would like primarily to sketch and to transcribe such a twilight-like world. I have been thinking too that I would like to impart in my works a world of the singulary in-between, which is on neither extremity of good and evil, right and wrong, pleasure and displeasure.

Izumi Kyôka, "Tasogare no aji" / The Taste of twilight (translation by Gerald Figal)
from Gerald Figal, Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (Durham: Durham UP, 1999) 1-2.

wanderlust

To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as guide. [...] I have often wished that my sentences could be written out as a single line running into the distance so that it would be clear that a sentence is likewise a road and reading is travelling.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, p. 72.