(Incidentally, this is a continuation of Remembrance of thoughts lost. Does it mean that I am thinking of these entries as if they were pages, linked to a parent page and presently integrated into ever larger wholes, e.g., section, chapter, Part . . .?)

What is a diary? The dictionary definition reads, A book for use in keeping a personal record, as of experiences. I’d list two essential (formal) characteristics:

• the experiences or objects digressed about are, to the diarist, worth of consideration. A corollary to this is that a diarist may not review situations that others would deem important.
• good faith is expected. Since a diary is, by definition, a book for use in keeping a personal record, the diarist enters into an implied contract with himself — himself now being the reader — that he will attempt to be as honest and straightforward as his nature permits.

Embedded in the first characteristic is something else, present only in a writer’s diary (would-be writers such as myself included here):

• maximum importance is accorded to literary allusions because significant writing is tantamount to beautiful writing.

A writer agonizes about punctuation while someone who is not a writer keeps tabs of who was present at the party — were the handrails velvet? — did the gentleman who exchanged glances with me have a peg leg? External facts like these leave me cold. That said, the systematic overuse of quotations in a writer’s diary cannot be excused on grounds that “I’m taking stock of great writing.”

Thoughts, whether one’s own or not, are the mind’s window to the world. When a window treatment includes etched glass, louvers and sheers, house plants and other ornaments, the light opening is obstructed. In language, that opening is silence. Put in ample silence — only then can thoughts be heard. And beware of quotations that proliferate, eventually steamrolling the thought that each small excerpt was meant to clarify.

As I read Opacity and Gestalt, I am reminded of the wisdom of keeping some distance — some emotional separateness — from the “truth” we wish to express. The price of not writing then and there, while this insight was forming, is that it was missed, the memory of it quickly thawing out.

Walter Benjamin’s published writings include fragments, dashed off as markers (mojones in Spanish) for thoughts he did not want to lose. ¹

By the way, must read Benjamin’s The Metaphysics of Youth ² The reason I say this is because, by chance, the book opened on this passage:

A diary is an act of liberation, covert and unrestrained in its victory. No unfree spirit will understand this book. When the self was devoured by yearning for itself, devoured by its desire for youth, devoured by the lust for power over the years to come, devoured by the yearning to pass calmly through the days to come, darkly inflamed by the pleasures of idleness but cursed and imprisoned in calendar time, clock time, and stock-exchange time, and when no ray of immortality cast its light over the self — it began to glow of its own accord. ³

Back to the main point: The idea in this Remembrance of thoughts lost is a commonplace of established wisdom: jot it down, else you will forget! And it is also well known that Socrates ⁴ doubted that writing advanced the cause of truth; instead, he feared that writing

will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

It is this particular complaint — that writing works not as an aid of memory but to reminisce — that concerns me deeply. What justifies quoting others, as I have been doing? I rationalize it on grounds that what others wrote leads me to think — by asking questions and weaving a fabric of mental connections. So when I quote from a book, I really want the opportunity to think (by walking) along with that author. But a more genuine reason has to do with nurturing myself. “One is alone with oneself,” writes Bloch. ⁵ Pointedly, he adds:

By ourselves we are still empty. So we easily fall asleep with no external stimuli.  . . . We can’t be alone for long.⁶

What Socrates labels “reminisce” — the ability to remember information — is wholly removed from moulding one’s life, which is (for Socrates) the goal of truth-seeking. Remembering one’s personal truth and remembering the truths written by others are as different as, say, inhabiting a house versus working with “a coat of stone that I wrapped around my body to give me shelter from the elements.” ⁷ Wearing a house, actualizing truth  . . .

I just read the following:

Bachmann’s doctoral thesis is one of the earliest and most important documents of her faith in art and poetic language to express the ineffable and the irrational, what she called “an awareness of life.” She concludes that Heidegger’s philosophy cannot legitimately make any claims to truth and that the basic human experiences which existentialism addresses can find their best expression in art. She concludes by citing Baudelaire’s sonnet “Le gouffre” (”The Abyss”) as “linguistic evidence of the extreme possibility of expressing the ineffable.” ¹

When we scour language for the ineffable, we let go of that distance we badly need in order to grasp the whole. Musil remembers a fly he once saw “interned in rock crystal”:

By being sealed within an alien medium it lost the detail of what one might call its “fly personality” and appeared to me only as a dark surface with delicately shaped appendages. I remember having felt this way about people seen in the tired light of some evening, moving as black dots on grass-green hills across an orange sky. It was a sense that these figures that would certainly, in some way or other, have offended me in close-up now awoke in me a certain aesthetic satisfaction, a reverberation of sympathy. ²

Here is the Baudelaire sonnet:³

The Abyss

Pascal had his abyss that moved along with him.
— Alas! all is abysmal, — action, desire, dream,
Word! and over my hair which stands on end
I feel the wind of Fear pass frequently.

Above, below, on every side, the depth, the strand,
The silence, space, hideous and fascinating…
On the background of my nights God with clever hands
Sketches an unending nightmare of many forms.

I’m afraid of sleep as one is of a great hole
Full of obscure horrors, leading one knows not where;
I see only infinite through every window,

And my spirit, haunted by vertigo, is jealous
Of the insensibility of nothingness.
— Ah! Never to go out from Numbers and Beings!

Philip Levine titled a poem of his, He would never use one word where none would do. ¹ All of a sudden (I might add by chance, as such things are wont to happen), this particular poem sprang to mind as I was still contemplating Bachmann’s short story titled Everything. ²

Awestruck. By Bachmann, I mean. The plot is thin in action — in fact, the story is concerned with the narrator’s (protagonist’s) interior journey. The narrator has fathered a son whom he nicknames Fipps (a pet’s name) because none of the three names given to the child (father’s name, father’s father’s name, mother’s father’s name) seem to fit ³ Earlier, the narrator had voiced his dismay at “this whole line of descent”:

… in every case there is darkness, so that it makes no difference whether we attach ourselves to Adam and Eve or to two other exemplars. Only if we don’t want to attach ourselves and prefer to ask why each one had his turn, we find ourselves completely baffled by the chain and don’t know what to make of all the begettings, of the first and last lives. For each person has only one turn at the game which he finds waiting for him and is compelled to take up: procreation and education, economics and politics, and he is allowed to occupy himself with money and emotions, with work and invention and the justification of the rules of the game which is called thinking. ⁴

Since the father is loath to push the child into “the game” that is waiting for him, he decides it would be best to teach Fipps nothing:

He was the first man. With him everything started, and it was impossible to say whether everything might not become quite different through him. Should I not leave the world to him, blank and without meaning? ⁵

The father’s resolve to let Fipps decide on everything extends to not telling the child even the names of things or the use of objects:

And I suddenly knew, it is all a question of language and not merely of this one language of ours that was created with others in Babel to confuse the world. For underneath it there smoulders another language that extends to gestures and looks, the unwinding of thoughts and the passage of feelings, and in it is all our misfortune. It was all a question of whether I could preserve the child from our language until he had established a new one and could introduce a new era. ⁶

On Sundays the father takes Fipps to the woods, to a stream, there to teach him the “language of stones”, the “language of water”, the “language of leaves”:

But since I knew and found no word of such languages, had only my own language and could not pass beyond its frontiers, I carried him up and down the paths in silence, and back home where he learned to form sentences and walked into the trap. ⁷

As he is socialized by his mother Hanna, Fipps betrays an “evil” side: he kills beetles. Once, in the middle of a temper tantrum, he said: “I’ll set the house on fire. I’ll smash everything to bits. I’ll smash you all to bits.” ⁸ Later, in school, he stabs a classmate. The father blames this turn of events on schooling. Now that Fipps treads in everyone’s footsteps, the father doesn’t want him any more. Only after Fipps dies (from an accident) can the father accept him, “this son.” The way to acceptance is, thinking no longer. The language of acceptance is the “language of shadows”:

I sometimes speak to him in the language that I cannot consider good.

My wild one. My heart. ⁹

And this, too, is the language that permits him to decrease the distance from a man to a woman, from himself to Hanna.

Bachmann joins language and ethics. Mentioned in the same breath are teaching Fipps and taking part in this world, which is “the worst of all worlds” ¹⁰ The narrator acknowledges thinking in universal terms ¹¹, in ways that banish feelings from language:

And when the trees cast shadows I thought I heard a voice: “Teach him the language of shadows! The world is an experiment and it is enough that this experiment has always been repeated in the same way with the same result. Make another experiment! Let him go to shadows! The result till now has been a life in guilt, love and despair.”  . . . But I could spare him guilt, love, and any kind of fate and free him for another life. ¹²

I have had my own running battle with language as a capacitor that severely trims expression and cannot but speak in generalities. While Bachmann thinks of an Adamic language in an Adamic earth (”I owed it to him, I had to act, go away with him, withdraw with him to an island. But where is this island from which a new human being can found a new world?” ¹³), I went to the other, farthest edges of history — my protagonist is not the first man but the last man. What would such a man say in those extreme conditions? I tied speaking the end-of-the-world in with speaking the subtlest differences that mark everyday phenomena. Here is a poem I wrote on the subject, several years back:

Scribbles for a Dead Young Poet

From lorn streets, from gray unbroken,
three noises:
     jag–
          jag-rub! Furiant–like, dragging,
a Cola can jangling,
wheeling under the quiet air.
And long unloosed from a damp bale,
a wintry leaf tript crackingly dry —
it flitted like a gull,
               tick-tip-tie — so withered so thin so
               hyaline.

No doubt, in time, someone will be last,
but will he himself know he
     is the last to go? Will it not be as in the
beginning, before man breathed out
     a single word?
What say you —

What say you like the silence of the leaf (midrib stuck into the ground) that flops
     gently,
          listing
               now to one side, now to the other? —
( barque waiting to founder? )

     chir-grey-let —
There, crack the riddle!

The end of language and the beginning of language are joined together by language’s opacity. (Topics yet to be explored:

• Biblical undertones in Bachmann’s Everything. The Father-son pair: flipping the Biblical story of Abraham-Isaac on its head? What of Freud’s theory of the prehistoric need to murder the father so that the father will not murder the son?
• Which is the turning point when the narrator decides that he can/will learn “the language of shadows”?)

I read some poetry by Ingeborg Bachmann:

I don’t answer as to why I waste time,
that I eat and sleep and read and listen to music,
that I am, am not, am not that, but that
I live.

And I go around in these socks and buddy shoes,
through the rotted grass and the vineyards,
so that I live, give everything up, even the meekest
hope that it could be otherwise, that a plane
will not fly, that a face will appear in front of me
not again, but finally, that’s what I hope for.

And so I don’t move, I drink my tea and sleep
badly. But I hope, strangled by banalities,
I hope for a life in which red blossoms.
That’s not modesty, but extinguishment,
an agreement with joy that enters the face out of boredom,
the accomplice of banality and passing time, and
the wild  . . .
¹

But, though strangled by banalities, I still hope for a life the color of blood — and wine and socialist ideas and ruddy skins. “That’s naught but extinguishment:” what’s the referent of “That”? I think it is “I live / not moving, drinking tea and sleeping / badly.” The amber of tea is a chromatic aberration of red, but it does contain some of the red hue. Extinguishment — the accomplice of banality and passing time — itself is extinguished or quenched from within. (Extinguishment cannot be said to be “obscured” because darkness, far from sapping life, invigorates. The amber of tea is an anemic red, but the red of blood — or in the vineyards — is dark.)

That’s not modesty but extinguishment The German Bescheidenheit would perhaps be better translated as humility, the insight that everything that interfers with life is harmful, even life’s own excesses — the Greeks’ “Nothing too much.”

According to Sontag ¹

the solitary narrator is the true protagonist of Sebald’s books.”  It is the articulated consciousness of the promeneur solitaire (Rousseau’s solitary walker) that invites a dialogical relationship with the reader.  The gesture is mediated by a highly allusive and self-consciously literary use of language  . . .

Richard Long’s mud works ¹ are made up of endlessly flowing lines. Their frame-less composition makes them more akin to the free layout of scrolls than to the congruent pages of a book.  I suspect that the book is on its way out, if not as a physical object, at least as the container of strictly unified (abstract) thinking.  Many texts today can be read irrespective of sequential ordering.  The walk as text (or as art) creates a record analogous to the ancient type of writing known as  ‘boustrophedon,’ which means literally ‘ox-turning’ for the way a farmer drives an ox to plough his fields. (Texts were written from right to left, left to right, and even so that alternate lines read in opposite directions.)

Despite protests from Australian scientists, citizens and faith groups, the timber of this wondrous island [Tasmania] is being turned into wood chip and paper pulp while the remaining forest — once the big trees are harvested — is burned to the ground with napalm and then replanted with a monocrop of eucalyptus trees. Around the tree nurseries the company plants blue carrots treated with a lethal toxin in the ground so that any small mammals that survive the burning of the forest are killed to prevent them from eating the young trees. ¹