exhaled-spirals

[exhaled-spirals]

“Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot, in other words, it colors and inhabits and magnifies each and every day; heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through […]. Heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity: in a love relationship, in a life’s work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is [an] essence and emblem of care… [W]e use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream… But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.”

— David Whyte, Consolations (via exhaled-spirals)

[exhaled-spirals]

“‘Let me see, Mr. Vyse—I forget—what is your profession?’ ‘I have no profession,’ said Cecil. ‘It is another example of my decadence. My attitude quite an indefensible one–is that so long as I am no trouble to any one I have a right to do as I like. I know I ought to be getting money out of people, or devoting myself to things I don’t care a straw about, but somehow, I’ve not been able to begin.’ 'You are very fortunate,’ said Mr. Beebe. 'It is a wonderful opportunity, the possession of leisure.’”

— E.M. Forster, A Room With a View (via exhaled-spirals)

[exhaled-spirals]

“The richness of the rain made me feel safe and protected; I have always considered the rain to be healing—a blanket—the comfort of a friend. Without at least some rain in any given day, or at least a cloud or two on the horizon, I feel overwhelmed by the information of sunlight and yearn for the vital, muffling gift of falling water.”

— Douglas Coupland, Life After God

[exhaled-spirals]

« After all, didn’t someone like Marcel Proust demonstrate that revision could be an art as rigorous and sophisticated as writing itself? […] Or consider James Joyce, another compulsive amasser of words, for whom revising was almost more sublime than writing—if indeed he even distinguished between the two—and was, happily, an endless task.

[...] The key in both cases—though each was haunted by his own idiosyncrasies—was to free revision from guilt. They didn’t re-write because they had made mistakes, or because they hadn’t given the first draft everything they had, or because it was time to address the problems they hadn't initially managed to solve. Nor did they revise in order to improve, to inch closer to some remote ideal of beauty. They revised because they couldn’t stop writing, plain and simple. Revision, then, was not the hygiene of writing but its continuation by other means.

We don’t edit our texts to rectify, complete, tidy, or adjust them […]. In revising, we are not policing our previous drafts. We are—or at least we could be—freeing them, deepening them, multiplying them.

Perhaps it would be necessary to excise from the words "editing", "revising" or "correcting" everything that fatally ties them to moral goodness. Guilt-infused revision always implies a “should be,” against which we measure our achievements and our shortcomings; […] its function is always the same: to discriminate between virtues and vices, efficiency and uncertainty, necessity and luxury, focus and digression, balance and excess. It rewards the former, of course, and condemns the latter.

But imagine, for a moment, if such sanitary discipline were applied to […] the prose of Samuel Beckett, from whom comes the beautiful battle cry that presides over these reflections: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Beckett was not invoking revision as a precaution that saves us from the abyss, but rather as a headlong plunge into darkness—our own, first of all—and, at best, a call to be the best possible artists of failure.

But what does it mean in this context to fail? How could an error be not the unhappy accident that vigilant correction steps in to amend just in time, before it ruins everything, but instead a path—or better yet, the path?

Let us return to Proust and Joyce. Let us return to the idea of revision as the continuation of writing by other means, in other ways, through other dimensions.

There is something undoubtedly tortuous in the excess with which Proust and Joyce heaped new words onto their already unwieldy texts. Something stubborn, even perverse, as if the pleasure of writing were nothing more than the antechamber, the preparation for a greater pleasure: the insidious, unruly pleasure of revision, so out of control that at times it threatened the very integrity of the text itself.

“Again,” writes Beckett. “Try again. Fail again.” Because the point is not merely to fail. Anyone can fail once; […] what matters is to fail again and again, always, as if there were no other way. Because repetition proves that failure is not a matter of will: it is not chosen, and therefore cannot be appeased, controlled, or stopped.

Well then, this error we cannot help but fall into is not just any error. It is our error; it bears the shape, the consistency, the taste, the temperature, and the rhythm of our desire, our imagination, our hallucinations, our reckless ideas about writing and about the world we write.

[…S]o let's say it clearly now, once and for all: there are no solutions. No true problem has a solution […]. The solution is not to seek, demand, or believe in solutions. The solution—the only solution—is to deepen the problem, to unfold it like a map. For that is what a problem is: the map of a particular way of doing something with language.

Consider Proust the ponderous, the asthmatic whose sentences breathe across page after page; the frivolous man who loses himself in irrelevant details, who fails to advance the action, who delays it, forgets it, contradicts it.

Consider Joyce the encyclopedic, the unreadable, the man who sought less to write than to invent a unique language that only he could speak and understand [...]. Consider Beckett the stammerer, the paralysed, the one who moves neither backward nor forward, who sinks, who grows weary, who writes his way into silence. […]

What unites them? What do they share? I would say: they are people with problems—many problems, in some cases—who perhaps possessed one singular lucidity: the clairvoyance, modest and ambitious at once, [...] to ask whether those problems might not, in fact, be the only thing they truly had. Or not the only thing, but the most personal and most precious.

Proust and Joyce parodied revision in the Japanese manner: over-correcting, revising to excess, flooding copyeditors, proofreaders, and long-suffering publishers with wave after wave of changes that no one—not even themselves—had anticipated. That is not the only way. Others, more contemporary, more conceptual, have chosen the opposite strategy: they do not revise.

I am thinking, for example, of a compatriot: César Aira. He is famous [...] for not revising. […] He allowed himself the luxury of making all his characters speak like philosophers or quantum physicists, regardless of whether they were teenagers from shantytowns, retirees delivering pizza, or dogs. And he allowed himself to end his novels with no concern for organic unity, with last-minute acrobatics and marvels, some more absurd and implausible than others, for which the narrative offered no preparation nor pretence of justification.

Aira, in a novel strategy as well, did not criticise his critics nor defend himself. He admitted everything, but without guilt, as one accepts a kind of natural fatality. Yes, he would say, his characters did speak as people complained they spoke, and yes, his endings truly could not be more arbitrary. But that was simply how things unfolded in him as he wrote. The errors attributed to Aira he did not deny nor minimise. He turned them into fatal behaviours, compulsions without alternative, ways of writing that might strike others as shocking or even provocative, but that in his world were perfectly natural and inevitable.

Aira, with that irritating Zen-impostor nonchalance, would say: “Why should I revise? I keep writing. The next novel will correct the last one, and so on—or not.”

Proust and Joyce revised endlessly in order to keep writing. Aira does not revise so he doesn't have to stop writing. But their vices are not problems in need of solutions; they are the very engines of their art. Whether through excess or refusal of revision, their habits carved out a place in the system, a place which perhaps didn't exist before, a place like a generative core—a poetic principle. »

— Alan Pauls, Fallar otra vez (translation mine)

[exhaled-spirals]

« The sea refreshes our imagination because it does not make us think of human life; yet it rejoices the soul, because, like the soul, it is an infinite and impotent striving, a strength that is ceaselessly broken by falls, an eternal and exquisite lament. The sea thus enchants us like music, which, unlike language, never bears the traces of things, never tells us anything about human beings, but imitates the stirrings of the soul. Sweeping up with the waves of those movements, plunging back with them, the heart thus forgets its own failures and finds solace in an intimate harmony between its own sadness and the sea’s sadness, which merges the sea’s destiny with the destinies of all things. »

— Marcel Proust, "La Mer" from Les Plaisirs et les Jours

[exhaled-spirals]

— Jean de La Fontaine, Daphné (1674)

[exhaled-spirals]

“The most tragic form of loss […] is the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different.”

— Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (1954)

[exhaled-spirals]

« [I]n the early decades of the 1800s, no one had any inkling that there had ever been such creatures as dinosaurs. The word dinosaur would not be coined until 1842. That seems awfully late in the day, especially considering how much we now take dinosaurs for granted. Today every natural history museum in the world boasts an enormous dinosaur skeleton that scrapes the ceiling [...]; every toddler has pajamas with cartoon dinosaurs or a bin stufed with toy dinosaurs.

But a time traveler from 1800 would look at those toys and relics in bewilderment. Shakespeare, who imagined everything, never imagined a world ruled by house-sized beasts and where human beings had never set foot. The world’s most farseeing thinkers had never seen that far. No such possibility had ever crossed the mind of Leonardo da Vinci or Galileo or Isaac Newton or Benjamin Franklin. [...]

Outside of myths and fairy tales, no one had ever dreamed that creatures like three-toed giants had once rambled across the land. No one ever imagined that, for eons and eons, legions of flying, slithering, lumbering creatures had ruled the world, and that human beings had played no role whatsoever in the tale. [...]

And dinosaurs had an unfathomably long run; they reigned for over one hundred million years. (Some scientists believe the true figure is closer to one hundred eighty-six million years.) Modern humans have been around for perhaps a hundred thousand years. If humans manage to survive ten times as long as we have so far, we will have made it 1 percent as long as the dinosaurs did.

[...19th-century scientists] had only a few bones or teeth, and their task was to imagine a body from those scanty hints. It was a bit like trying to solve a maddeningly dificult jigsaw puzzle where a great many pieces had been lost, and pieces from diferent puzzles had been flung together, and no one had ever seen the picture they were trying to assemble. [...]

Today we encounter these puzzles from the past in their complete, solved form, with all the signs of hard work hidden from view. The resolution of the tale is so familiar—dragonlike creatures roamed an ancient world—that it is easy to forget how hard-won those successes were. [...]

The tale begins around 1800 and reaches its climax on New Year’s Eve 1853. Those bookend dates are key. These were early days for science—the word scientist did not exist until 1834—and natural history in particular was an unsettled muddle where nearly every question was up for debate.

The dinosaur discoveries were news flashes in a world unprepared to make sense of them. Suddenly it seemed that the familiar world had been built atop a vanished world, or perhaps a series of vanished worlds, that had been filled with gigantic marauding creatures.

The cozy cottage had become a haunted house. »

— Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

[exhaled-spirals]

« I mean I get used to myself at night, it takes that long sometimes. The first thing in the morning I feel sort of undefined, but by midnight you’ve done all the things you have to do, I mean all the things like meeting people and, you know, and paying bills, and by night those things are done because by then there’s nothing you can do about them if they aren’t done, so there you are alone and you have the things that matter, after the whole day you can sort of take everything that’s happened and go over it alone. I mean I’m never really sure who I am until night, he added. »

— William Gaddis, The Recognitions

[exhaled-spirals]

[M]any puzzle pieces had been picked up, admired for their handsome appearance, and then put to one side because no one recognized that they had any special significance. (A clue is not a clue until someone sees a mystery.)

— Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party

[exhaled-spirals]

« And again the dread of the night came on him. He was a network of nerves [...]; he was haunted by anxiety and a sense of dangerous impending void. [...] [H]is dread was the nights when he could not sleep. Then it was awful indeed, when annihilation pressed in on him on every side. Then it was ghastly, to exist without having any life: lifeless, in the night, to exist. »

— D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

[exhaled-spirals]

Cet univers complètement pourri de richesse, de sénilité, d'indifférence, de puritanisme et d'hygiène mentale, de misère et de gaspillage, de vanité technologique et de violence inutile [...]

— Jean Baudrillard, America

[exhaled-spirals]

Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.

― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

[exhaled-spirals]

— Simone de Beauvoir, in a letter to Nelson Algren, July 3rd 1947

[exhaled-spirals]

“She had exactly the German way; whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, … or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”

— Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

[exhaled-spirals]

« “I wish I knew when I was going to die,” ninety-six-year-old Dame Frances Anne often said, “I wish I knew.” “Why, Dame?” “Then I should know what to read next.” »

— Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede

[exhaled-spirals]

« Some of [the citizens of Tainaron] carry their innermost apartment, a one-roomed flat which fits their dimensions like a glove, with them everywhere. But this has the drawback that one cannot always make sense of what they say, for it echoes and reverberates from the walls of their private apartments.

Poor things, who never come among people without this innermost shield. It reflects the terrible vulnerability of their lives. [...] But if it is taken away from them, they die—perhaps simply of shame, perhaps because their skins are too soft for the outside air, or because they do not have any skin at all.

Who would be so cruel as to tear from them this last shield! Oh, I have heard that such things, too, happen here in Tainaron; I have been startled by the moans of death-throes in the depths of the night. But I have my own theory concerning why this happens. For, you see, those who constantly drag their houses with them remain unknown to other people. One can gain only a brief glimpse of them, if that; they are always in hiding.

And then there are those who cannot bear such a situation, those who wish to see everything face to face and to reveal, open, show the whole world the nakedness of things... Now and then the temptation becomes overwhelming to them, and they split open the house of some poor unfortunate. I awake to shrieking, sigh and turn over—and soon fall asleep again. »

— Leena Krohn, Tainaron: Mail from Another City