II.
Dear Friend
I am wandering through another city on tour, this time it’s Paris, in the neighborhoods where it feels like bits of the world have gathered, swept together like crumbs: from the Maghreb, from West Africa, from the Subcontinent. Smells of roasting coffee float out a doorway, the sign tells me from Brazil. Aren’t these Rimbaud’s ideals, come to life and (how ironic for the adventurer) come to Paris? The triumphal arch at the top of the Faubourg St.-Denis, lit by the orange glow of an unseen sunset, is to the mechanized city a barrier. But on foot — in human scale — it is a monument to all the people and all the things that crowd around its base.
And my own feelings: why not let them crowd around? What is it that I am keeping at the perimeter, outside the barrier?
In a dream, Titus’s arch in Rome is (still) buried up to the inscriptions describing the destruction of the Temple. I touch the reliefs. The ground below is not solid; it is a glass walkway, constructed for tourists. Loudspeakers announce approaching troops. And then I am in bed at my grandparents’ house, having that familiar dream again — a dream so much a part of my experience, it can even be a dream within a dream — it’s the one where the screen door, which leads out of the room and directly into a field, will be my escape. Bears and crickets fill the field beyond the door. There is another loudspeaker outside. Animated like a face, it grimaces and shouts directions.
Gare de l’Est. Gare du Nord. Church of the West. Southern Seas.
When I saw the garden at Ryoanji, I thought: it makes the flow of a stream into an image. Similarly, the flow of ideas is a literary trope (“stream of consciousness”). But the flow of the street — the barber dusting off a chair in preparation for a client — this doesn’t feel to me like an image or a trope, it feels like life itself. Is it because this is the only kind of life visible to a person on the run? You have to sit still to contemplate the motion of a stream. Perhaps also to observe one’s thoughts. And sitting still is a privilege of peace.
The Surrealists made use of this flow of the street in their art, it’s true — I’m thinking not of their automatic work, but their works of imitation: Immaculate Conception, Hebdomeros, Adventures of Telemachus… In these the metonymy of the street — the signs, slang, snippets of conversation — stand in for the more discursive antecedents of history, literature, philosophy. Just as the coffee beans I smelled today are Brazil.
Is it that I feel each refugee is a nation? Each carries all we are to know — here, in the flow — of that other place. And each has borders — barriers. That’s the cold war that follows every hot explosion. Scatter people, and they grow icy hard, as lava turns to stone. Bumping along the road, and against one another in the street, those stones are ground to pebbles. Crumbs.
An actress from David Mamet’s company once described to me a technique they call, “as if.” Do not play the Queen of England, play yourself as the Queen of England. No artifice = the greatest artifice. We know you are not the Queen, but if you are being true to the moment then we know what you are thinking and feeling as the Queen; all that is left for the actor is to accomplish what needs to be done in the scene.
Isn’t this game equivalent to the literary idea of imitation? When Breton and Éluard simulate madness, the effect of their work depends on our knowing that they are not, in fact, mad. In the same way, Buster Keaton does not satirize, or ironize, the melodramatic hero. He simulates the hero — he casts himself in the role despite his unfitness for it.
Rimbaud did the same, out there in Aden. He could have bought coffee in Paris.
I realize now why I am writing to you: I feel unfit to tell this story. But I have been cast in the role regardless.
*
This letter, with all its literary debates and anxieties, struck me as strange, even artificial. It is artificial: the artifice of “as if.” Do not play Kafka, play yourself as Kafka. No artifice = the greatest artifice. We know you are not Kafka, but if you are being truthful then we know what you are thinking and feeling; all that is left for the writer is to accomplish what needs to be done in this book.
*
What Is To Be Done? The title is so compelling, I’ve kept it on the shelf all these years, just to read the spine.
Others? The Wretched of the Earth. The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State. Mules and Men. The Interpretation of Cultures. Language as Symbolic Action. The Language and Thought of the Child. Growth and Structure of the English Language. The Forest of Symbols. Writing Degree Zero. On Collective Memory. Zakhor.
Their import seems so obvious now — my bookshelf is like one of those embarrassingly overdetermined dreams in Thomas Hardy. How could I not have seen it?
*
N. wants to write herself a letter from Paris, and tell herself how it feels to be away from home, away from her family.
*
Certainly it is easier to write if I can believe (pretend?) it’s private. This must have been my motivation for a pseudonym, before I first published. R. talked me out of it. Careful not to divide things too much, she warned — there might not be enough to go around. But she probably didn’t imagine I wanted to keep the work secret from family; there was nothing in those first poems (or was there?) to indicate that.
And could I have kept it secret? Had I published under a pseudonym, and later divulged it, I would have found myself in an even worse situation: no secrets from family, all secrets from the public. And what I craved was the opposite: all secrets from family, none from the public. I will have to live with no secrets from anyone.
*
Kafka’s letter to his father, written but never sent. My letter to N.’s father — trashed so that I would not be tempted to send it. My letter to my father… You are reading it.
*
The morning after arriving home from Europe, the phone rings and N. picks up. “Are you deeply depressed?” says my father, without announcing who it is. “No, are you?” she says, and hands me the phone.
*
My self-recriminations come flooding back: chief among them that writing like this is not literature. This is not a book. Is it a letter?
Cf. Ovid:
… though the words are the same, I write to different people --
one cry for help, but many addressees.
(EP III.9)
And my ambition, at its most grandiose: not to write a book. To write a non-book.
Cf. Robert Smithson, site and non-site. Eva Hesse: “non, nothing, everything.”
*
The room we rented in Paris, already slipping into nostalgia. The saffron curtain. The Christmas lights hung on the mirror. The mantelpiece with a drying bouquet. The small utensils we bought to cook our meals.
*
By a rice field at night, our friends pull the car over so we can listen to the frogs. We are near the mountain where we will spend the night. The room at the inn is so fragile, it feels like it was made in a children’s art class — paper, sticks, and glue. The light flickers from the insects flying around it, casting shadows. Steam rises from the building next door. We bathe, then sit together in a more brightly lit room, drinking sake and telling ghost stories. Next morning, a walk down a mountain path — there are plants we have never seen, growing on each side.
*
Before returning home, N. and I each write ourselves a letter, posting them from the airport along with our détaxe.
I’m gonna sit right down and write myself a letter
And make believe it came from you
*
It is early spring. At the far end of Walden Pond, N. and I are by the railroad tracks, listening to a loud buzzing sound. We cross the tracks and walk down a path that leads to a clearing. There is a small marshy pond sitting in a bright bowl, the area is loud with peeping frogs. The sound blots out everything but the light.