IV.
Dear Poet,
Your non-book arrived. Not by post, exactly. The situation reminded me of something else you once sent:
…the letters they wrote were transported by hand, out in the open, from place to place.
I do not mind your sharing these thoughts with others, even if it’s only to reach me. But are you sharing everything that you promised? Did you “include it all,” as you say? What are you leaving out, beyond the perimeter? Have you left those things out on my account?
Did you imagine that I require that of you?
Consider the pleasure of picking up the guitar and simply playing — that’s what Gertrude Stein felt, writing. I know because she told me. Yes, in a non-book, delivered not unlike yours.
Why not just write about the things you love? Take them — 78s, old movies — and do whatever seems possible with them, or in their spirit.
Halbwachs speaks of memory as distinct from the individual — arguing that our memories are determined by others’ recollection, as well as our own. Memory is a social fact, not only a psychological one. Dreams he identifies as memory without society; hence nonsensical, scrambled, non-linear. Social memory, on the other hand, tells a story. It has a purpose; individual memory does not.
Using Halbwachs’s terms, is not fiction a form of social memory? In other words: why are you bothering to tell the truth?
How perverse that you have turned yourself into an editor. Leaving out has never been your problem.
Rereading Bruno Schulz lately, I was struck by the different tone in his two books. The first (Cinnamon Shops), so effortlessly strange and lyrical. It is addressed to no one and stands tall as an autonomous object. The second (Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass) is self-consciously addressed to the reader. It is lyrical, too — but as in Agnon, or Chekhov, here the lyrical is presented in order to move the reader, rather than for the disinterested pleasure of its own existence.
Consider the title story of that second book: a perfect dream logic, until the last two paragraphs. (You see, he needed an editor).
Music gives you that disinterested kind of pleasure, I know. A gamelan performance, with dancers, in midwinter at Sanders Theater in Cambridge — doesn’t it convey both the idea of a symphony, and that of a voyage? The playing in unison, the balance of the instruments, their careful positioning in the room… And at intermission, one of the dancers in full make-up, wearing a camelhair coat over her costume, selling scarves and jewelry at a table.
What did you feel then? Why are you leaving that out?
Schulz, again: “It is part of my existence to be the parasite of metaphors, so easily am I carried away by the first simile that comes along. Having been carried away, I have to find my difficult way back, and slowly return to my senses.”
From his truly perfect story, “Loneliness.” Study it.
I watched Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser last week. It too has many lessons for you: in particular, the scenes where he struggles to reason, or to express himself; the puzzle of the tower and the room inside it; the comedy of his debate with church and university; his tears, falling from open eyes.
You sang about that once --
And who am I to ask why I’ve been found
I’m just water fallen down to the ground
Or was that about me, too?
*
This letter tore through me, as if I were its envelope.
*
Is this the consolation of poetry? To make something out of what cannot be used. To say something of what cannot be said.
The effaced inscription resembles lyric.
Is this why I stopped writing poems, stopped breaking lines? It seemed like it was saying less, rather than more. I wanted to include it all, so I wrote prose.
But if the subject cannot be spoken of — cannot be the subject — is not mine to speak about — is not permitted to be spoken of —
Then the leaving out — the blank spaces — (fill in the gaps)
Saying it all is for the dead. Biographies. Variorum editions. Plaques and memorials.
And for the living: an effaced inscription. Lyric.
*
The only remaining question, then: who is living?