october 2014
by uzwi
Disused quarries filling with water as autumn sets in. Trees. Light rain. The power station siren. Various mud. Fallow deer in the wood, running down a narrow salient between two overgrown pits. I don’t know who was more startled, me or them. All I could do was watch. It’s one thing to see deer in parkland, another to have them flicker past you in and out of the trees on some business of their own. I come home and melt frozen soup for lunch. It slips out of the container with the polished surface of an object machined from rock. How do you continue to write about the world when it’s stopped being mysterious?
You pretend you are inventing, or can invent, another (world).
A good start-point. You’re trying to invent this world too. There’s the classic Paul Eduard quote, isn’t there? — “there is another world, but it’s this one.” I’m trying to write a book about that–about intense invention of everything, via glimpses, from a phenomenology of compiled fragments like the one above–just this minute.
Having just read your reply, I guess that’s what I would ideally have wanted to express with “pretend” – as if it were possible to make an elsewhere in opposition to this one world, though everything in the end confirms the base mundanity of what you are maybe trying or wishing to re-enchant. You don’t fly to the moon, you leave the earth, and that blue speck becomes the more desperately desired the further out you go. Or maybe only that far-flung perspective allows you to see that it wasn’t such a common rock, after all? Does your book have a working title?
It doesn’t yet, no. I mean, it’s got a score of them but I know none of them will do, even as a working title.
I’m currently reading On the Back of Our Images by Luc Dardenne. It’s amazing. I keep thinking about your work as I read it. I completely recommend it. It’s excerpts from his diary. So much good stuff. Listen to this from June 24th 1994; “Feeling engorged, encumbered. Have to sweep, clear out, uncover a sparer language, a flatter, sharper style suitable for naming again, distinguishing, sorting, cutting rumours short, getting out of the mishmash. There’s too much, far too much.” I especially love “naming again”.
I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
– Louis MacNeice
The difficulty being to write “about intense invention of everything, via glimpses” through intense invention via glimpses.
Or just invent the stuff to link the spaces between glimpses, if that even means anything like an actual operational difference. There’s a thing called inattentional blindness; you don’t register visually what you don’t attend to. Can there be an attentional (far-/second-)sightedness? To attend to anything, even a figment, is to call it into being?
I dunno. I am flagging now. I was always a better literary sprinter than a cross-country runner.
I look forward to the book-in-the-making.