“Literature - which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality - seems to me the end towards which all human effort would have to strive, if it were truly human and not just a welling up of our animal self.” (Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet).
Stairways that transgress the need to understand the reality in which we are placed invite us to ascend to “what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.” (C.S. Lewis, On Stories). “Today, he repeats, they have to shout down the din of the world! They have to block it out by putting the volume up.” (John Berger, To the Wedding). To undulate in thought, to run deft synapses over information subtracted into nothing, is to pursue the creation in the abundance — “being has the character of nothing.” (Martin Heidegger, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning)). Nothing; forgetting time through the perception of interpretation. “I want to be a person like somebody else was once.” (Peter Handke, Kaspar). Loss without nostalgia but with a meeting point between the past, present, and future: “inscribing the present as a memory for the future . . . [where] Every moment immediately negates itself—it ceases to be as soon as it comes to be—and must therefore be inscribed as a memory in order to be apprehended at all.” (Martin Hägglund, Dying for Time). Coexistence of instances in “a collaboration in progress” (Richard Powers, The Overstory), thus empowering the written word as the impalpable inertia of the abstract to polysemous verity. Words. The interweaving of perception, to perish in the word of the blind, to use “language to take us to a place beyond language.” (Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Poetry Like a Professor).
Not accumulation but erosion. “[B]eing has the character of nothing” (Heidegger, Contributions), a condition in presence, where what is must lean against what is not in order to appear at all. The world is not filled but perforated, sustained by absences. To become is to conceal the nothingness, faltered only by language itself, an exposure to what cannot be held.
A slipping as condition of transformation. To let “us see things as they are anew, under a new aspect, transfigured, subject to a felt variation. . . that is both beyond us yet ourselves.” (Simon Critchley, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens). Words disturb, pressing until the ordinary fractures, and returns are altered, yet recognizable. Both ours and not ours, familiar yet estranged, as if reality itself had been tilted slightly off-axis. To feel the pressure of reality is not to disappear, but to resist and reshape into something that can be borne.
“Nothing surrenders itself so completely as the word. One pronounces words and immediately lets them go.” (Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow). Both the vehicle and vanishing. Back to nothingness: “When there is nothing left, there will still be sand.” (Jabès, The Book of Questions). Traces of reality in a field of provisional endless recombination.
And so the uneasiness persists:
“It reminds you of a placid rivulet, meandering smoothly through green pastures and shaded by pleasant trees, till at last it falls into the vast sea; but the sea is so calm, so silent, so indifferent, that you are troubled suddenly by a vague uneasiness.”
-W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
The calmness in this sea of vastness, constantly shifting, dissolving substance into conditions of cognition. Not clarity, not solution, but potential of disquieting the invisible.
Raffaele Mainella, From Nos Invisibles, 1907
Books Mentioned
Berger, John. To the Wedding: A Novel. Pantheon Books, 1995.
Critchley, Simon. Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Routledge, 2005.
Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse. Harper Perennial, 2018.
Hägglund, Martin. Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov. Harvard University Press, 2012.
Handke, Peter. Kaspar. Translated by Michael Roloff, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.
Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Indiana University Press, 1999.
Jabès, Edmond. The Book of Questions. Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, Wesleyan University Press, 1991.
Lewis, C. S. On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.
Marías, Javier. Your Face Tomorrow. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa, New Directions, 2013.
Maugham, W. Somerset. The Moon and Sixpence. 1919.
Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet. Edited and translated by Richard Zenith, Penguin Books, 2015.
Powers, Richard. The Overstory: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.
