Despite our APEX expectations of Paris, the destination marker sits squarely over London. We passengers stare at the video projection screen, willing the plane to change course, to fly towards the indicated landing point instead of along this unpredicted hypotenuse. We are veterans of too many airport movies and too many video games, and there is a ridiculous terror in the GAME OVER outcome which must follow this. The seemingly mis-aimed icon follows its passage between the warzones: Da Nang, Kabul, Baghdad, Kharkov. These are the recognisable names between Bali and Athens.
An announcement: the pilot assures us we are not flying to London: Paris is a new route, and Zero Point Paris has yet to be programmed into the system. Hmmmn. It could be me alone, but I imagine row after row of tightened, doubting lips. Our symbol sits still on the screen, or jerks forward pixel by pixel.
As we get closer to northern France, the skew path becomes more disturbing; I am more disturbed by it. Despite the pilot's soothing techno-talk and, on-screen, battle markers superseded by wine producing centres and punctuated by the periodic stillness of the airline logo, all purity (the round-ended metal tube, evenly spaced passengers struggling for sleep positions, weighed meal portions on rectangular trays, flight attendants' perfectly practised routines) is gone, muddied by this minor techno-gap. We descend, the altitude measure dropping at near enough to 10 m/s/s (as it would), the distance from destination almost unaltered. Switch it off! I brace as the altitude falls below 300 metres. I'm gripping the armrests, pushing myself back against the upright seat, telling myself: come on, relax, relax, it's routine. The screen eventually goes blank. And as usual I'm thinking about farewell notes, who should be mentioned.
Some books it's best not to read as inflight entertainment. "I don't know what to call this story", Marguerite Duras writes. The story of a young British pilot, shot down near the village of Vauville, in the last days of the war. "The child remained a prisoner of his airplane." And Duras becomes a prisoner of death, through this death. The whole village did. The women tend his grave still. "Death baptizes as well." It brings into community this "child who had died from playing at war, from playing at being the wind."
Duras writes, again and again, around this fact of death. "It's a brutal, isolated fact, without reverberation", an "inexhaustible fact". And perhaps this is one way for writing to find another speed, a speed outside the machinery of war and commerce. But how? "There is nothing I can write. There should be a writing of non-writing. Someday it will come.... Lost. Written, there. And immediately left behind."
Women's experience: the body rubbed against a particular speed. Her body labouring, making and being made by the house, making the house a home, a factory of domestic speed. "A house means a family house, a place specially meant for putting children and men in so as to restrict their waywardness and distract them from the longing for adventure and escape they've had since time began."
Men and children fly off, caught in other factories, other speeds -- school, work, war. "I can recall the kind of silence there was after they went out. To enter that silence was like entering the sea." A deep sea. "There'd been nine generations of women before me within those walls... All over the house there were surfaces rubbed smooth where grown-ups, children, and dogs had gone in and out of the doors."
The plane lands smoothly enough, at 246 kilometres per hour or thereabouts, and fluent as a game of tennis -- "thock, thock," as Tranter would (has) put it -- wheels bouncing moderately for a few metres, the force of airbrakes which all pilots no doubt wish for, and the only cure for my tremendous vertigo is to be flat on my face (flat against someone else's face is actually better, though it risks a vertigo of intimacy which is also a form of compulsive jumping); momentary ignorance is no help, not with my experience.
At the hotel I pull Barthelme's City Life from my travel bag. I'm feeling blokey, in need of undermining. I re-read the story beginning "A dog jumped on me out of a high window." The story's called "The Falling Dog". I suppose it's about inverse vertigo, the fear of being jumped upon. There's no analysis of speed, and I'm in the mood for empirics. I suppose it's a stupid story, but "good-stupid", like his "stupid" story about capitalism which does manage to contain a critique of capital's logic. And it takes my mind off falling as a death-act, which I hope means I will fall asleep. The dog falls three or four stories before landing on the protagonist. Barthelme breaks into verse:
"I looked at the dog. He looked at me.
who else has done dogs? Baskin, Bacon, Landseer, Hogerth, Hals
with leashes trailing as they fall
with dog impedimenta following: bowl, bone, collar, licence, Gro-pup."
It's a sick tactic, to soothe myself with the falling dogs of literature. I'm coming to hate gravity, for all its organisational ability. How do solitons -- models for the new message factories -- manage to resist its effect for mile after mile at constant speed? Do dogs fall, or do they jump? I fall asleep without figuring it out. Or do I jump to sleep? It's all so difficult, words. Dreaming of jumping cats. On waking, crumpled on the bed, I remember this jumping cat thing comes from something I read in [Newspaper] once. The record for falling cats in New York is 34 storeys. The cat suffered a broken leg, but lived. Some New York cat hospital keeps score.
Cats have a lower terminal velocity than humans. Its funny how you fall faster and faster, then you just fall at the same speed. Then you bounce. Cats bounce well, apparently, and fall slowly. Their fur adds wind resistance. Humans fall head first, air slipstreaming around the cranium.
I always imagined cats and dogs are things that might jump or have a fall. But what if it's all the other way around? What if jumping or falling is something that might have a cat, or a dog, or a person? What if I don't sleep, but am sleeped? What if I don't dream, but become dreamt? Why do we think, because we are a noun, that we have verbs? What if verbs have us? What if there are only verbs? No, no, that's not right. What if there is only verbing. No, still not...: Whating becoming verbing. Verbing becoming whating. Becoming verbing whating. Yes...
Fire up the laptop, plug the modem into the nearest phone socket. There's email from you. Something for Speed Factory, finally, and an apology:
"My computer's gone down, so I realise this may be out of time. If so, sorry
about that, and just leave it out."
So I email you back:
"The rules of this game are flexible. Speed bent like light around humans, humans bent like water around speed."
Meaning, I think: email is a rotten medium for complaint, a channel in which jokes must be explained, curtness is the way of life, everything subtle draws in a tendency to insult. Perhaps the problem is that email has not yet in place a natural-feeling phatic system. To compensate, a profusion of winks and friendship indicators, explanations, over-articulated apologia. You reply with clarity rather than literature. That's your re-assurance: it's a game, it's okay, it's fun, relax. Later, though, you display another attitude: I see your vision of the speed factory's nature of manufacture. You envisage the transformation of mundane communications into poetry.
(I could remain polite, and write "the poetic", but that's hardly an alchemical term and, anyway) I'm still sitting back when your speed factory product arrives: I'm unpoetic, "receiving". I am still mannered by the medium, as though only an email has arrived, rather than writing from a writer. (The dogs and cats fall away; gravity's negligible action on waves in canals is outside the scope; terminal velocities are reconfigured to refer to the speed of plugging in.) I like your abstractions, speed subject to quantum mechanics in relation to the human; speed solidified, humans flexible. But I am not convinced by your means of arrival (I'm still worried about email, maybe, or maybe I'm a closet Cartesian). Fiona Capp's dog falls asleep under the table of a Paris jazz bar: not far to tumble, not even for an Alsatian. The dog sleeps through the seduction scene: "Eva rested her head on Marcel's shoulder, her black, shining bobcurling around her ears. His hand hovered at the base of her back."
So Capp sleeps the dog, sleeps together her characters. And my insecure ego-sense cannot accept that I am breathed by the Melbourne air. Although the Melbourne air, no doubt, respires sleeping dogs, and cats, and humans, without too much fret.
Perhaps it's just that even though my laptop has been in my life for some time, it hasn't yet passed into the writing. Computers, networks -- tools for writing, but not yet belonging to writing, and though writing, belonging to life.
Georges Perec knew about this. "The passage of time (my history) leaves behind a residue that accumulates: photographs, drawings, the corpses of long since dried up felt pens... this is what I call my fortune." And my fortune, if I think about it, includes discarded computers, dusty boxes of old computer discs, email archives in obsolete formats. Now that they are old, worn, scarred with the accidents of life, these effusions of the speed factory can become part of the everyday, and through the everyday, part of literature.
I know when Perec's writing became part of me. I wrote it in the margin: "Read on flight QF 17 taking off from LAX in 26th July, 1998." And these are the lines I wrote that beside: "Reading isn't merely to read a text, to decipher signs, to survey lines, to explore pages, to traverse a meaning; it isn't merely the abstract communion between author and reader, the mystical marriage between the Idea and the ear. It is, at the same time, the noise of the M_tro, or the swaying of a railway compartment, or the heat of the sun on a beach and the shouts of the children playing a little way off, or the sensation of hot water in the bath, or the waiting for sleep."
Isn't it just the feeling of familiarity about the places within which the book is read that makes the phatic dimension of books seem so agreeably friendly?
"A work consisting of refused communications." It was Elias Canetti's idea, only I think perhaps we're writing it.
I learn so much from Canetti, above all from his refusal of good form, the smashed language, broken down to catch the speed of thought.
"A 'modern' man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice."
Isn't that why some of us became postmodernists? Only time caught us up again. Few from our pod will be sharp enough to cut through time.
"A shattering thought: there may be nothing to know, and error comes only because we try to know it."
Now there you have it -- the thought from the outside. But did anyone else ever put it so pointedly? Canetti's though is alway sharp, but he points the tip away.
I keep a collection of Canetti quotes on file in this laptop. I forget when or where I first read him. I forget when I keyed in the passages I'd marked. I even forget if it was this computer, or an older one, from which the whole file might have subsequently been ported. In any case, there's a duplicate file, including the Canetti, on my other computer, in the office.
Circa 2000: These quotations go with me everywhere. Some Canetti, Woolf, lots of Montaigne. They make home for me -- especially some selected words by friends. There's even some of you in there. And I carry this with me, from Alberto Manguel:
Circa 1000: "To avoid parting with his collection of 117,000 books while travelling, the avid reader and Grand Vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, has them carried by a caravan of four hundred camels, trained to walk in alphabetical order."
Mm, which goes to show how out the rate of the folding up of language has accelerated: a carry rate of fewer than three hundred books per beast would hardly be worth boasting about today. I picture them snaking along the crests of the dunes.
"Deviation without sweetness is corrupt," claims the proverb generator I've installed in my laptop (the generator I suspect was responsible for the previous crash of my desktop computer, a crash which separated 850 word files from their names and creation dates, exposed the lack of orderliness in which I work, the impropriety of my drafting practices, meant that instead of being up to a definable point with pieces of writing I was comparing three or four similar drafts and unable to choose between them). "Sobriety is like a Nashville geisha," it says also.
My remnant feeling is that work remains precarious, and this is emphasised not only by the down state of my desktop computer now (bus problem, according to it) but metonymised in the current state of the bookshelf to my left (which I banged together last year from a couple of old kitchen shelves). The shelf is leaning sharply to the left, held up only by the proximate bench. It's quite a good design really, or idea for a design ("quite a good accident" would more precise), the shelf as image of inability to bear. It has only ninety-four books (plus a few pamphlets), all paperbacks except Lenin: Selected Works; Journey to Armenia by Osip Mandelstam; and David Dietz's 1945 pop-sci number, Atomic Energy in the Coming Era (coverline: "The Great New Bomb" ...)
Skipping through my sources I find an epigraph for the Menzies book. I almost know I'm back into the writing.
(And as HackProverbs momentarily insists, "knowledge ratifies itself.") In the process of moving my library out of the apartment, I found a bit of duralex glass behind the couch. The books just took over the place, like in Canetti's Auto Da Fe. Either they go or I go. Books have such a physical presence. The little buggers just quietly digest themselves, the acid in the paper ruminating away. And books are such indolent things. Most of the time they do nothing, just sit around, keeping their thoughts to themselves. There's something amusing about the way we all labour away to make them, and then they sit around doing fuck all until they rot.
It's like books are the superannuation program for thoughts and feelings. If they don't get sweated out in the editing, then they're set til the end of their papery days. Anyway, this bead of duralex glass -- it reminds me of the first time I 'lost' my writing on the computer. The hard disc died and took all my words with it. Of course I hadn't backed them up. It was my first computer with a hard disc and I hadn't yet learned of their alarming propensity to suicide.
Speechless with rage, I had to do something. Not just because of the loss -- I'd lost notebooks before and cursed my absent mindedness -- this was something more than loss. So I took out my duralex glasses, those unbreakable ones that latt_s come in, and threw them at the wall, really hard, one by one. Sometimes they bounced, and I had to try again. There was a really satisfying effect when they popped. Ordinary glass can break a little, or a lot. That duralex stuff either bounces, or shatters instantly into tiny cubes. They became the tangible analogue for my lost electrons, lying doggo on their dysfuctional disc.
When I was beginning to write, I thought (liked to think) that once the words were out there, they could never be recanted ("out there" included in my notebook). I was living with abstract painters, surrounded by vastly expressive black and red canvasses. This idea of the perfection of the expressed was liberating in a kind of religious way: revelatory, practical outcomes, granting knowledge of what one must do. My subsequent liberation was in the slower embeliefment that the writer is a hitchhiker along the vectors of culture. I haven't been writing for very long; I changed from one system of self-regard to the other not that long ago.
I'm wondering what word or proto-word your duralex fragment stood in for -- whether the metamorphic process from loss-beyond-loss (which I take to mean the double loss of object and faith) through the wonderful and shattering control/loss of control act through to finding that (after ten years, at a guess) the shard retained its meaningfulness as a kind of re-enchanted souvenir of your disenchantment, whether this process wiped out verbal particularity.
Perhaps this fragment is the word 'compulsion'. Did you keep it? I can accept that we are living in this exchange the refusal of communication (this you said more than a thousand words ago, and I was in a bad mood then and am varying from moment to moment now). I mistreat my sources (you are a source). I looked up Canetti in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus and found the word "enantiomorphosis", meaning (according to the translator) "prohibitions on transformation". My impulse is to note that we are writing 'Metamorphoses'. We may be refusing communication (you are a source) yet are corresponding in other ways. Eg, my Menzies epigraph was from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Following behind in my car, I lost sight of the truck on the first turn. My whole library was in that truck. I thought briefly of the possibility of losing the lot. Found it strangely comforting.
Because I got there late, the removalist refused to carry the big boxes of books up the stairs. He had another job to do. Not a moving job. I heard him conspire about something on his mobile. So I had to lug the whole lot up stairs myself. I still feel the pain of it in the tendons of my left hand.
It's from pain that we learn. Or so I've learned. That there is no such thing as the text, and hence no point to interpretation; that was today's burden. Texts are weightless; books are really fucking heavy. Books are not texts, but vectors. You don't interpret them, you move, or are moved by them. As I was moved, by this impossible responsibility of owning a library.
There's nothing to it -- becoming a writer -- just the metamorphosis. That's it. A transformation without content, purpose, subject, goals. Other than sneaking around the traps -- of authorial vanity, truck and barter. Just as there's nothing to reading, besides avoiding the trap of being in custody of a library.
There's nothing hiding in that word, 'expression', except the secret that there is nothing hiding in it. What is expressed just is. It's different from what expressed it, and from what it expresses, but in no particular or significant way. There's nothing repressed in it, just things refused.
There's no going back. No going behind the back of the text to the author, but no going back to context, discourse, the unconscious. There's only a going forward, a fresh expression. How stubbornly literature avoids this concept of itself!
Yes! I have had numerous literary experiences with removalists: "what's in all these boxes?" one asked in 1993. (This was a move around the side of a house and into storage in a neck-high cellar. I'm with you on pain, also.)
"Books."
"Books! No wonder they're so fucking heavy. The only reading material at my place is Rugby League Week, and I throw it away as soon as I'm done with it."
And I like how easily "fucking" and "heavy" go together: as though books should be as light as the abstractions inside.
More literature going forward -- I love it -- going forward by truck, and only by you or me following these books in a car do they metamorphose into texts. (This is not the tree falls in a forest tale; the making of a book into a text is a very particular move: hence the "you or me". We are the ones who think in this specific transformative manner. I read a bad sci-fi book about creatures of certain molecular densities who lived in a mine and could walk through walls and were somehow [can't remember how] a danger and in the end could be destroyed by fire, and I suspect that we talk in this other dimension, at least judging from the way people try to talk to me about my writing sometimes.)
This is a reactive sort of response, I guess: my hard drive is being low-level formatted as I write (was and is a dud, a reason to abandon Macintosh), and you're wondering about disappearing libraries, and I'm thinking of packing mine into boxes again and putting it into a cellar (again) leaving it all there for six months of floods and fungus and termites.
I took my time being someone-who-writes. Or maybe time took me there, to someone-who-writes. Willing the plane to change course doesn't change it's course. It's a dumb tactic, reversing the poles, but maybe it's where the meta meets the morph.
There's nothing inside the text. Beckett led me to this (or rather hearing someone I was just getting to know and just starting to love read Beckett's poem 'Cascando' aloud to an empty kitchen, on hearing the news that someone once loved was now dead, but that's another story) and now I'm stuck with it.
God isn't dead, he's sleeping. Sleeping in the text, in the culture of text -- the reverence with which readers turn pages like prayer wheels, line their walls with booky shrines, congregate at writer's festivals for that old timey revival feeling.
Writing has to be something more than work, work, work, this march of fingers and keys. Or maybe something less, something like play, like dancing. To be against the book but in favour of writing, and maybe for books that are incitements to writing, morphs that court meta.
Literature says: "don't fuck with me!"
Writing says: "fuck with me...."
Or so I imagine, but I'm still hearing spirits, murmuring in the sleep of text. But thesedays books seem like brute material facts compared to 'real life'. 'Real life', where our money circles the globe, checking in and out of investment opportunities with all the patience of an electron. One second its a high yield government bond for Argentina, the next minute its a bit Japanese pension fund.
But then its not just capital that cruises, looking for the money shot, nor do laser guided smart bombs have a monopoly on speed. So do does chat, and gossip, and rumour, all of which now have instant global means of arrival.
Jesus Fucking Christ. And toothache! Whoever said writing has no shamanistic value (this I know wasn't you!) is herewith and forthwith banished from my mind. Let it be magical, let it be healing, let it overflow with fucking hippy therapeutic value.
Come on then, writing, tell me your manifold prescriptions for pain. How do you deal with the reference of pain along the lower jaw? (When my friend had a fit, my only knowledge came from the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: should I try to shove a book in there to prevent him biting off his tongue? Would his teeth fall out when his jaw slackened?) Writing, how do you deal with pain referred down the windpipe? Or the direct pain of swallowing, and added to it a burning sensation from clove oil? What about this: I think I can feel the enamel, the cubic space of the tooth, the conic root. Writing, what do you say when pain escapes from nerves, those weighty and direct organic vectors, and spends the night chasing itself into and around body space? Do something, for God's sake!
Do it, you writing, bury my mouth in your soft wet text; let me feel the seep of the most aesthetic anaesthesia. Writing, read me with reverence! Ooh, yes, that's the spot, right at the back there. Ease me, please, release me. Writing, if you are a march of fingers (oh! where is postmodern English's subjunctive when I need it?), be the march of soothing fingers; if you are work, be the work of play; if you are play, be the play of morphine on consciousness; if you are dancing, then, sure, dance, dance, but let the music be loud, the lights bright, the company distracting. And, yes, writing, fuck with me too.
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am writing on behalf of the Customer Service department of Muse Corporation in regard to the letter we received from you on 12-04-99. It is our company policy to reply promptly and courteously to all such inquiries to try and ensure that our customers are comfortable with our products.
Unfortunately, I regret to inform you that your complaints about our Writing line of products refer to features that are not available from the products offered at that particular price point. If you examine the warranty documents supplied with your copy of Writing you will find that the guarantee for that particular product does not cover situations of extreme sensation, such as pain and joy. Since you have purchased the family pack from our economy line, the inscription of sexual joy is specifically prohibited, as are expressions of physical pain deemed likely to cause alarm or discomfort to minors.
Here at Muse Corporation we aim to answer all the creative needs of our customers. I am happy to inform you that, should you wish to purchase an upgrade to improve the intensity of performance of your Writing, I can offer you a special discount on any of our premium lines.
May I draw your attention to our Intensity ValuPak product. This popular accessory will enable you to write effective and original sentences on a wide range of emotionally and physically intense topics. It covers all kinds of physical pain, and with our new surgical weapons, this release is specially useful for postmodern warfare applications.
The Intensity ValuPak can also be configured for a wide range of Writing on adult themes, including sexual joy, anxiety and dancing. You must include proof of age with your purchase order if you wish to purchase this version of Writing.
Fortunately, at that moment a dentist intervened. For $109 she vaporised both a flap of gum (my mouth is filled with the flavour of singed flesh) and sexual fantasies regarding pale models in Harper's Bazaar, September 1998, not that they (the fantasies and the depicted application of orange eyeliner) were particularly 'creative'.
I was squinting into the dental lamp. She asked me if I'd like to wear sunglasses: she had a pair for that very purpose.
No thanks, I said. I'll use my eyelids.
She laughed and made a series of jokes at an equivalent level, and I laughed too, with the lignocaine needle stretching the insertion point. Would you like to spit out?
What is the difference between a patient and a customer? I might have asked, but by that time my mouth was full of surgical instruments.
I gave over that I was nervous of dentists. She wanted to know if I'd met any particularly interventionist ones and I described the ligation of a tooth lying horizontally in the roof of my mouth. She indicated that this procedure must have been conducted by the dental equivalent of a revhead. I thought the lignocaine had numbed everything, but I flinched when she jabbed so she gave me another shot. My tongue felt like someone else's, family dentist or not.
Did I wear a pacemaker, she wanted to know (routine question, of course: I don't look like a pacemaker wearer, even though I was in Leura, home of the "Pacemaker Olympics" according to last week's Blue Mountains Gazette). The gum vaporiser tended to interfere with the CD player, but unfortunately the sad old soundtrack to Ally McBeal continued. What's the difference between a listener (reader, even) and a customer? I might have asked, but it would have sounded like "woshadishersh".
"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary the first condition of existence for all earlier... classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away. all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober sense, his real conditions of life and relations of his kind..."
There are times when I feel that the best argument in favour of modernity, capitalism, industrialisation, the whole sheebang -- is dentistry. I mean it just doesn't bear thinking about, what people had to go through before modern dentistry.
Tree hugging hippies go on about herbal medicine, and champion venerable superstitions from some ancient third world country or other where everybody dies from gastroenteritis. And hell, who knows? Maybe they got a point. Maybe putting string through your nose and drinking your own piss really is good for you. But have you ever heard of herbal dentistry?
Even Balmain's basket-weavers, hell, even people in the Blue Mountains, have been known to cancel yoga class to go have a wisdom tooth extracted by a stainless steel professional in a white coat and what by electric chair standards is one mighty comfy electric chair. Gimme that everlasting uncertainty, Karl my man, so long as I when I get this molar plugged I get the injection. Step on the gas now!
Has Karl passed the baton to the wrong man? The radio man steps on the gas. He talks about the gas, he gasbags. He likes gas. He likes electric chairs. He doesn't mind lethal injections. He understands the guillotine. He knows about gallows. He hates yoga. He is reasonable and he has strong opinions and he's convinced that these two characteristics are compatible. "I had my teeth cleaned recently. Some of you are trying to wonder how that relates to the caning in Singapore and some of you know immediately how it relates... I'm convinced that part of our confusion about the problem of evil in general is due to our American view of the incompatibility of love and pain."
He turns on the television.
"Marcia gets a crush on her new dentist in Paramount Television's The Brady Bunch. Dr. Vogel, the new family dentist, is the subject of Marcia's daydreams after she meets him. She believes that her feeling is returned when she misinterprets his interest in her as a babysitter."
We love our dentists, we love our babysitters. We feel the need for oral hygiene; we understand about parental abandonment.
I'm getting the big wind-up now from the producer. Remember, kiddies, babysitters are for loving. Dentists are for hugging. Orthodontic nurses lean across, mmm, but then there's a sharp jab in the back of the hand and count to ten: no one makes it past four, and here we are at seven. The light fades too fast. You come to and there's so much pain contained behind that blood taste. The ward nurse offers you a drink and you wonder why it hurts to swallow and it's two years later that you find the anaesthetist had stuffed a tube down your throat. Good bye, good bye.