3 What do you mean by “what Others make of us”?
Language sets the parameters of the speakable. Quotations allow other voices to shape the text and order it. Someone said a book is a trial by fire. Clarice Lispector, Thomas Merton, and Ingeborg Bachmann all died young in fires of their own accidental forgery, in bed with cigarettes burning forever, the accident of sleep. Some say Bachmann died by suicide, in the fire she wrote, in the novels she intended.
The writer doesn’t get the last word on their life. “Your interlocutors try to push you into as many abysses as possible simultaneously. All interlocutors are always mutually pushing one another into all abysses,” said Thomas Bernhard in his novel, Gargoyles. Interlocutors become an inextricable part of our lives, and they
“Write in order not simply to destroy, in order not simply to conserve, in order not to transit; write in the thrall of the impossible real, that share of disaster wherein every reality, safe and sound, sinks,” said Maurice Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster.
We stand “in the thrall” of what Blanchot called the “impossible real.” Maybe this is an expression for what Adam Zagajewski called “the unmutilated world”. Even if it isn’t, impossibility places us on the threshold of Adam Zagajewski’s poem that opens with the invitation: “Try to praise the mutilated world.”
“Writing, like painting, engendering forms of art that lacerate the eyelids, writing at night to pierce it with lightning: this is my struggle to escape from and face the terrifying thing, the spirit of the crime that resides sometimes in you, sometimes in me,” said Helene Cixous in Stigmata: Escaping Texts.
The “spirit of the crime” that Cixous says resides in us is the persistence of its incredulity and disbelief. Death lives inside us, alongside the sins of the fathers, the silence of the mothers, the betrayals of friends, and the ravage of history. The end of silence is the space where the dead dance among the living. This is the world of the book.
And the book is the text that may survive the trial by fire only to be burnt in the inquisition.
But the book is also the fire’s trial and the heart’s countless failures. When I set out to write about my mother’s azaleas—the baroque of their annual fuchsias, the decadence of their overwrought efflorescence—the azaleas remained unsplendid and sullen. The azaleas refused—or did they recuse themselves?
I maintain that the azaleas failed me. But there is a sense in which I, too, failed the azaleas. There is a reciprocity in this failure to accept the unexpected. And this relationship is the beginning of a poem.