Intimate Stranger

MIND SHADOWS

“Poetry is about repetition,” Karen Blixen wrote. And when we repeat, as long as it is not just empty patternmaking, we bring about space because the ‘super-structure’ of meaning is weakened and other aspects of writing are foregrounded. In a similar vein, I already suggested several times that writing is a consciousness-expanding activity for both writer and reader, if only because it brings sharpened awareness of what we cannot say or would have liked to say better. After all, the more you expand the greater the space of the unsaid and the unsayable around you; the more we know about the horrors of warfare, for instance, the greater will be our sense of inadequacy at expressing it. The matter of consciousness (not that which we are conscious of — people, places, situations, desires, even thoughts) is, for lack of a better concept, a mind-picture. But it remains that only: a fleeting glimpse, a dream and an unconscious perception, a negative space, unless and until it materializes in writing, painting, music or other forms of expression / creation. We have to create in order to know. The word and its world will be the secreted gray presence of awareness.

Where do these mind-pictures that we work with originate? An easier question may be: what sets them off? (For who says the pictures don’t pre-exist?) Obviously, there is a sensory stimulus at the outset, a perception. The field of reception / transformation of the impulse, I’d suggest, consists of memory and imagination, immediately prismating (prison-mating) into combinations and cross-breeding of the two, giving way to invention, intuition, knowledge, experience, analysis. . What we can ‘know’ of the ‘outside’ world also comes to us through imagination (apprehending) and memory (relating and situating). In fact, I think memory and imagination so closely shade one another that they may as well be two faces of the same mirror.

Who looks into the mirror? Why, the face looking out! Or the face remembered by a connection of imaging. That is imagination (or image-generation). That is, the face imagined by memory.

But this matter (the mind-picture), because of its specific consistency made up of becoming, when passing into the flesh of words ‘takes on a life of its own.’ It ‘re-members’ through patterns of references and repetitions which exist independently of the intention of the rememberer; what would seem to be an autonomous consciousness ‘breathes’ through the rhythms and is ‘grounded’ in textures; it ‘invents’ or imagines or colonizes by allusions to the ‘known,’ presenting new variations, stretching the expected meanings of the material by breaks and jumps that arise from the core or the nature or the history of the words; and thus it ‘presents’ (presences) itself in some ‘sense-making’ (presence-making) manifestation of its own. You could say the mind-picture has its own past, which you can only guess at.

Could we be chiming with rhythms and sounds coming from way beyond? Do the ancestors, going back all the way to dust, speak through us? Are we just receptors? What if the Unknowable were just the (provisionally?) Unsaid? And what if we all knew the Unsaid which, potentially at least, is just waiting to be pictured by mind? Could it be that we are giving shape (pre-sence) to the Unknowable in the process of translating mind-pictures into material modified by its (own) consciousness? Creation is repeating the known — as exorcism and transformation — and making the unknown familiar; writing then a pealing silence. .

Let us approach it from another angle.

Manuel Rivas, a Galician writer (in an interview with Libération, 26 October 2000) claims that he started writing short fiction because it is the most popular genre in Galicia. It is popular because it descends from oral literature. And one can see how the short story has been shaped in contents and form by oral transmission. To hold the listener’s attention the storyteller must not go on for too long; he (and in many cultures it was more likely a ‘she’) should not make it too difficult; at the same time there must be enough flesh to engage the audience, the intrigue (or the lesson) must be kept alive and carried to the very end, and style (vocabulary, rhythms, tenses, voice) must not come between narrator and listener. (Or, one could say, between teller and told.)

The material must be allowed to stand on its own.

But you don’t want it to go awry. How does one make of writing an honest woman, or a presentable kept man? You walk her or him on your arm down the street and you pretend she’s virtuous, maybe even virginal (and he honorable in his intentions and scrupulous in his thrusts). When you take her or him into your usual haunts you hope she won’t be indecently flashing her charms and her wares at the regulars, or he won’t go ogling and pawing the other dames.

Manuel Rivas makes the further point that fiction-writing often renders the unacceptable sayable. This task or effect, he suggests, is a form of public engagement. He refers to this function as la curación de sombras (the healing of shadows). He says that it habitually happened in his country that somebody in perfectly good health would go to the curandero (the healer) to complain that “I’m fine but I feel bad.”

The healer would answer that the malo (the illness) is in his shadow.

The historical story doesn’t interest him, Manuel Rivas says, since literature is in the camp of life, not that of History. He’d only be interested to check if that history was still present — alive or applicable. Two things worry him: the mechanisms of producing hate and the suspension of consciousness (or the conscience — in French ‘la conscience’ could mean both or either). History is a succession of things that ought never to have happened, and the writing act is a kind of revenge against this. Literature allows you to get closer to the real than you could through history or sociology since it reaches where witnesses cannot touch. Dreams and the imagination of what might have happened (or should have happened) will incarnate or say reality. The carpenter’s pencil speaking to the ear of the soldier about designing the scaffold brings about a link between the victim and the executioner, and this way of writing is more real than that which we denote as ‘realism.’ The real consists of concentric circles. Reality is but the first circle, the only visible one, and the most interesting parts can be found in the other circles. “To write is to be weaving in and out of the circle, as if one were invisibly stitching a cloth.”

Then he says: “It is ridiculous to believe that writing can change the world, but it may help you survive another night, one more night after the thousand and one nights, so as not to be cold.”

(mirror note 4)

Is the mirror the memory? Is it not true that memory is always in the present tense, with the tenseness of the unpassed present? In his Imaginative Horizons the anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano quotes Saint Augustine famously claiming that memory “is like a great field or a spacious palace, a storehouse for countless images of all kinds which are conveyed to it by the senses. In it are stored away all the thoughts by which we enlarge upon or diminish or modify in any way the perceptions at which we arrive through the senses, and it also contains everything else that has been entrusted to it for safe keeping, until such times as these things are swallowed up and buried in forgetfulness.” And later on he has Augustine suggesting that it is “a sort of stomach of the mind.” Which brings one by the ways of nature to digestion and to reflections on flatulence (a tautology, surely). To excretion. That which has not been absorbed, “buried in forgetfulness” (the mind), will be shat in words. And how are we to preserve the crap? Never before in the history of mankind has so much memory been created so effortlessly, odorlessly saved in electronic files, disseminated in blogs; never before have we been able to access and to log on so broadly. All together, in pealing silence, we establish an all-inclusive virtual consciousness. We could say God. How to stock it in time though? Soon we will not be able to access it — support, software, programs, the machines themselves will be nullified by time and become obsolete. As we forge and spread and imagine we wipe out. We will know everything and remember nothing. There will be no origin, only process. We will be the immaculately conceived offspring of Narcissus. The stomach will be a forgotten myth, the ass a dry mouth.