Intimate Stranger

SURFACE

I’m cutting up words and pasting them in a painting. And I have to think of the Tibetan prayer flags, words and wishes scribbled on cloth to flap in the breeze at crossroads or in inaccessible mountain places. To forward pleas, to appease the gods and the departed spirits. What is the ‘use’ of beauty which ‘nobody’ can see? No one will ‘read’ them: these are sounds confided to the wind. Especially to wind — the presence of absence, the breath of immortality and of death.

We have covered much ground in the weeks we spent together; it has been an exciting time and a privilege to be with you. And yet, we only scratched the surface. We looked sideways at some of the elements and implications of writing, but we only paused to discuss more closely when they surfaced through your stories. For example, we did not consider the primordial importance of the sentence — the donkey — that essential beast of burden encapsulating breath or breathing a wisp of thought. Nor did we study the function of texturing through sounds and patterns and associations, or how repetition leads to absence. (Or does it originate from the void, like a reverberating sound-wave, effacing itself through repetition?)

Surface is important. It constitutes and illustrates the flapping of our minds. It is the federation of intention and illusion, of emptiness and of manifestation, and then it exists and shimmers in its own right. I have often thought that it might be worthwhile to try and write a treatise on The Metaphysics of the Surface.

We always work with sensitive spaces, both in our relationship to what comes down on the paper (and this will be a sustained tension all through one’s writing life) and in the way we position ourselves to the product — the adaptability and acceptability of it, its coherence or resonance or success; and then the attitude to the reader’s expectations and our relations with other writers and the links and breaks among our own various writings.

Writing is the dialectic between absence and presence. It is the art of leaving out so that you can let in more. It is the process of surfacing. As you write, you surface to yourself — like turbulent water stilling to the rise of an image. The water is not any less deep and there are as many creatures gliding through the sweet thickness of currents, but it now allows itself to be focused to a surface of reading, to what I referred to earlier as ‘a plausible bounded mirage of meaning’. . (Movement, of course, obviates the need for a recognizable face.) And then, if the writing works, it will allow the reader to surface to him- or herself. As Russell Banks put it: Writing is the art (and thus the pleasure and the pain) of being intimate with strangers. With yourself as the first stranger.

You always start out having at least an idea of what you wish to write. But then, it is only in the writing that you find out what you’re about. This is the creative tension between intention and discovery, and it is this relationship that makes for welcoming spaces.

The ethical respect you show your stories — to the characters, the situations, the plot, the environment, the tenses and the tensions — will consist of not having your texts preach your convictions about rape and violence and racism and global warming and war, or the free market and other aberrations of stupidity. The only effective action as writer against social folly is to write better, go deeper, open the mind more, be more democratic in the space you allow the reader.

Enhanced consciousness — that is, first of all the matter of touching and smelling, running your hands over the rough edges of words with their histories and their bastard natures — is the bedding of conscience.