Intimate Stranger

GOING

There is always the moment of going. All too soon. Rain moved in from the sea — or wherever rain comes from in these parts — the tops of the tall challenges to the force of gravity, built by man in steel and glass and chrome, reaching for the sky, are wreathed in invisibility, the trees on the square below our apartment house are spent so that one can see the paved red walkways shining wet, and hear a dog barking. Now is the hour; it is time to move on. And as ever, before leaving on a long journey, one wants to drop some advice, some reminders in order not to be forgotten, the blown leaves one used as hand-maps to dreams, a few left-over insights. .

1. Emptiness or Void promotes interaction, transaction, transmutation even, between Heaven and Earth, and thus between Space and Time. Time may be seen as the actualization of vital space. Emptiness introduces a discontinuance into the process and so doing assures rhythm and breathing. Time sucked into breath becomes space. The only way we can live with this Time /Space dichotomy is by having the “empty heart” (hsü-hsin). In this fashion — the way, too, of being in the right receptive posture, and with neither interests nor judgments nor even expectations — we can interiorize, perhaps by imitation, the processes of mutation. This play and interplay of empty /full will modify the meaning of the reach of your words (or brushstrokes), and impart to the writing (or painting) its own consciousness or ‘image.’ (Remember — ‘image’ is the anagram of magie, ‘magic.’) And so the relationship between writer /reader and the world mediated by the work — this breathed unit of timed space — will be changed. There will be interaction between the “inner feeling” and the “exterior landscape.” Try to suscitate the void needed for movement by deleting the subject, the I. (Shehe is a dead squirrel at the best of times.) It is not unlike sucking. The resultant emptiness will evoke other absences and create further resonance: you could mistake this movement of emptiness for ‘thinking.’ By being rubbed out or “underheard,” the subject interiorizes the exterior. Other becomes I. (Hello, Dolly. .) Through empty I the landscape comes into the writing. Writing becomes instant land scaping itself. (And landscape is memory, and memory is passage. . or resistance.)

2. Be aware of things within themselves, of words also outside themselves, of surfaces, the laws and by-laws and in-laws of meaning and how to transgress these, the face of the Real, movement, the invisible and the void pulsating below the surface, birth and death and other cycles and bicycles, writing as boat in which you row at night through the cornfields of crackling stars, the relationship between writer and writing and writer and reader and writing and history and the seen and the said. . Why? Because you don’t want to die an idiot, your drool will sully the sheets; because it is one of writing’s functions to raise consciousness the way one raises chickens to have eggs in the house (apart from also exorcizing pain and dulling the sharp cut of knowing); because transformation of self and of thing and of context — ‘writing’ is finally the presumptuous business of creating the existing — is predicated upon a mastery of the components and the interactions among these; because this is what the reader hungers for and recognizes as something that. . works, that sounds right. How so? How now, multi-hued cow? Awareness is to be dancing to a tune of meaning, memory, forgetting, invention. It is about movement — becoming other, shifting perspectives, making the landscape shake. It is to be movement. But also the reassurance of repeating the known steps to cover old frozen ground with the sounds of a new sweetness. It has to do with camouflage — hiding in the black light of writing, feinting being, making false bottoms, weaving to blend with the background, catching a you with the word, shifting the pea under the cup. It is about disguising a mountain in the metaphor and making of the writing a mask and a cardinal frock to dance and die in the shadow of that mountain. Awareness is about elimination and displacement — not only recognizing live from dead material, but knowing too that ‘leaving out’ is a way of situating what’s left in, of entering upon a dialogue with the absent, of saying and showing that the absent is in the present, of having the shadow of the concept peering through the hole burnt by the word. It has to do with autonomy — the thingness of text and its parallel life unlinked from the personal diary. And texture: to have appearance run over the surface through color and glitter. What you see is what you get. Word-stones are the washed-up measure of the dance, irrespective of the ‘meanings’ they may carry. Play with the colors and the constituent parts of words and phrases, make patterns and cross-references and riffs, let them weigh (in) with their own existence — this, all together, will be your texture. The taste of writing is in the texture. The skin is the surface of eternity. Through texture is awareness awakened and bonded. And by striking the jarring note, by rubbing dulled expectations the other or ‘wrong’ way, you can make of awareness the line of living the present, of moving in the possible tense where dream and reality merge dynamically.

3. Writing is not an art form, it is a life discipline. Write from the totality of your being, not only from the confessional or the ache of unrequited love. It must as much come from the loins as it emerges from memory (this is surely a tautology!). Love is not a technique, it is a secret. Explore that secret continent creatively and assiduously. Change it; allow yourself to be changed. Truth and falsehood have nothing to do with fact. A fact is but a finished act. Or a fucked one. The fact is that some act as if fattened by fucking. Writing is the intelligent but unbiased heart living in its own beating. The only way to gain detachment, also from that heart, is to remain intimately involved with its ebb and its flow.

4. Traveling is a moment of creation. By moving you make. The identity is crystallized or re-configured by confrontation and by change; you hold the mirror up as compass and the Other is flushed out or seen in a new light; the point of view shifts; you bring something more to the landscape (if only your shadow); you rewrite the world. Because you are not only crossing over into the unknown — you are also unraveling the line of (your)self and singing the topography. And memory then becomes a place of resonance, a gland secreting the digestive fluids of comprehension. You are living perpetual change against a backdrop of the unchanging. You continue journeying to keep one step ahead of death. But it is through traveling that you ultimately ripen for death, when your shadow comes to sit on your lap. You will die from having eaten too much time — and then you will be time. (There’s a time for everything. .) You have to empty the mountain first, though. Wisdom is when you gradually discover (or uncover, from emptying the mountain) what you’d known all along.

5. Rhythm, repetition, making patterns — these are not only important devices for shaping the strange and abstract instrument /object we call a poem or a story, but they are craved as well because of our primordial need for reassurance, the sense of security we get from moving over the known. A mystery doesn’t lose power in revisiting. Writing is not just to know, it is also to console. We need to be reminded that we are part of the obscure rhythm of birth and decay. It is the humming that matters.

6. All true writing moves with profound ethical concerns. (Ah, this is a mouthful. .) It has little bearing upon what we think of as ‘morality,’ ‘good’ or ‘evil.’ But the act of writing, engaging the emptiness, is after all the living proof that man is born good, that Heshe can praise life and sing death to continue inventing Shimself. Which is metamorphosis. Always imagine that there’s real life beyond the page. Don’t be afraid of vulgarity. Allow yourself to be angry and to cry. Sing as often as you can — it is also an excellent breathing exercise. Remember that writing is breath. Get drunk frequently, but always with friends. Do not, however, depend on drugs or drink for an escape. Rather try breathing through one nostril at a time or standing on your head or love-flying. Visualize the community you are part of. Remember, there is no ‘purity’ of race or culture, only a seamless life of mixing, a ceaseless hunger for Other, an ongoing bastardization.

7. Beware of psychology: understanding is a trick for castrating creativeness. Don’t take the puerile and sometimes curmudgeon conceits and /or marvelous flights of fancy of writers like Freud and Jung as science. It is all snake oil for the ache of the absent soul. Western psychology is a ploy in the quest for power and control, for servicing the ‘self’ and ultimately an obeisance to Unum One-God Warlord. Be religious if you can do no else, or at least be aware of that transport, because the rituals and the homes of the gods are often very moving, but know that monotheism will take you to jealousy, inferiority, guilt-production and intolerance, maybe cruelly to the marble ovens and tombs and vaults and truth-rooms or other torture chambers of Western arrogance and power, to bombing starved children from dizzying heights and having colonies of non-people in off-shore concentration camps. Better, if you find it too lonely being an infidel, a heathen or a pariah, to respect humor and honor all gods and spirits, and partake of all rites and the eating of rice. Practice particularly the ritual of mountains, trees and water. Cover your bets.

8. Read as much as you can. Texts, articles, comics, testicles — this is all manure for maturing the mind. With time you’ll find that you read with more discrimination, mainly because you have less time, and then it will become both communion and communication as if you were writing it yourself. There’s a lot to be said for forgetting. Don’t bother with theory and criticism. Never read the kind of shit you have at present under the eyes. Don’t judge. Leave that to the power-mongers, to those who wish to impose democracy, to them who think Africa can be saved. (Or so they pretend.) But develop your capacity for feeling what you read and see.

9. Every stretch of writing that works aspires to its own inevitable shape and form. You have to learn how to accommodate/accompany the emergence towards that shape. Structure, texture, posture — work at these essentials. Shape form. Don’t shy away from structuring, even the old-fashioned way: the most beautiful flesh must still be draped over an assembly, a topography of bones. (You could say death structures life.) The structure embodies the ‘image’ of the writing that will imprint itself on your mind. Don’t be stingy. Think big but speak like a knife. Be irresponsible too — in the sense that you’ll burn your boats and everything else (including the sea) in the wild quest to extract that drowned kernel of the essential life. If you see what I’m getting at. Burn without compunction. Then be kind to yourself. Listen to your stories. Let them sit on your lap and listen to them. Read (to) them aloud, and also those of other people, so that you may feel how rhythm and sound and spacing go toward structuring a sense.

10. By ‘posture’ I mean not only voice and attitude, but also the alert waiting position, the readiness. For that you need to be clean as the barrel of a gun. Keep contact with what’s just below the surface of day. Go fishing. Remember previous paragraphs where you fumbled for fudged kernels. You are the fisher, the hook, the bait and the fish. At all times keep a small notebook on you to wrap the catch in. Don’t scorn a bite when it comes: reel it in, gut it in your pages lest it sink into the mud of a telephone directory or disappear into the virtual forgetting of computed memory. If you don’t it will stink up your head and attract flies. The trick is to keep just enough order in your mind-memory, without Order pushing you out of line. (I don’t know what this means either.) Posture is also finding the right balance. To breathe with the spine.

11. There are many exercises to promote the flow. Make verbal sketches of landscapes. Jot down situations, rhythms, dreams, the things that move through the head. Make an effort to translate from other languages. Improvise variations on a line, even when it is another jazzman’s theme. Make up songs. Use the odd news item as starting point. Reality is an open sore, richly oozing. Cut up and reassemble texts. Write writing books. Write the portraits of your family. Especially and maybe preferably when they’re dead. Make collages and posters and kites.

12. Walking strengthens the mind and loosens the images. (Jogging can be problematical, since you risk running the breathlines out of memory.) The best ‘ideas’ may upear while you shower or brush your teeth or work rhythmically at physical labor, and then probably provoked by the repeated gestures, by the pre-birth sound of water, by the mind being put in neutral. Take these gifts when they come and be grateful. Don’t impede the flow. Don’t ask for names or reasons. Take no names! Don’t bother, at first, what the story wants to be ‘about.’

13. Let it hang to ripen so that the sinews and ligatures may become self-evident — or, at least, so that the ‘thing’ may pass from darkness to familiarity. Let the story become used to you. It may help, literally, to put it up on a wall.

14. Revise, revise, revise. It is never too late to die. This is the other form of writing. Like translating the shape behind the initial clutter.

15. Try never to forget what it is/was/will be like to be a writer-in-progress, wildly paradoxical and deeply ethical: that is, to live (on) the edge, close enough in any event to push the fly-blown Self over it. In this direction lies responsibility. And dignity.

16. I know no more.

17.

what a wonderful journey it was across continents and seasons

through snow and through sand

and past cities with names

singing on the tongue

everywhere poverty, everywhere despair

everywhere abattoirs and battlefields

and towns burnt blunt

in the rich man’s kitchen pots simmered

on the street the maimed sidled on haunches

late night the woman’s hand was a vow

the child played with sticks in the dust

in bookstores paper voices murmured

in execution chambers people swung from ropes

like pendulums over a topography of life

from mountain peaks there was smoke in the valley

birds warbled in the darker copse

islands were floating arks on the horizon

what a wonderful journey it was

across continents and seasons

18.

Silently and without cover You should cross the dark stream —

The riverbank trees have an abundance of mute birds

With twilight eyes;

Besides, that burning hat on your head

Is not yours.

Goodbye. One must always go well. Hamba kahle.

New York, November 2004