Without Lifting A Finger

The painter Friedrich Pecht, in a reminiscence from this time, relates how on several occasions he observed Mörike noting down things which came into his head on special scraps and pieces of paper, only soon afterward to take these notes and “tear them up again into little pieces and bury them in the pockets of his dressing gown.”

You wanted to become pure spirit as a writer, and what did you become? A ghost! True: your quivering writerly language came from wordlessness, a primal wordlessness. Without this primal wordlessness, there would be no writing, or so you believe. (And your writing, then, between guilt and elation.) But wordlessness today? As the basis of a writer’s existence? Old hat, snows of yesteryear, not worth mentioning. Every word and every sentence is available nowadays in advance, as prefabricated components, so to speak. Enough of your guilt and also, granted, your elation. The quivering is over and done with, my friend.

I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, in control of one's material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, subtracting rather than adding. When I first met Joyce, I didn't intend to be a writer. That only came later when I found out that I was no good at all at teaching. When I found I simply couldn't teach. But I do remember speaking about Joyce's heroic achievement. I had a great admiration for him. That's what it was: epic, heroic, what he achieved. I realized that I couldn't go down that same road. Samuel Beckett 

.. What has happened with me is what happens with all who undertake a work on a grand scale: I have, first of all, set up a flag at both ends then, planting and replanting my scaffolding here and there, I have raised the stones and cement of intervening constructions; it takes several centuries to create a Gothic cathedral. If Heaven allows me to live, the monument will be completed throughout my life, the architect, ever the same, will only vary in his age. For the rest, it is painful to keep the intellectual self intact, imprisoned in a worn material envelope. Saint Augustine feeling his body weakening, said to God: ‘Be the tabernacle of my soul’; and he said to men: ‘When you find me in this book.. pray for me.'

Valery refuses to believe in the Muse of the Romantics, makes fun of what is called "inspiration." He adopted with pleasure the words of Flaubert: "Inspiration? That consists of sitting down to the table at the same time every day."

Been busy with school but have been reading and writing quite a bit. Refuge. Recent reading: Nabokov, Coetzee, Coetzee, Nabokov, David Ferry (reread), Thomas Bernhard. Got Melville on the back burner, or I may reach for another Bernhard (we'll see). * From Bernhard's The Lime Works : Even though it was still referred to as the lime works, when it came up, it would after all be truer to speak of a shut-down or deactivated lime works, when referring to the lime works. People are always referring to all kinds of structures or mental complexes, Konrad is supposed to have said, that have long ceased to be the same structures or mental complexes they once were.

The wise old egret. Shuffled a few words around in my head.  

Finished with Concrete . Wondered where "concrete" and the suicide would come in: both at the end. * Loved this bit about writing: When we have sentences in our heads we still can't be certain of being able to get them down on paper, I thought. The sentences frighten us; first the idea frightens us, then the sentence, then the thought that we may no longer have the idea in our heads when we want to write it down. Very often we write down a sentence too early , the another too late ; what we have to do is to write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.

Or perhaps the path was more tenuous than that.

From the essay on Rousseau: If he nevertheless persevered with writing, then only, as Jean Starobinski notes, in order to hasten the moment when the pen would fall from his hand and the essential things would be said in the silent embrace of reconciliation and return. Less heroically, but certainly no less correctly, one could also see writing as a continually self-perpetuating compulsive act, evidence that of all individuals afflicted by the disease of thought, the writer is perhaps the most incurable.

     In the end a battle arises between you and the work, the same as that between a driver and the horses which are carrying him off. I cannot control the horses, but I must take care not to overturn the wagon on any of the sharp curves of the course. Where will I end up, I don't know, but I must get there in one piece. Moreover, I must, when I get the chance, recall the delicious terror of the ride.

Another of the "autos." He's gone off to college and is also teaching elementary school. *** Re his teaching experience: What it is that makes the competent teacher is not clear. Some produced an effect by their quiet manner, others by their nervousness; some seemed to magnetise the children, others beat them; some imposed on them by their age or their manly appearance, etc. The women worked as women, i.e. through a half-forgotten tradition of a past matriarchate. John was not competent. He looked too young and was only just nineteen; he was skeptical about the methods employed and everything else; with all his seriousness he was playful and boyish. The whole matter to him was only an employment by the way, for he was ambitious and wished to advance, but did not know in which direction. Re writing and talent: John was seized with a craze for writing verse but could not. The gift must be born with one, he thought, and inspiration descend all of a sudden, as i...

Two recent bits I delighted in.      At first I was almost frightened by the man from Cairo. He is sure to be a good German, Arab draped in a sheet, chasing you in the empty office. What's the good of my place at your desk! Better to be the night watchman in your factory than so distant a lover as I. *** You once said you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write (I can't do much, anyway), but in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; . . . This is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.

Though I'm closer to home now, I've gone from Physics to middle school math. Underutilized perhaps, but it pays the bills. I've only written one poem this month (still tinkering). The short list of recent reading material: Kafka's Letters to Felice , Barnes' The Lemon Table , some of Paul Bowles' stories, and Daudet's In the Land of Pain (translated by Barnes). From Daudet's Pain (one of the many interesting "notes"): *Proust, in Contre Sainte-Beuve , describes how he could scarcely look Daudet in the eye when they met: 'I remembered to what extent bodily pain, so slight compared to his that no doubt he would have enjoyed it as a respite, had made me deaf and blind to other people, to life, to everything except my wretched body, towards which my mind was stubbornly bent, like a sick man lying in bed with his face turned to the wall.' Proust was astonished and impressed by the way 'the beautiful sick man' held forth on...

A little more than half way through Coetzee's Foe . The second part (more than half the book page-wise) is a marked departure from DeFoe's novel. It's largely about Susan Barton in England (Friday is with her; Cruso died on the way back), her give and take with Mr. Foe, perhaps something about Art and the process of writing. Through Barton we hear: Teasing and braiding can, like any craft, be learned. But as to determining which episodes hold promise (as oysters hold pearls), it is not without justice that this art is called divining. Here the writer can of himself effect nothing: he must wait on the grace of illumination.