I sleep poorly. Inside my head carnage repeats itself daily; by night it is bloodier, since the vocabulary of image and event available to nightmare seems crudely vulgar and sensational. It is also predictable and banal. I may dream architecture and colonnaded freedoms, but my nightmares are of body parts, humiliation, fear and leakage.
I suppose we know so well what to scare ourselves with, having made the limited and powerful selection without words before we could speak much. Most of us saw before we spoke.
The most intimate consolations have been offered by two writers who did, as it happens, dictate much of their work, Henry James and Marcel Proust. The length of breath, the precision and extent of steer, the understanding of the pictorial and the want of illusion, that acceptance that we are very little but all in all to ourselves and all that we ourselves have, that breakage can be less sterile than some forms of wholeness, are in both cases such that each writer in his own fantastically atomised fashion does reflect the fabric of thought while seeming for the duration of one’s immersion in his art, to hold up or to reveal the richest losses of time.
Each of these great consciousnesses could be said to have married itself and within this solitary generous hermaphroditic union to have fertilised its own internal world with a rich inward folding, with the apparent arrested liquidity, the look of layered softness, of some sea-rubbed rock. Retirement from the world, in the cases of these two more than sociable men, by all accounts matchless companions and talkers, superabundant writers of letters, was not a sterile fugue but a necessity in order for the travail of making to be protected, fostered, brought to multitudinous birth. Both teach compassion through clarity and that style, far from being extraneous embellishment, is the transmitting currency and current between reader and writer.
Both writers suffer from being smart names to dismiss. Rather, they do not suffer, being beyond existence, which is suffering, but potential readers are discouraged, which is a wanton deprivation in a diminished world. Eyes are voluntarily sealed in the name of clear-sightedness. Most dismissal of either writer takes place without the fatiguing commitment of investigation. A superstitious hope of ingested glory goes with the dismissing. Just as if you eat the heart of your gallant enemy you may be held by some onlookers to grow in courage, you may be accounted rather a stayer if you contemn the immensities of In Search of Lost Time, or something of an exalted spirit if you belittle the heights of the later James, decrying the rainbow-rich mist as wilful fog.
Thus you may bag the medal without enlisting, never mind getting anywhere near the heart of the engagement.
That is not to deny that the problem is there, the other way about, where the artists’ names are not there in their full suggestive lightness and potential but mentioned with the thumping self-satisfaction and positioning of a name-drop, as though the adducing of one or other of these two, let alone both, settled something in this world instead of adding other worlds to it. You know the stakes are high when Proust or James is brought in to settle one of those questionnaires about the best works of the twentieth century. You also suspect that no one wants to talk about it much any more but rather to set a monument upon the question, adding a stone with the partisan reader’s name upon it to the cairn at the top of what can be regarded, or so the implication is, as a mountain range un susceptible of scaling save by, well, such people as that high-breathing cultural referee.
It is now May 2009, almost a year since I thought I had ‘finished’ What to Look for in Winter and, if anything, the frost has taken a tighter grip on my eyes and upon my life.
I have abstracted myself from that life for two months in order to find a way of thawing it out.
How have I managed to get to where I am now from where I was then?
And which ‘then’ would that be?
And why should you care?
I will answer for the moment only the third question. The frost, in some form, is waiting there for us all. My account of how I failed to help myself, while trying as far as I could tell very hard to do so, may make you feel smug. In an age of self-help books, here is an account, to warn any reader, of almost exemplary self-unhelp. May it inoculate you against the same sickness, or against it in so acute a degree.
What connects my blindness, the atheist’s wife and the living words of dead men? I have come to an island to find this out for us, you and me. I have fifty-six days left in which to do it.
During that time, I hope to finish this book, and to set in the ground that I roundly hope will be melted thereby the bulbs whose flowering will I also hope compose a short novel, as vivid as energy and compression under silence can have made it.
I have set aside the whole month of May, writing a minimum of eight hours a day, to write the first draft of this second layer of memoir.
At present, I can see when writing if I hoist my forehead up with the flat of my left hand as I laboriously and inaccurately type with my right, and when my eyelids get wise to this and clamp insistently down, I lift them with my thumb and little finger, dedicating the latter to my right eye, the thumb to my left. My eyes fight back and weep to be shut down and left in peace. They are hot and dry and hard. Their white goes to leather. They leak thick tears. These tears are ineffectual lubricant. They are so hot that sometimes they make you feel like crying.
Meanwhile the bottom of my face works and strains and munches and contorts as it reaches for some kind of comfort let alone rest. It is not pretty. Quite often I dribble. I swear (my condition, blepharospasm, has a contiguity with Tourette’s Syndrome). I was never before a swearer. The features of my face have thickened, the skin over them coarsened as I pull at my mask in the attempt to free my thwarted struggling gaze that I know is in there somewhere. There are surprising batches of wrinkle and hard elbowy flesh on my face as though it were a long-used handbag or a tired dog. The dog likeness is made closer by a couple of twitches and a tremor that is worse in company or sunlight. My eyebrows are a tangle of argufying bristles, like moustaches. Along the crevices of my muzzle, where I grimace in the reach for settled sight, the skin is irritated, red, flaking and psoriatically itching. I bare my teeth such that strangers comment, and babies, after whose company I hanker, hide their faces from this witch. Those teeth clench and grind and gurn away, trying to find settlement for the reaching eyeballs lying above them, to catch the wind of sight and set aloft my eclipsed brain again.
I haven’t seen what colour my eyes are for months. I know that they are green. I’ve looked into no eyes for years. Humans read one another with their eyes well beyond, within, through and behind words. I’m trying to find new ways of doing this deeper reading.
There is something wearyingly unimplicit about the social life where little can be left unstated and understood; understanding being, with the word’s apparently negative start, a perfect example of what Keats called negative capability, the magnetically attractive force of what is felt to be present in the unadvertised, the swell of beauty lying within what is not bound or bounden.
As far as I could, I avoided contact. This can worry and upset the small number that remains of persons who can endure you, or who are bound by piety or affection to do so. I terribly regret that.
If you think like this, you are likely to be straddling a cruel gulf into which you will decisively fall, and from which I am typing these words to you.