chiasmus
We’re all caught in the coil of various entanglements and entrapments. I have been having this eerie feeling of becoming aware of being blindly caught up in something and not seeing its danger—though it’s not exactly danger that I feel I am troubled by. It’s more ignorance; not being able to see the true nature of certain things and in particular the motives and indifferences and strange ceremonies of ordinary life, its secret passion. I keep on thinking about the William Blake poem “The [Sick] Rose”: its “dark secret love”, it says.
I am living now in this detached and marginal position in life. I’ve woken up and found myself in this world that somehow I never really understood, never really belonged to and yet participated in, in good faith and even protected by the ignorance I mentioned before, the innocence maybe, following my own path while for a long time staying acceptably, by virtue of patronage and intelligence, within—until a certain point of rupture—the acceptable pathway. But never knowingly treading that particular road. And so that double path, one path innocently followed that for a long time was on the same route as the prescribed path allowed me to misunderstand the nature of the two paths.
And then at a certain moment, by the fact of some act of refusal, protest, desperation and exhaustion—courage as well—finding myself or being left only with a lonelier divergent path from which after a sufficient period of time it was possible to get sufficient distance to then have this eerie, disturbing experience of sensing the hidden psychology and purposes and programmings of the life that, while I was surrounded by it thinking it was my own, I couldn’t see. And then when I was far enough away to see that it wasn’t my own still there was this chilling sense of surprise and weird recognition of the strangeness, the dangerousness, the inhospitability of what it always was. And so again there is the sense of being caught in the coils of a rope.
ersatz
I remember reading one writer writing at this time when the forces of violence and ecstatic hate were emerging, and the conflict that was expressed across many pages between different ideas of what was happening. And the basic idea, the starting point that kept needing to be returned to, was the age-old idea of demons and evil spirits, of hell unleashing agents of destruction and deception. But at the same time a countercurrent of hesitation and upon deeper thought, on closer consideration, the assertion that this picture of spectral/demonic invasion/eruption was too easy. And it gets contrasted with something else, and that something else is much less obviously frightening. It doesn’t belong in a religious world-view. This alternative has more to do with theatre and the idea of a stage and a stage set where props and backdrops and indeed actors are not real in themselves. They are flimsy, artificial, shallow objects or performances: imitations. Or else there is the image of the fairground, which is a place of gaudy decorations, a place of noisy fun, with its rides, its hall of mirrors, its freak shows, its ghost trains.
The writer can’t quite put these different world-views and ideas of what’s wrong together, and so he shuttles backwards and forwards between them. There’s a moment when he observes young devotees of the ecstatic movement and they look to him like fallen angels at one moment and then at another moment they look like cardboard cutouts with no depth, no minds of their own, and it becomes difficult to work out which of these two impressions is worse, which is more frightening, which is more violent. And it comes to seem that it’s the cardboard cutout which is more the essential nature—the fake, the pretender, the con artist, the one-dimension figure … where “figure” has no poetic meaning, is just a template or a mould. And there’s something very compelling or worth thinking very carefully about, that what is to be noticed and feared isn’t the dark demonic spirit peeping out of the underworld—and there are other images of this same force. Other people think of it as a machine or as a monstrous creature. But what if it is the cardboard cutout which is the true menace?
And then there is the mental strain that comes from trying to adjust between these different views, where the more vividly/obviously frightening version, which is to say the demon/the phantom/the creature of darkness, is much easier to think about and therefore more comforting paradoxically than the empty, hollow, fake alternative.
the guards
—a gloomy, narrow path heading away from the mass of the living who require that veils be draped over illness as a revelation of a lonely, heartbroken part of life such that its inclusion brings in fact a fullness. So there’s the paradox of exclusion involving some kind of fullness.
And I keep thinking of a certain view of childhood and innocence, which is among other things an openness to every aspect of life, that precedes and doesn’t yet encompass these passions of the will and machinations of the society ruled or animated by lusts for control and emotional obligations/regulations. So whether or not this or that child or any child perceives the difference between their world and this other world, still the possibility exists of this innocent comprehension which is (to go back to the paradox) what in fact makes full the world and life which is otherwise defined by this law of violence.
two rooms
I don’t know what it means to dwell in the past, as though the past were a home or a room and there was a decision to stay voluntarily in that enclosed space which perhaps belongs to you and meanwhile (the suggestion is) life goes on outside, as though beyond the window of the room (the room of the past where you have decided to dwell). But what if it is some reversal of that picture or architecture, that topography of the whole world? So that the enclosed or locked-in experience is somehow to dwell in the present, or perhaps to be made to dwell in the present on the assumption which is a command—an atmospheric command—that this is the nature of home sealed from, protected from the wild or desolate or wintertime world of the past. And not just the past in the sense of some fixed scene like a painting hanging on a wall to be looked at, rather than what lies beyond a window and isn’t fixed even if it is desolate and if the branches of the trees are bare and if it seems deserted as if there has been some disaster. And so instead of the still life of the picture in its frame there is a bleak and barren landscape which nevertheless is alive and encircling and vast. And then you turn towards it with its strange drab grey colouring, its emptiness, its quietness and you might think it a minimal scene where nothing can happen. And then there is something in the distance: abstract, an effect of light, of fire, an effect of revelation that might be a miracle or a catastrophe or just an accident created by a reflective surface out of sight. And still it is winter, still it is empty, still it is grey after the abstraction of the event which is a mystery. And still it is this amazing change quite unlike any fixed image of the past. And if the room where you dwell is the past then the distant spectacle is the landscape of life not lived, of what is ordinary, of what goes on, of where you should be instead of dwelling in the closed room of the past. But if instead by hidden command the room is the enclosure of the present, of the day and the next day, then the vision of light (perhaps frightening, perhaps wonderful) is instead of some forged fixed picture this deep and precious universe which you perhaps hardly know how to dwell in.