Working Notes:
Serialscribbler
(as the title suggests) is an ongoing work, so far only in prose, though
there's no rule about that. It started a couple of years ago, when I sent
out a piece of scribble on a postcard every day to someone I knew around
the world. The texts were continuous (a lot of drivel thrown in) but each
recipient only received a fragment. The idea was to re-integrate other
people's (not necessarily writers or artists of any description) responses
in my own writing. So far, that hasn't happened, and after some 120 postcards
I stopped sending them out, especially as the internet seems to throw
a slightly anachronistic twist on the project. For the time being, then,
it's still an open-ended project and anything might happen with it.
From some working
notes on Serialscribbler found in my notebooks from the last few years:
The language eludes
me just as I step into it. I do not have the power to seize it, let alone
transform it.
Serialscribblerwhat
is more than language in it
now sit in Waterloo station
now hear & be tempted to bark
but not bark, quarantinelook up "bark"
then & now reconciled (thru fog)may as well not pay & suffer
the consequenceswhat if someone gets up & leaves in the middle
of a wordhow do we find the middle of a wordif poetry is an
approximation, the world is a wild guessguests come & go, trains
depart & arrive, film rolls.
Snatch scribblerbetween
picking up dog shit & chasing after the puppy, the memorable phrase
or fragment might fall into place. More likely it will not. Take in the
decent weather while it lastsa day or twothen brace yourself
for the onslaught of dark winter days.
Write without closure,
as if each block of text were a prelude to the soundwork or video. Take
it one sense at a time and then return not quite, but in a spiralling
form rather than a circle serialscribbler.
"the natural
suspicion of words"
Sometimes it happens
that even Serialscribbler, who by definition is busy at all times if not
totally self-absorbed to the point of oblivion, sometimes (I say) it happens
that Serialscribbler will devote some attention to another experience,
eg, reading a stranger's book or looking at a sculpture, even feeling
it to gain some tactile experience of it.
I write in prose
by default . I don't know where to break the line in free verse and I
don't like having the line-lengths predetermined by fixed verse forms.
It's an interim solution. I write in prose but think in poetry.
I took editor to one
side and had a quiet word with him. This is for my own good, I whispered,
and proceeded to disable his editorial tools, lopping off his hands, extracting
his tongue, etc. He seemed to understand and, as I now read it, thanked
me profusely with his lolling head and rolling eyes. Then I began to practise
my fiddling, keeping an eye on his writhing body while folding, turning
one word into another the way dough is turned before being given time
to rise. I dredge up the analogy (more fiddling) with a tinge of regret,
even shame, for bread is my favourite food in all the worldI suppose
I would kill for itand to mention editor in the same breath as bread
seems almost blasphemous; ah, but I remember there's a limit to words
and it's just been reached. So let's step back a step, retract that near-blasphemous
breath, inhale deeply, say: I fiddle is to say I scribble within the confines
of my own space, despite the neighbours' persistent complaints about the
screeching and scratching, their calling in the police who, in any event,
are powerless to stop me fiddling when I explain that the noise is just
a scribbling, a turning of one word into another in the manner of kneading
dough, careful to point out that I'm not inciting any revolutionary acts
by invoking the analogy and, at the same time, carefully keeping editor
out of view lest he give the wrong impression or, perhaps, because I'm
ashamed of him. Upon leaving the police shake my handI've always
had a way with the police, as one has with children or animalsand
I resume my fiddling. Editor is hurt, professionally and physically, and
since this has just been established as his necessary condition, we are
now both faced with a steep learning curve which we need to get used to,
each in his own way.
I am no virtuoso, it must be said, and fiddle only because I'm curious;
my fiddling is spurred on by a vague desire to discover the new sounds
rather than improve or polish the old ones. That's not to say I don't
appreciate the old ones, much in the way editor does, but it's not enough
to fulfil my desire. Editor, in contrast, has a way of expunging the new
sounds with a stroke of his pen, somewhat like an abortionist, fossilizing
them before they ever take flight. He believes my desire is misguided,
that there is a better way of channeling and controlling it, that it should
be put to better use. While he was fit and able he'd always wanted to
have a virtuoso at hand (forgive the expression) and had dreamed of making
me one of his own. Ah, but there are too many virtuosos, cried Robert
Schumann, spitting on the polished parquet floor. Editor is confounded
by the riposte. I can see his mangled body, thinking: surely you mean
virtuosi. He is certainly not humming a melody inside his head, because
as I snatched the pen and disabled him I discovered, to my shock, indeed
my shame (after all, he is/was my editor), nothing in his internal makeup
remotely connected with music. Instead there were millions of micro-blueprints
stacked on top of each other, slightly curled at the edges like wafers,
each bearing the imprint of some formula for a melody, past or present
or future: all nuts and bolts and intricate scaffolding, which in its
way presented a dazzling construction that any virtuoso would have given
his right arm to play (forgive the expression), but without the slightest
indication of what voice or tone or timbre such melodies might be borne
upon. In fact, a moment before disabling him I informed editor that there
are no more virtuosos in the world, only students, and to my surprise
(and eased conscience) he seemed more relieved than disturbed by the news.
I was not telling him the whole truth, of course, but our relationship
is such that it forgoes the elaboration of truth (on my part because its
structural complexities would be overbearing, while on his part the aesthetic
and moral dimensions would defy his comprehension); rather the smallest
grain of truth is often enough to maintain the fragile rapport between
us. So for the moment editor and I live side by side, reconciled to each
other's exclusionary habits; I fiddling, he nodding his wobbling head,
keeping time for the sake of appearances. Occasionally, when our respective
tasks come full circle and we turn a mutual glance of recognition towards
each other, we will take a break together over a cup of coffee or a glass
of wine, our dreams oozing incoherently from the corners of our mouths,
dripping like bird shit on the cafe table, as life flows to and fro on
the pavement before our eyeshis, like mine, darting back and forth
with unabashed lust as one young woman or another comes into viewonly
to have our little reveries promptly interrupted by a waitress asking,
"Are you all right, sir?" So that I'm forced to look up and
around me, awkwardly, desperately. Editor has suddenly absconded and left
me to answer her simple query. In a futile attempt to grasp a pen with
my mouth and scribble "yes" on any scrap of paper, I have, not
for the first time in my life, accidentally overturned the table and chairs.
Remorse for my reprehensible behaviour towards editor momentarily seizes
me, and a shameful tear is about to fill my eye as the waitress, brimming
with kindness and efficiency, comforts me: "Don't worry, sir, it's
all right." Dutifully she bends down and shuffles on all fours as
she cleans up the mess around my truncated legs; her breasts, liberally
exposed to my parched and crippled gaze, sway slightly with her scrubbing
movements, as if to say: drink, drink my compassion, o scribbler.
As a student of fiddling I am prone to daydreaming, especially when I
practise my bowing and fingering, which I do religiously yet by all accounts
hopelessly, for whether I practise once a week or every day of the week,
whether I fiddle on street corners or in cafés or in the privacy
of my room, the result is always, acoustically speaking, a scribble. It
has to do with distraction, of course, and the enticement offered up by
an image of loveliness passing by on the street, in a café, or
across the walls of my room. Oh, but I like that, remarks a progressive
tutor, a specialist on expressionism, his ear ever alert to the permutations
of the new sounds. Annoyingly, I must watch my posture at all timesme,
a cripple, watch my posture!make sure my eye-line does not stray
too far from the strings, and always keep my feet firmly planted on the
ground. Such, at least, were the rules given at the outset, when I was
a mere sub-scribe, long before I became a student, and although I'm now
at post-graduate level the same rules still apply, the cardinal one among
them being "never drift into mindless reverie." The trick, as
another tutor advised us, is to dream without affecting a dreamer's countenance,
to cast one's mind off in some direction while the (very same) mind stays
focused, enrapt by the intricacies of the hands' manoeuvres. As you can
see, I haven't given up yet, perhaps because I've noticed that over the
years tutors come and go, experts become fallible, if not completely discredited,
histories get revised, wars start up and arrive at their conclusions,
stores change ownership, buildings get torn down and re-built, and things
generally move onwhereas scribbling just evaporates into the atmosphere
like so much vacuous sighing and, despite its noxious fusion with the
air we breathe, is accepted as just another waste product with a tolerable,
low-level health risk, no more dangerous than the toxins given off by
other human wastes. The fact that nobody pays any attention to it, however,
could prove tragically fatal under certain circumstancesfor example,
if a scribbler were to be retroactively regarded as talented, even a genius,
and we, human kind, belatedly berated ourselves for having been so deaf,
so blind, and beat our breasts with futile lamentations, and tore each
others' hearts out with proprietary fingernails, and waged suicidal wars
in the name of said dead scribbler, now canonised, his or her pen emblazoned
on the national pennant billowing proudly over our burning libraries,
day and night, etc. But in the case of students, even at post-graduate
level, such potential catastrophes are highly improbable, as unlikely
as a cataclysmic end of days, so there's really no need to fret, no need
to get anxious over our performance, no need (or indeed desire) to seek
encouragement from our peers or advice from experts, because scribbling
is merely a process, nothing more, a perpetual practice session with or
without a fiddle, and in any case, as otologists have shown, the human
ear's threshold for noise rises by the hour, edging nearer to a level
of infinity with every exclamation, every grunt and moan, every scratch
or tap of the finger, with every etched apostrophe or comma on a blank
page. As one of our most distinguished tutors put it: Our potential
capacity to listen to everything will shake the foundations of our belief
systems to their core. I was thinking, as it happened, about the word
as the foundation of faith (not my original thought, just pondering an
old one) when he added: It's something we should consider with the
utmost gravity and tackle with a measured rationality. I think he
was soft peddling doom, imploring us to reinstate a more humane threshold
for the ear's intake of noise before it's too late. Too late for what,
I wanted to ask, eager to join the debate. But being a cripple, being
doomed to my studies, playing uncontrollably with my fiddle, I would have
been unable to get my point across to him, over there, on stage, behind
the podium, without upsetting the furniture and provoking a riot. All
the same, upon leaving I reflected that despite my restraint it was an
interesting outing for a bleak winter's afternoon, and I went away believing
that my knowledge had increased by two- or threefold.
Although I'm sometimes mistaken for a cripple, sometimes I'm not. It is
therefore just as true to say that I am as that I am not a cripple, and
it's a matter of political interpretation whether you believe one or the
other of these truths. My identity as a scribbler has not been affected
one way or the other in this respect, but this is probably due to the
perverse social conventions of our time. In the old days they would have
certified me, put me in a safe place behind walls for my own good, and
said no more about the matter; invisible, I would have been perceived
as either happy or unhappy. Today our techniques are more subtle and sophisticated,
especially in the free world, where we take pride in the fact that we
can air these issues openly and hold interesting debates at our local
cafés or on television or occasionally even on a bus, on the way
home from work, though that is still somewhat rare owing to our collective
fatigue after work. But those of us who don't work, who are less weary,
will not hesitate to launch into such democratic debate if we should come
upon a fellow non-worker on the bus, even heading home at 5 a.m. after
an all-night party, just when our fellow workers are setting off to work
on that bus, though they may not be sufficiently awake to participate
in the debate and are possibly too preoccupied with their night's dreams,
reconstructing the details, thinking of plausible explanations for implausible
events, half-consciously tying together random associations in their minds,
their hands struggling to support their drooping yawning heads, their
bleary eyes peering into the pre-dawn darkness as they silently ask themselves
what does this or that object mean in that incongruous setting, among
such unlikely people, and is the dream object connected with the real
thing they stumbled upon only a few days earlier, after not having seen
the likes of it for years, their brains persistently searching through
this miasma of vague objects and people for some kind of solution, a key,
as if these freshly painted dreams were riddles that only needed the correct
answer to facilitate a stress-free day at work and allow them to confront
their superiors with the confidence of people who know themselves, whose
selves have been revealed to them in dreams, regardless of how menial
their jobs might be and irrespective of their professional status, their
pecuniary position, their grooming or their physical appearance in generalit
being their democratic prerogative, theoretically, to be themselves in
any guise they choosebecause they saw the light through the dusk
and, having opted out of a now raging democratic debate, heard a voice
in the wilderness and were born again on the upper deck of the bus at
5a.m., en route to work. I know all this for a fact because, having participated
in that democratic debate, I witnessed their revelations with my own eyes
and quickly scribbled everything down while it was all fresh in my mind,
when their dreams were far less obscure than they are today.
Since then reverie has been my precise goal, and my fiddling studies are
only a means of dealing with the pragmatic side of other dreamers' dreams.
One fine day, as we return from our afternoon ritual of ogling nymphs
on the banks of the boulevard, editor and I will come upon a list of words
posted on our door, with a set of instructions to consider their place
in my scribbling. Editor is keen to proceed, sensing an opportunity to
regain the high ground in our relationship, but I remind him of our pact
and avert his deployment for the time being. He is all but dead, a mere
copyist, but I too am suddenly paralysed by a bout of amnesia, my lifelong
years of study failing me miserably. Conscientiously I copy the list into
my computer and it comes out like this:
Shame
The private
The secret in narrative writing
Representations of time
Event
Expectation (the future) in narrative
My computer (or rather its editor) automatically capitalizes the first
word in each linenot what I expected, but I leave it as it is. I
imagine the software writer will claim responsibility, perhaps a former
poet eager to accommodate traditional verse writers. But, capitalized
or not, the words are easily comprehensible, so I feel at least partially
redeemed by my scribbling studies, imagining that any reader would understand
them: the typography and size of a word has no bearing on its meaning,
I remind editor, though it may be argued there's a difference in degree.
Though I would have preferred the initial words without capitals, it seems
pointless (and too difficult) to change them now. (Perhaps in future the
software writer, a being of necessity in the future, will include an instruction
that would allow the computer's editor to distinguish between a list of
items and lines of verse; perhaps another instruction might be added that
would allow its editor to discern a writer's intended nuance for a given
word, or line, and automatically capitalise such wordsfor example,
"life" as typed in by an immortal's fingers.) But this is beside
the point. The point is I don't understand why or how language and writing
coexist, though I understand and to some extent sympathize with the historical
expediencies that have conjoined them. But how, after so many thought-bearing
hours in such claustrophobic proximity, have they failed to find their
separate autonomous domains? Have they just grown used to each other and
learned to be mutually tolerant? Have they gone a step further (backwards,
it seems) and learned to coexist, perhaps even to love each other in our
thought processes? If that were sothough I don't for a moment believe
itwhy? what for? We scribble, day in, day out. If we advance, writing
lies in wait, ready to devour us; if we retreat, language stabs us in
the back. Would it not be better if we had neitherno language, no
writingif there were no scribbling, no anti-scribbling, no pauses
and deliberations over their duration, if everything were simply a constant
torrent of some alien construct pouring into the well of truth, that shameless
metaphor born from the union of language and writing. I'm not alone in
this my bafflement. My incomprehension is borne out by the writers I read,
writers who have nothing to do with language, who don't know the meaning
of the word, writers as removed from representations of time, event, expectation
and futures as Greek shards, who have as little idea about shame, the
private, the secret in writing as that extrovert Yaweh, who have never
even heard of a narrative concept. Those writers I read, those are the
writers I write, that is, those writers I re-write; that's why they write
and why I write, why we, they and I, write, tuning our scribbling fiddles
to a sorrowful pitch. Editor reads the very same writers I write, and
yet invariably incinerates their pages, marking every word for approval
before burning them, and sometimes adding a last-minute grammatical correction
in his head. But editor reads only what has already been written, texts,
what may never be re-written, that's impossible, what may only be read
over and over and over. Whereas I and the writers I read write only to
re-write each other and will not allow ourselves, for our verbs are many,
to be re-written otherwise, distracted by a shopping list of contingencies
with moral and historical imperatives, since we're ambitious to succeed
our scribbling with our failure. That shopping list belongs in my pocket.
It is revealed (like a furtive cigarette in the street) when I go shopping
and use language as a counter, when I'm talking face to face, seeking
out your immediate reply, my lips smacking each other, my jaws moving
like pincers, my tongue slithering between movements of jaws and lips,
my vocal chords dilating or contracting like synchronized swimmers, my
lungs and every other pertinent organ acting in time and with deceptive
ease to allow me to articulate something or other, this or that. Thus
we talk and act, sometimes sequentially, sometimes synchronously. The
articulation of our bones, as well as what we concoct with language, says
something about our life, in death, after the flesh has rotted away and
the worms have moved to another body, yet language itself can never exhume
the writing that went on (perhaps on a daily basis) before the final heartbeat.
While the writer, o scribbler, is steeped in shame, in some perverse privacy
or in the self's profoundest secret, the body of writing is perpetuated
in its own skin, marking out its own as-ifness the way silence delineates
the borders of language. Let us admit, let's say, that I have murdered
you and am now stricken with remorse, dumb with shame and crippled by
guilt; whatever I've done, whatever else I'm doing, I am not writing.
I am outside the writing, doomed to carry in my language as author some
pitiful mental inflammation throbbing with a succession of phonemes, each
in turn having been orphaned by its murderous language, the same that
suckled it, that gave it comfort in the face of silence. Which is all
well and good, is as it should be in the realm of as-if, but as the writing
proceeds what if, scribbling, it revealed itself in some sacred alphabet,
a revelation earmarked as a future holy text, as though writing were shame
and privacy and secrecy itself, to be divulged in our death? And what
if that as-if were an angel, classical, orthodox, with the power to unleash
language's ultimate terrorthough I and the writers I re-write don't
know what that might bewould editor allow it to fulfil its divine
mission, or would he intervene and, effectively, overthrow the lord in
our household? Such questions seem infinitely difficult when, of an afternoon,
editor and I return from viewing the maidens by the river, slightly tipsy
from their beauty.
I like, I say to him before reaching our door, a poetry that is definitive
in its ambiguities, but cannot be as passionate about it as I am about
a poetry of ambiguous definitions. Reaching for the list of words on the
door, he calls me a hypocrite.
I was so ashamed that, if writing were language, "so" would
never survive under the burden it claims to support, for shame draws us
back through time, as even the earliest scribblers evoking Paradise were
at pains to point out, and during that interregnum every act of love and
war perpetrated by the species has accrued to its surface. Since writing
is not language, however, it is easy to articulate the so of it, to say
it or spell it or memorize it for future use. And I hid, editor confessed
to me once, for I was so naked.
The nonsense we tolerate, I confessed back to him in a moment of compassion,
is nothing compared to the nonsense we produce, especially when the latter
is predicated by a collective pronoun and dressed, how can I put itI
paused, I scratchedaphoristically? he offered.
(work in progress)
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