Breyten Breytenbach - Intimate Stranger

To promote true exchanges. To open up spaces for vigorous creativity down there. To let us see some of the diversity and incoherence and confusions of your cultures, not just the smooth products adobed (and daubed) by officialdom. Why are you so expansionist? Is it in your barbaric nature? Are you not using ‘culture’ as the lubricant for better screwing the rest of the world politically and economically? In the front row a man with a very expressive and unruly moustache became more and more agitated. He put up a finger, either asking for assistance or requesting permission to leave the hall. What about this politically correct nonsense of cultural equivalence? Can we not agree about a number of basic taboos, the infringement of which will be intolerable and unacceptable, and then build further? Clitorectomy, pedophilia, the enslavement of women, ethnic cleansing. . “Are these expressions of culture?” someone asked. Capital punishment, as indulged and largely condoned in the United States of America. .? The moustache was by now crawling over the man’s face. It was time to go.

(mirror note 6)

The only real divertissement came when a gentleman with a prospering moustache, functionary of UNESCO, explained the wondrous project they’d embarked upon to establish (create?) The Memory of the World. One had visions of an enormous echoing space, maybe a cave, that had to be furnished with the elements that would constitute our shared human memory. In this way shall we become global. The earnest man of Arab origin, a librarian by profession, presented his paper while projecting on the wall behind him images of our memory genes. That is, our documentary heritage which was being rescued from the attrition of time, “acidified paper that crumbles to dust, leather, parchment, film and magnetic tape attacked by light, heat, humidity or dust.” Next to him on the podium sat a ponderous German historian, eminent member of an organism called IAC, the International Advisory Committee, white-haired with age and seasoning, and nodded a solemn and wise head. Trouble was that there was little traceable correlation between the discourse and the images. Peccadilloes! The beauty, surely, was that here you had the dream of creating a vastness with neither beginning nor end. Like the Borges story of attempting to draw a true remembered face of the world, this ‘map’ would eventually have to be big enough to cover all of human consciousness. Were there criteria?

You bet, sir! Documentary heritage must be shown to have had major influence on the history of the world at a particularly important time and crucial place , associated with people who made an outstanding contribution; it should give valuable information about a major theme , or should be an example of outstanding form or style , encapsulating a cultural and social or spiritual value which transcends, transcends. . And the morsel of heritage will be enhanced if it has a high degree of integrity or completeness or if it is unique or rare . But how do you decide as poor, coughing, foot-shuffling humans? Oh, oh, sir. It is almost too much to bear. Maybe the old tried method of leaving the documents on a table overnight and that which has not fallen off deserves to be included? Are there exclusions? Well, after months of agonizing but expert deliberations, it was decided not to include anything relating to the ‘Condor Project’ in terms of which a cabal of Latin American dictators and the CIA had physically eliminated thousands of leftist agitators and dreamers. . This was too horrible to remember. And nobody knows yet how to incorporate the Berlin Wall.

I’m cutting up words and pasting them in a painting. And I have to think of the Tibetan prayer flags, words and wishes scribbled on cloth to flap in the breeze at crossroads or in inaccessible mountain places. To forward pleas, to appease the gods and the departed spirits. What is the ‘use’ of beauty which ‘nobody’ can see? No one will ‘read’ them: these are sounds confided to the wind. Especially to wind — the presence of absence, the breath of immortality and of death.

We have covered much ground in the weeks we spent together; it has been an exciting time and a privilege to be with you. And yet, we only scratched the surface. We looked sideways at some of the elements and implications of writing, but we only paused to discuss more closely when they surfaced through your stories. For example, we did not consider the primordial importance of the sentence — the donkey — that essential beast of burden encapsulating breath or breathing a wisp of thought. Nor did we study the function of texturing through sounds and patterns and associations, or how repetition leads to absence. (Or does it originate from the void, like a reverberating sound-wave, effacing itself through repetition?)

Surface is important. It constitutes and illustrates the flapping of our minds. It is the federation of intention and illusion, of emptiness and of manifestation, and then it exists and shimmers in its own right. I have often thought that it might be worthwhile to try and write a treatise on The Metaphysics of the Surface .

We always work with sensitive spaces, both in our relationship to what comes down on the paper (and this will be a sustained tension all through one’s writing life) and in the way we position ourselves to the product — the adaptability and acceptability of it, its coherence or resonance or success; and then the attitude to the reader’s expectations and our relations with other writers and the links and breaks among our own various writings.

Writing is the dialectic between absence and presence. It is the art of leaving out so that you can let in more. It is the process of surfacing. As you write, you surface to yourself — like turbulent water stilling to the rise of an image. The water is not any less deep and there are as many creatures gliding through the sweet thickness of currents, but it now allows itself to be focused to a surface of reading , to what I referred to earlier as ‘a plausible bounded mirage of meaning’. . (Movement, of course, obviates the need for a recognizable face.) And then, if the writing works, it will allow the reader to surface to him- or herself. As Russell Banks put it: Writing is the art (and thus the pleasure and the pain) of being intimate with strangers. With yourself as the first stranger.

You always start out having at least an idea of what you wish to write. But then, it is only in the writing that you find out what you’re about. This is the creative tension between intention and discovery, and it is this relationship that makes for welcoming spaces.

The ethical respect you show your stories — to the characters, the situations, the plot, the environment, the tenses and the tensions — will consist of not having your texts preach your convictions about rape and violence and racism and global warming and war, or the free market and other aberrations of stupidity. The only effective action as writer against social folly is to write better, go deeper, open the mind more, be more democratic in the space you allow the reader.

Enhanced consciousness — that is, first of all the matter of touching and smelling, running your hands over the rough edges of words with their histories and their bastard natures — is the bedding of conscience.

In the bright morning a daymoon just the barest knuckle of a reminder of subterranean dimensions. Red birds flit and flutter in the bare branches of a big tree. This is Connecticut. We are staying in the house of an old writer. There are many rooms smelling of ancient dogs and manuscripts, narrow passages, creaking wooden floors, framed New England faces against the walls. For breakfast we have ‘hambiscuits’ — salty and sweet Virginia meat cured by the master in his bathtub, then glazed.