Nescio (21)

NESCIO (21)

The priestess was pleased with her last intervention. The sister was now centre of attention from a man who considered her more than kindly; a man who knew better than to love her blindly.

His intention was only to love her for who she was. (It was a difficult task and a lot to ask.)

He succeeded in it.

The priestess revelled in it.

The sister really wasn't that bad. It was probably due to the life that she'd had. With the right kind of guidance, the girl would be fine.

The priestess reached for another bottle of wine.

The Sub-Editor - Intervention (2)

INTERVENTION (2)

'At certain moments, I felt that the entire world was turning into stone: a slow petrification, more or less advanced depending on people and places but one that spared no aspect of life. It was as if no one could escape the inexorable stare of Medusa.' (Calvino, 1992, 4)

Thus describes Italo Calvino the gulf between 'the facts of life that should have been my raw materials and the quick light touch I wanted for my writing'.

He continues: 

'Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world - qualities that stick to writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them'. (Calvino, 1992, 4)

For Calvino, 'lightness' is the quality to which one should aspire. Not lightweight, but lightness: in contrast to the 'vitality of the times - noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring'. (Calvino, 1992, 12)

For Calvino, lightness must be sharp, a sharp, bright light trained on the truth but without precluding humour:

'Lightness for me goes with precision and determination, not with vagueness and the haphazard'. (Calvino, 1992, 16)

A gulf, a chasm, separates the way our character feels from the words he can summon to describe his situation. He aims for a lightness of touch, but Medusa's spell is working well and he is fast becoming petrified.


References:
Italo Calvino, 1992, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, London: Jonathan Cape

The Sub-Editor - Intervention

INTERVENTION

So, what does it mean to lock oneself away?

And, then, how should that story be told? How do you write of boredom and loneliness? How do fill a page with unfilled and unfulfilled hours?

If, as Larkin states, one must be true to the experience, what precisely is the terrain of that experience?

Perhaps 'to write' is to map experience, but a map is not equivalent to the territory it describes. It remains a highly contrived set of rules and signifiers that allows uncharted land to be conceptualised. It doesn't come close to what it means to move - the body and the soul - through space and time.

Georges Perec's character, Bartlebooth, 'hardly goes out, he scarcely leaves his study all day'. And, Smautf, another of Perec's inventions, 'stays for long periods each day in his bedroom. He tries to make some little progress with his arithmetic; for relaxation he does crosswords, reads detective novels which Madame Orlowska lends him, and spends hours stroking the white cat, which purrs whilst massaging the old man's knees with its claws'.

There is comfort in these descriptions of solitude; perhaps because they describe what the characters do, rather than what they're thinking or feeling.

Our character does not have the advantage of an omniscient narrator. That's why I've decided to intervene. He has locked himself away - he 'hardly goes out', he holes up in his bedroom for 'long periods each day'.

He blogs when he can find the energy but, already, the process - the effort - of arranging his thoughts requires a distance that removes him from the chaos of his emotions.

And, he wonders where the truth might lie: in his words or his silence?