The Sub-Editor - Day Of Reckoning

DAY OF RECKONING

'The thing to remember is that nothing has changed. Except what I thought was the case. But my case was a myth and a fantasy; a lie combined with bad faith.'

My brother turned to me and asked, 'what do you mean by this?'

'The day of reckoning is, in fact, a re-positioning. A case of seeing the facts. A case of seeing the reality, and adjusting the way that one acts.'

My brother turned to me and suggested, 'perhaps you are pissed?'

'To believe in God is surely a vanity, but I must say I'm sad we've discarded Greek tragedy. The thought of the Underworld is strangely life-affirming. Posthumous reunion strikes me as quite charming. And I have to confess that the thought of love is calming. The thought of not having love is certainly disarming.'

My brother turned to me and said, 'can I offer you an olive or, maybe, a crisp?'

'Yes, it's one thing to hypothesize, it's another to enact. I, for one, can intelletualise, critique, interpret, analyse, but it's altogether different to behave as if you're wise.'

My brother turned on the TV.

'You see, emotions are immune to self-control and censorship. They're disruptive and subversive and, at times, are quite seductive; to be immersed in something abstract but so vicsceral, persuasive. Though I'm somewhat loath to say it, I would say it's quite addictive.'

My brother turned off the TV and shouted, 'so what you gonna do about it?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'You tell me. After all, let's face it, it's your reality.'

The Sub-Editor - Intervention (4) Austerlitz, Then

INTERVENTION (4) AUSTERLITZ, THEN

'You always have been rather remote, of course, I could tell that, but now it's as if you stood on a threshold and you dared not step over it. That evening in Marienbad, said Austerlitz, I could not admit to myself how right everything Marie said was, but today I know why I felt obliged to turn away when anyone came to close to me, I know that I thought this turning away made me safe. . .' (W G Sebald, 2001, Austerlitz, London: Penguin, 304)

Ok, let's play the pause game one more time. I'd stop time here, if I had the chance:

We had walked all day and talked the way we always did.  We had picnicked in the shelter of a dry-stone wall. Yorkshire in autumn: the sky stretched out blue and forgiving above us, and the beech trees were dressed in copper-red.

We walked for miles and, with you, I felt complete. As I always had and did with you. With you, I knew, I was safe.

We dropped down the hill.  We passed the Co-op on the left and the Inn on the Bridge on the right. We reached the station, and laughed about something I can no longer remember.

You said, 'I'll see you soon'. And I said, 'yes, please'.

I wanted to add, 'I love you. I don't like this life without you', but I didn't dare say it; say how I felt. I had learned to be wary.  Even of you. We had learned to be as bad as each other at not daring to ask for help.

You said, 'I'll see you soon', but, you never came back.

I'd stop time before you said, 'I'll see you soon' because, then, there would've been no promise to break. And I wouldn't have wasted so much time anticipating, desperately longing, for your return. 

The Sub-Editor - Pause

PAUSE

So, she's back: our omniscient narrator.

I don't know who she thinks she is, this self-appointed interventionist. But I recognise her.

The last time I saw her she was sitting on a wall, a dry-stone wall in Yorkshire. She had insisted I come for a walk. A stomp and talk, she called it.  Stretch the legs. Blow away the cobwebs. She was full of the latest book she'd just read: Wanderlust. As with all her enthusiasms, she had now turned her attention fully, comprehensively, to walking - as a consequence of her reading - with renewed and exasperating vigour. (Although, to be fair, it wasn't only a fair-weather occupation of hers, this walking, this stomping, the stretching of the legs. She had always walked when she was pre-occupied. When asked, as a child, what she'd like to become she answered with naive sincerity 'a bag-lady'.)

It was a glorious day, the season shifting into autumn: crisp and fresh. She began by telling me how she loved the touch of the breeze on her forearms and face - 'like a gentle embrace', she said.  But, then she began talking of scopic regimes, launched into the fact that photographs aren't ever what they seem. A photograph is one-dimensional and static.  To live is to be fully sensate, fully embodied.  She turned her face to me and said, 'I'm scared that for me, all that's too late'.

I stopped in my tracks, not knowing what I'd heard, except that it was bad. And she turned and looked at me, and laughed.

We ate our sandwiches in the shelter of a wall. A dry-stone wall in Yorkshire. And when we had finished she hoisted herself up and sat on it, letting the breeze caress her face and blow away the cobwebs, as she drank from the water bottle.

As children we used to play this game. We called it the pause game. These were the rules: you had to describe the scenario in which you'd like to die.

In retrospect, I suppose it was a morbid game for children to play.

As she sat on the wall she said, 'let's play the pause game'.  I shook my head as I lit a cigarette, and refused to look her in the eye.

'Come on,' she said, slightly goading. 'Give me that, at least.'

But, I said nothing.

The day didn't end there, but I have no memory of what followed. We would've continued to walk, to stomp and talk. We would have reached town and continued, passed the Co-op and the Inn on the Bridge, on to the station. We would have laughed as we waited for the train, and kissed before I embarked. But I cannot picture any of that.

So, my sweet sister, let's play the pause game now.

I would stop it all there, with you, fully embodied and fully sensate.  Provocative, over-dramatic and irritating, as usual.  Pre-occupied and scared and, as usual, pretending not to care.

Really, I would stop it all there.

The Sub-Editor - Intervention (3) Photographic Fallacy

 INTERVENTION (3) PHOTOGRAPHIC FALLACY

It is impossible to re-connect properly honestly authentically with the past. 

And, photography: it's a fallacy - a theoretical rhetorical insanity - to believe it can act as substitute (or 'fetish') for the real thing, the real person.

The loved lost body.

The fully embodied, sensate body is precisely what the photographic portrait is not.

A photograph of someone who is no longer alive: it provides neither comfort nor solace. It only reminds one that that person is dead. Arrested in time, the subject refuses to change and fails to get old. The subject refuses and fails to recognise understand respond to who you have (had to) become - in order to survive him.

The photograph, like death, has silenced the subject.

If I remember correctly the Swedish playwright, August Strindberg, believed in a kind of photographic telepathy. He believed he could communicate the subject's true identity, as well as communicate with him (or, in this case, her) through photography.

But, for our character, the power of the photograph is fading fast: badly fixed.

He is no longer sure, even, who the images portray.

The Sub-Editor - Wish You Were Here

WISH YOU WERE HERE

The Sub-Editor - Austerlitz

AUSTERLITZ

'It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.  And, might it not be, continued Autsterlitz, that we also have appointments to keep with the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us. . . ?' (W G Sebald, 2001, Austerlitz, London: Penguin, 359-60)

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