Body, language, sentences, words

Today I want to be a translator. I’ve been leafing through some notes I made years ago on a book by one of the most important Romanian writers of the late-twentieth century, Gheorghe Craciun (1950-2007). He’s little known outside Romania, and especially in the English-speaking world. The Body Knows Better (2006), the book I was browsing through, is a journal of sorts. It records the thoughts of a writer obsessed with one thing alone: how to express language through the body, and the body through writing.

For Gheorghe Craciun there couldn’t be a separation between writing and body. Unlike, say, Foucault, who saw writing as a departure from the body, the purpose of which would be to create a fantasy of freedom, Craciun militated (masochistically, I would say) in favour of a painful unification of the two, one that would expose all the physical shortcomings of the one and the creative weaknesses of the other. This is why he needed the form of the confessional to write down his doubts and his hurts, without hypocrisy and without false heroism. “A man alive is a man forever undecided,” he says in one of his aphorisms. And indeed, the volume from which I am translating here is one such exercise in indecision. I chose fragments that speak of writing as toil, as obsession, as obligation, as disappointment. I find them highly relevant to the profession of writing; not as lessons, but as awakenings.

Source: Observator Cultural

I don’t want to reflect on these fragments here. I want to let them be the way I found them, scattered through the book, the way I picked them up one by one, with an impulse typical to aphoristic writings: reading them in no order, reading them for their own sake. But for continuity, I will start with two passages directly connected to my last week’s post on writing and sleep. After that, everything will be a game of combinations.

“In the mornings, after waking up, with the coffee on the table and the cigarette between my fingers, sitting on the chair, I often make long attempts at dragging myself out of the murkiness of slumber. I resemble a machine with its mechanisms out of order. My mind is almost inexistent. But the most serious thing is that there’s no dominant thought, no feeling that I’m about to hold on to something solid.
A deserted state, a state of dizziness and indeterminacy, in which the desire to find my diurnal routines struggles against the obscure pulsations of the body, which are pulling me down, in a kind of mire of pains, nausea, grief, amorphous sensations, independent of me and devoid of sense, memories of my sleep, desires to escape from the vague opacity of my flesh.
A long time goes by before I can feel growing in me that meaning-yielding situation favourable to the writing of the first sentence. That’s exactly what I’m expecting: to become capable of turning my body into a coherent sentence, a nucleus around which I can gather the filing dust of everything inside me that’s obscure, but which has to become structure, transparency.
Mornings should be eliminated from existence. I felt this hundreds of times and I spoke tens of times about awakenings. There’s a mystery in them. It’s not by accident that we consider sleep to be a form of death. It paralyzes, indeed, the structure of our rationality. And my writing, which, paradoxically, aims towards classical limpidity, cannot be satisfied with that which the body (now out of control, cancelled by sleep and by dreams) doesn’t know and doesn’t want to express. I write with the desire to rationalize even my incapacities, the hypnotic nonsense of an organism that exposes, brutally, its independence from language.”

***

Source: Deviant Art

“Every morning offers you the chance of writing the grand page. Better to get used quickly to the idea that you won’t, however, write it today…”

***

“The most terrific accident that could happen to me: to forget writing. A sentence I cannot see is a sentence that doesn’t exist. An object you cannot lock within a sentence doesn’t exist either.”

***

“When it is said that writing is confession, very few realize that this confession is, in fact, of one’s own sins.”

***

“What is writing: a form of witnessing (in which case the one who writes is a witness who's defending a truth) or a form of confession (the self-defense of someone who is being accused of something)?”

***

“I live in order to fill with my experiences sentences that already exist.”

***

“If I’m a hand that writes, then I’m a muscle that thinks. Ha!”

***

“We invented syntax in order to tame our irrepressible need for expression. Any syntax shows, in fact, the desire to tame whatever it is that we want to say.”

***

“Without love, the poison of writing. Without this poison, the imbecility of the quotidian.”

***

“There are times when the obligation to write (for I have become a slave to writing, the way others are slaves to automobiles, to alcohol, to love, to their career etc.) drives me crazy. That’s when I have the feeling that writing is a form of mortification, that it cancels life. It’s therefore understandable how writers give in to bohemian temptations.”

***

“I admit it: I re-read my work every now and then. I do it as an attempt at keeping in check, at least for a few minutes, the misery of this life of continuous obligations. I re-read my work in moments of quotidian disgust, in the hope that I’m not some other imbecile of the great throng.”

***

“If you’re a true writer, you can only write about the body. Not only because it is that thing that pulls you down, towards the region of inferior existence, but also because it constitutes your world. The body makes existence possible: a truth applicable to all of us, to every one of us taken separately. The aberrations of abstract thinking are always the product of those who despise the body, who labour to obliterate it, who want to get rid of it as if it were a residue. Whereas, it’s clear, everything starts with the senses. Our thinking gets its sap from the capillarity of the senses. It’s an uncomfortable condition, I know. The idea of pure thinking, of pure poetry, speaks precisely about this discomfort. But if the body is vulgar, inferior, we need to make the effort of figuring out where precisely it is situated in us (in the structure of our selves), what it looks like, what desires it has. If we want to subjugate this body we must attack it; we must, in fact, love it.”

***

Artist: David Tucker. Source: Second Skins

“I write, and while I’m writing I know that my body would like to be in another place. I feel this place inside my brain, I have it in my mind, behind the eyes; it is never the same. Usually, these places that supplement my writing are places in nature, hills, river banks, forest edges. I write but, in spite of having discovered inside me the other place – which is not the sheet of paper –, I don’t want to stop doing what I’m doing. I simply want to be in two places at the same time. My writing is insufficient; the abstract nature of the space where this writing unfolds makes necessary the other space, the concrete one, the one endowed with precise objects, with material objects: the open space.”

***

“I haven’t clipped my nails in a long time, and I’m feeling inside me something like the excitation of a clawed being.”

***

“Writing depersonalizes. Even those who read your work know it. If you’ve been recognized as a write, you no longer have a right to hesitation, abandon, weakness. Those who know you cease to regard you as a normal human being. You’re no longer allowed to be an individual like all others. Writing is a profession, so you’re obliged to produce. The world expects new books from you, all the time.
Well, it doesn’t really expect them. But the world knows that this un-weakened productivity is a mechanism, that this mechanism must function. There’s this idea in your reader’s mind that, since you write, you are the keeper not only of the secrets of writing as technique, but also of the secrets of life. You’ve reached beyond the stage of trials, of searches, of doubts. You are above all this. Your doubts, if they exist, will show in your manuscript.
In any case, you’re no longer a person, but an institution with a timetable. Your civic persona, with all its happenings, becomes insignificant. If it keeps you from writing, it simply means you’re no longer a writer. But if you still are one, don’t expect to be understood, don’t expect any mercy. Nobody will grant you any mitigating circumstances. It would be unfair if they did.”

***

“A person I know sends me on my birthday a piece of ‘esoteric’ fiction. I tell him it’s not quite well written and that he’s got some more work to do on the text. ‘But I don’t intend to build a literary career!’ he replies standoffishly. ‘Career, you say?’ I burst out loud. ‘You believe this is some kind of trade, something to assure your life fulfilment? Instead of being a writer I’d rather be a mountaineer!’”

***

“Where is the beauty of life? If you don’t know how to create it, it doesn’t exist.”

Writing in order to be

Let me return once again to Michel Foucault’s interview from 1968. It’s in order to see (once again) what he meant by the obligation to write. Perhaps the most important, the most intriguing angle from which this obligation can be regarded, is this one, where we encounter the body that writes.

 

Where there’s writing there’s a body. Here’s a syllogism with good chances at appearing too obvious to be taken seriously. But the relationship between writing and body is far more complex than what this syllogism is about to recommend.

 

I disappear, therefore I am

It’s not in the presence of the body that one is likely to find the impetus to write, but in its disappearance. Now, of course, there are ways and ways of coming to terms with this disappearance of one’s own body through the embodiment of the text that is one’s only possible future. For a start, one could realize that this disappearance is not death; not exactly death. When I say my body has disappeared in the process of writing I am not uttering that Romantic ideal of the genius who lives for and through himself: that perfect mind, that perfect consciousness, that superhuman presence that fared so well in the nineteenth century and seems to have died (or maybe not yet) with Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Flame, ominously published on the cusp between centuries, in 1900, or better still, with his Charter of Carnaro, from 1920. (The genius dies in relation to his kind; he lives only insofar as he is misanthropically placed on a cliff overlooking humankind with aloofness).
No. What I mean by the disappearance of the body is that almost mundane oblivion that overtakes every writer when their scribbling is in action: even the person who puts his culinary desires into words on a shopping list, even the person who writes the ticket to punish me for my wrongly parked car.
In the process of writing, one needs to get rid of one’s body, so to speak, to put a distance between their selves and their words. It is only in this disappearance that writing can take place without the writer worrying about consequences. Otherwise, there’s too much fear, too much reflection, too much distraction; too much of the world and too little of the text. So, when writing, one is really hiding oneself in order to allow the text to come to life. It's a situation that resembles hunting. In hunting, the animal is lured by an invisible body. The animal is afraid, obviously – it is worried for its life. But the hunter is afraid too – worried that the hunt will not get to its expected outcome; that there will be no game to take home; that – if you like – the scenario of the hunt will not be materialized. A disappearing body is the guarantee of the game's appearance. An immaterialized body expecting the materialization of a text – this seems to be the right formula for the understanding of writing as an action performed through/with the body.

 

Foucault

This is my take. Foucault’s goes, obviously, a little further. To him, writing appears as an obligation to please this disappearing body by offering it the chance to stay away from the society that builds walls and constraints around it. When writing, the body disappears not only in relation to the text and the page on which that text is being laid down, but also in relation to the external pressures of the world. Writing is, at its core, a form of fantasy. It starts from an impulse to liberate the self and goes so far as to affirm that self to the obliteration of the world. This is why writing is different from speaking, as Foucault insists in the interview: because the former evades the world, while the latter addresses it, lives with the world, embraces it as a place for communication. The body is torn between the two, since speech needs it in order to materialize itself in the world, while writing rejects it precisely in order to come to life.

“Another reason why writing is different from speaking is that we write to hide our face, to bury ourselves in our own writing. We write so that the life around us, alongside us, outside, far from the sheet of paper, this life that’s not very funny but tiresome and filled with worry, exposed to others, is absorbed in that small rectangle of paper before our eyes and which we control. Writing is a way of trying to evacuate, through the mysterious channels of pen and ink, the substance, not just of existence, but of the body, in those minuscule marks we make on paper. To be nothing more, in terms of life, than this dead and jabbering scribbling that we’ve put on the white sheet of paper is what we dream about when we write. But we never succeed in absorbing all that teeming life in the motionless swarm of letters. Life always goes on outside the sheet of paper, continues to proliferate, keeps going, and is never pinned down to that small rectangle; the heavy volume of the body never succeeds in spreading itself across the surface of the paper, we can never pass into that two-dimensional universe, that pure line of speech; we never succeed in becoming thin enough or adroit enough to be nothing more than the linearity of a text, and yet that’s what we hope to achieve. So we keep trying, we continue to restrain ourselves, to take control of ourselves, to slip into the funnel of pen and ink, an infinite task, but the task to which we’ve dedicated ourselves.”

 

Putting the body together

Indeed, “we write to hide our face.” The writer, even when he/she is an author with a photograph proudly printed on the back cover of a book, is an entity without a face. His/her text is to a certain extent a reconstructive procedure: an attempt to form a face. This is because an author’s identity is not the identity of their face, but the identity of their work. Their name too is, in fact, nothing but a form of ID. So the creation of a text is, really, the creation of an identity. And this identity keeps forming, keeps coming to light, with every text written, with every word taken out of its linguistic context and placed in the context of its newly acquired text.

The problem is that we’ve come to identify writing almost exclusively with authors of books, and that’s why we can’t see this reconstructive nature of writing, this obligation to write in order to form a face and a body. But take once again the example of someone who’s writing a shopping list. Where is that person’s face? Where is their body? What can we say about that person if we found their shopping list (as we often do) fallen onto the ground, left to disappear once the work has been finished (once shopping has taken place)? Nothing. Nothing about their body, that is. But there is an identity right there, on that little piece of paper, and that identity comes to life as the result of writing. That's how that “dead and jabbering scribbling” is a guarantee for the person who wrote the list that he/she will be remembered – if such might one day be their desire. Remembered, obviously, in the sense of re-membering, of putting that person back together from the little scribbling on that paper.

 

We cannot write forever

But what’s really painful to see is, as Foucault points out, the failure of this process of self-disembodiment. Yes, we’ve acquired, through writing, a sense of standing apart from the world. But the world doesn’t die when we push it aside. We realize that, instead of being apart from it, we are a part of it.

Writing cannot happen forever, i.e. we cannot be forever in the process of scribbling. In contrast, the world never ends. It is. It exists on the outside of our selves and awaits, patiently, for us to switch off the fantasy we are fantasising about. We’re never going to be like the geometrical figures in Abbott’s Flatland. True, complete, irreversible disappearance from the world would be, indeed, a form of imprisonment on the page, a transformation into a character, into a diagram, into a geometrical material. I don’t know if that would be better. I don’t know if Foucault really meant it that way. (Him, the critic of imprisonments?) But one thing is certain: he saw the impossibility of such a project. As a consequence, he sees writing as a temporary transfer at best. We leave the world to live in a fantasy, but at some point we will be obliged to return. And when that happens, we find that the world is there. It has never left. The world is where we return; it is where we’ve never departed. This is the pain and the pleasure that come with writing. Whoever thought it would be easy!