1
There is strangeness at stake in complexity. There is the pleasure of encountering something unknown, the rush of rubbing one’s mind against that weird rock, feeling the sharpness sharpening. What Jean-Luc Nancy called "the imaginary . . . that point the accomplishment of the act is worth infinitely more than the act itself" is inscribed in the motions and gestures of ritual. At that point where the symbolic and the real collide, "the image brings us into its presence."
"Fury is the desire that wants to grow and suck on the source of desire itself… and desire is that or nothing; exacerbated exasperation, " Nancy wrote.
2
In a wonderful essay for The Paris Review titled “In This Essay I Will: On Distraction”, David Schurman Wallace evokes reaching the point in his writing when the initial spark loses its come-hither glint—the point where distraction courts the mind. Wallace's eyes fall onto his shelves, lingering in the memory of former trysts, former relationships with texts. And there, on the shelf, is Flaubert's final novel, the book left unfinished. There is that temptation courting the mind, looking for an excuse to wander back into it.
Wallace gives us the paradox of writing as labor, namely, that distraction doubles as blessing and curse. Distraction releases us from desire, or from the intensity of edits and drafts and evidence; desire lets the mind literally wander over the wall, and take a side trail into an elsewhere. Desire opens an Otherwise.
Flaubert's two clerks want to know everything, and this interest in everything keeps them from the labor of attending to something. "Their curiosity has no staying power," as Wallace observes. Their desire lacks commitment or willingness to sweat.
Writing is not fun in the way that this word is conventionally used.
Writing is cannibalized by "the possibility of detours"; research leads us to the rabbit hole that seeds new ideas and flirts with different beginnings or projects.
3
"Everything is unique, nothing happens more than once in a lifetime," declared those two choirboys of gossip known as the Goncourt brothers in the year of 1867. We have their notebooks to hold against this presumed uniqueness, for while the instant may differ in details, schadenfreude vibes the same. For the Goncourts, the notebooks existed as places that resisted the vanishing regimes of modernity. The bros. remained “at home in” the words they'd committed to remembering others.
“Home” is a word for the place that is uniquely familiar.
4
"Literature is a voracious and anarchist beast," George Steiner declared in an essay that pondered why Tolstoy and Wittgenstein maintained a skepticism of Shakespeare. Both men believed Shakespeare didn’t deserve the cult that surrounded his name. Both reasoned from the Platonic complaint leveraged against tragedy: Shakespeare does not tell us how to live our lives. His words and plays are spectacular, but spectacle does not present us with difficulty. If anything, spectacle is a distraction from the difficult parts of being human. Plato, Tolstoy, and Wittgenstein all share this concern about spectacle, and how aesthetics can destroy ethics.
5
“I wouldn’t say that being trans now is living my truth. I’d say it’s a better fiction,” writes McKenzie Wark in Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir (Verso, 2023).
6
Dave Hickey concluded the Acknowledgements section for one of his books by libating the uncertain nature of their recounting. “Finally, since the experiences recounted in this book have been compressed, elided, collaged, and occasionally disguised to protect the guilty, my apologies to those who remember it differently, or remember it all too well,” Hickey wrote.
7
Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays
8
If we avoid writing the shadows, it is because very few books have time or audience willing to study the angles of light brought to each text. “All lights around the space it illuminates with the shadow it produces.” I’m paraphrasing what I copied from Pascal Quignard’s Abysses (as translated by Chris Turner) into my notebook. The syntax is ragged; I probably miscopied—-but there is something interesting to me about leaving the error as written. And refusing to be corrected in my misapprehension.
Consequentialism is the sword we raise against the abyss, as Quignard tells it. The abyss is simultaneously without consequent and inconsequential: it defies sequence and unbinds temporality. Cocteau’s “scandalous visibility” can be read against this sequencing at the heart of representation: we come to know (or believe that we ‘know’) by virtue of ordering. We recognize a shape and console ourselves in this recognition of form. But the shadows on the walls of the cave haunt us precisely because they are the part of reality that continues to escape us. Even as they invoke, provoke, and lustrate us.
9
At one point in Quignard’s Abysses, he tells us: “I like the shadows cast by shapes, struck by light, like the repercussions one sees in mirrors.” Almost immediately, my mind interferes and poses a question to my demiurge, namely, how did this relationship between human sound (or “percussion”) and punishment (“repercussion”) emerge?
Nonsense.
“I love the sea,” wrote Charles Debussy, responding to critics who chided his piece, La Mer, for breaking with classical traditions. “I have listened to it with the passionate respect one owes it. If I've transcribed badly what it dictated to me, that's no concern of yours or mine. And you'll allow that all ears don't hear in the same way. In the end you love and defend traditions that no longer exist for me, or at least that only exist as representatives of an epoch, in which they weren't all as beautiful or as worthwhile as one might care to say, and the dust of the Past isn't always respectable.”
I have listened to it with the passionate respect one owes it. And so I return to the work of collecting traces and listening to shadows amid ciphers buried inside literature’s scandalous visibilities, holding the ‘possibility of the detour’ close.
