The test of ambiguity

...man always has to decide by himself in the darkness, that he must want beyond what he knows.

Why do you run away? What is hidden there – beyond the blurry images frantically moving, obscuring the view? Stand still and look past them, look into the centre. There what do you see? 

You see only ambiguity. Neither good nor bad, it’s only the feeling you have when you climb to a great height and you look down. Vertigo. You are dizzy. You want – in the most panic stricken way – to stay alive but at the same time you want to jump. You dream about it, you obsess about it and you can’t look down because of it.  You want to stop fighting, stop trying. You want the ambiguity of whether you can cling onto the surface of that high tower to end - and you want to do it in a way you can be certain of. Anything is bearable if it’s not a surprise.

But this is the lesser known test of life and it will not leave you alone. What do you do with your share of ambiguity? Make no mistake – as Beauvoir sets out in her Ethic of Ambiguity – it comes with freedom. They’re one indivisible package. You are free to create the meaning of your life and the meaning is unlimited. And yet you start in the mud as a worm, struggling, wriggling, turned blindly towards the sky but not knowing what you are reaching for. You do not know that ambiguity is the same thing as freedom and freedom the same thing as responsibility. And so you put it down.

Its unbearable, the ambiguous depths you can fall into, just like the dizzying heights from the top of that tower. 

 

Into the emptiness

The feeling of emptiness comes and goes. Don’t fight it, don’t analyse it, don’t act on it. Just be still and sit with it. Hold it. Accept it and it will go away again after a while. And then sometime later it will come back. The thing to do is, again, sit with it, stand with it, lie with it, roll around with it and accept it. Allow it to be there however long it needs to be there, until it goes away again. It’s a cycle – don’t you see - that will go round and round. As long as you stay on the ride you can carry on with your life – as husband, father, dentist, brother, Jew, immigrant, non-immigrant, American, writer, fictional character and whatever else you happen to be.

Some though wont’ or can’t ignore the emptiness. And here’s what happens when you run into the emptiness in search of something – you run up against Roth’s Counterlife. For those of us who are self-destructive enough to have to explore what is there just because it’s there, the reward you get is a tangled mess of identities – what you are, what you’re trying to escape, your attempt at rewriting it or being rewritten by someone else and the totally alien one you’re trying to leap into – each one just as unsatisfying as the first, the one you would have had had you just stayed on the ride.

Yet we – the selfishly destructive curious ones – know there is something in the emptiness and the dissatisfaction. It may even be the dissatisfaction itself. It’s the universal constant. Anytime you try to define something by giving it an identity trouble bulges at the seams – whether that’s nationality, ethnicity, religion, or marital status. It is begging our pesky human need to rewrite things – and that’s where Counterlife gets so interesting and so clever – because all these bulging dissatisfactions are examined in parallel with the writer’s neurotic need to write and rewrite the narrative. The author who is trapped by his own fictions and the process of writing, the fictional characters trying to escape the author, the real characters trying to avoid being fictionalized. We are all of these things. 

Circular ruins

Gradually, in this way, she came into possession of what was already hers. 

I wasn’t sure what I was trying to convey. Maybe it was the ceaseless aroma of eucalypti in the gardens of a villa of infinite symmetry; maybe it was the humid garden saturated with time that forked, time that diverged, converged or ran parallel to each other, unawares, for centuries; maybe I was trying to capture the invisible persons of all times, busy in that saturated garden in their multiple forms. I know I wrote about someone who woke from sleep and wasn’t sure if she dreamt, while the day and night turned above her. She mistook dusk for dawn. I know I wrote about someone who had arrived with no past and no future in the ‘unanimous night’, dragging herself nauseous and bloodstained to the circular ruins.

I know there are no new metaphors –none that matters I mean – so I am only a mirror, reflecting back in a slightly different light what has been said already (and will be said again). We spend most of our time repeating things. That’s why it’s possible, for Borges in this quote to form time into a circle in a sentence – with no awkwardness at all in grammar or tense. That possibility was always there, in the language, in our psyche.

But inside that labyrinth, at its centre, what I really wanted to convey was the depression, the mourning that we are all engaged in, constantly, because of the selves that die every minute we are alive. You yearn most for the things that were once intimately yours, you crave and you search but you cannot come into possession of what was already yours; you cannot catch up with the selves you’ve already lost. They are always ahead of you, in a circle, in earth’s gravity, in orbit, falling away from your grasp. So you fall together continuously. You mourn because there is no way to change that fate, you cannot escape time’s progression.

Except in dreams. They discovered that the brain doesn’t just respond, it anticipates and it creates a world for our selves to inhabit before that world has had a chance to intrude. It is its own mirror. So in dreams you are reunited with your selves, the things that were already yours; big vivid dreams that take up the whole day – or even a whole lifetime. But then you wake up and have to actually live again. Wouldn’t you be exhausted? Wouldn’t you think, you had lived two lives? And which one makes a deeper impression? There is a part of me that can’t tell the difference.

Infinite sides to every story

Imagine you arrive at your destination late at night. Your destination, you thought, is a castle. But search as you might when you ’arrive’, you find no turrets, no towers, nothing that looks like a castle. No matter which path you take – and you take many, this way and that - you get neither closer nor further away. You begin to wonder and are disappointed by the thought that the ‘castle’ is just the loose collection of buildings you are in.

What would you do? How would you cope? What if the ‘castle’ is not a castle but your dreams and goals, and the journey to ‘arrive’, your assumption that the years are well spent, planning, doing and hopefully getting. You expect a beginning, middle and end, but it turns out: there is only a middle.

This is the disconcerting world Kafka creates in The Castle and his character K responds with an odd mix of emotions that do not obviously fit together. But that’s not the point. The point is that their meandering logic lead to an irrational defiance, a determination to see things through to the end, though he doesn’t even know what ‘things’ might refer to.

‘...they knew all about him at the Castle…they had weighed up the strengths and weaknesses and were ready to do battle with a smile. On the other hand… it showed that they underrated him... And if they thought they could keep him in a constant state of terror with this lofty acknowledgement… they were mistaken.’

It’s a hard book to read. The experience of reading it is like K’s fraught search. He finds nothing except that there are infinite sides to the story. Every character has a story to tell which sheds another, different light on the unfathomable situation.  He pulls off veil after veil from its opaque face, only to reveal a more and more complex picture, one that pushes meaningful understanding away into an explosion of details.

Some people get bogged down in elaborate interpretations. In the end though I don’t think it’s hard to unravel, it’s just hard to accept. Impossible in fact. The fragmentary world of The Castle where there is only a ‘middle’ is a lot more realistic than our insistence that things should make sense, that we should be able to understand and therefore have something to strive for, or hope for or search for. This means we prefer only to see one version of events out of an infinite sided circle and so, our grip on it is fragile - dangerously stretched by every other side that comes into view. We react to this threat with rage. We hold on.

The universal substitute

The door swung inward noiselessly, and I found myself being looked at by a young boy whom I judged to be about fifteen.

He rubbed his eye with a finger, as if he had just got up. He was cadaverously thin; he had no shirt on, and his ribs stuck out like that of an emaciated figure in a medieval woodcut.  The skin stretched over them was nearly colourless, not white but closer to the sallow tone of old linen. His feet were bare, he was only wearing a pair of old Khaki pants. The eyes, partly hidden by a rumpled mass of straight black hair that came down over the forehead, were obstinately melancholy, as if he was assuming the expression on purpose.   

*** 

He must have been equipped with a kind of science fiction extra sense, a third eye or antenna. Although his face was turned away so that he couldn’t see mine, he said in a soft dry voice, ‘I can tell you’re admiring my febrility. I know it’s appealing, I practice at it; every woman loves an invalid. I bring out the Florence Nightingale in them. But be careful.’ He was looking at me now, cunningly, sideways. ‘You might do something destructive: hunger is more basic than love. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal, you know.’ 

*** 

What is character? Maybe we know them only by the dent they make in our emotional landscape. Some are so odd in shape you are left wondering for years afterwards what difference did they make? What did they change? Like someone who came into your house when you weren’t around and rearranged, ever so subtly, the things on your shelves. You are compelled to go back and back over anything you can hold onto to find an answer, but like a seed that refuses to grow, the dent gives you no answers.

There is a character from a book I read years ago who won’t let me go. The character is an aimless graduate student called Duncan from The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood. Aimless, thin, unattractive, sly, manipulative and selfish, he was completely, smugly and self-consciously comfortable with not conforming to expectations. He was calculatedly deceptive and so he often pierced through to the truth. It’s not clear if he brings redemption or destruction – or just nothingness - as he (metaphorically) devours the heroine at the end.

I feel like I’ve received the occasional long distance phone call from a ‘Duncan’ over the years. I hear the ringing mostly when I’m asleep and have slept so long I can hardly wake up. I feel like I’ve met many ‘Duncans’ over the years, he keeps reappearing in different guises. Sometimes he even feels like a permanent fixture, there at the back of my mind, being his sly mocking self, making things uncomfortable, offering no answers. 

***

The long time she had been moving through…had been merely a period of waiting, drifting with the current, an endurance of time marked by no real event; waiting for an event in the future that had been determined by an event in the past; whereas when she was with Duncan she was caught in an eddy of present time: they had virtually no past and certainly no future… Duncan was irritatingly unconcerned about her marriage. He didn’t seem to care about what would happen to her after she passed out of the range of his perpetual present. She found it comforting, and she didn’t want to know why.

*** 

‘I don’t want you to think all this means anything. It never sort of does, for me. It’s all happening really, to somebody else.’ He kissed the end of her nose. ‘You’re just another substitute for the laundromat.’

Marian wondered if her feelings ought to be hurt, but decided that they weren’t: instead she was faintly relieved. ‘I wonder what you’re a substitute for, then,’ she said.

‘That’s the nice thing about me. I’m very flexible, I’m the universal substitute.’

*** 

He was talking in a monotone, sitting hunched forward, his elbows on his knees, his head drawn down into the neck of his dark sweater, like a turtle’s into its shell… He wasn’t even looking at me. He might have been talking to himself.  I leaned forward too, so I could see his face. In the blue-tinged fluorescent lighting of the laundromat, a light that seems to allow no tones and no shadows, his skin was even more unearthly. 

*** 

His mouth tasted like cigarettes. Apart from that taste, and an impression of thinness and dryness, as though the body I had my arms around and the face touching mine were really made of tissue paper or parchment stretched on a frame of wire coathangers, I can remember no sensation at all.

*** 

She wanted to stand for only one more minute with the snow sifting down here in this island, this calm open eye of silence…

‘Hello,’ a voice said.

Marian was hardly startled. She turned: there was a figure seated on the far end of a bench in the darker shadow of some evergreen trees. She walked towards it.

It was Duncan, sitting hunched over, a cigarette glowing between his fingers. He must have been there for some time. The snow had settled on his hair and the shoulders of his coat. His hand, when she removed her gloves to touch them, was cold and wet. 

*** 

His ringing jolts me from my sleep. But that's it. I wonder what he would say if I ever picked up the phone? I imagine it would be something like this: 'hello, sugar,' he'd say. 'It's me.'

Endings

Reading Li Yiyun is like dancing a slow two-step, cheek-to-cheek, only to be stabbed in the heart at the end.

On the evening of the day the children return, Granny Lin is asked to leave. Her things are packed and placed at the gate: a duffel bag, not heavy even for an old woman.

"The happiness of love is a shooting meteor; the pain of love is the darkness following." A girl is singing to herself in a clear voice as she walks past Granny Lin in the street. She tries to catch up with the girl; the girl moves too fast, and so does the song. Granny Lin puts the duffel bag on the ground and catches her breath. All the people in the street seem to know where their legs are taking them. She wonders when she stopped being one of them. 

What is there to say about modern China? After death and the birth of money, after the lights and dust refuse to settle, when frenetic energy and escape is exhausted, what is there left of us that is still human?

One moment later, he comes out and looks at Mrs Su with a sad and calm expression that makes her heart tremble. She lets go of the receiver with Mrs Fong's blabbering and walks to Beibei's bedroom.  

There she finds Beibei resting undisturbed, the signs of pain gone from her face, porcelain white with a bluish hue. Mrs Su kneels by the bed and holds Beibei's hand, still plump and soft, in her own. Her husband comes close and strokes her hair, grey and thin now, but his touch, gentle and timid, is the same one from a lifetime ago, when they were children playing in their grandparents' garden, where the pomegranate blossoms, fire-hued and in the shape of bells, kept the bees busy and happy. 

Can you feel you lived at least - and acted - even though through its entirety, you suspect, you were a blind mole doing the wrong things in the right context - or was it the right things in the wrong context?

But on second thought, I wish that Mrs Pang had lived long enough. I wish we would sit together and fold his clothes for the last time. I wish Mrs Pang would smile at me when she puts away Mr. Pang's clothes, and I would know that she is proud of him, earning his life between hills of envelopes at seventy-nine, being a useful man, defending himself, dying with dignity. 

- Death is not a bad joke if told the right way.

I don't eat, I don't sleep

I do nothing but think of you.

What's the difference between love and obsession?
And the difference between obsession and desire?
I don't know.

This is not clever, or bashful, or exuberant or playful. It doesn't hide too hard. It's just good writing:

The Nadir right at this moment, all lit up and steaming north, in the dark, at night, with a strong west wind pulling the moon backward through a skein of clouds-the Nadir a constellation, complexly aglow, angelically white, festive, imperial. Yes, this: it would look like a floating palace to any poor soul out here on the ocean at night, alone in a dinghy, or not even in a dinghy but simply and terribly floating, treading water, out of sight of land. - DFW

with sound punctuation.

Cleverness is endearing if it comes with bashfulness and exuberant playfulness

 (otherwise it's annoying). This may - or may not - be an example:

The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one. - David Foster Wallace. 

Anyway I like it. Or rather, I can't get rid of it. The pointlessness of the recurring words keep ringing in my head, banging around from one wall to the other like a bad echo. It is strangely similar to obsession. 

What we talk about when we talk about love

             L.D. put the shaving bag under his arm and picked up the suitcase.

             He said, “I just want to say one more thing.”

             But then he could not think what it could possibly be.

This is the ending Raymond Carver's editor forced on him, after cutting a romantic, lingering, uncertain five paragraphs off the end. One of which was this:

It came to him with a shock that he would remember this night and her like this. He was terrified to think that in the years ahead she might come to resemble a woman he couldn’t place, a mute figure in a long coat, standing in the middle of a lighted room with lowered eyes.

I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this ... except that I like the idea of radically cutting even vaguely good paragraphs. 

Or maybe it's this - I like the desolate feeling you get after too many Raymond Carver stories, like everything has been stripped of its meaning. Maybe that's liberation (at least for the writer).