Babel Tower (65 page)
Authors: A.S. Byatt
She wanted to be made much of the age, was a dead distance of silence between the immanence of her peace superseding knowledge, height or colour, but something was only the third, unrealized could he know himself what not as oneself, but said “Your nose is beautiful being in a new one, a new, sounded like lies, and she was the duality. How can I say “I,” he said, whispering with truth to be, and you have ceased to the real truth. It was transcended into a new oneness of having surpassed one because there is nothing to answer, old existence. How could travels between the separate new and unknown, not him, there is perfect silence of self at all. This I, this old letter.
In the new, superfine bliss she could not know there was no I and you, there to be adored. There were wonder, the wonder of existing between them. How could he tell summation of my being and of beauty, that was not form, or paradisal unit regained from the strange golden light. How love you, when I have ceased, her beauty lay in, for him. We are both caught up and your chin is adorable. But where everything is silent, disappointed, hurt. Even when all is perfect and at one. Speech “I love you, I love you,” it was parts. But in the perfect Oneself, of having transcended the bliss.
Which says more or less what it was originally saying, with more or less the same rhythm, as though all the breathings of all the words were interchangeable. The Forster, more tightly constructed, will not deconstruct until cut into considerably smaller segments, when a certain effective contrast of high and low, abstract and solid words begins to work.
Outwardly he was cheerful, could only point out the salvation, all had reverted to chaos and in the soul of every man. By an incomplete ascetic whole of her sermon, only connect husband or widower, he had always, and both will be exalted, passion is bad a belief that is at its highest. Live in fragments passionately. Religion had connect, and the beast and the monk were read aloud on Sunday, life to either, will die. No gift of her own she would only connect! That was the form of a “good talking.” The prose and the passion would be built and span their human love which she was never prepared to give. Only connect his obtuseness robbed of the isolation that there was no more to give. It need not take the souls quiet indications the bridge a white-hot hatred lives with beauty. One quality in Henry saints and love the Infinite, however much she reminded could be a little ashamed simply did not notice things she said. He never noticed bothers about my own inside, the sneaking belief that bodily desirable only when held respectable.
She pastes the three cut-ups, the solicitor’s letter, the adjuration to connect, the ode to Oneness, next to each other in the notebook.
She thinks: I am being unjust. I am not thinking clearly. I am accusing Forster and Lawrence of making me marry Nigel, out of some desire for Union of Opposites, of Only Connecting the Prose and the Passion. Whereas in fact, at least in part, I married him for exactly the opposite reason, because I wanted to keep things separate. I thought the sex was good, was satisfactory, which is better than good, and I think I thought that because he was rich, I wouldn’t have to be a
housewife like my mother. I thought all the other parts of myself could go on being what they were, and marrying Nigel would deal with negotiating sex, and with not being a housewife. I deserved what I got, whatever that was: it includes Leo, who is not a question of what I deserve, but of
his own life.
But the desire to Only Connect, the romantic bit, that was there
too,
we are a mixture of impulses. Here I go again, connecting to John Ottokar, disconnected from him.
She writes a word, underlining it, as a title.
Laminations.
She senses the shape of a possible form, a space where a form will be, that is not yet there to be apprehended.
Laminations.
Cut-ups are part of it. It is a form that is made partly by cutting up, breaking up, rearranging things that already exist. “All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read overheard.” These sentences of Burroughs’s sent a spiky thrill of recognition through her brain.
The point of words is that they have to have already been used, they have not to be new, they have to be only re-arrangements, in order to have meaning.
If you write “ragdon” or “persent” those are nothing, but write “dragon” and “serpent” and the thoughts and stories and fears and inventions and colours and stinks and softnesses and violence of human beings everywhere drag and float at the end of them like giant kites sailing from thin strings or monsters of the deep caught on fishermen’s lines. Where the cut-ups go wrong is in an over-valuation of the purely random, a too great reliance on the human capacity to insist on finding meaning in the trivial, the flotsam and jetsam of the brain’s tick and tock, messages on scraps of paper with one word on. Anything is a message if you are looking for a message. But the glare of an eye looking for a message anywhere and everywhere can be a mad glare, a pointless glare.
She writes down, slowly, under
Laminations
:
I found my own growing inclination, which I discovered was not mine alone, to look upon all life as a cultural product taking the form of mythic clichés, and to prefer quotations to independent invention. (Thomas Mann,
Die Entstehung des Dr. Faustus
)
Quotation is another form of cut-up; it gives a kind of papery vitality and independence to, precisely, cultural clichés cut free from the web of language that gives them precise meaning. The Mann quotation looks solemn and academic compared to the cut-ups, but it has more life in it. Or a different life. “Only connect” is a cliché, and so
is Lawrence’s Oneness; also they are ambiguous words of power. You could quote other things, Frederica thinks, as the beginning of the form of what will be
Laminations
goes in and out of focus in her mind’s eye. You could quote newspapers. Dostoevski made his novels from the clichés and the reported facts that are newspapers. In this context even the
faux-naïf
style of “I did the things you do in the bathroom” would be one cliché amongst the rustling others, and therefore admissible, contained, laminated. She thinks: I need a card index, not a notebook, I need to shuffle. You could quote your own life. Lawyer’s letters amongst lectures on Mann and Kafka. Raw material, worked motifs.
That week, she adds:
James told of how, when walking on a summer evening in the park alone, watching the couples make love, he suddenly began to feel a tremendous oneness with the whole world, with the skies and trees and flowers and grass—with the lovers too. He ran home in panic and immersed himself in his books. He told himself he had no right to this experience, but more than that, he was terrified at the threatened loss of identity involved in this merging and fusion of his self with the whole world. He knew of no half-way stage between radical isolation in self-absorption or complete absorption into all there was. He was afraid of being absorbed into Nature, engulfed by her, with irrevocable loss of his self; yet what he most dreaded, that also he most longed for. Mortal beauty, so Gerard Manley Hopkins said, is dangerous. If such individuals could take his advice to meet it, then let it alone, things would be easier. But it is just this which they cannot do. (R. D. Laing,
Divided Self,
p. 91)
To this she adds:
The god ascends the stage in the likeness of a striving and suffering individual. That he can
appear
at all with this clarity and precision is due to dream interpreter Apollo, who projects before the chorus its Dionysiac condition in this analogical figure. Yet in truth that hero is the suffering Dionysos of the mysteries. He of whom the wonderful myth relates that as a child he was dismembered by Titans now experiences in his own person the pains of individuation, and in this condition is worshipped as Zagreus. We have here
an indication that dismemberment—the truly Dionysiac suffering—was like a separation into air, water, earth and fire, and that individuation should be regarded as the source of all suffering, and rejected. (Nietzsche,
Birth of Tragedy,
p. 66)
And:
World declaration hot peace shower! Earth’s grass is
free! Cosmic poetry Visitation accidentally happening
carnally! Spontaneous planet-chant Carnival! Mental
Cosmonaut poet-epiphany, immaculate supranational
Poesy insemination!
Skullbody love-congress Annunciation,
duende concordium, effendi tovarisch illumination,
Now! Sigmatic New Departures Residu of Better
Books & Moving Times in obscenely New Directions!
Soul revolution City Lights Olympian lamb-blast!
Castalia centrum new consciousness hungry
generation Movement roundhouse 42 beat
apocalypse energy-triumph!
You are not alone!
Miraculous assumption! O Sacred Heart invisible
insurrection! Albion! awake! awake! awake! O
shameless bandwagon! Self-evident for real naked
come the Words! Global synthesis habitual for this
Eternity! Nobody’s Crazy Immortals Forever!
Esam, Fainlight, Ferlinghetti, Fernandez, Ginsberg,
Paolo Lionni, Daniel Richter, Trocchi, Simon Vinkendog,
Horovitz. Invocation to First International Poetry
Incarnation at Albert Hall.
And:
| Vladimir: | Rather they whisper. |
| Estragon: | They rustle. |
| V. | They murmur. |
| E. | They rustle. |
| Silence | |
| V. | What do they say? |
| E. | They talk about their lives. |
| V. | To have lived is not enough for them. |
| E. | They have to talk about it. |
| V. | To be dead is not enough for them. |
| E. | It is not sufficient. |
| Silence | |
| V. | They make a noise like feathers. |
| E. | Like leaves. |
| V. | Like ashes. |
| E. | Like leaves. |
(
Waiting for Godot,
p. 63)
And:
The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion.
As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible.
The crow wish’d every thing was black, the owl that every thing was white.
Exuberance is Beauty.
If the lion was advised by the fox, he would be cunning.
Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without Improvement are the roads of Genius.
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
Where man is not, nature is barren.
Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ’d.
Enough! or Too much.
(Blake,
Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
Plate 10)
It is like any student’s commonplace book. It rustles with uneasy energies. One night, on an impulse, Frederica adds an anecdote.
After the extra-mural class, in the pub, Humphrey Maggs told us the story of a friend of his whose mother died and left her nothing but debts and a bacon-slicer. She had had a shop which had gone bust, and all that was left was a bacon-slicer. She took it into the cold store
of the butcher’s shop, which was empty and about to be sold, and tried to slice her wrists with it. It was hard to get her wrists near the blade, and it was too cold in there for her to go on trying: she collapsed in there, in a mess of blood, “a welter of gore, you could say,” he said. The cold stopped the blood running and “they” found her and took her to hospital. They tied her up and stitched her up. She liked it there. She became a hospital orderly and after a bit trained as a nurse. She works in an operating theatre. She likes that. She feels needed. No, I don’t know what became of the bacon-slicer, he said when I asked him. I expect she sold it. I expect it’s slicing bacon somewhere, doing what it was designed for.
This story is interesting because of the words bacon-slicer, and for that matter the thing to which they refer, a whirring blade with a precise function which is not self-slaughter. It is a tale of congruities and incongruities, perhaps spoiled by this excrescent commentary which I may learn to omit.
Two days later, she adds another.
A woman is sitting in Vidal Sassoon’s salon, the Bond Street one. She is having her long hair, which she has always had, shorn into one of those smooth, swinging cuts, like blades in their precise edges and points. Two young men are working together on the nape of her neck. Her feet are surrounded by shanks and coils and wisps and tendrils of what until recently was her body. It sifts, it is soft, it pricks between her collar and her skin. One man leans over her and holds the two points of her new hair down, dragged down, to her jaw. He hurts her. If she tries to look up, he gives her a little push down again, which hurts her. The other works above the vertebrae of her naked nape with his pointed shears. She can hear the sound of hair on blade: a silky rasping. He nicks her skin with his points. He hurts her. She is almost sure that the small hurts are deliberately inflicted. Over her neck the two talk. “Look at that one then, look at her strut, she thinks she’s the
bee’s knees,
the
cat’s whiskers
and she’s a walking
disaster,
look at that clump he’s done at the back, like a great
bubo
all bulging and she can’t see it, she can’t see it jiggle and wiggle as she walks, she thinks she looks
delicious,
he told her so, he held the mirror at the right angle, so she couldn’t see what a godawful
mess
he had made, cutting higher and higher trying to make it better and now there’s nothing left to cut, only a gob on the back of
her
lumpy
head.” They laugh. The woman under their hands tries to look up and is jerked down. She thinks, I will always remember this, but doesn’t know why; there are many humiliations, many disasters, why will she always remember this one? They let her head up. She sees her face through tears. The line is like a knife along her jaw. They tell her she looks lovely. All the women in the room have the same cut and all look lovely in the same way, except those who don’t. When she moves her head, the curtain of her hair swings and re-forms into its perfect edge. Her neck is naked. She gives the two a tip, though she would like not to. Her hair looks good. Does she?
