Author: mathelinda

The colour range, which probably would be casually described as ‘bright’, is actually more towards muted than bright. In a design or craft context it would be referred to as ‘sub-brights’. Matthew Collings, ‘No Narrative’

My idea of a muted colour is of a colour that has had its intensity covered over by a grey veil. Or to use a more modern image, by a filter to give it, say, a sepia tint. Referring to muted colours as ‘sub-brights’ seems to completely reverse this idea: rather than being a covering, muteness stretches itself out like a subterranean stratum beneath the casual luminosity of colours. Where it breaks through, the colour becomes sub-bright.

Reading bright colours as a metaphor for lingusitic expression may be one way of understanding the muteness that is the ground of all language. As we chatter along, we let the said cover over the unsaid, which nonetheless remains there beneath our words. Sometimes it breaks through; a rugged rock tearing into the casual luminosity of speech.

The infinity of the unwritten page. Bounded only by its edges. In this different from the blank page: the blank is a something that fills the page to the brim. The task of writing on a blank page is a call of war against the blankness. Each word, successfully written down, a minor victory in this campaign.

The unwritten, on the other hand, is a page no longer blank but a page prepared for writing. Much like a field ploughed in preparation for seeds to be planted into it. It is not a space of resistance, but of expectation.

It expects anything.

The anything is a promise of expression, pressed out of the damp earth like sprouts in the still watery sunlight of spring. The fear is that your words will have rotted while lying in wait for the sun.

The only redeemable feature of my ugly handwriting is that it is illegible. A secret code that only I can read (and sometimes so secret that not even I can read it). What consternation, then, to be presented with a “Secret Agent Pen” that writes in invisible ink. The task was to write down responses to feedback that I do not wish to be read. Writing without leaving a trace and therefore honestly. But this is a ploy for children and the ink is not really invisible. It becomes visible in the light of the small torch that comes attached to the pen. And even the most illegible hand can be deciphered with the right amount of patience. Just as James Joyce could pride himself on writing two sentences in a day, so I can take pride in fishing two lines out of a tangle of cancellations even if it takes me all week.

To be possessed by a book by no means means to have possession of it. Not only because one may be possessed by books one doesn’t own (library books, borrowed books, illicitly downloaded pdfs), nor even because the books one buys one tends to not read, and the books one has read tend to end up in a charity shop, but because the books that settle in you (and therefore unsettle you) are ones that cannot be possessed. Ones that escape the greedy clasp of your understanding them.

The best way to write something significant is to focus the mind on anything but that which you should be writing. Somewhere in the periphery, the thoughts will be chasing words until suddenly, like a cat with a mouse, they will drag the sentences to your attention. Still warm with the glow of inspiration.

How obvious and yet mysterious that when I say “I”, I mean me,

but when you say “I” you mean what I mean by “you”,

and yet we both mean us when we say “we”.

When Wordsworth asserted that his poetry is an experiment in writing “the real language of men” he probably did not have women in mind. 

But I wonder whether he did think about the language in which men (and women) recite poetry. The deepened voice, the earnest tone, the profound mien. In short, the trappings of seriousness that, at least nowadays, lend a poetry recital the air of a rundown circus: the poet a clown who’s lost hold of the power to amuse. 

Literature exists only when it discovers beneath apparent persons the power of an impersonal – which is not a generality, but a singularity at the highest point

Hélène Frichot, ‘Instructions for Literature and Life’

The same thought put differently:

The words I, you, they, are not signs of any actual difference subsisting between the assemblages of thoughts thus indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind

Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘On Life’

If literature is our power to mingle in the I (I write it “I”, you read “I”, we both understand that this “I” is a narrative subject position that does not amount to ourselves), then why do we insist on its relation to life?

If I put this thought differently:

Two writers, separated by two hundred years of history, appear to suggest that the markers of personhood (I, you, they) will at the highest point of singularity dissolve into an impersonal one mind – a highly singular mind which may even be defined as one in which the I that is me is no different from the I that is you, or them. This is the mindset of literature (we read “I” in a literary text and we know that this “I” does not denote me or you). But because we are no longer ourselves in this “I” what right do we have to assume that it has anything to do with our lives? Is it not equally possible that literature is the point at which the impersonal is so modified as to eradicate any trace of my self in my writing, my reading of the word “I”?

It is a robbery of the highest order.

Not because we discover that what we think has already been thought, but because we discover that it was not even us thinking it.

(Suggested by J. Hillis Miller’s Ariadne’s Thread)

The black line that threads itself into a character is an act of resistance against the whiteness of the page. Characters turn into words and the words in their turn tread into line to resist its silence. Metrics are footsteps, and the white page a dancefloor.

I woke up and realised that I had just dreamt that I woke up and realised that someone had burgled my home whilst I was asleep. All my possessions in disorder with the valuables gone. Except that the burglar had not found my true valuables, which I – just then – could not locate either. And yet somehow I woke up rested, assured, that those valuables were still there.

Walter Benjamin suggests that ‘only from the other shore, from bright day, may dream be addressed from the superior position of recall.’ But maybe it is not the bright day, but the thickening of dusk that brings the dream into the purview of recall. One night calls to its predecessor, and the day in between is revealed as what it truly is: a leftover of the night.