Impossibility of Knowing

A friend told the author that for years she had observed a particular couple in a cafe every day.  Then one day, the couple stopped coming, and as it turned out the man had been killed.   The story became the seed of a novel  titled  "Los enamoramientos" which has been translated as "the Infatuations". The author Javier Marias, the narrator, for the first time in Marias' novels a woman, the themes, those occupying Marias in all his novels, love, death, loyalty and betrayal, impossibility of knowing, as he says in an interview
"the impossibility of knowing things, or people, or yourself, for sure."

I have read all of Marias' recent novels translated into English, and have just ordered A Man of Feeling, which he says is the first work where he developed his digressive style, and I must say that I have not yet read a more fascinating writer of such power, who gets to the core of things, and whose prose hits so very close to home as to become disturbing, sometimes forcing me to step back in the middle of a novel to take a breath and distract myself with some other author's writing, as happened a month or so ago, and again last night when I returned to the third volume of his masterpiece Your Face Tomorrow.


But let's stay with the main theme, which Marias says in an interview published on Youtube, has been a theme of all literature, the impossibility of knowing.   I know.  As I return in memory to things that happened to me in recent times and a long time ago, things like stumbles and failures, but also successes, I cannot honestly say why and how they came to be, I cannot to begin guessing the motivations and reasons of other people involved, and this can be particularly painful when one thinks of the defeats that somehow came my way all too often, or so I tend to think.  No, the truth is that I have been guessing at the others' motivations and I haven't reached any conclusions, just questions that I cannot ask of anyone, theories based on thin evidence, conjectures and fantasies. And why I behaved one way or another might have been clear to me at the time, but was it right, or should I have done something different, and if I had would the result have been different?

Words Forgotten

In the first volume,  Fear and Spear, of the three-volume novel Your Face Tomorrow (page 85), a retired Oxford don Peter Wheeler experiences a sudden blockage and cannot find the word for the object he's asking the narrator to bring him.  It's not an age thing, we learn, just a momentary slip, something that happens to all of us, he calls it "momentary aphasia" and it happens to him with "the most stupid words", he says.   The word in question was "cushion".

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a friend and he was telling me how up until the 1950s , 1960s Americans had a common culture, references they all shared, agreed upon and understood.  This is no longer the case, we both agreed, and to describe it I sought a word that just wouldn't come eluding me completely.  I used some poor substitute, which I no longer remember, and then, an hour later, the topic long past, we were parting,  by a stroke of luck I somehow managed to avoid the familiar l'esprit d'escalier  experience by remembering the verb "to disperse". Yes, the culture became dispersed, I said.  But no, I later realized that a better word would have been "fragmented", and still not the word I needed.  I searched the Thesaurus and found nothing better.

Until three days ago, when I was reading Decoded by Mai Jia, where I found my word.  The following day, I tried to recall  the sentence in which it appeared, and I searched the book backwards 5 pages from where I had stopped, reading it forward, then 10 pages, again reading forward, then 15 and 20, until frustrated I gave up to return to my bookmark, when I found it one page back (202), where an epigraph from some book (non-existent) that the main character had bought is quoted saying (while describing  genius):

Like any other treasure in the world, they are delicate, fragile as a newly planted bud; once hit they crack; once cracked they fracture. 

Places, events, people

Yesterday, I learned that a place I last visited a decade ago, had dramatically changed.  It didn't wait for me, it didn't ask my opinion or permission, it just changed.

Somehow, places don't wait for us, don't long to see us, don't miss us.   You can hug and kiss the Eiffel Tower, but the Eiffel Tower won't hug and kiss you back because the Eiffel Tower doesn't know you and  doesn't care. People like to leave their palm or foot  prints on the freshly poured cement sidewalks to mark forever (they hope) their passing presence there, or they walk the paths that famous men walked years or centuries before them to feel what it was like, and still the places don't care.  Over the years, I watched a man living two streets over from me become old and die, his descendants then selling his house, and the neighbourhood forgetting he ever existed.  I may be now or soon will be the last person here remembering him.

A jazz festival is taking place in Bremen, Germany this weekend, Jazzahead it is called in English, and if you were there, come Sunday evening you'd have to pack up your things and head for home.  And if you weren't there, the festival would have gone on without you just the same, and would not miss your presence.   When I traveled to professional conferences, 3, 5 days in far away cities, I usually stayed at the conference venue until the last hour, attending the last sessions, after most of the participants had already departed for the airport, while I didn't want the conference to ever end.

If you've lived long enough in a metropolitan area somewhere on the planet, you might have acquired friends and acquaintances all over the world.  Presumably, they would be happy to see you where they live now, to buy you a drink, to show you around, and to tolerate your presence for a day or two. That's all fine, but you need someone to tolerate your presence all day every day.

Deep

It's an old story of a young man putting down a book he has finished reading, saying to himself "I can write better than that", proceeding to write, and eventually becoming a published writer world famous.  Many artists in all disciplines of art have gone to glory the same way.  That said, this is not the path you would follow if all you considered was the highest art, Rembrandt, Artur Rubinstein or Proust.  Seeing, hearing, reading the works of the masters can sometimes only discourage one from proceeding.  One can never measure up. No, I couldn't do better than that.  A different motivation must be found.

It isn't very difficult to create or  fake meaning in film and in photography.  Do you remember the shots of fog, rain, long shadows, vast empty prairies, and then the dramatic musical score, and how they all affected your emotions in a dark cinema? Filmmaking is a collaborative art, and the film director works with partners, script writers, directors of photography, composers, to assist him in creating moving pictures that carry or suggest some meaning.  But other than what was said in the dialogues, what was the meaning, what did the film tell us if anything?

I've been aware of these tricks and techniques for a long time, and perhaps it was  this knowledge that steered me  into photography and filmmaking.  But when in my wanderings I see interesting scenes and in a matter of seconds or sometimes minutes I press  the shutter of my still camera, and later edit the photos in a computer program the same way as I would correct them in a darkroom, no more than that, no Photoshop tricks, I don't know, I can't tell what if anything they convey and mean. Let the viewer decide.  What do the Richard Avedon portraits mean?  Or the million dollar Andreas Gursky photographs?  Is photography then a viewer's medium? The photographer suggests (or perhaps fakes), and the viewer makes up the meaning?

Since this is written word, let's return to it.  I have ideas for several short stories, and doubts about writing them down as I read in my spare time not the penny dreadfuls, not the airport bookstore literature, not Harry Potter, but top shelf literary works by acclaimed writers, writer's writers and other masters.  No, I couldn't do better than any of them, I'm thinking, as I struggle with my ideas searching for deeper meaning in them, and falling short unable to reach the profound insights and depth that these writers I read can so casually toss about.

Taking Care

Future Islands is a rock trio which suddenly shot up to the top after a recent appearance on David Letterman's television show (Youtube has it. It must be seen!)  Subsequently, the Google Play service filmed a promotional clip featuring the members of the band staring directly into the camera and answering questions about themselves .   They come out unpretentious and quite normal.

At one point, the lead singer Samuel Herring, asked what he misses, mentions his (presumably deceased) dog and says "She took care of me."  Hearing it, I though that only an artist could say such a thing.   She took care of me.  And only a pedant or a cynic would dismiss it, or demand an explanation.

In taking care of others, especially those unable to take care of themselves, like children or domestic animals, we let them take care of ourselves.  And only when we no longer have anyone to take care of, we must be literally and not metaphorically taken care of.

At one time I took care of her expecting nothing in return, but she betrayed me, went away and I never saw her again. I did in the end receive nothing. Perhaps  instead of expecting nothing I should have demanded everything.

The Translation

You can't complain that the world has forgotten you, when you yourself have forgotten the world.  My mobile phone, an antique model commonly called a flip phone, as opposed to the modern miracle preferred by the masses, a smartphone,  on the rare days when its battery is charged, seldom if ever rings, making powering it off unnecessary when visiting doctor's offices or cinemas.  The land line telephone, which connects to my house never touching land, at least not in its last half mile, rings every hour, voices offering me a new house roof, home improvement loans, presumably to finance the new roof, hearing aids (if I needed a hearing aid, would I be able to hear the hearing aid salesman's voice?), and other items I should not be able or allowed to live without.

Then, just yesterday afternoon, the land line telephone rang, I picked it up, and a female voice said: "Hullo Lucas, this is your aunt Cecilia from Sydney!  How are you?", the voice sounding as if we had last spoken a few days earlier, when in actuality, we had spoken some twenty years ago, and then about trivial matters over a bad connection.  I decided to use my best Rodney Dangerfield line in response, and said, "I'm fine now, Aunt Cecilia, but the last couple of weeks have been rough!"

"Oh, I'm sorry to heard that," said she, "Spring fever?"

"No, you must remember that it is fall in our hemisphere now."

Silence. Laughter.

"Your late mother told me you were a comedian."

"More like a clown without a circus. So, what's up, or shall I say, down in your upside down world?"

"It's you who's upside down, my dear," said Aunt Cecilia.

I hoped that next she'd tell me "I'm dying and decided to leave my interest in the diamond mines to you." I've never met aunt Cecilia, who's only a few years older than me, and whose exact relationship I'm not sure of, although it's been explained to me several times, remembering only that she's not my mother's sister like a regular aunt would be.   We're related, that's enough. She had married an Australian millionaire and moved there decades ago.

"I've got a favour to ask," she said, and I could swear I heard the British spelling of the word "favour" with the letter 'u'.

"Your wish is my command," I said, the diamond mine fortune still in the back of my mind.

"I have here an article you wrote in a Spanish film magazine, and I'd like to translate it and publish it here.  Do you have the English original handy?"

She told me the title.

"That one?  Oh, I wrote it in Spanish years ago," I lied.

"You speak Spanish?  I didn't know," she said.

"I was joking.  I'll have to look for it through my papers."

So aunt Cecilia was doing Spanish translations in her spare time now.  Certainly not to support herself, I figured.  The article in question was about a Russian film pioneer whose grandson I happened to meet and interview in New York.  When writing about historical figures you must strive to find an original angle, an impossible task when everything has already been said, or preferably a source which adds new information to what is already known about this figure, if you want somebody to publish the piece.  I got lucky that time.  How it ever got published in Spain, I don't remember.

"What exactly do you have in mind, if I may ask?" I said.

"Well, since you have the original English version, it would save me time and effort to use it as my translation.  If you don't object.  You'll get paid anyway"

I didn't object, and I started searching for a copy of the old article.

Fiction

I met a well dressed man today.  "Do you remember me?" he asked.  Although I recognized him at once after many years, I replied, "I don't know any prematurely balding men!"  He then said his name, which I had actually forgotten. It sounded Russian, ending in "itch", or perhaps "ish", but he pronounced it with an accent I thought sounded German.  "Ah, yes", I said, "You are the one who ordered his sister to break up with me."

People think that other people's wounds are mere scratches which heal quickly leaving no scars. The only cuts which don't leave scars are those made by a skilled surgeon, a specialist who hadn't seen you before, won't see you again, and presumably has no personal feelings about you one way or another. I've had such cuts. The man I met should have known about the nature of surgical cuts since his and his sister's father was a heart surgeon.