The cowardly temptation of rereading

As it has been well over a year since I last posted here, it's probably not surprising that I feel the weight of it immediately at my neck as I dare, now, to write in this place again. And yet it's not as if I haven't been typing onto my computer screen the whole time -- typing material that fails to end up here. But let's break the imagery into bits: I'm not exactly typing onto this tilted white slab even now, because in the same moment that rigid little banners of words are shifting themselves into parallel rows as I drum on the plastic squares below them, I can also sort-of believe that somebody else, really, is stitching them into place... how easy it is to trick the self out of its fears through this sense that somebody else is furtling around in the glazed box of the internet instead.

Meanwhile, outside that box, I have succumbed to the comfort and (I should admit) cowardly temptation of rereading -- and so have come across what I might have been looking for all along: the section in which the narrator, in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, describes the exact same "torpor" of the mind I have been fighting with -- a torpor that the narrator's acquaintance (can we ever call them friends?) had fallen into when, after years of following minutely obsessive paths, his inner and then outer voice sank into an airlessness and then stopped being able to stir. I've often thought of Sebald as the champion of such voiceless voices: of the kinds of voices that disintegrate into the brown-edged pages of the books that survive him -- and (further) into the grains of the images he sets among the overly spaced out lines of his prose and which look, especially now, so entirely appropriate to my no-longer-so-crisp, early millennial editions of his works that have dust furring their upper edges (which is an only apparently sad predicament for them since, as the character Max Ferber tells the narrator of The Emigrants, a soft enveloping in dust is something utterly desirable for inner things -- and how I would love to believe him!).

And yet what of Sebald himself? What of the writer-narrator, who wraps the outer casing of the telescope -- or, for him, the more furtive periscope -- of his writing around the infinitely receding periscoping of multiple voicings? James R. Martin has reminded us of the other Sebald-writer-narrator -- the one who, in his early academic work on the fatal connection between the bourgeois framing of the assimilation of the Jews during the Enlightenment and the genocide of the Holocaust, used to be criticised for his crudely combative polemic. All of which makes me want to ask: is it this irascible figure's exhausted and, usually, pain-ridden ghost whose cuffs I've been trying to catch onto each time it slides out of the rooms of the later prose works? The narrative persists in pulling us away from this figure (no -- not there -- over here it keeps saying), and yet, in the course of my rereading, I've found myself all the more fascinated by the mostly unnarrated chasm that seems to be propelling this figure around and in past the edges of its subjects. In fact, I have been wondering whether it is just the bakelite-era translucence of the narrator-voice -- its readiness to receive and imprint onwards whatever shadow it receives -- that succeeds in turning the dense not-to-be-spoken-about nothingness of its individual pain into that characteristic but deceptive glow of empathic distraction.

Ad infinitum

It has taken me until now to realise that all the objects that we imagine ourselves to be surrounded by in Ulvi Haagensen's latest solo exhibition, Ad infinitum, at Defiance Gallery -- each apparent tea towel tucked onto its apparent hook -- the spectral clothesline perfectly, wantonly pegged (how I cram my own line!) -- a bobbing poppy field of vacuum cleaners -- a propped mop, stilled aprons -- that all of these conjured objects are themselves so alluring, so magical to me, precisely because the 'unimportant work', as Haagensen calls it, is the very work that I find most troubling of all -- this work whose restful, simple and rarely celebrated monotony and value has never had any simplicity for me whatsoever: I have to suspect that I have never felt it to be monotonous enough, so difficult I still find it -- never having experienced this work as restful or allowed it to be valuable, despite my conviction that without this very same netting of everyday tasks that I (mostly with the help of others) sort-of fashion, I'd be holing up in a doorway somewhere on King Street now, stiff and stinking in a cardboard box.

Men, perhaps, are more prone to this difficulty. In the meantime I hanker for wall after wall of nothing at all (except for a single drawn wire of one of Haagensen's tea towels). In her last showing, she drew -- what was it? soap? -- onto the floor only to clear the whole of it away; in another, strings of white washing multiplied itself into a fine, grey density on walls that were finally washed clean. Ah bliss.

Her work: perhaps the opposite -- or rather the epitome, the end-work? -- of not writing.

She writes:

I am interested in 'unimportant work' and professions, whether as unpaid in the home or outside. Cleaning and housework is generally an invisible 'art' that is only noticed when it hasn't been done. Why do we do these jobs day after day -- for love, money, a sense of duty or because it is expected of us? Or do we do them to appease, as a form of atonement or out of a sense of guilt.

How does it affect us to do a task repeatedly?