Bento's Sketchbook Page 5
In following a story, we follow a storyteller, or, more precisely, we follow the trajectory of a storyteller’s attention, what it notices and what it ignores, what it lingers on, what it repeats, what it considers irrelevant, what it hurries towards, what it circles, what it brings together. It’s like following a dance, not with our feet and bodies, but with our observation and our expectations and our memories of lived life.
Throughout the story we become accustomed to the story-teller’s particular procedure of bestowing attention, and of then making a certain sense of what was at first glance chaotic. We begin to acquire his storytelling habits.
And if the story has impressed us, something of these habits, something of its way of giving attention, will remain with us and become our own. We will then apply it to the chaos of ongoing life, in which multitudes of stories are hidden.
This ‘inheritance’ is what I mean by a story’s outcome. Every storyteller has her or his own procedure. No two are alike.
Yet, if we imagine the stories being told across the world tonight and consider their outcome, I believe we’ll find two main categories: those whose narratives are emphasising something essential that is hidden, and those which emphasise the revealed.
To comment on the two categories of storytelling we need to look at other world events.
A hand-knitted baby’s jacket laid out on the kitchen table when we came back to the house after a visit elsewhere. The front door was not locked. Clearly it was a present for our grandson, who is three months old. There was no indication about who had knitted it and left it as a present on the kitchen table.
For me it epitomised warmth. Warmth of two kinds. The warmth which such thick wool, when worn, proffers the baby. (Last night it was -15ºC outside.) And the sentimental warmth which inspires the neighbourly tradition of knitting for the newly born.
Next day an e-mail announced that the knitted jacket was a present from M-T., who lives 300 metres away and is herself a grandmother.
There’s a Greek statue from 500 BC which shows a kore (a young woman) with plaited hair, a bracelet and a crown, and she is wearing a knitted woollen sweater (carved in marble!) whose cable stitch is similar to that used by M-T.
I first met her thirty-five years ago when she was a young woman. It was in one of her father’s fields where several of us were haymaking. He had a large moustache and intense eyes. The hay cart was drawn by a mare – there was no tractor and no mechanisation of any kind. Six or seven of us loaded the cart with wooden hay forks and used them again to arrange the hay in the stifling barn. After four carts we’d sit in the kitchen to drink coffee and cider before unloading the last cart in the barn.
Today M-T. is a computer fan – hence the explanatory e-mail. She adores downloading and dispatching. I walked across the village to thank her for the knitted baby jacket. It was dusk and I could see a light on through her kitchen window.
The human capacity for cruelty is limitless. Maybe capacity is not the right word, for it suggests an active energy, and, in this case, such energy is not limitless. Human indifference to cruelty is limitless. So also are the struggles against such indifference.
All tyrannies involve institutionalised cruelties. To compare one tyranny with another in this respect is pointless, because, after a certain point, all pains are incomparable.
Tyrannies are not only cruel in themselves, they also exemplify cruelty and thus encourage a capacity for it, and an indifference in the face of it, amongst the tyrannised.
In his searing, unforgettable book, written in the late 1950s, Vasily Grossman tells the story of a man who after thirty years in the Gulag is ‘rehabilitated.’
He visited the Hermitage – to find that it left him cold and bored. How could all those paintings have remained as beautiful as ever while he was being transformed into an old man, an old man from the camps? Why had they not changed? Why had the faces of the marvellous Madonnas not aged? How come their eyes had not been blinded by tears? Maybe their immutability – their eternity – was not a strength but a weakness? Perhaps this was how art betrays the human beings that have engendered it?
(V. Grossman, Everything Flows, NYRB, p. 52)
What is distinct about today’s global tyranny is that it’s faceless. There’s no Führer, no Stalin, no Cortés. Its workings vary according to each continent and its modes are modified by local history, but its overall pattern is the same, a circular pattern.
The division between the poor and the relatively rich becomes an abyss. Traditional restraints and recommendations are shattered. Consumerism consumes all questioning. The past becomes obsolete. Consequently people lose their selfhood, their sense of identity, and they then locate and find an enemy in order to define themselves. The enemy – whatever their ethnic or religious nomination – is always found amongst the poor. This is where the circular pattern is vicious.
The system economically produces, alongside wealth, more and more poverty, more and more homeless families, whilst simultaneously it politically promotes ideologies which articulate and justify the exclusion and eventual elimination of the hordes of new poor.
It is this new politico-economic circle which today encourages the constant human capacity for cruelties that obliterate the human imagination.
‘Last night a friend from Vadodara called. Weeping. It took her fifteen minutes to tell me what the matter was. It wasn’t very complicated. Only that a friend of hers, Sayeeda, had been caught by a mob. Only that her stomach had been ripped open and stuffed with burning rags. Only that after she died, someone carved “OM” on her forehead.’ (OM is a sacred signature of the Hindus.)
There are Arundhati Roy’s words. She is describing the massacre of a thousand Muslims by Hindu fanatics in the Indian state of Gujarat in the spring of 2002.
‘We write’, she once confessed, ‘on yawning gaps in the walls that once had windows. And people who still have windows sometimes cannot understand.’
Go into a field, observe, investigate, report, rewrite, write a final version, it’s published, it’s widely read – though one never really knows what is wide and what is thin – become a controversial writer, frequently threatened, also supported, writing about the fate of millions of people, women, men, children, get accused of contempt, go on writing, go on unravelling other projects of the powerful which are leading to more immense and avoidable tragedies, make notes, cross and re-cross the continent, bear witness to the evident desperation, continue to be published and argued with again and again, month after month, and the months add up to years. I’m thinking of you, Arundhati. Yet what one is warning and protesting against continues unchecked and remorselessly. Continues irresistibly. Continues as if in a permissive, unbroken silence. Continues as if nobody had written a single word. So one asks oneself: Do words count? And there must sometimes come back a reply something like this: Words here are like stones put into the pockets of roped prisoners before they are thrown into a river.
Let’s analyze it: every profound political protest is an appeal to a justice that is absent, and is accompanied by a hope that in the future this justice will be established; this hope, however, is not the first reason for the protest being made. One protests because not to protest would be too humiliating, too diminishing, too deadly. One protests (by building a barricade, taking up arms, going on a hunger strike, linking arms, shouting, writing) in order to save the present moment, whatever the future holds.
To protest is to refuse being reduced to a zero and to an enforced silence. Therefore, at the very moment a protest is made, if it is made, there is a small victory. The moment, although passing like every moment, acquires a certain indelibility. It passes, yet it has been printed out. A protest is not principally a sacrifice made for some alternative, more just future; it is an inconsequential redemption of the present. The problem is how to live time and again with the adjective inconsequential.
‘The question here, really,’ replies Arundhati, ‘is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit? Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be?’
How to live with the adjective inconsequential? The adjective is temporal. Perhaps a possible and adequate response is spatial? To go closer and closer to what is being redeemed from the present within the hearts of those who refuse the present’s logic. A story-teller can sometimes do this.
The refusal of the protesters then becomes the feral cry, the rage, the humour, the illumination of the women, men and children in a story. Narrative is another way of making a moment indelible, for stories when heard stop the unilinear flow of time and render the adjective inconsequential meaningless.
Osip Mandelstam, before he was killed by the Gulag, said this precisely: ‘For Dante time is the content of history felt as a single synchronic act. And inversely the purpose of history is to keep time together so that all are brothers and companions in the same quest and conquest of time.’
Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. I looked on the shelves over there and couldn’t find it – is it perhaps in another section? Russian Literature or something?
The librarian consulted a computer. We both waited. The wait was friendly, full of the special time that wanders in municipal libraries, like a solitary walker between trees in a wood.
She lifts her head and says: We have two copies and I’m afraid they’re both out. You want to reserve one?
I’ll come back another day.
She nods and turns to attend to an elderly woman – younger than me – who is holding three books in one hand. People hold books in a special way – like they hold nothing else. They hold them not like inanimate things but like ones that have gone to sleep. Children often carry toys in the same manner.
The public library is in a Paris suburb which has a population of around 60,000. About 4,000 people are members of the library and have tickets for borrowing books (four at a time). Others come to read the papers and journals or consult the reference shelves. If one takes into account the number of babies and young kids in the suburb, this means that about one person in ten has a ticket and sometimes takes home books to read.
I wonder who’s reading The Brothers Karamazov here today. Do the two of them know each other? Unlikely. Are they both reading the book for the first time? Or has one of them read it and, like myself, wants to reread it?
Then I find myself asking an odd question: if either of those readers and myself passed one another – in the suburban market on Sunday, coming out of the metro, on a pedestrian crossing, buying bread – might we perhaps exchange glances that we’d both find slightly puzzling? Might we, without recognising it, recognise one another?
When we are impressed and moved by a story, it engenders something that becomes, or may become, an essential part of us, and this part, whether it be small or extensive, is, as it were, the story’s descendant or offspring.
What I’m trying to define is more idiosyncratic and personal than a mere cultural inheritance; it is as if the bloodstream of the read story joins the bloodstream of one’s life story. It contributes to our becoming what we become and will continue to become.
Without any of the complications and conflicts of family ties, these stories that shape us are our coincidental, as distinct from biological, ancestors.
Somebody in this Paris suburb, perhaps sitting tonight in a chair and reading The Brothers Karamazov, may already, in this sense, be a distant, distant cousin.
There are two categories of storytelling. Those that treat of the invisible and the hidden, and those that expose and offer the revealed. What I call – in my own special and physical sense of the terms – the introverted category and the extroverted one. Which of the two is likely to be more adapted to, more trenchant about what is happening in the world today? I believe the first.
Because its stories remain unfinished. Because they involve sharing. Because in their telling a body refers as much to a body of people as to an individual. Because for them mystery is not something to be solved but to be carried. Because, although they may deal with sudden violence or loss or anger, they are long-sighted. And, above all, because their protagonists are not performers but survivors.
If we return to Anton’s challenge, what does this mean? It does not offer a recipe. What it offers is a certain kind of lens for observing the stories asking to be told.
Living, as distinct from literary, speech is continually interrupted, and there is never a single thread. Observe and listen to the chorus of actions undertaken together. Common actions which are as unforeseeable as conflicts.
Laughter is not a reaction but a contribution. What can happen in twenty-four hours may outlast a century.
Motives when shared are clearer than talk. Silence can be like a hand extended. (Or, of course, under different circumstances, like a hand cut off.) The talkative poor are surrounded by silence and such silence often protects; the talkative rich are surrounded by unanswered questions.
There are two forms of continuity: the acknowledged one of institutions and the unacknowledged one of clandestinity.
Accept the unknown. There are no secondary characters. Each one is silhouetted against the sky. All have the same stature. Within a given story some simply occupy more space.
Write by hand with a knuckle bleeding. Like this blood underlines some of the words.
Every story is about an achievement, otherwise there’s no story. The poor use every kind of ruse but no disguise. The rich are usually disguised until they die. One of their most common disguises is Success. There is often nothing to show for achievement except a shared look of recognition.
The heartfelt hopes, once exemplified in triumphant Holly-wood stories, have now become obsolete and belong to another epoch. Hope today is a contraband passed from hand to hand and from story to story.
Finally, by perfection in general I shall understand, as I said, reality, that is, the essence of anything, in so far as it exists and operates in a certain manner, without any consideration of duration. For no particular thing can be said to be more perfect because it has remained in existence longer: the duration of things cannot be determined by their essence, since the essence of things does not involve a certain and determinate time of existing; but everything, whether it be more or less perfect, will always be able to persist in existing with the same force with which it began to exist, so that in this all things are equal.
(Ethics, Part IV, Preface)
As long as the human body is affected in a way which involves the nature of any external body, so long the human mind regards the same body as present; and consequently as long as the human mind regards any external body as present, that is as long as it imagines, so long the human mind is affected in a way which involves the nature of the external body…
(Ethics, Part III, Proposition XII)
The Prado in Madrid is unique as a meeting place. The galleries are like streets, crowded with the living (the visitors) and the dead (the painted).
But the dead have not departed; the ‘present’ in which they were painted, the present invented by their painters, is as vivid and inhabited as the lived present of the moment. Occasionally more vivid. The inhabitants of those painted moments mingle with the evening’s visitors and together, the dead and the living, they transform the galleries into a Rambla.
I go in the evening to find the portraits of the buffoons painted by Velázquez. They have a secret which it has taken me years to fathom and which maybe still escapes me. Velázquez painted these men with the same technique and the same sceptical but uncritical eye as he painted the Infantas, the Kings, courtiers, serving maids, cooks, ambassadors. Yet between him and the buffoons there was something different, something conspiratorial. And their discreet, unspoken conspiracy concerned, I believe, appearances – that’s to say, in this context, what people look like. Neither they nor he were the dupes or slaves of appearances; instead they played with them – Velázquez as a master-conjuror, they as jesters.
Of the seven court jesters whom Velázquez painted close-up portraits of, three were dwarfs, one was boss-eyed, and two were rigged out in absurd costumes. Only one looked relatively normal – Pablo from Valladolid.
Their job was to distract from time to time the Royal Court and those who carried the burden of ruling. For this the buffoons of course developed and used the talents of clowns. Yet the abnormalities of their own appearances also played an important role in the amusement they offered. They were grotesque freaks who demonstrated by contrast the finesse and nobility of those watching them. Their deformities confirmed the elegance and stature of their masters. Their masters and the children of their masters were Nature’s prodigies; they were Nature’s comic mistakes.
The buffoons themselves were well aware of this. They were Nature’s jokes and they took over the laughter. Jokes can joke back at the laughter they provoke, and then those laughing become the funny ones – all prodigious circus clowns play upon this seesaw.
The Spanish buffoon’s private joke was that what anyone looks like is a passing affair. Not an illusion, but something temporary, both for the prodigies and the mistakes! (Transience is a joke too: look at the way great comics take their exits.)