The missing All – prevented Me

From missing minor Things.

Emily Dickinson

It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

(…)it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking.

Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari

I am afraid I am going to deluge you with an overly extended opening, but sometimes, especially when – metaphorically speaking – one’s eyes were not used in a way one had wished them to be used, certain letters delude us in a prolonged manner without the slightest indication of any mischievousness. Or is it life, not letters, that dupes us mercilessly?… Oh well, how can one really tell one from the other anyway? How can one discern?… And after a while that seems like an eternal passing which never happened, one almost believes that all has been forgotten, all has been erased, all has ceased to be, become, come and go (“talking of Michelangelo”?…). Only shards of “inconsequential perplexities” remain, with a few occasional jots of hazy im-memorabilia of time immemorial. The serenity pervading this new totality, this fully hermetic type of post-internal “on-one’s-owness” in which one has been nested since the unknown “somewhen”, exceeds every expressiveness, every extraordinary evanescence. Even cross-possibilities of hopeless escapism (but, frankly, where to escape if there are only two “wheres” on everyone’s road to nowhere, both already overexploited beyond their boiling points – life and death) will not allow the slightest stir on a flat-lined consolation, relief, respite. This state of good-for-nothing, pre-ontological vagrancy may be the ultimate rebellion against. That’s right, no predicative prepositional phrases – just “against”. But first things first.

There is this anecdote about one of the ancient skeptics (Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus?… How can one remember not to forget all those names in the long run?) who reportedly went for a walk with one of his pupils and when they were both confronted by a stray, possibly rabid dog (growling, barking, baring fangs, bristling a coat, frothing at a snout, etc.), he uttered a shout of fright which he should not have uttered due to the state of deep ataraxia (a lame definition would put it as: the tranquility of soul perpetuated by the suspension of judgement associated with each and every external and internal perception – the end goal of every self-respecting skeptic) he had supposedly been immersed in and well known of. When approached by his ultimately stunned pupil, after the dog had been chased away, he excused himself by saying that “sometimes there’s no other way”.

Wittgenstein’s Mistress is the “gait” which your legs are obliged to incorporate if you fall onto the endless treadmill of the aforesaid coercion. The way of skeptical “no-other-wayness”, let alone the oppressive calmness of being “against” have been taunting and tormenting Markson’s protagonist – Kate – for at least two decades. There is not much to tell about her life, following the standard meaning of the phrase “not much to tell”. Instead of blatant bookish goings-on, what we are being exposed to is an outpour of uncertainties of the highest caliber regarding renowned names and personas of a broadly defined term “culture”. Painters, philosophers, writers, poets and composers are Kate’s bread and butter in her “last of meeting places” or, shall I say, last resort, since all of them are treated merely as grist for the mill of anecdotal speculations i.e., pupils of Rembrandt painting coins on the floor of his studio to fool their penniless master, Guy de Maupassant eating dinner on the observatory deck of the Eiffel Tower in order to enjoy the view of Paris without the obtrusively eye-catching landmark in the background or Martin Heidegger owning Vincent Van Gogh’s shoes. At least they sound like these. One cannot simply tell whether they are true or false, whether they might resemble the possibility or something only vaguely similar to impossibility. Although, at times, one is almost able to recall something that was overheard ages ago, a trifle given a once-over on the Internet (Wikipedia, YouTube comments, Instagram?) which corroborates Kate’s speculations, thus turning them into verisimilitude of plain and simple facts. One suddenly catches oneself suffering from the very same “illness” that has been devouring Kate – F(r)actography syndrome. One starts to wonder: how the hell do I know that Marvin Gaye was shot by his own father? How on earth was I able to remember that Prince’s only child died from Pfeiffer syndrome? Or that Jeffrey Dahmer abused alcohol so badly while being stationed somewhere in West Germany that he was discharged from the military and failed to become a combat medic which resulted in his…oh, well…pursuing a completely opposite “career path”.

Oftentimes, one chuckles under one’s breath when Kate tries to recreate the probable exchange of courtesies between two or three individuals who apparently lived in the same town, e.g., Spinoza and Rembrandt (“I was extremely sorry to hear about your bankruptcy, Rembrandt. I was extremely sorry to hear about your excommunication, Spinoza”) or El Greco, St. Teresa of Ávila and St. John of Cross. One grins a lot too when she keeps on indulging herself in sheer speculations. Her daydreaming about who would be most likely sitting inside Giotto’s studio or how Galileo, due to his fear of germs which he could not have seen (unlike Leeuwenhoek – the Father of Microbiology), would not have shaken hands with any of Dutch “Golden Age” painters coming from Delft if he had lived in Delft. Yet one’s eyes quickly go out of their sparkle, because one seems to realize or, rather, be caught up in a state of presupposing and experiencing the vision that, back in the day, Kate could not have gone over one singular line, but must have done so over innumerable ones along with the world itself (scarce, allegedly post-apocalyptic allusions scattered around the text resonate in one’s head as a sound confirmation or just a shaky falsification of…”Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’” – it is unreachable anyway). One is under the indelible impression that not only had she been up against many impermeable walls at the same time (what kind of walls?… One may only hypothesize…), but she also, paradoxically, by some completely inaccessible and imponderable “somehows”, tunnelled through quite a few of them too. She might have caught “something out there” – a shadier, less peaceful, more gangrenous “cousin” of ataraxia, perhaps? Maybe she had been onto-pulverized so badly that all she was left with when she got back (did she?…) was the sense of indestructible, cathartic monotone of doubtfulness aimed at everything that might be called “perceptible”. One of the side effects of her finally getting a grip (or losing one…) surely must have been the sedulousness towards mentioning the intricacies of imprecision of the language itself, ever-present in her 248-page soliloquy. The ensuing bewilderment is precisely the thing which would explain the title Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Due to her linguistic bewitchment, Kate becomes Wittgenstein’s most faithful “lover” in a strictly “agape-ish” sense of the word.

Please forgive me for bringing up this revolting obscurity. I have been led astray by some phony grandiloquence which should have been kept at bay, for it is one of the last things one can extract from Markson’s novel, despite tens of surnames of men and women of different cultural “offshoots” tumbling around, merging with each other and submerging in deep non-territorial waters of Kate’s “no-other-wayness”. Much more noteworthy would be the notion that one feels not in the least intimidated/offended/suffocated by her merciless beating about the bush – a brilliant proof of her forlorn unfathomable knowledge (the protagonist forgot more about the Western culture than many of us would ever get to know). Those…hmm… dehumanized fact-like recollections of hers, woven with almost obsessive-compulsive predilection towards linguistic exactitude (as far as an “onto-somnambulist” is able to express anything at all…) give one this peculiar foreboding that Kate may be under influence of some kind of third sensory stimulant, plane of referentiality, variant of reality. Hell-bent on being as clear as possible right now (although what you have just read may unintentionally seem otherwise), let me use a simple description to illustrate what is on my mind. In order to do so, I am going to twist one of – surprise, surprise! – Wittgenstein’s quotes a little – what cannot be said, can be shown.

In a movie you all probably know not like but better than the back of your hand – Drive – there is an/the(!) elevator scene in which Ryan Gosling kisses Carey Mulligan. What happens right before it is what I guess is quintessential to see the idea behind the idea of “thirdness”, referentiality from meta-outside, a new variable of reality. The pausing effect of his right hand reaching behind his back, gently but resolutely grabbing her arm, protectively making her move to the corner of the elevator, is followed by his turning round to face her. The camera cuts to his right palm reaching to this unnamable area where her lower back fuses into the top part of a hip and a buttock. Or so we assume, as the camera goes steadily upward and he moves closer to her with the same speed so that our eyes meet their faces when the inevitability of a kiss creates a lot more than everything, anything and nothing have ever had to offer combined together in an ambiguous metaphysical ménage à trois. The parting intensity of this short sequence, consisting of two shots only, might be the best visualization of how a-perceptibly and indescribably captivating the (other)world(liness) could have been, or better yet, still is, extending farther into the unknown where the Within in general is capable of surpassing its innermost inside and the Multitude as such tends to be a mere beginning of something more uncountable than the set of transcendental numbers. But then, one minute later, a bad thing happens, the elevator door shuts “and we drown”…

Some kind of odd sensation is encroaching me now. The last three words from the previous paragraph and the year in which David Markson published Wittgenstein’s Mistress should have made me use a visual example from a completely different movie – the one having more drive to dive and to saunter along the color blue… Well, I guess my own “against” must have interfered with the decision. Or maybe it was a sign that it should be spared for something even more effervescently alien than Markson’s novel… All in all, what should have been written, has been written in a way it must have been written. In hindsight, I am fully aware of the fact that this time I have not hinted anything at all about the novel and, frankly, when I read my letters again, I am almost 100% positive about their total lack of necessity to come about in the first place. Then again, how was I supposed to mention something without mentioning a thing? How was I to overcome the “inconsequential perplexities” of language to deliver at least a shadow of an approximation to the pre-sense/presence of Kate’s state of “no-other-wayness”? In the epoch following the era of reminiscing not-Prince Hamlets, “would it have been worth it, after all”, to ask further about the (im?)possibility of inquiring like that? Didn’t we all get used to not missing minor Things long time ago? Perhaps we should wait for another sunrise…oh, wait…

Amonne Purity

I do not want to begin another text using one of the three most predictable openings – a rhetorical question, a quote and an anecdote – but I am afraid I will have to sign a Faustian pact with one of these three devils once more, because I am bound to squeeze a 905-page book into an encapsulation of no more than 2 leaves. And what a book it is, indeed! Its author, Harry Mulisch, hailed as a member of ‘The Holy Trinity’ of the 20th-century Dutch literature along with Gerard Reve and Willem Frederik Hermans, has accomplished a feat, which surely grants him a place in the pantheon of classic writers, on the omnipresent, absolute, canonical floor, among giants like Tolstoy, Joyce, Mann, Dostoevsky, to name but a few. The Discovery of Heaven, a toughie itself when it comes down to any possible question which could crack open its indestructible surface to let us out and exhale at least a tiny fraction of complexity and knowledge stored inside its cavernous body, a monument due to a certain ‘story-ness’ written with a capital “S”, dominating other books by the scale, scope, range and reach of the matters dealt with on its pages, and, last but definitely not least, a certain embodiment of ‘longing’, belonging to the unfulfilled ways of history to chart itself differently, alternatively, without causing the indescribable metaphysical sadness of standardized irreversibility of subsequent zeitgeists… All right, enough of this lengthy recital! Mefisto, where are you?! I have already cut my finger and drawn some ink for a signature!

It is going to be one of those short questions, whose source I cannot recollect, unfortunately. It may have something in common with a particular passage from Lem’s His Master’s Voice or it is likely to have originated in a sheer speculative area of non-existent thoughts. The thing is rather simple: what throws a given entity into a state of ‘self-lockdown’, complete unreachability, noumenal bondage, and could we, in the following case, ask not only about any ‘what’ at all, but also about the justification of an unclear, skittish sensation that ’’’something’’’ in there (triple quotes to stress the extraordinarily trifle conventionality and blankness of the term “something” here) would turn out to be ‘overdivinely’ amazing, if we pierced right through the barricades that encircle it? Perhaps The Discovery of Heaven would serve us as a nuclear missile to tear down these walls (no Gipper allusions intended)? Or is Mulisch’s magnum opus itself the thing-in-itself from beyond Godlike astonishments?

Where to begin?… The characters perhaps. They are the most approachable elements of The Discovery of Heaven, which prevent us from getting lost in the author’s own remoteness. Onno Quist, Max Delius, Ada Brons. The first one is a black sheep of a prominent, high-class family, which retains substantial connections in the Dutch political establishment. A quick-witted, snappy yet sometimes excessively eloquent Onno – a linguistic prodigy, a recipient of a honorary doctorate degree for deciphering the Etruscan language and a son of the former prime minister of the Netherlands – amuses us with his seemingly nihilistic disposition and over-intellectualized tirades about as many issues as there are nuances boiling inside a postmodern cauldron of the late 60’s highbrow western ruminations. The second man is nothing like the former. A hopeless hedonist and a pertinent pedant when chasing skirts and fighting off the second law of thermodynamics in his apartment, Max is a low profile astronomer by profession. In striking contrast to Onno, his family background (and he himself too) has been stigmatized by a tragedy no one sane would ever envy – Max’s father denounced his own wife, a Jew, to Nazi authorities during the World War II, for which he was sentenced to death after the war had finished, orphaning then twelve-year-old Max. Finally, Ada. Being twelve years both Onno’s and Max’s junior, she is a student of music conservatory in Leiden. A sensitive and talented cellist, her thoughts are often ridden with genteel touches of naivety as well as bouts of melancholic dreaminess. While Onno’s and Max’s kinship issues cover the most extreme variables of the family specter, Ada’s own can be situated in a rather ordinary middle section of cold-hearted, bossy mothers and subdued but noble-minded fathers. All in all, this trio and its sophisticatedly intertwined kismets, spanning over 18 years, create one of the most memorable and unsurpassable testimonies to the ultimate power of literature to narrate.

What is so momentous about the general mnemonic mementos in The Discovery of Heaven, then? All that the above mentioned characters are weaving before us via author’s pen. And when I mean “all”, I do not mean all. At all. What I have in mind instead is a Story (yes, this one has to start with a capital letter due to its nature [Tolstoy and Mann nodding appreciatively aside]), which attempts to cover most, if not all, of the profound ideas, phenomena, impressions, etc., which happen to shape each individual human being, more or less directly, after he/she has been thrown into the world. Fate, contingency, historiosophy, being, political affiliations, music, cosmology, evil, typography, architecture, speculations, death, contemporary physics, philosophy, euthanasia, memory, religions and, quite like a condor with a tremendous wingspan, floating graciously above all, God – all of this comprises the brainy pole of the novel. Its soulful pole, let’s call it that way, teleports us to spheres of loss, hope, friendship (or even post-friendship), dedication, devotion, love, suffering, sacrifice, withdrawal, ecstasy, and many more. To enumerate all would be too much. Yet we cannot refrain from counting, as some of them have been sketched only with a feeble strokes of charcoal (Mulisch was only a human being, after all…[was he really?]), others, on the other hand, form figurative paintings dripping wet with abundance of an oil paint. We recognize them, the lines, the shapes, the intensities. They come from our own lives – a truly divine collage of transience. Suddenly we are able to grasp a dim recollection of something. Is the memory impairing effect of metempsychosis waning? Has it been real? Have we already found our own Citadel, the Citadel beyond the center of the world, beyond the possible and impossible propositional abilities of any conceivable language, reality, divinity? This is the grandeur, the monumentality of Mulisch’s marvel – to use all that there is to create even more than has ever been before. To somehow make the divine ex nihilo mode of conception blush. To outsmart it big time and do not follow in Faust’s footsteps. That may sound all too simple, even banal, if not totally hubristic, but isn’t the simplicity, which lies behind all complexity, a domain of purest geniuses like the Dutch author himself, AFTER ALL (block capitals and no quotes this time to highlight the double significance and literality of the phrase “after all”)? And isn’t it true that when we look over the fence to see what is behind it, our noses are being automatically stuck up in the air?

I might have been wrong in the second paragraph, where I had put forward a question regarding certain unreachability of things(-in-themselves). Maybe we do not have to smash through trenches, ramparts or barriers of any sort to reach them, because their ‘in-itselfness’ is and has always been permanently accessible; it is our eyes that remained shut. Maybe we have not figured out yet how to open them correctly to make a genuinely brilliant discovery of such a neo-divine splendor, which, when compared to the previous inferences and perceptions of heaven, would make them look like the very center of hell? Maybe there is no need for any kind of investigation to burst open essences, not because the reality/God/whatever forbids us from doing so, but because we have to wait for a Spark bright enough, like lapis-eyed Quinten Quist, ‘letters’ readable enough, like future Joyces, Manns, Tolstoys, but also yet-to-come Pynchons, Kafkas, Ecos and Blanchots, movies visionary enough, like those few which I would not dare to list, because somebody would do it undeniably better than me – to navigate us through the seas of alternative realities, multitudes, offshoots, outgrowths, etc., which would simply greet us with open arms, awaiting our spectacular creations and groundbreaking discoveries – the archipelagos of new, pristine ‘substances’? I am certain that the magnificence of The Discovery of Heaven is in itself one of the first lighthouses leading us out of the much too regular, repeatable and reproachful environs of coastal waters. May our eyes have the courage and perseverance to spot the next guiding Spark on the horizon.

Amonne Purity

Today I am going to write out of shame. At least that’s what it seems I am capable of doing right now. It is not a silent shame, which usually makes faces of some little scamps burn, after they have been caught stuffing the exhaust pipe of their grumpy neighbor’s car with a couple of plums. It is not the one petrified with guilt either – too grave to forgo all the self-explanatory possibilities. Dodging potential names and avoiding conclusive classifications, it more or less resembles the specific type of embarrassment which occurs when we are bound to confess that we have been peeped while sharing an intimate moment with someone and the vision of acknowledging our self-disclosure by the interlocutor (with all of the uncalled-for, one-dimensional, bawdy mental representations popping up uncontrollably in his/her mind) tramples us down into the pit of nauseating edginess. I am already feeling giddy due to the oncoming violation of my sense of privacy which I have tied up with everything The Unbearable Lightness of Being consists of for me. I am stuck between a rock of an unquenchable urge to expose myself totally (unfortunately, ‘naked’ letters are prone to contract ‘pneumonia’ of pretense in the blink of an eye) and a hard place of curling up and hiding behind the cover of Kundera’s masterpiece, blushing like an old spinster.

Torn between these two extremities, left at a loss for words of the golden mean, I am opening the novel to a random page. Just like during our first rendezvous, the letters are immediately beginning to caress my wholeness as a warmth of dream lover’s breath enfolds a cheek with its delicate breeze only seconds before landing on an earlobe as a passionate whisper. All at once, my shame is tamed and I realize I was wrong from the very start. I will write straight from the inside of my intimate relationship with The Unbearable Lightness of Being which is one of those ultimately ‘close’ novels the reader cannot help but simply fall in love with them.

I definitely wouldn’t avoid wearing sackcloth and ashes, were I to reveal any crucial details regarding the plot of Milan Kundera’s renowned book or to present thoroughly four main characters whose direct and indirect interactions are fuelling the possibility of affection between the reader and the text. Moreover, such a leak would be pointless anyway, because in order to uncover above connections, there needs to be someone who is actually reading the novel in the first place, not a lone ‘peeper’ (like the one I am trying NOT to become right now), who is indiscreet enough to take some exposed ‘propositional photographs’ or to write a few peeled ‘photographical sentences’, loaded with probable vivisections of how should interpretational so-and-so’s and what-if’s arrange themselves on the ‘premises’ of book’s appearances. Giving hints like that is unforgivable, because The Unbearable Lightness of Being should be left just with you, The Potential Reader of Kundera, for a subtle, flirtatious, enchanting tête-à-tête in a surrounding silence of everything else.

So I keep asking myself, what can I actually write about the novel that would reveal as little as possible about its matter? Shall I remain in the superposition of disclosing and not disclosing at the same time or would I rather try to overcome this feeling of being Schrödinger’s Peeping Tom?…

Czech author’s piercing, whiplash-sharp observations and notions of various existential issues – possessing a quotable thoughtfulness, insight and versatility of not only a thinker but also, and above all, a person who is deeply concerned about the contemporary human condition – are the main flywheel of the novel’s true inclination to unfold itself before the reader. Kundera’s masterpiece takes care of our honesty of thought, reciprocates the open-mindedness – or better yet – the open-heartedness of the approach towards its pages, fires up a knack for philosophical speculations, gives a comforting pat on the back, gently hugs our compassion and empathy, when dramatis personae are facing shifts from the overwhelming weight of existence to the titular unbearable lightness of being. And we catch ourselves being dragged along their metaphysical vertigo too. Having perceived our surprising participation, we try to gulp back the tears of emotional outbursts every time we experience the humane (and I really cannot stress the word “humane” enough!) warmth of Kundera’s prose. But there is even more to it than that!

From the very first page the reader is engulfed by the profound meta-impression of getting around in a ‘territory’ of a philosophical treaty which has taken shape of an existential novel. Keeping in mind the fact that a paraphrase might be calling the shots now, Gilles Deleuze wrote that the philosophy is the creation of concepts as intensive multiplicities. As we are immersing ourselves in the events which comprise the lives of Tomáš, Tereza, Sabina and Franz, we are swept off our feet by the unexpected notion that Kundera has actually written a philosophical work, which presents a remarkably impressive set of relations regarding human existence, using numerous already-coined terms and phrases on various levels of their significance or – putting it in a more bearable vibe – their lightness and weight. Starting from Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence”, he sheds light on the whole chain of concepts, to name but a few: “betrayal”, “body”, “parades”, “strength”, “necessity”, “coincidence”, “soul”, “smile”, “cemetery”, “kitsch”, which are not only constituents of the human’s life motion alongside the main existential polarity “weight – lightness”, but they also depict the subsequent realization of the aforementioned movement, in this particular case mainly inside a reality of the country from behind the Iron Curtain – Czechoslovakia. All these nuances assemble an exceptionally convincing summarization of the contemporary human beings, whose unbalanced ‘dance’ of weight and lightness cannot be overshadowed even by a fact that the writer used already existing “intensive multiplicities”. Frankly, I suppose it is precisely because of this unmistakable formation of concepts working in an ‘already-being-here’ mode that the intimacy between the reader and the book is possible at all. Or is it just me?…

Leaving the above for you – My Dear Probable Reader of Milan Kundera’s Tour de Force – to mull it over, I must admit that I have never been caught in such a crossfire of the exposing lightness of review and the imposing weight of silence. I have an unbearable feeling that I must have gone too far with the former option. I am not sure whether or not the resulting text should be called “the unforgiveable weightlessness of writing”, but I’m certain about one thing. I overcame my shame and wrote straight from my intimate relationship with this brilliant book and I wish you developed as close a connection with this or maybe the other work as the intensively multiplied concept of “novel affection” has been a quintessence of my passionate romance with The Unbearable Lightness of Being for the past couple of years.

Amonne Purity