Napoleon's Roads (9 page)

LOST PAGES

It's a constant temptation of the human to invest the unknown with ulterior meaning, to see in the gaps of its own understanding some purposeful hand beyond. But how else explain the lost pages? The lines, the whole tracts of thought gone. If I can't get them back it's surely time they had some epitaph, though even in proposing such a thing there's trepidation, apprehension that this, too, will mysteriously evaporate before it sees the light of day. Although perhaps it could be seen as some kind of test: proof positive, if this also goes missing, and proof negative if it does not, although such might also be a nefarious attempt to obscure the matter.

~

It was a familiar joke, a story to be told while drinking or after dinner at Sarafini's, a whimsy to most of his writer friends, although to him in solitary moments – moments of self-doubt or envy – also a matter of regret, resentment, even mourning. The Night of the Lost Pages. The Night of the Grand Illumination. It had been his own fault, perhaps, for telling the story with such self-irony, for making so light of it. As they all did: it was their manner. As if Truth had been ruled out finally and after all. There had been a divergence, at the tip of his tongue, a fork, and he had taken the wrong path. But since he had first told the story it had served as a magnet for other tales like it. M, for example, reminding him of the draft of the poem that he, M, had left on a seat on a suburban train, or J telling him of A's notebooks, twenty years of ideas and reflections lost in an office fire. One by one almost all of the group had added some tale of their own, or brought him a story from a book they had been reading, a conversation they had just had: of the first draft of V's novel left in a bookshop where he had been browsing and never seen again, of H's wife burning what she thought to be his outrageous confessions, of S's husband feeding her diaries to the fire on the twentieth anniversary of her death.

~

If everything that we write, every word-thing we create, is carved out of silence, chaos, emptiness, the vast Outside, it stands to reason, doesn't it, that the winds or currents of that chaos, that silence outside us, will sometimes make off with a portion of it, and will carry it far beyond reach. But if it stands to reason, that may be all that it stands to, and doesn't account for the nagging pattern of such depredations, the way so many of them seem to bear upon the same channels of thought, seem to hover about the same subjects, the same borders.

~

Although, in the works of Heinborn, there is nothing specifically on textual loss, Gilberto Raimondi, the most perceptive of his biographers, argues that such was not only a logical extension of his work, but an actual subject, though a subject that itself, as if in demonstration of Heinborn's own theories of Omission (‘The Aetiology of Omission', 1933), did not survive the destruction of his papers. But by the same token, since there is no omission that does not leave its
residue
, this
possible subject
can, from hints, fragments, implications – those verbal
raised eyebrows
for which Heinborn is so famous – be reconstructed. In one of the notorious ‘secret seminars' in the unofficial conference on his work at Clermont-l'Hérault in 1955 he is said to have spent the first hour speaking of
that of which he was not able to speak
, given that, on the train from Düsseldorf, he had ‘lost' the first section of his lecture, a trope which some immediately suspected to have been an invention in demonstration of the very
Verschwinden
(disappearance) that was his subject.

~

The Night of the Lost Pages. In fact, when he first thought of it like that, no pages
per se
had been lost at all, only the script that should have been on them. He had woken in the pitch dark with a thought in his mind that he had not wanted to lose – something that had come from a dream – and so had got up and found his notebook and a pen, and written it down. As he was about to return to bed, a last, precautionary codicil had struck him – one idea so often led to another – and he had picked up the writing materials and, turning off the light in the study, walked back through the dark house to the bedroom. Crossing the foyer he had dropped the ballpoint pen but, having heard where it clattered on the tiles, had been able to find it without turning on the light and had continued to the bedroom. Ten minutes later, in bed, on cue, as if the initial thought – it had been little more than an image – had been only an advance guard, a warning, an entire argument had come to him, an answer to a metaphysical problem that had been troubling him for years. And so simply, so clearly could he see it now, that it might have been an exact formula, a philosophical principle as clear as that of Pascal's Wager, or at the very least one of the aphorisms of Schopenhauer.

Afraid that if he went back to the study he would lose it, so brightly and urgently did it appear, and yet not wanting to wake Grace by turning on the reading-light – knowing, too, how light can dissipate the focus – he had sat on the edge of the bed in the dark writing it all out in note-form over four or five pages, the words burning, glowing within him, a trace, a gem, a gift such as comes to even the greatest writers only a handful of times in their career. And then had lain there, heart racing, the ramifications spread out before him like a grand vista, a wide landscape of thought, and eventually slept profoundly, as if the thinking itself – the receiving – had exhausted him.

The next morning, remembering, he had turned immediately, excitedly, to see what he had written, only to find that the ballpoint had been damaged by its fall, and that, apart from an occasional sputtering, there was almost no trace of the lucid, inspired writing he had done, and of which now, so deeply had he slept, he remembered little more than the exuberance and an occasional haunting word or phrase.

A morning of intense frustration followed as he tried by all means he could think of to rescue the text. But the most careful, most delicate rubbings only served to increase his disappointment as he found the pressure applied – the scoring of the inkless pen – to one side of the page had been rendered only the more illegible by the pressure applied by the pen to the obverse. Where he could produce any image at all it resembled not text so much as a writhing of snakes.

~

as late this afternoon, when, after a storm, with another storm promising – the day having been hot though overcast, as humid as a sauna – he set out for the beach and a swim in the grey swell. He had hardly reached the top of Carr Street when the first idea came to him, of something – a story? an essay? – about the Language of Birds. Not the one/s they speak themselves, but how the names we have for them are so inadequate, so misleading, signifiers floating above the signified. All the birds missed or not caught in its net. All the ‘stages' of birds that don't fit into the simple descriptions of ‘immature' or ‘adult' that the field guides provide. All the colour-forms between one ‘stage' and another. All the exotic, blown or travelling birds that are not supposed to be where we see them. The idea getting no further than this before the next idea crossed it like static from a new place and he had begun, only a block further down the three-block hill, to think more of the birds in
this
place, or, rather, this place that the birds were in.

~

B. suggests that this
is
mere paranoia, that it is only a matter of brain cells dying, but how could that contribute? We use only a small portion of the brain's capacity. Who is to calculate the effect of a minuscule attrition of what is already only partly employed?

~

Dead text. Lost text. Text that has broken itself against the impossible.
Boulder
Or been broken, cracked from within. Shattered by something it couldn't contain. Was too fragile. Iron text, rusted. Corroded by time. Acid in the air. The rain. You see them. Beached in the grass. At the Aral Sea. Those boats. Or on the edges of the Danube. Near Linz. Near Galati. Words painted on their bows. Barely legible. Some dream. Some intention.
in the
Footprints. Idea gone off. Beyond finding. The tracker not capable. You
see
but there is not the will. Not passage. Words locked in silence. Pages like arctic ice. And the sewers. The threaders. Of fragments. These ragged clothes. The sewers. A murrain. Terminal. Breccia.
heart's
‘Nothing / left but a / mind / flaring'. ‘As if'.

~

But in truth it was hardly the first time. Never before such a revelation, perhaps – never before a thought of such brilliance, such clarity, resolving so much (but that was all he remembered, the feeling that it would resolve, that it had, just then,
resolved
) – but small, glowing fragments of a puzzle one might at some point piece together, or
seeds
, that with careful nurturing might grow into a poem, say, or story. On a filing card, a bus ticket, a docket from the supermarket, fallen from one's pocket as one fumbled for change, or accidentally discarded in some pile of now irretrievable wastepaper, or slipped somewhere into the leaves of a book in one's impossible library – lost, or if, as sometimes happened, found again – for sometimes they
were
found – found also to have been sketched with ridiculous, self-defeating self-confidence, with too many lacunae, too many passages marked by dots, to be filled out later with things now far beyond the mind's recall. Forgotten, if it was an idea before the idea before sleep, in the absurd belief that it would somehow be remembered in the morning. So that it was not a page, a phrase, a word that was lost, so much as a connection within, and only oneself to blame.

Perhaps, he thought, trying to explain this, it was the loss itself – its power to fixate one – that gave these thoughts their apparent value, the way one can become almost obsessed over a lost glove, a spanner, when one could so easily go out and buy others. But mightn't it be, too, that it was something in the thoughts themselves that could not allow them to be uttered? The sudden, awe-ful thought – ridiculous, yes, paranoid, yes, but nonetheless awful for that – that there was Something, Someone, against all his scepticism, all his disbelief, and that that Thing, that Being could not allow what he had uttered – what he had
thought
to utter – to be written, to be published, to be seen. A Thing? A Being? Or was it a system,
the
System, so deep, so filamentous that it operated through him or around him, in the night, in the patterns of waste, in the patterns of luck, so as to cancel out a part of him, so as to have
him
cancel a part of himself? (For might it not, also, be he himself, some part of
him
, who was not allowing, as the writing came close to something – some secret, from the dark field of secrets – so deeply hidden, so repressed, that when a fragment surfaced, or some fragment upon the surface resonated, some other part, some guardian of the subconscious snatched that fragment from sight …)

~

… as if in an age …
I once typed, rapidly into a file on my word processor in that tiny room on rue Buci,
when we have done away with such lordly imperatives, there are words which
may not be spoken
, thoughts which
may not be thought
, or the doing away with imperatives were itself a veiled imperative …
And then, most bizarre of all, looked up at what I had just keyed, to find that, as had never happened before, what I had written had leapt into large letters – had I entered a command I did not know about? – shouting at me, as if a part of
me
were shouting at
myself
, trying to warn me:
words which
may not be spoken
, thoughts which
may not be thought

~

… kite. And she had thought it was the thing of paper I was speaking of but I meant of course the raptor, and the shadow of the wing, touching the mind, something as fleeting, as evanescent as that, as it swooped, on its own business …

*

She tells me, in another mood, that there are some things that are simply unspeakable, and that writing, whatever else it might be, is also a seeking-out of these, that they are a curse
and point
of it. Why is it, she asks me, that whenever someone writes about Yen Dokla – the sheer abject horror of what occurred there – they find themselves in the middle of legal action, accusations of plagiarism, their integrity and ability in question, unless there were not some unconscious communal agreement that this were a wordless place, a not-to-be-spoken, or the horror were somehow un-writable, a silence that art cannot break? To write strongly and powerfully the horror of things, she says, doesn't one have to resort to techniques, tropes, mouldings of sounds and words that belong to the realm and mind of art, not of the reality and the horror? To
speak
it, in this sense,
is
to betray. To make language powerful, she tells me, is also to take it away. Something else – weakness, deprivation, erosion, loss – becomes necessary if we are going to intimate or locate the unspeakable, if we are going to
say
it.

~

Night-thoughts often, from my insomnia, when one writes in the dark, fumbling for the pen and the book beside the bed, writing by feel on a page one prays is blank, the words sometimes running off the paper's edge, hoping that in the flow of a thought or image one has not forgotten oneself and, failing to space the lines carefully by finger-breadths, over-written one's own writing so that, line laid upon line, word scrawled upon word – the breaks between words, on one line, obliterated, bridged over, by the words of the over-writing line – one has created only an indecipherable knot, a kind of black mass …

~