Dog, Drifting

Where, in all the myriad ways that question can be answered, is it that writing comes from? I’ve just read The Illuminated Burrow by Max Blecher, issued in 2022 (Twisted Spoon Press, Prague) although written in 1937–38, and his final book, and to have it retreat even further from grasp—published posthumously, abridged, in 1947. Reading it, I asked almost throughout— where is he in the act of writing, where is he when the writing is happening? Where does this manifestation take place? Writers are always, or often, surprised—I am—finding where the writing has taken them, that odd but entirely pleasant state of mild delirium and inhabitation, then waking with a start. Blecher does that, says he does that, wants to, but wishing isn’t the transit that takes the writer there, so what is, or where is? The writing takes over; it does. But how, or where? No one in this fortunate state wants to see an exorcist at the door. Go away; I’m happily, productively haunted or unhinged. Transported.

The place or space from which Blecher’s writing comes, or out of which he wrote, located somewhere in his being, is far from enviable. He died at 29, he was ill and suffered, limited in his movement, spending the final years of his short life moving from one sanitorium to another, seeking treatment. But I read him and still I want, in the reading, to locate the geography of his writing, asking again, where was he when he wrote? He’s on the page but he floats; the words are inked but beyond the reach of my stretched fingers.

Constrained by speaking only one language, I am intrigued by literary translation, and some of the same questions I’ve asked about where Blecher’s writing comes from apply also to translation. How does it happen, where does it take place and what, finally, is this second or other iteration? Kate Briggs, who writes translation, if that is the correct verb, asks these questions and others in her book This Little Art (Fitzcarraldo Editions, London, 2021). She is sometimes beautifully, microscopically analytical and detailed so I won’t be, in using references from this loosely linked ouroboros of a book she calls a long essay. One example—not given here, in this short essay, does present a translation problem, she says. But in my looking for such an ephemeral place as the site of Blecher’s writing, I have given myself licence to pick my way in search of phrases that apply. “This scene presents a problem,” and about it she says, “but it also lays bare the fiction, the thin layer of further fiction that the translation introduces and asks us to accept.” She goes on, here paraphrasing Roland Barthes, who noted that fiction is like the transfers used in transfer printing, like the technique of printing onto ceramics, where he suggests (and this is Barthes) “a slight detachment, a slight separation which forms a complete coloured picture.”

So, out of this I am picking, in reference to translation, these ideas: fiction, the thin layer, a slight detachment, a slight separation. Blecher, like Barthes, has used layered images, which slide into place to form a complete picture—for Blecher, the two images forming one, stereoscopically, using an old-fashioned device of wonder that produced one image, appearing in three dimensions. Seeking the place Blecher’s writing inhabits, I’ll double back later.

The thin space and Barthes’s slight detachment is also Marcel Duchamp’s inframince, the ultra-thin, elusive, barely graspable illusion of space. Separation or detachment is the key, like Deleuze’s stutter, as Briggs notes, which does make a space, and we perceive it, however minimal it is, where it offers the generative possibility of repetition (which is affirmation), which is also mimesis, iteration, replication. With this is the unavoidable shift in registration that moves it out of the perfect and back into the real where we can put it to some use. Still no bead on where Blecher writes from.

Barthes says, and Briggs reminds us, “I write because I have read.” But this is why and not where. And since she writes about translation and its mysterious source and definition, Briggs returns to Barthes, who, reading something beautifully written, desires it and feels it lost, and separate. “I have in some way to retrieve it by redoing it; in this way, to write is to want to rewrite: I want to add myself actively to that which is beautiful and that I lack; as we might put it with an old verb: that I require.” As beguiling as his explanation is, again it speaks to why, not where, and I am still searching.

“To experience something or to dream it is, in my opinion, one and the same, and daily life is as hallucinatory and uncanny as a dream. Any attempt to precisely determine in which of these worlds I am writing these lines would end in failure,” Blecher wrote, attempting to thwart my efforts. He toys with me, dropping casual understatements to trip me up, such as: “I suspect there might be a slight difference between the exterior world and the realm of the imagination.” A difference between, which makes enough space from which to write. Or, maybe this is where he is: “I gaze around me in profound and utter astonishment, and the shock is exactly the same whether I have my eyes open or shut.”

Blecher does something with linguistic dissonance—I don’t know what else to call it—but it’s as deliberate as anything he says he does or doesn’t do, awake or in a dream state. The dissonance sets up a clangour and oscillation and that makes a space. You are awake and alert or you are asleep. He tells us about a story that plays out in his dreams (as though it were theatre you could call up when the company travels through town) and he wants us to know he’s not certain which state the story is set in because, as he says, “it is as coherent, or incoherent in the light of day I submerge myself in as I pen it as it was in the bright sunlight of the ‘dream world’ where these bizarre and melancholy events were staged.” On the chance that we were neither asleep nor awake when reading, he adds, “More melancholy than bizarre … and unintelligible rather than hallucinatory.” Wonderful incongruities of language and tone.

Since it is a particular space I am looking for—that space from which Blecher writes—I want to dwell (you can in a space) on the idea of an idea of a space, or an idea of an idea. Donald Judd has something to say about space. From his essay “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular,” 1993 (Donald Judd Writings, Judd Foundation, New York, and David Zwirner Books, New York, 2016), he says, “Two of the main aspects of art are invisible; the basic nature of art is invisible.” (He is referring to space and colour.) We can say he is impatient with most architects. He says, “There has been some discussion of space, usually of proportion by past architects.… There is some by recent architects.” The list is short. He says, “There has been almost no discussion of space in art,” and, stating his concern, “There is no context; there are no terms, there are not any theories. There is only the visible work invisible. Space is made by an artist or architect; it is not found and packaged. It is made by thought.” He and Max Blecher could talk. Judd says, “Therefore most buildings have no space. Most people are not aware of this absence.” And we don’t know if they are awake or dreaming. Judd says further, “They are not bothered by a confusion and a nothingness that is enclosed.” I’m on it; I know this.

Clarice Lispector knew this, too, and in her final novel, The Hour of the Star, she wrote about her beloved heroine, Macabéa, struck down in the street by a luxury automobile: “With her dead, the bells were ringing but without their bronzes giving them sound.” Lispector saw and recognized an absent space. My interest is there, too—the bells ringing without sound—which also accounts for my attempts at tracking Blecher’s elusive space. I wrote in the essay “Clarice Lispector: The Thereness of Language” that the essence of what she consistently sought was “the ‘empty,’ encircled by a form, outlined and given shape by the form that isn’t really there.” It’s the space, I suggested, that’s conjured by our imagining: an iron hoop, the small location inside the hoop having measurable dimensions. Now, “Remove the hoop. That’s the space. There, gone, there.”

Clarice Lispector knew this, too, and in her final novel, The Hour of the Star, she wrote about her beloved heroine, Macabéa, struck down in the street by a luxury automobile: “With her dead, the bells were ringing but without their bronzes giving them sound.” Lispector saw and recognized an absent space. My interest is there, too—the bells ringing without sound—which also accounts for my attempts at tracking Blecher’s elusive space. I wrote in the essay “Clarice Lispector: The Thereness of Language” that the essence of what she consistently sought was “the ‘empty,’ encircled by a form, outlined and given shape by the form that isn’t really there.” It’s the space, I suggested, that’s conjured by our imagining: an iron hoop, the small location inside the hoop having measurable dimensions. Now, “Remove the hoop. That’s the space. There, gone, there.”

He uses words that are states of being in his writing—an assemblage of words and feelings that are dissonant, at odds, trembling, stuttering, their received agitation pushing the edges— and, like Judd says of Josef Albers’s paintings, one colour next to another, about the shapes of colour (two invisible things: space and colour), “Even the word ‘edges’ is too definite.” What Blecher is making here and in this immaterial way is a three-dimensional space from which, notionally, the writing happens, takes place, occurs, is made. In dream or reality, each is a commodious space for Blecher. “Questions such as these never trouble me when I revisit my dreams or memories, whose beauty or oddity enthrals me, with their sad, calm atmosphere or their painful, heart-wrenching drama.… Because what is most bewildering and exciting is that every ordinary thing is transformed into something ineffable in the world of sleep (or even in reality), something which I cannot then unlearn.”

The house at the end of the street, on the corner, is an appealing, good house. Two storeys, white clapboard, newer than the others on the block, built when there was money for building, trimmed in a wine-toned red. A low white picket fence marks the front yard and a higher but similar fence shields the backyard since this was a house on the corner and a public sidewalk ran along it. A nice, narrower sidewalk divides the front yard and is welcoming. Hello, it said, right up the middle to the steps at the front door, and another narrower, also nice sidewalk led off at the front steps around to the side, too, and to the backyard beyond.

Right up the middle, invited by the welcoming concrete path, walked the little girl with bare legs, and wearing a short summer dress. She had soft brown hair—to picture her. She thinks she was four years old and, fine-boned, couldn’t have been more than that to squeeze through the small low door of the doghouse, which was so perfect and new in white clapboard with the pitched roof covered in wine-red shingles like the house behind which it sat. There was a dog, too, a small blond spaniel, and he was in the little house and didn’t acknowledge her company, not having to make room for her small person since he was beyond the entrance, at the further end, lying against the back wall on the green grass that was the floor of the small house. The dog, the girl said nothing. Inside it was very quiet, as quiet as a space can be when you measure it out, even if all you do is drape a blanket over two chairs and crawl inside. The world is gone, perfectly. The small dog, the small girl, the quiet interior light, which should be night since there were no windows, only the low door, and the girl, even small, was more guest than the house expected to receive, and the two together used the space the light might have occupied. The two, and a flat dish, near the door, which the girl had seen before she bent her bare knees and moved inside on the green grass. It wasn’t empty; she was a careful small guest and she wasn’t going to bump the dish, even with the toe or heel of her sandalled foot. Quiet, dark. How it sounded, how it looked, but there was a scent, too. Not as fitting as the quiet, not as fine as the light. It was a thin milk, not the velvety milk that filled her small juice glass and left a thin curtain of white, even when you drank it all down. This was a sink-rinsed but not nicely washed white and it smelled like, smelled like something from the garage behind her house where only bigger people go. Like dandelions losing their yellow, their necks broken and smelling like the dish in the little house. And the dog would die. Small enough to bend her bare knees and feel the grass prickle her skin, she was also big enough to know that a little house, the right size, with a wine-red roof was big enough for things she mustn’t really know, that could be hot like a red coiled element don’t touch or sharp like a knife to slice apples don’t touch or dark brown like a small bottle the right size for her hand don’t drink. So she knew poison, danger, bad, and that the dog was sick and would be dead. No one to tell. The quiet dark space was everything. She was in it; the blond, still dog was in it. Only they were. Large, not small like the girl, were the incidents and details. Everything supporting, leading to the dog was critical. The light, the smell, the soundless space. But the dog was not.

Parallel to the grass on which he lay, he simply lifted, rose up, transparent, unseen into space. ❚