Aaand - Maxim, what about him.
Maxim heads off for two nearly back-to-back (creative) writing weeks on Monday. His fantasy had been that, having stepped off the Pall Care academic merry-go-round in September, with 'all that freedom' in the last two months he would have 20,000 words of his best seller book under his belt by now, and be up and roaring and ready to go for the next 20,000. The reality was he slipped into abjection [ref: J Kristeva. Powers of Horror, An essay in abjection, tr L Roudiez. 1982, Columbia U Press... essential reading,
absolutely essential] having lost the ability to write one word. One thing was the need to stroll [ref: W Benjamin, tr H Eiland, K McLaughlin. Das Passagenwerk (the arcades project). 2002, Harvard U P - (almost at random) P555: ' Baudelaire in his review of Madame Bovary: "Realism-a repulsive insult flung in the face of every analytic writer, a vague and elastic word which for the ordinary man signifies not a new means of creation, but a minute description of trivial details." Baudelaire, L'Art Romantique, p413], another thing was a deep longing to hear the voices of other languages in his ears [ref: The Dialogic Imagination, four essays by M M Bakhtin, ed M Holquist, tr C Emerson, M Holquist. 1981, U of Texas P] and other reading (currently Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, bueno, bueno, bueno).
In other words… grace for our needs, grace for our needs, while, my beloved began her fourth year of pschoanalytic training in London, ak was finding his feet again in the Dartmoor wilderness , and I began learning another tango song which I am due to perform (scary but so good) in two weeks, Chiquilin de Bachin (listen to the Roberto Goyeneche version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCT5FYVIbu0
on U Tube, bueno, bueno, bueno) ... grace for our needs, the gift of
space.
Here is the working title for my book, Life Before. Life before death you might imagine it means, and I did and for quite some time, in a 'depressed dissident' sort of state of mind thinking of all the things I had learned about this year that need to change about End of Life care and so on, We know them all, don’t we, We do, We do. Then I recently began to see the meaning as being life before birth, an umbilical or ur-meaning, or both meanings in fact but, muchas importantes, in that order, decreation
before creation. So Life Before... it is, Es, ça, sa, one way or another, the
mix of friendship and aloneness, flushing out our conversations into the light of day.
Flushed out like one of those whirring-winged pheasants on the estate by a rugged, ruddy faced peasant, tugging at his forelock . . . but really, where else is there but the wilderness.
Posted by: Alan Kirby | November 07, 2009 at 11:57 AM