A Confrontation With Falling

The owl you heard hootingIn the middle of the night wasn't me.It was an owl.Or maybe you were So asleep you didn't even hear it. The sprinklers on their timer, programmed to come onAt such a strangely late hour in lifeFor watering a garden,Refreshed your sleep four thousand miles away byHissing sweetly, Dispensing the smell of green in Eden.You heard the summer chirr of insects.You heard a sky of stars.You didn't know it, fast asleep at dawn in Paris.You didn't hear a thing.You heard me calling. I am no longer human.


from Ooga-Booga

This story belongs to a friend of a friend of a friend.
She was on a motorbike. She was crossing an intersection. And then she was caught under a truck somehow, being dragged across the asphalt with the bike sparking beside her. Two paramedic students, who happened to be passing at the time, attended to her body. The news crew arrived and filed the report of her death. The truck and carnage was in the background of the shot no doubt, just out of focus. The reporter would have been standing beside the road looking ruffled, kindly, saddened, urgent.
Except that she wasn’t dead.
The ambulance arrived eventually and she lived, against all odds. Some weeks after that, while she was recovering, she received a package. I don’t know how it arrived, perhaps through a friend of a friend of a friend. It was a DVD. She watches it at every opportunity now. And yet no one else shares the intensity of her fascination. They find it too difficult, too eerie. It’s the news report that never went to air, the story of her death.
In 2002, while the Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz was preparing his Nobel Prize Lecture, he received a large brown envelope in the mail. The letter had been sent to him by the director of the Buchenwald Memorial Centre, the concentration camp where Kertesz arrived, in 1945 at the age of sixteen. Contained within the envelope was a copy of the original camp report from that day, February 18th. In one of the columns, Kertesz was able to read about the death of prisoner #64,921 – factory worker, born 1927. Kertesz had made himself two years older, so that he wouldn’t be classified as a child, and had given his occupation as “worker” rather than student in order to “appear more useful to them.” The war ended before he was able to fulfill the Nazi prophecy.
It would be too easy, as Kertesz himself realizes, to draw from these stories, some belief in an otherworldly order, in some sort of providence, or “metaphysical justice.” To do so, would be to sever “the deep and tortuous ties with the millions who perished and who never knew mercy. But if we are destined to be exceptions”, Kertesz continues, “we must make our peace with the absurd order of chance, which reigns over our lives with the whim of a death squad, exposing us to inhuman powers, monstrous tyrannies.”
Thinking of these stories, I think also, though aslant, almost inappropriately I know, of Tom Ford’s recent, somewhat overrated film, A Single Man, and how, in the face of his immanent suicide, the main character’s world acquires again the colour and smell of miracle. For less than a day, he lives like an angel, drenched in the last beauty of things, in the toxic Californian luminosity. In one particular scene, he stops a woman on the street, so that he can smell the ears of her small dog, a smell that reminds him of buttered toast.
I can understand that desire to watch and re-watch the scene of my own death. I can imagine it becoming an obsession, the desire to feel the drug of its liberation as often as possible – that uncanny trick of time, and the taste of coffee perhaps, since I would watch it over breakfast, and drink coffee that I shouldn’t be able to taste, in the wash of morning sun that I shouldn’t be able to feel washed by.
The privilege which Kertesz shares with this motorbike survivor, is the tangible evidence of his own miraculousness. While the rest of us, survivors in our own less cataclysmic manner, and without the adamancy of such proof, must find our own ways to die, our own ways, every morning, to get reborn.

A woman came into the bookshop where I work the other day and admitted to being a Virgo. Even though she was aching to read the final installment in Steig Larsson’s absurdly successful Millennium Trilogy, the size of the current trade-paperback was putting her off. The thought of having a third book on her shelf, which didn’t match the size of the first two, was overwhelming. She’d rather starve.

My own father, also a recovering Virgo, toiled similarly under the tyrannical reign of such extreme orderliness. You could hear him the whole length of the house away, restacking the dishwasher and swearing at the recklessness of our original design – the sheer idiocy of the way in which we’d placed the special ceramic cups next to the saucepans, the single-bloody-minded blasphemy of our plate order. In the garden outside, the pegs on the clothes-line were colour-coordinated – red red, yellow yellow, blue blue etc and the cracks between the bricks were cleaned of moss and other non linear, rhizomatic forms of rebellion, no exaggeration, with a small metal implement made painstakingly in the garage for just such a purpose. It was a way he had of keeping chaos in order, a way that brings to my mind the orderly rows of human bodies we tend to line up after some shocking disaster. Lists and straight lines render the terror, at least in part, manageable.

For many years, especially the ones during which I was listening to a lot of Rage Against The Machine, my father represented an absurd order, against which I was waging chaos. (I must have been reading Lacan at the time, if I remember correctly, because I also spent inordinate periods of time looking at myself in the mirror.) We inherit the world of our parents, after all, and it takes about 15 years or so before we realize what a mess they’ve made of it, what a diabolical system of stupidities and inequalities they’ve abided, and abetted and bequeathed.

Two films reminded me recently of this enduring and universal tension between fathers and sons, between the order, which "The Father" represents, and the chaos, which his literal replacement, "The son", promises. These divisions are by nature, reversible, of course. The Father’s order weakens upon closer examination and is revealed as chaos. It is The Son, so to speak, who must teach him the new order.

Not long after Hugo Weaving was the voice of an evil robot / car, in Transformers, he became Kev, a struggling father and thug in Glendyn Ivin’s wonderful, Last Ride, a film which disappeared somehow without a trace, and without winning every single Australian film prize, for which it seemed destined. The ride in question is a desperate lurch through South Australia, undertaken by Kev and his young son Chook in a series of stolen cars, while the forces of consequence and disaster gather and close on them. Kev, charged with the job of protecting and teaching his young son, struggles against his own erratic cruelty, even repeating in one sublimely terrifying scene, the vicious methods of his own father, by abandoning Chook in the middle of a salt lake.

The Road, John Hillcoat’s rendering of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, might be viewed in this context as an auspicious companion to Last Ride, it’s strange mirror. The road tells, similarly, the story of a father and son who travel across a bleak, beautifully rendered desolation toward nothing really.

According to the historian and sociologist Theodore Zeldin, Humanity’s job has always been to produce more humanity. To begin with, this was a matter of numbers – of survival and procreation. Gradually, it has become a question of dignity, of humaneness. Amidst the chaos, these films ask by extension, how do we find ways to order our most noble impulses, to institutionalize dignity, to extend, even by a little the amount of goodness in an already broken world bequeathed to us by the previous generation?


At the end of his book, Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, proposes one such possibility:

“Learn and seek to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis played last night at the Astor, twice – once on the main screen and once, simultaneously, as a cropped reflection in the glass cabinet where the emergency fire hose is kept.
From its inception, cinema was obsessed with its own creation, with the miraculous production of itself, the reproduction of life. It rehearsed this infatuation, subliminally in part I think, through the character of the toiling scientist, the scientist driven half mad by his own brilliance, and by the scientist’s bastard offspring, his mirror – the monster or robot.


Cinema, of course, was one among many new technologies, which were rapidly changing the world. Amongst these early filmmakers, there is a noticeable ambivalence, towards the uncertainty of this technological future, and toward their own part in its conception. The scientist is driven mad by his God-like power; his hubris and his narcissism are his downfall.
This obsession with the scientist is, more accurately, an identification with the chemist, with his concoctions and innumerable steaming beakers, and thus naturally with alchemy. No doubt this has everything to do, also, with the original process by which photographic images were drawn out from their chemical baths in the dark room. Early cinema can be thought of, in fact, as the literal reenactment of this process – the revelation of images, by some miraculous process, to those gathered in a dark room.
Behind cinema, like its shadow, stands the anatomy lesson of history, the revelation not of life, but of death. The scientist who unveils his robot, his monster, reinterprets the scene in which the physician unveiled the inner workings of the human body.

Watching Metropolis, you realize how dramatically the early film-makers actually defined the genre, how different film would have been without them. When Guy Madden made his brilliant silent film Brand upon the Brain! in 2006, he drew upon this history of scientific obsession, to create a portrait of his own father as a mad scientist, forever toiling underground, cooking up potions made with the brain-sap he collected from orphans. And in Victor Erice’s 1973 masterpiece, The Spirit of the Beehive, 6-year-old Ana, too young to understand the distinction between fact and fiction, becomes obsessed with Frankenstein’s Monster, believing him to be a sort of spirit. Which is what photography, and by extension cinema is after all, a second self, a sort of spirit, cut from life or risen from death.

The other day I found the photograph below, (here) one of the first ever taken. The man’s name was Robert Cornelius and the year was 1839, yet it feels like it could have been yesterday. It’s like looking at a spirit, or the atom from which cinema was born.

PLUS the subconcious art of testing stuff in space:











from HERE

It’s been said, and for the most part I agree, that people who enjoy waving flags don’t deserve to have them. Australians did their best to confirm this theory last week, on National be a dickhead day. Acland Street was full of people trying to park their Cadillacs and waving things they’d just bought from the Two Dollar shop, made of Chinese plastic. Writing in the Brisbane Mail, John Birmingham identified a new shift in Australia’s attitude to being a dickhead:

“One of the things I really like about Australia, or I used to anyway, was our quiet reluctance to wave the flag in everyone's face; a reluctance which has gradually given way to an uglier, brutish readiness to paint the flag on our arses and sit on the face of anyone who looks even remotely disinclined to play along.”

As a quick glance at the primary policies of the Australian Protectionist Party will attest to, most of this Fascist flag waving stems from a fear of strangers common to humans during the rudimentary stages of their evolution, The Middle Paleolithic Era, at least 40 000 years ago. The Protectionists, (and you can blink disbelievingly at their website here) are actively working for:

“…sensible immigration programmes that will be geared towards accepting into our country only those people who will readily fit into our society, primarily from traditional sources such as Europe and Britain.”

In direct opposition to this sort of grunting, the philosopher and historian Theodore Zeldin is explicitly concerned with expanding the way in which we identify our roots, or our socio-historical origins. In his groundbreaking study of human emotions An Intimate History of Humanity, Zeldin claims:

“The mind is a refuge for ideas dating from many different centuries, just as cells of the body are of different ages, renewing themselves or decaying at varying speeds. Instead of explaining the peculiarity of individuals by pointing to their family or childhood, I take a longer view: I show how they pay attention to – or ignore – the experience of previous, more distant generations, and how they are continuing the struggles of many other communities all over the world, whether active or extinct, from the Aztecs and the Babylonians to the Zoroastrians, among whom they have more soul-mates than they might realize.”

According to Zeldin, fear has historically been overcome by one of two methods. The first is by replacing the old fear with a new, slightly more hopeful fear. The second is through curiosity to what is different or unknown.

Reading Zeldin, whilst at the same time being attacked with Australianess ads and barbeque propaganda has prompted in me the desire to perhaps declare complete and sacred independence from Australia, at least for one day a year. And since furthermore, and against the odds, I do actually enjoy waving a flag, albeit in a kind of pathetic way every night before I go to bed, I am now calling for a new day, on which we can each declare our independence, not just from Australia, but from all nations, organizations, political parties, violent gangs, scout clubs, reading groups, artist collectives, mother’s committees and trout farms. Xenization Day, which is the catchy title I’ve settled on, celebrates the process of being a stranger everywhere, holds sacred our own essential loneliness, promotes the creation of flimsy handmade individual independence flags and encourages adventure to foreign lands where, with every new encounter we might meet a new race of person who will not will readily fit into our society. As Bjork declared on her most recent album, Volta:

Start your own currency Make your own stamp Protect your language Declare independence!

It's my birthday today and maybe i feel a little bit like this:

from here: ParkeHarrison-the architects brother


ahoy!

Philip Wolfhagen - Winter Nocturne IV

It’s often said that people speak of the weather only when they have nothing else to say. This cliché is an attempt for whatever reason, to separate us from the world, to install us instead in some half furnished future where the air-conditioning works overtime to delude us. “Meteorology”, as W.G. Sebald taught, not long before his death, “is not superfluous to the story. Don't have an aversion to noticing the weather.”

Some day’s ago, in any event, suffering under the sort of malaise beneath which Sebald himself seemed invariably to be struggling, I had the idea to head out toward the coast, with a few members of the Malvern Surrealist Movement, to see the watery part of Sorrento. It’s a way many of us have, if we’re lucky, of driving off the nameless despair, which envelopes us once every while, like a smoky vapour. The purpose of these expeditions, if the truth be known, is merely to notice the weather in a little more detail.

Whenever I find myself growing weary of my own company, whenever a weedy abandoned block opens out in my heart, whenever I find myself wistfully contemplating the precarious height of bridges and window ledges; and especially when old people, far from appearing somehow holy, (by virtue of their being so close to death,) seem exceedingly stupid instead, stumbling unthinkingly as they do across the barren years towards their inevitable and unconsidered end, then I reckon it about time to get out coastward and go snorkelling.

A little while ago, during the 1920’s, the French poet Francis Ponge was a very angry young man. “Too angry”, according to Margaret Guiton, “to commit himself to much more than sporadic gestures of one sort or another. He was angry at all human institutions and arrangements, most particularly the words whereby this sordid state of things insidiously penetrates our minds.” Gradually, Ponge came around, to the point where he was able to declare, that all poems should bear the title “Reasons for Living Happily.”

“At least in my case, he said, each (poem) I write is like a note I try to hit when, during a meditation or contemplation, a rocket of words bursts from my body that refreshes it and encourages it to live a few days longer.”

This self-renewal through language is always initiated, according to Ponge, by the mind’s “return to things.” In the soupy present world, where we are surrounded as much by the absence as by the presence of things; the return to the real, to tangible objects and to the weather, by some careful recognition, almost inevitably precipitates the desire to live happily, at least for a few extra days.

Ponge writes of “things” in a way that few poets have ever been capable, or willing. He writes of “The Mollusk”, “Bread”, “Vegetation,” “The Cigarette”, “Dung”, The Pebble” and “Moss”, but by utilizing a constant process of defamiliarisation and by transforming the language of science with the urgency of an elemental philosophy, these insignificant “things” are revealed again as they might be to a child or to the first human, as essentially miraculous.

Of The Seashore, Ponge writes:

"…An elementary concert, made all the more pleasurable and thought-provoking by its discretion, has here been offered to nobody through all eternity. For the first time since it was formed by the insistent action of the wind on a boundless platitude, a wave, come smoothly from a great distance, at last finds someone to defy.

But only a single brief word is vouchsafed to the pebbles and shells, which seem quite moved, and the wave dies uttering it; and all that follow will die uttering the same word, sometimes a bit more loudly. Climbing over one another as they reach the first rows of the orchestra, each draws itself up a bit, bares its head, and gives its name to whomever it is addressing."

To my mind, there is no one who can speak so well about the weather. “If speaking of earth like this makes me a minor poet, Ponge said, “an earth tiller, that’s what I want to be! I do not know a grander subject.”

The end of the year grants us the opportunity to look back and remember which celebrities have died. That’s the truth. We like our death filtered through the spectacle of obscene wealth and fame and obscured by the low resolution of paparazzi images. We hold death at the distance of Myth, in order to comprehend it. And then we have a party and get really messed up.

New Year’s Eve is by definition, a funeral ritual, the means by which we sublimate our fear of death. It is our little Armageddon, where we rehearse the end of time. Even the annual firework display, seems to anticipate some spectacle of devastation, enclosing whole bridges in fire and smoke. Perhaps this is why I am clinically terrified of New Year's Eve, and why I haven’t really enjoyed it since 1991, when I was allowed to stay up and watch Clive James on television talking about which celebrities died during the year. It was the only day, as far as I can remember, on which I was allowed to watch T.V., a novelty that I’m still excited about.

The other day in Portugal, thousands of octopuses enacted their own little Armageddon, by washing up dead along a stretch of beach some 5 miles long. “Authorities have warned the public not to eat them.” A volcano, in other news, is threatening villagers and chimpanzees in the Congo with ash and molten lava. In this slightly morbid mood, such news put me in mind of a strange little Werner Herzog documentary my family and I watched this Christmas Eve, instead of going to midnight mass. “Waiting for an Inevitable Disaster” is Herzog at his most mythic, trespassing through a deserted Caribbean island town in the shadow of a smoldering volcano. Donkeys and dogs have taken over the streets. The traffic lights continue to change, a television plays from an abandoned house, but the rest of the town is eerily empty, silent, like some sort of science fiction set. Every boat has left the harbour, but the water, so we are told, is full of snakes that fled the mountains and threw themselves into the sea, to drown.

In 1902 the same volcano, La Soufriere, emitted identical warning signs before it wiped out the entire population, bar one. The only survivor ironically, so Hertzog tells us, was a criminal, “the badest guy in the Town” who was protected from the blast by the walls of his solitary confinement cell. The lucky man spent the next miserable years of his life as a touring curiosity. Herzog discovers three similar characters in the present tense who have decided, out of poverty or madness or profound spiritual acceptance, to stay behind and face their inevitable death. One such man lies under a tree with a cat, at the base of the Volcano. “God takes us all to him, not just me” he tells Herzog. “Why should I be afraid?”

Profound spiritual acceptance is something I tried practicing this New Years Eve. It’s like when the plane wobbles 33 000 feet above the earth, and your heart skips its beat and you’re able to think, for the longest second, “here it is, my death, welcome.” This year I didn’t get messed up. I stood on a beach in Wilson’s Promontory and watched the sky blacken, watched the pink lightning pulse on the horizon. When it grew dark we drove home through the blackness, slowly enough to avoid wombats, but too fast to avoid the frogs, as the road steamed in the rain. Then we watched channel nine present the Sydney Fireworks, the two onscreen presenters like Emissaries from hell. Afterwards, we lit sparklers and some sort of animal made a noise like a horse breathing heavily in the bush beside us. Then we went to bed and dreamt and woke up in the new decade.

Last week we had our gumtree cut down. It was lifting up the house looking for water, and posing various dangers to the property and life of the neighbours. It had been around since Dad first bought the house 30 years ago. I feared for it in storms, but it was the best tree on the whole street and its death is, in some ways, a freshening of the grief we all felt when my father died. The photos of the whole process reminded me of a painting I made six months ago, of a lone man in a forest, a woodcutter perhaps.

When the people from the little town of Munshk awoke one autumn morning, they discovered that the council had been busy without them. In the town square, or more precisely, where the town square had previously been, now stood an enormous public art. And since the public art was not just a lump of something, (as had been explicitly stated in the proposal), but was rather, a living, breathing inhabitant of the city, parts of it stuck out much further than what had previously been understood as the rightful geographical boundaries of the former town square. Parts of it had been found in Berlow’s Bakery, other bits had made their way, or so people said, into Mr Peaks illegitimate bed while he was in the middle of it, and still other associated remnants of it had awoken the drunks even before they could be kicked awake, in an alcove two miles from the epicentre.

 

It won’t surprise you to know, that the inhabitants of Munshk, (a quiet brewery town on the outskirts of more important places) were very much flummoxed by the imposition. The night-watchman, for one, whose job it is to do the kicking of the drunks, had been particularly put-out. I was passing through at the time, there are fiords nearby, and I witnessed some of the grave events that were to follow, with my own eyes. Other events were told to me by Barry, the brewery worker and by Gavin, also a brewery worker, in the pub on the corner of Elm and Pelican Sts.

 

The inauguration ceremony that first evening went smoothly enough, though the speech by the important politician went on for far too long (and became increasingly strange), and the whole event was accompanied by the dull mutterings of discontent, like the rumbling of an enormous belly. Also some kid began yelling that his dog had disappeared.

 

The next day three more children were complaining of missing their dogs.  By the end of the week, there wasn’t a single dog – rabid, stray, deaf or otherwise, left in the entire town and it seemed clear to everyone that something should be done lest they themselves be devoured next by the big fucking dog-trap that the council had installed in their midst.

 

So the citizens of Munshk held a meeting, and there they came up with a plan. They gathered all the homeless people they could find and lead them by rope to the big public art. Then they fastened them to a lamp-post and ran back to their cars, to wait with the doors locked. Nights and days past. The homeless people died of exposure or thirst, of enforced homelessness basically, and the big public art was dismantled and carried away, every bit they could find, in many different boxes and put into storage with all the other public art that cannot be entirely disposed of, like radiation. 

It’s true, I have seen things I wish I had never seen. And yet I have become accustomed, living like this, to catching those close glimpses into our neighbours lives. I knew who was home by the light in their windows, and I got used to hearing those half-phrases, or watching, not for long, but watching nevertheless, their mouths move in the kitchen as they talked, as they discussed their plans or cooked. At night when a sudden rain began, we would all, separately, come to our windows, which is to say, to our senses, as if the rain reminded us of something.

And whether we performed for each other in some way or not (certainly not like those people in high rise city blocks who perform for each other, nakedly and each with their own telescope), we at least knew and were comforted no doubt by the knowledge that our presence, at the very least was being registered, that our music was being overheard, that the books on our shelves and the paintings we had hung on our walls were being glimpsed and guessed at from across a small divide of air, through the glass of two windows.

Occasionally we would greet each other, ambiguously, and I dreamt of them vividly sometimes, moving through the slightly altered architecture of our shared buildings, lighting cigarettes in the thick dream heat, some sub-tropical evening. There is, even awake, quite often a dreamlike quality to living so close to one another, without ever knowing one another’s names. And once, when I had woken in a storm, and was sitting in the dark on my steps, which face their steps, smoking, I heard a door open nearby. But it was only when the lightning illuminated everything for half a second, that I saw her standing on her balcony, naked, like the wooden statue at the prow of an old ship.

It’s strange that they managed to leave without me noticing. The window-sills have been cleared of their potted plants. The walls are bare and the rooms remain dark, even at night when we used to cook dinner across from one another, without looking. I catch myself peering out sometimes, still, to see what they're doing. It’s like when you open the window to hear the rain at night, only to realise that you’re mistaken – that the sound you thought you heard was the sound of a shower somewhere else in the building, or nothing at all, not even the wind.

The day she died, and without realising what had happened or was about to happen, I was watching this documentary about her.

"I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands" she said.

There is a small, goat ridden and rocky island in the Caribean called Redonda, to which one can belong, theoretically, as a member, though not, so to speak, as a citizen, given that the absence of any significant source of fresh water has made it impossible to live there.
Nevertheless, Redonda is a Kingdom, ruled over from afar by a King, or, more precisely, by a series of individuals who all claim to be the King. One such claimant is the Spanish author Javier Marias, who also runs a small publishing house called Reino de Redonda (Kingdom of Redonda) and awards a particular literary prize, which bestows upon the recipient, along with a certain sum of money, the title of Duke or Duchess of the said Kingdom. Previous winners include, Pedro Almodóvar, who became the Duke of Trémula, Francis Ford Coppola – the Duke of Megalópolis, Alice Munro – the Duchess of Ontario, and J. M. Coetzee who likewise became the Duke of Deshonra. Apparently W.G Sebald also received from Marias, the official title: Duke of Vertigo.

Strangely, the island of Redonda lies beside the Island where Herzog made his beautiful and cruel little documentary, "La Soufrière - Waiting for an Inevitable Disaster") in 1977. Sebald’s work bares many startling resemblances to that of Herzog and so it seems only natural that he have some sort of influence in those seas, where, according to Herzog, the snakes drowned themselves to get away from the volcano.

A portrait of the King from, by Jan Peter Tripp which appears W.G Sebald's, Unrecounted

It is on the vague advice of W.G Sebald, the Duke of Vertigo, that I finished reading, just this morning, Javier Marias’ remarkable novel, A Heart So White.

The novel is narrated by Juan, a recently married translator, and begins like this:

"I didn’t want to know but I have since come to know, that one of the girls, when she wasn’t a girl anymore and hadn’t long been back from her honeymoon, went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra, and aimed her fathers gun at her heart, her father at the time was in the dining room with other members of the family and three guests."

This woman, so it turns out, was the previous wife of Juan’s father, Ranz, before Ranz remarried the dead woman sister and had Juan. In this way, she is both almost mother and aunt to Juan, and yet, of course, she is neither, could never have been either, her death being a prerequisite for his existence.

This blurring of the boundaries between characters – where one person almost becomes another, or another, is central to Maria’s novel, as are the notions of chance and inevitability and the voyeuristic, sexualised violence.

The second scene takes place during Juan’s own honeymoon in Cuba. His new wife Louisa is ill and lies feverishly asleep in the hotel bed. Juan is standing at the balcony, when he notices a young woman waiting impatiently on the street corner below. At a certain point, the woman looks up directly at Juan, appears to recognise him and begins yelling, insulting him and rushing angrily towards his hotel window.

The woman, it turns out, has mistaken Juan for the man in the room next door, a man who we eventually hear, but never see. Juan and Louisa listen to the two people arguing through the wall, as the woman from the street threatens to kill herself, demanding instead that the man kill his dying wife.

The novel sets out a series of acts or tableau’s which remain distinct at first but gradually leach into one another, until they become all but indiscernible. Marias untangles his themes so delicately that, by the novels end he is concluding numerous sub-plots simultaneously, as a caucophony of intermingling voices, characters, quotes, thoughts, memories, times and places merge.

Much like his recently completed trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow, (both titles come from Shakespeare) A heart So White is a novel which deals with the twin acts of speech and silence, with secrecy and with the corrupting power of knowledge. As Terry Pitts has pointed out “Marias uses the world of spies and spying” (or in this case listening and translating) “as a vast, flexible metaphor for literature”, and yet it would be a mistake to consider his work as mere self-reflexivity, as literature about literature first and foremost.

A heart So White raises many such questions to do with translation and deception and story telling, but these are essentially questions about the possibility and responsibilities of knowing one another in the world as men and women and families, specifically. More generally though, they are about the dubious possibilty of knowing anything for certain. Fiction is truth spoken, and the very act of speech not only falsifies but carries with it, its own unimaginable consequences. To speak or to remain silent, to act or to remain still, to know or to remain ignorant these are the questions which Marias confuses and tries to negate, since nothing can be known in its entirety. And yet even partial knowledge stains, and every act carries its own impurity, such that we cannot long remain, with a heart so innocent, so uninvolved, so white.

To be in the world unites us with others, with their horror and capacity for violence, which we have, in many cases, no choice but to accept.
And this is true to the extent that we no longer know where another’s responsibility ends and ours begins.

At the same time, Marias emphasises our separation from each other, the exclusions and secrets which even language cannot overcome and the threat which marriage poses to male identity. The central image, and the one beautifully rendered on the cover of the American edition, is of a man standing on a balcony, looking out onto the street. Behind him lies the domestic world, marriage, obligation, the necessary singularity of ones identity. This is the world to which he belongs, the world he has chosen and from which he cannot escape except by an act of violence, and yet he has his back turned on it. Before him lies the outside world, the multiplicity of selves and possibilities from which he is now excluded.

For the characters in this novel, the spectre of violence hangs behind every sexual act. Sex and violence are both secrets in this world and thus natural partners. Men cannot be trusted, either to act honestly or to act without cruelty. Even Juan’s casual silences might be small betrayals, in a certain light, especially if we consider marriage as the impossible unity of two distinct people, who cannot hope to share the same mind, the same loyalties, the same histories.

In Marias' world, (and in this sense it’s a distinctly, even unfashionably masculine book) man is caught between the one and the many; between the isolation which even speech cannot overcome, and the loss of ones own self, ones innocence, in the chaos that speech calls forth.