Reading
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| Érik Desmazières: La Salle des planètes |
― Nikolai Gogol
It began with Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and the journey will always have the appearance of
being static, but only because of the overwhelming fact that thought does not
seem to travel from its visibility outside. I had begun the novel years before
and my imagination was more or less at a complete disconnect back then due to
being rendered almost paralytic by information without emotional content. Means
of escape dwindled as the straight lines of structure appeared more firm and,
though I had momentarily gathered myself together whilst reading Herman
Melville’s Moby Dick years before, I
still felt like the central character Ishmael, lost at sea and abandoned to a sometimes
unforgiving nature. So to be able to pick up War and Peace after many years of silence, of watching and
daydreaming, wrapped in music without words to explain, cloistered in abstract
and isolated concepts and notions of difference and latent meaning everywhere
without the means to direct myself towards it.
Tolstoy’s novel took me almost an entire year and its
stuttering progress was like a film that could only be shot in five minute
reels each time but was worth all the difficulties. I found a certain
confluence had appeared, a certain mutual understanding that I had not
encountered before except within myself. It has always been within, though,
this latent understanding, and the novelist or writer directs it and speaks it
if given the opportunity. As I was to later read in Emerson’s Self- Reliance, I understood that the
concept of genius or of creativity was mostly being capable of having a good
angle, a mirror-like awareness and an ability to see inside of people, rather
than make surface guesses which undermine reality. What I found in War and Peace was a transcendental
philosophy cast in with a sense that everything ends, that everything has a
certain fate. Caught between two concepts, between two “sides” both Russian and
French, between mankind and nature, the novel began to unfold many unrealised
ideas; especially that of the depth of the individual and also a new perspective
on the landscape of humanity in this place.
Tolstoy’s ability to make sense appear in the world through
described movement, through the quiet reflective scenes in nature and when
beauty was emptied of its apparent meaning; when the causes of life’s meaning
were gradually, rather than narrowed, made more mysterious, more ineluctable
and far more rich and complex than could be seen before, the novel began to
take a complete grasp over me. It was then that I understood that I was
travelling and seeing things for the first time, Tolstoy’s protagonist Pierre
explaining with powerful clarity to a friend in suffering the words and
philosophies of Alexander Herzen, who was always to admit that the lines of
humanity could not be traced, and that the complexity rendered beauty and life
possible. Tolstoy himself rendered life possible through anti-historical
conclusions, statements that made history seem so much emptier of prior meaning
and content. The novel was a means of travelling beyond identity and of seeing
connection in whichever direction I may have gone next.
And perhaps this was the point of remaining entirely static
but travelling as far as possible at the time within myself; to really unthread
all that apparently permanent material and look at it for the first time was a
perfect prelude to a wider journey through ideas and even memories. My travels
became attempts to remember, and to find a certain connection with people that
as a child there is a sense of but it is lost in the already-existing language,
the forms of learning, and the already-mapped destinations. That learning is as
much like putting yourself outdoors and seeing the world with your own eyes is
something that became of tremendous value, that having eyes to see was just as
important as to be able to take them somewhere. The intention was to loosen off
all the values that are simply given and to try to create patterns of
understanding within myself, to see the process and not just the idea. In
short, to see the world not as in a frame, but as in a place where everything
is possible; in which a human face not only contains expression but is a tower
of optimism and a cellar of regret, of unexpressed subconscious longing.
Then there was Don
Quixote, miraculously written by Miguel de Cervantes in 1605, in which
imagination became the reality, in which absurdity became romantic (this also
worked the other way around), and where the reader was brought to a new idea of
reading; that there is no actual need for narrative or consistent structure
within a novel for it to take the reader places and it is rather an ecstatic,
meaningful lack of process. The pages teem with expansive tragicomic scenes
which are pushed forwards by the Don Quixote’s absurd yet hugely entertaining
struggle to serve his invented path as a knight errant, a life that he imagined
for himself from the pages of so many stories of chivalry and heroic knights
serving a noble cause. The novel really pushed the boundaries of the self, and
Don Quixote’s unselfconscious humanity perhaps had a role in invented this
self-understanding that is now so useful for making sense of life, and sharing
its internal depths.
It would be impossible to write a
tolerably concise article on three years of going further into the depths of
imagination, and explaining in a short article all the different discoveries,
but it was a useful prelude to travel, to begin to know myself and notice that
there are maybe no limitations upon man except in how the body can travel; the
imagination is endless, and even timeless. Seeing this inside of other people
was the next step forward, seeing possibility and a new set of eyes which
changes through language and climate, through life experiences. Creating a
depth and articulation within myself, and recalling (as Marcel Proust would
demand of me whilst reading In Search of
Lost Time) the past so that it did not separate me too much from other
people; realising that understanding myself was the first condition of really
wanting to feel in another language and to go to another place and to actually
liberate yourself within imagination and make a return with an entirely new way
of looking at structure, of avoiding it for the more impermanent and fleeting
ideas, the ideas that always appear richer because they are host to change and
to possibilities. I found that the need to know myself as a part of this world
preceded my need to find myself in another continent; rather see everything for
the first time, without any coloured perception or any expectation or need to
control differences.
In that I found myself successful,
and I slowly walk through the deepest memories and parts of my imagination
whilst finishing a three year long travel, which was only a prelude to going
somewhere for the first time, and truly the first time. Books lie scattered
everywhere and a library is complete, and like the Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges, I know that it is one of
many and that it has its own well-honed quality, has moved the reader to new
places within himself, and will certainly move more. The nature of reading is
always different and this journey was more or less an unconscious effort to see
parts of myself in other people, to feel that this place was somewhat
limitless, and it has appeared that way. Now I learn languages amidst the
almost finished works of men who died for a certain clarity and vision. Perhaps
the whole meaning of this was to understand that meaning always changes, and
that this is what is so entirely beautiful, this constant inconstant. The
discovery of the self through travel, or before travel, or during travel; it
depends on what sort of person you are and what needs you have. It took a lot
of time to liberate myself from myself and from a notion that I was always
unchanging, always a certain identity that I would see in the mirror. And now I
know that this is not true, and I am not so caught up in definitions when the
underlying process is what is most substantial. So I now see the world with new
eyes, eyes which will hopefully see the depth in every individual rather than a
reflection of myself.
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