Sunday, March 3, 2013

with many blows



As for the decapitated son in the Heike -- forever now running, forever now without his head and running at the same time, headless and running or running into his father's sword -- save yourself father, he says, run away, but no says his father and off goes the head, poor perishing child who never knew, when he approached his father at the age of two or three, that this day was in his future, that this father who gave him a cake would one day take off the head that ate the cake -- I had to look him up too for he had faded like shadows. I remembered his M and none of the other letters. He was this:

M_____


That gap was occupied by I-don't-know-what, an impression or artificial fullness, reassurance, or enough padding to make the word behave like a name, non-intact but nameful, an echo mistaken for a speech. When I remembered him running away from Imai Kanehira a thought came into my head, "What's after the M?" This was a new feature for him, and not in the poem. It was a trait added by myself and no other person. What was his father's name; that was another mystery, and so there were all these mysteries around the mysteries in the story as it would have been if it had been recalled fully in every detail by myself which is how I pretend to remember it when I say, "The Heike is like the Iliad in such and such a way --" all the while feeling endless avenues of but opening here and there as I run down the corridor of this proclaimation, all opening behind me where I cannot see them, still, other people, seeing, saying, "Monsters coming out of that door," like spectators in the audience of a horror movie, pointing, "The Iliad you say?", galloping over that connective bridge even as they doubt it, monsters coming to get them too, coming, coming, coming; and each book teaches a new system of forgetting.

If I knew in advance what I was going to remember then I could have a book made -- I don't know how but it could be done if I had a prophetic telepath and a research assistant; I'd outsource -- with nothing in it except the parts of novels that I was destined to remember. I would read nothing except that book. Then I could start speaking about books or writing blog posts exactly as I'm doing now, based on everything I was supposed to recall. The outsourcee would know when I'd need a reference too, so they'd leave page numbers, eg, they'd write,

son can't escape, running, endangering father, they are being attacked, "Muneyasu was too fat to run even a hundred yards" (Heike, page 436, about three fourths of the way down the page, Seno-o, father won't go, waits with son, beheads him, invites death, slashes at enemy, eventually dies, see pg. 437, "They answered him with many blows | until at last they struck him down.")

I had to look up the page numbers to write that too. It was blahnumber filling the gap this time instead of blahname. If a book disappeared as I was reading it, piece by piece, each page dissolving after I had left it for the next one, and I couldn't go back, I think it would be as if I had eaten it, gone like that.


10 comments:

  1. I just finished Gerald Murnane's Barley Patch, and in several places I felt like I was reading Pykk (but with flatter prose), and now I feel like I reading a more lively Murnane.

    The idea of the book containing only the parts of other books you will remember is like the first third of Murnane's book compressed into a few lines.

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    1. Were you planning to do a write-up? I've been watching Barley Patch in your Currently Reading list and wondering what you'd say about it.

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    2. I have been wondering the same thing. I will know soon.

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    3. Well, not pressuring you, and I mean that seriously, but I'd read it if you did. Have not read the book but I know some of his others.

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  2. I am far too lazy to read Hadrian the Seventh, but I think you are an adventurous reader and would like you to give it a go and tell us about it:
    http://blog.frieze.com/hadrian-the-seventh/

    Murnane has my admiration for having taught himself Hungarian.

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    1. Do I have to read the first six or can I just start there?

      I'll do it, if you're serious (though the article you've linked to wants to call it "in many ways, a dreadful book," so I wonder --) but give me a while, I'm on Finnegans Wake at the moment and I think I may be some time, as Lawrence Oates said one day in Antarctica, refusing both boots and going away to certain death in his socks.

      When I hear about Murnane and Hungarian I think, "And zmkc too, studies Hungarian," and when I see you mention Hungarian I think, "And Murnane too, studies Hungarian," so there you go: reciprocal cycling.

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    2. Is that really true about the boots? I went to primary school with a girl called Oates who claimed some kind of relationship to him. She was quite dull and so it was lucky she had some claim to fame. I shudder on your behalf re Finnegan's Wake. You are extremely brave.

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    3. This article thinks so (http://tinyurl.com/arqsds3) but where it found its information I do not know. Scott's diary doesn't say anything about Oates leaving his boots behind (as far as I can work out, doing a quick skim at Project Gutenberg) and the body never turned up, either booted or bootless. So maybe not.

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  3. By the way, I think studying Hungarian is the epitome of Beckettian futility and, 'I can't go on, I'll go on' is the phrase that most perfectly suits it.

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    1. One of the best endings that any book has ever had.

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