Napoleon's Roads

by David Brooks

  ~

  If everything that we write, every word-thing we create, is carved out of silence, chaos, emptiness, the vast Outside, it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that the winds or currents of that chaos, that silence outside us, will sometimes make off with a portion of it, and will carry it far beyond reach. But if it stands to reason, that may be all that it stands to, and doesn’t account for the nagging pattern of such depredations, the way so many of them seem to bear upon the same channels of thought, seem to hover about the same subjects, the same borders.

  ~

  Although, in the works of Heinborn, there is nothing specifically on textual loss, Gilberto Raimondi, the most perceptive of his biographers, argues that such was not only a logical extension of his work, but an actual subject, though a subject that itself, as if in demonstration of Heinborn’s own theories of Omission (‘The Aetiology of Omission’, 1933), did not survive the destruction of his papers. But by the same token, since there is no omission that does not leave its residue, this possible subject can, from hints, fragments, implications – those verbal raised eyebrows for which Heinborn is so famous – be reconstructed. In one of the notorious ‘secret seminars’ in the unofficial conference on his work at Clermont-l’Hérault in 1955 he is said to have spent the first hour speaking of that of which he was not able to speak, given that, on the train from Düsseldorf, he had ‘lost’ the first section of his lecture, a trope which some immediately suspected to have been an invention in demonstration of the very Verschwinden (disappearance) that was his subject.

  ~

  The Night of the Lost Pages. In fact, when he first thought of it like that, no pages per se had been lost at all, only the script that should have been on them. He had woken in the pitch dark with a thought in his mind that he had not wanted to lose – something that had come from a dream – and so had got up and found his notebook and a pen, and written it down. As he was about to return to bed, a last, precautionary codicil had struck him – one idea so often led to another – and he had picked up the writing materials and, turning off the light in the study, walked back through the dark house to the bedroom. Crossing the foyer he had dropped the ballpoint pen but, having heard where it clattered on the tiles, had been able to find it without turning on the light and had continued to the bedroom. Ten minutes later, in bed, on cue, as if the initial thought – it had been little more than an image – had been only an advance guard, a warning, an entire argument had come to him, an answer to a metaphysical problem that had been troubling him for years. And so simply, so clearly could he see it now, that it might have been an exact formula, a philosophical principle as clear as that of Pascal’s Wager, or at the very least one of the aphorisms of Schopenhauer.

  Afraid that if he went back to the study he would lose it, so brightly and urgently did it appear, and yet not wanting to wake Grace by turning on the reading-light – knowing, too, how light can dissipate the focus – he had sat on the edge of the bed in the dark writing it all out in note-form over four or five pages, the words burning, glowing within him, a trace, a gem, a gift such as comes to even the greatest writers only a handful of times in their career. And then had lain there, heart racing, the ramifications spread out before him like a grand vista, a wide landscape of thought, and eventually slept profoundly, as if the thinking itself – the receiving – had exhausted him.

  The next morning, remembering, he had turned immediately, excitedly, to see what he had written, only to find that the ballpoint had been damaged by its fall, and that, apart from an occasional sputtering, there was almost no trace of the lucid, inspired writing he had done, and of which now, so deeply had he slept, he remembered little more than the exuberance and an occasional haunting word or phrase.

  A morning of intense frustration followed as he tried by all means he could think of to rescue the text. But the most careful, most delicate rubbings only served to increase his disappointment as he found the pressure applied – the scoring of the inkless pen – to one side of the page had been rendered only the more illegible by the pressure applied by the pen to the obverse. Where he could produce any image at all it resembled not text so much as a writhing of snakes.

  ~

  as late this afternoon, when, after a storm, with another storm promising – the day having been hot though overcast, as humid as a sauna – he set out for the beach and a swim in the grey swell. He had hardly reached the top of Carr Street when the first idea came to him, of something – a story? an essay? – about the Language of Birds. Not the one/s they speak themselves, but how the names we have for them are so inadequate, so misleading, signifiers floating above the signified. All the birds missed or not caught in its net. All the ‘stages’ of birds that don’t fit into the simple descriptions of ‘immature’ or ‘adult’ that the field guides provide. All the colour-forms between one ‘stage’ and another. All the exotic, blown or travelling birds that are not supposed to be where we see them. The idea getting no further than this before the next idea crossed it like static from a new place and he had begun, only a block further down the three-block hill, to think more of the birds in this place, or, rather, this place that the birds were in.

  ~

  B. suggests that this is mere paranoia, that it is only a matter of brain cells dying, but how could that contribute? We use only a small portion of the brain’s capacity. Who is to calculate the effect of a minuscule attrition of what is already only partly employed?

  ~

  Dead text. Lost text. Text that has broken itself against the impossible. Boulder Or been broken, cracked from within. Shattered by something it couldn’t contain. Was too fragile. Iron text, rusted. Corroded by time. Acid in the air. The rain. You see them. Beached in the grass. At the Aral Sea. Those boats. Or on the edges of the Danube. Near Linz. Near Galati. Words painted on their bows. Barely legible. Some dream. Some intention. in the Footprints. Idea gone off. Beyond finding. The tracker not capable. You see but there is not the will. Not passage. Words locked in silence. Pages like arctic ice. And the sewers. The threaders. Of fragments. These ragged clothes. The sewers. A murrain. Terminal. Breccia. heart’s ‘Nothing / left but a / mind / flaring’. ‘As if’.

  ~

  But in truth it was hardly the first time. Never before such a revelation, perhaps – never before a thought of such brilliance, such clarity, resolving so much (but that was all he remembered, the feeling that it would resolve, that it had, just then, resolved) – but small, glowing fragments of a puzzle one might at some point piece together, or seeds, that with careful nurturing might grow into a poem, say, or story. On a filing card, a bus ticket, a docket from the supermarket, fallen from one’s pocket as one fumbled for change, or accidentally discarded in some pile of now irretrievable wastepaper, or slipped somewhere into the leaves of a book in one’s impossible library – lost, or if, as sometimes happened, found again – for sometimes they were found – found also to have been sketched with ridiculous, self-defeating self-confidence, with too many lacunae, too many passages marked by dots, to be filled out later with things now far beyond the mind’s recall. Forgotten, if it was an idea before the idea before sleep, in the absurd belief that it would somehow be remembered in the morning. So that it was not a page, a phrase, a word that was lost, so much as a connection within, and only oneself to blame.

  Perhaps, he thought, trying to explain this, it was the loss itself – its power to fixate one – that gave these thoughts their apparent value, the way one can become almost obsessed over a lost glove, a spanner, when one could so easily go out and buy others. But mightn’t it be, too, that it was something in the thoughts themselves that could not allow them to be uttered? The sudden, awe-ful thought – ridiculous, yes, paranoid, yes, but nonetheless awful for that – that there was Something, Someone, against all his scepticism, all his disbelief, and that that Thing, that Being could not allow what he had uttered – what he had thought to utter – to be written, to be published, to be seen. A Thing? A Being? Or w
as it a system, the System, so deep, so filamentous that it operated through him or around him, in the night, in the patterns of waste, in the patterns of luck, so as to cancel out a part of him, so as to have him cancel a part of himself? (For might it not, also, be he himself, some part of him, who was not allowing, as the writing came close to something – some secret, from the dark field of secrets – so deeply hidden, so repressed, that when a fragment surfaced, or some fragment upon the surface resonated, some other part, some guardian of the subconscious snatched that fragment from sight …)

  ~

  … as if in an age … I once typed, rapidly into a file on my word processor in that tiny room on rue Buci, when we have done away with such lordly imperatives, there are words which may not be spoken, thoughts which may not be thought, or the doing away with imperatives were itself a veiled imperative … And then, most bizarre of all, looked up at what I had just keyed, to find that, as had never happened before, what I had written had leapt into large letters – had I entered a command I did not know about? – shouting at me, as if a part of me were shouting at myself, trying to warn me: words which may not be spoken, thoughts which may not be thought

  ~

  … kite. And she had thought it was the thing of paper I was speaking of but I meant of course the raptor, and the shadow of the wing, touching the mind, something as fleeting, as evanescent as that, as it swooped, on its own business …

  *

  She tells me, in another mood, that there are some things that are simply unspeakable, and that writing, whatever else it might be, is also a seeking-out of these, that they are a curse and point of it. Why is it, she asks me, that whenever someone writes about Yen Dokla – the sheer abject horror of what occurred there – they find themselves in the middle of legal action, accusations of plagiarism, their integrity and ability in question, unless there were not some unconscious communal agreement that this were a wordless place, a not-to-be-spoken, or the horror were somehow un-writable, a silence that art cannot break? To write strongly and powerfully the horror of things, she says, doesn’t one have to resort to techniques, tropes, mouldings of sounds and words that belong to the realm and mind of art, not of the reality and the horror? To speak it, in this sense, is to betray. To make language powerful, she tells me, is also to take it away. Something else – weakness, deprivation, erosion, loss – becomes necessary if we are going to intimate or locate the unspeakable, if we are going to say it.

  ~

  Night-thoughts often, from my insomnia, when one writes in the dark, fumbling for the pen and the book beside the bed, writing by feel on a page one prays is blank, the words sometimes running off the paper’s edge, hoping that in the flow of a thought or image one has not forgotten oneself and, failing to space the lines carefully by finger-breadths, over-written one’s own writing so that, line laid upon line, word scrawled upon word – the breaks between words, on one line, obliterated, bridged over, by the words of the over-writing line – one has created only an indecipherable knot, a kind of black mass …

  ~

  Reminding us of Freud’s statement that there is no such thing as accident – tracing it, humorously, back through Napoleon and Schiller – Raimondi, reconstructing from hints and fragments the position of the Heinborn, a position which he describes as the lacuna about which all the philosopher’s work turns, argues not only that those things which are lost are deliberately so, as modes of repression, but that the loss does not come from within the individual, as a form of psychosis, but from without, given that the individual is a social construct, and is best conceived as infiltrated, from the point of his/her inception, by devices – psychosocial strategia – that filter discourse, determine what may or may not pass utterance. You ‘lose’ text; you ‘lose’ pages; your computer ‘swallows’ a fragment, a paragraph, a document, a month’s work, but it is never ‘accident’.

  ~

  A barricaded village hemmed in by snow, wolves and mounted marauders, struggling to keep them at bay. True, a thought only. But who is to say that, even as these words are written, it is not being snuffed out, as the first gates are smashed, the first of the invaders break through, homes, barns, woodpiles already blazing from the burning arrows?

  ~

  Clear night words – or, if not clear, at least the spidery-because-unseeing hand decipherable – leading to a furrow or trench where two other lines cross and for a short space – four or five words – write over. As if another animal had used the same narrow pass, obliterating the tracks of the first. Memory, partial as it is, suggests one thing, although attempts to decipher the scrambled lines do not seem to support it:

  that ,a ssing

  but I

  pages ssing

  utterable as they

  ggling

  dismiss

  its

  ~

  Raimondi, in The Hidden Heinborn (1986), identifies the thread of a counter-movement, a kind of rescue. Whereas Schiller, Napoleon, claim there is no accident because all is in fact fate, Heinborn demurs, although in a manner that suggests he is himself battling with his own in-filt(rat)ers, telling a tale of a philosopher, on the very margins of empire, exiled amongst savages, believing he is alone, and that the insights to which he has at last come, into the mind of empire, will die with him, unaware that the weakest point of empire, its periphery, is so not only because it is here that it meets its as-yet-unconquered resistance, but because it can be only so long before those internal resisters banished to it realise, counter-intuitively, that they are not alone, and that, in their very isolation, they have a power they had not thought they had. What are the implications for what has been lost? Is there hope of retrieval? Has he identified – embodied – that loss, within the person of the exiled man who does not know that he is not alone?

  ~

  Save continually, B. says, back everything up. But even this will not stop it. There is a kind of rent that you pay to the Machine. A word here, an emended sentence there, a whole set of edits and corrections, a lapse of concentration, a mis-filing, a careless or accidental deletion. At last, she says, we’ve come to a point, a technology, where – to all appearances – words can disappear without trace, or where only the True Adepts, the Technocrats, can retrieve them. There are also, out there, the viruses, that can be imported, can infiltrate, obeying some other program, cutting swathes through our documents, eating whole fields of text.

  ~

  How there had been difficulty getting here this time – how they had had difficulty – and he had been afraid he’d lost his connection, his link to it, which would be like losing a sacred centre, one of the few he had, maybe the only, and how, perhaps, he should write this down, all of it, in a journal entry, or in a letter to someone, but before he had worked much on the idea, and by now at the foot of Carr Street, on the top of the beach track, he found himself making, still only in his mind, a different kind of journal entry, on a further idea the previous idea had suggested. But by the time he had found the first words for this he was slipping down the grassy sand-ledge to the beach itself, and taking off his clothes, and was soon swept up in the enchantment and exhilaration of the waves and the twilight and the utterly deserted place – his only companion a reef heron stepping slowly along the far edge of the tidal lagoon – and the rain which then started and continued while he swam and body-surfed, soaking his clothes up on the beach and stippling the sea’s surface. His thinking, there, on the fringe of the continent, that he had come somehow to an edge of things, if only of a day full of people, uncertain weather, the frustrations of packing while the storm threatened, the driving through the earlier teeming rain (the heavens had opened around Nara), arguments …

  ~

  Yen Dokla. The forest. Of which no-one in that city will speak, so few historians even make mention. And yet, as the regime was crumbling, I found, in a small worker’s cottage by the railway, an old man – it was his son who had summoned me, having heard that I had been making enquiries –
who seemed to want absolution. He had never spoken, he said, for, in the early years, he had watched the fate of anyone who had. But a survivor – there had been a survivor – had told a group of them, and presumably others. And had subsequently disappeared. The regime had tracked him. Three thousand in one night, that man had said. And those who had done the shooting were themselves shot, a long way away, taken there so that those who then shot them would not know why they were doing so.

  ~

  So that now he has only to pause, in something he is reading, pause and stare, for the paragraph to begin to disintegrate, the sentences break up and drift apart, each word seeming only a fragment of a lost original, each phrase just a trace of a now-obliterated, undecipherable text beyond it … no matter what truth, what verisimilitude the writer might be seeking to establish, sheet-ice, breaking up beneath the runner, fathomless sea beneath …

  ~

  Carrying his wet clothes in a bundle as he climbed back up the hill in the near-dark, all he could think of was a hot shower. And it was only then, luxuriating in the hot water, that he began to think of the jewels again, and found them so ordinary – but – the unordinary thing – realised at least what had happened, and what it was just possibly a part of, the business of the Lost Pages, this time of the tail of something – he thought of it, for a moment, melodramatically, as the great kite of Nothingness – that had passed overhead, again, and the realisation that (again) he had not caught it. And so wrote/is writing, this, as a record of that passing …

  ~

  And yes, it’s all very well to say that with a little careful attention one should be able to find the end of the narrow pass, the over-trodden track, and take up the trace once more, but there, at the other end, although the two paths divided again and went on their separate ways, there seemed – as if in proof of the power of what I had so carelessly obliterated – nothing to connect them to their former selves. What had been a doe was now a fox; what had been a goat was now a stag; what had been a wood was now a crowd of faces.