16 April 2008
Patchwork Writing on The Invention of Solitude
)Published on April 16th, 2008 @ 11:46:00 pm, using 1301 words, 105 views
Yes, there was a reason for Paul Auster that day, after all. Just as there are reasons for waiting and refraining from forward motion. Just as there are reasons for eating and sleeping. Just as there are reasons for walking, pen and paper on hand. There’s solitude to be consumed to its last morsel. There’s the present, that entity of gelatinous texture (neither liquid, nor solid) both able and unable to stand on its own, and its enclosing glass windows, its solid, transparent link/barrier - that which at once promotes and hinders connection. It is by way of solitude that we learn to relate appropriately.
I walk these steps tonight, along this waiting platform, leveled chin and unseeing eyes fixed ahead, with these words just behind my lips: what I need, you need. I understand that now.
There are sudden diaphanous dreams of Amsterdam and its winding streets and its Vermeers.
There’s always a reason.
He thinks, in particular, of a painting he saw on his trip to Amsterdam, Woman in Blue, which nearly immobilized him with contemplation in the Rijksmuseum. As one commentator has written: “The letter, the map, the woman’s pregnancy, the empty chair, the open box, the unseen window – all are reminders or natural emblems of absence, of the unseen, of other minds, wills, times, and places, of past and future, of birth and perhaps of death – in general, of a world that extends beyond the edges of the frame, and of the larger, wider horizons that encompass and impinge upon the scene suspended before our eyes. And yet it is the fullness and self-sufficiency of the present moment that Vermeer insists upon – with such conviction that its capacity to orient and contain is invested with metaphysical value.”
Even more than the objects mentioned in this list, it is the quality of the light coming through the unseen window to the viewer’s left that so warmly beckons him to turn his attention to the outside, to the world beyond the painting. A. stares hard at the woman’s face, and as time passes he almost begins to hear the voice inside the woman’s head as she reads the letter in her hands. She, so very pregnant, so tranquil in the immanence of motherhood, with the letter taken out of the box, no doubt being read for the hundredth time; and there, hanging on the wall to her right, a map of the world, which is the image of everything that exists outside the room: that light, pouring gently over her face and shining on her blue smock, the belly bulging with life, and its blueness bathed in luminosity, a light so pale it verges on whiteness. (…)
“The fullness and self-sufficiency of the present moment.”
All during the three days he spent in Amsterdam, he was lost. The plan of the city is circular (a series of concentric circles, bisected by canals, a cross-hatch of hundreds of tiny bridges, each one connecting to another, and then another, as though endlessly), and you cannot simply “follow” a street as you can in other cities. To get somewhere you have to know in advance where you are going. (…) For three days it rained, and for three days he walked around in circles. (…) It occurred to him that perhaps he was wandering in the circles of hell, that the city had been designed as a model of the underworld, based on some classical representation of the place. Then he remembered that various diagrams of hell had been used as memory systems by some of the sixteenth century writers on the subject. (…) And if Amsterdam was hell, and if hell was memory, then he realized that perhaps there was some purpose to his being lost. Cut off from everything that was familiar to him, unable to discover even a single point of reference, he saw that his steps, by taking him nowhere, were taking him nowhere but into himself. He was wandering inside himself, and he was lost. Far from troubling him, this state of being lost became a source of happiness, of exhilaration. He breathed it into his very bones. As if on the brink of some previously hidden knowledge, he breathed it into his very bones and said to himself, almost triumphantly: I am lost.
Wondering and wandering – one and the same.
Sometimes it feels as though we are wandering through a city without purpose. We walk down the street, turn at random down another street, stop to admire the cornice of a building, bend down to inspect a splotch of tar on the pavement that reminds us of certain paintings we have admired, look at the faces of the people who pass us on the street, trying to imagine the lives they carry around inside them… (…) … just as one step will inevitably lead to the next step, so it is that one thought inevitably follows from the previous thought, and in the event that a thought should engender more than a single thought (say two or three thoughts, equal to each other in all their consequences), it will be necessary not only to follow the first thought to its conclusion, but also to backtrack to the original position of that thought in order to follow the second thought to its conclusion, and then the third thought, and so on, an in this way, if we were to try and make an image of this process in our minds, a network of paths begins to be drawn, as in the image of the human bloodstream (hearts, arteries, veins, capillaries), or as in the image of a map (of city streets, for example, preferably a large city, or even of roads, as in the gas station maps of roads that stretch, bisect, and meander across a continent), so that what we are really doing when we walk through the city is thinking, and thinking in such a way that our thoughts compose a journey, and this journey is no more or less than the steps we have taken, so that, in the end, we might safely say that we have been on a journey, and even if we do not leave the room, it has been a journey, and we might safely say that we have been somewhere, even if we don’t know where it is.
A red light might show you a different route, if you lack patience. It might make you take an unfamiliar right when a green light would’ve had you walk straight ahead. So many factors can change the course of things.
As you walk down the street, you’re given words… suggested words… almost forced to take them for your own and act upon that ownership. Your thoughts are thus fed. You’ll walk past someone and hear a snippet of conversation… random words, words raised from their context, single words, married words, lone words divorced from meaning.
‘… breakfast…’
A thousand possibilities could’ve preceded it and a thousand others followed it but ‘breakfast’ is your gift. A gift to the imagination. An unwrapped gift to be taken and spun in such a way as to be dictated by your solitude, by the meandering branches of one’s solitude, the circling streets, the upward and downward spiral of one’s solitude.
Let us go then, you and I…
(The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)
…wondering and wandering.
—— ∫ ——
AMAZING SHOTS OF AMSTERDAM COURTESY OF FLICKR.COM
Photograph by Joep R
Photograph by Mor (bcnbits)
Photograph by BarneyF
Photograph by BarneyF
Click here for more of my favorite passages from The Invention of Solitude.
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster, Amsterdam, Vermeer, Woman in blue, thoughts, meandering, winding, streets, outside, world, present, circles, lost, journey, words, gift, imagination, course, wandering, wondering, Prufrock
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