At Blockfabrik (3)

During an impulsive day-trip to Budapest on Jan 1st, I finished a short collection by Anne Carson, Red Doc, a subsequent volume of poems following one of her most well-known works, Autobiography of Red. I thought of this book and several other poems of her when recently reading the first few pages of Handke’s Repetition, where the character suddenly referred to his mother as “a stranger”. Not relevantly but in retrospect I think we all have a mothering nature at some point, the hidden tendency to care and tolerate, or to extend beyond an isolated self; yet most of us will come across a moment, sooner or later, when this built-in tendency stops being a priori, when some greater force of, say, defending an identity, or preserving the narrative consistency merged through one’s trajectory, alienates the natural setup so much that we cannot even recognize our mothers. Carson writes perfectly about the aftermath of such a transition—the “vacuumicity” between children and mothers (“How long will it feel like burning, said the child trying to be kind.”), wives and husbands (“Perfection rested on them for a moment like calm on a lake. Pain rested. Beauty does not rest.”), or potentially among all of us—about situations where characters cannot communicate, only sharing the intimacy beyond the fourth wall, through the readers (“the Other” as in Lacan’s words? this could be a wrong interpretation). W. H. Auden worked on something similar but wrote too kindly:

But happy now, though no nearer each other,
We see farms lighted all along the valley;
Down at the mill-shed hammering stops
And men go home.
Noises at dawn will bring
Freedom for some, but not this peace
No bird can contradict: passing but here, sufficient now
For something fulfilled this hour, loved or endured.

The mere thought of being hopelessly (“immortally”) isolated is not the same as self-isolation, I think, at least not so arbitrarily; and bearing with the thought does not equal to believing in a fatalistic downturn of any connection (bouldering alone is even more addictive now that I have a fixed block of time for internal interrogations of this sort). Most of the time I simply live in a nice fluffy blob of noises, and the limit is palpable only when I get closer enough. Upon that point anything can be lost. The rest is just another round of expanding vertigo.