apothegm: Beckett on Failure

"Fail again, fail better."

story: Man or Dog?

I should perhaps note that I am not in the habit of eavesdropping, but given the promenade of the drunk, the forlorn and the merely homeward bound that pass underneath my window, at certain hours of the night, it is hard to avoid. Inevitably much of what you overhear consists of the plaints of those spurned in love, the squabbles of those supposedly in love and the directionless threats issued by those who have failed to find love or, at the very least, an amenable substitute.

On this occasion, I found my attention directed toward a voice I recognised. It belonged to one of the neighbourhood drunks, well known to me on account of an extended occupation she had undertaken of the doorstep of some low rent accommodation I had occupied previously. On that occasion her voice had been made familiar by the regularity with which she asked for spare change as I passed her by on my way out, and in, conduct that would hardly seem likely to be conducive to good relations with what amounted to her de facto landlord.

It seemed liked pleasantries, however, compared to the acts of her companion, and lover. It appeared that he decided he had found his calling in life as a busker, more precisely as a drummer. His vocation was noticeably handicapped however by a singular lack of rhythm - something you would normally considered to have been useful if not essential. This did not deter him, though, and for hours he would beat out his one and only rhythm, a four four beat he mashed into unrecognisability. It might have been thought he was undertaking some kind of al fresco protection racket, hoping to skim the pockets of the musically sensitive, where it not for the utter sincerity with which he carried out his task.

Latter, and thankfully for the ears of myself and my neighbours, he seemed to have wandered off, though the woman remained. Perhaps he had become disillusioned by the paucity of his earnings, and taken up an other occupation, perhaps he had decided to find a more appreciative audience. There is even the outside chance that his arrhythmic genius had been recognised and he had gone to take his rightful place at the head of an ensemble of avant-garde metal bashers. I suppose it is more likely however love had failed to find its fulfilment it what were, it must be admitted, hardly the most conducive of circumstances.

So it was not a wholly joyous recognition that came over me as I sat in the bath listening to the voice below, for she was obviously addressing someone. The pattern by which she communicated herself was altogether familiar as well, first there was threats, then pleading, then more threats, then pleading occasionally leavened only by outbreaks of crocodile tears and the odd cajolement, as she tried to persuade the target of her attentions to follow her or at least stop standing in the middle of the road. Something about the pattern she followed as she spoke seemed to speak of something, though I was not really sure what, some failure to communicate perhaps.

It was only on reflection however that I considered the possibility that her companion on this occasion might, after all, have been, not a man, but a dog.

book: Blindness by Jose Saramago

Blindness is a dark and bleak allegory of the nature of evil and humanity, by the Portuguese winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Jose Saramago...

A man goes suddenly blind at a set of traffic lights, his conditions spreads rapidly and mysteriously. In response the authorities start interning the victims in a hospital cut off from the outside world. Inside the hospital it quickly descends into anarchy, outside the epidemic of blindness overruns the unnamed city and civilization begins to fall apart...

This is not an easy read by any means - none of the characters have names, Saramago mirrors the conditions his characters find themselves by replicating confusion and a sense of being lost in the narrative line and at times deliberately pushes the reader's sense of revulsion to the limits, It is worth persisting with, nonetheless. A rich novel of ideas it reveals most contemporary English writing as shallow and insufficient by comparison. For all its darkness it carries an ultimately redemptive message that serves as a timely warning for the times we find find ourselves in - that it is only by admitting our capacity to commits acts of evil that we can hope to avoid commiting them.

chrestomathy: Aphania

"...[it] is a peculiarly literary country. There is a special statute-book for literary offences, and a Court of Letters presided over by six judges receive huge salaries for their necessary abstention from literature. Any person found guilty of borrowing from the works of other writers is sent to the treadmills for three years. Adaptions from the French are contra-band, and violations of syntax merit capital punishment without the benefit of clergy... To ensure purity of style, all adjectives are kept in the National Library, and no writer is allowed to use more than a certain number in a day, without special licence from at least three of the Judges of Lettters."

Tom Hood, Petsetilla's Posy, London, 1870

Cited in Manguel and Guadalupi The Dictionary of Imaginary Places: Aphania, London, 1987