The Book of Disquiet: Excerpts

Page 82:

When I consider all the people I know or have heard of who write prolifically or who at least produce lengthy and finished works, I feel an ambivalent envy, a disdainful admiration, an incoherent mixture of mixed feelings. The creation of something complete and whole, be it good or bad – and if it’s never entirely good, it’s very often not all bad – yes, the creation of something complete seems to stir in me above all a feeling of envy.

And I, whose self-critical spirit allows me only to see my lapses and defects, I, who dare write only passages, fragments, excerpts of the non-existent, I myself – in the little that I write – am also imperfect. Better either the complete work, which is in any case a work, even if it’s bad, or the absence of words, the unbroken silence of the soul that knows it is incapable of acting.

Page 108:

Why should I care that no one reads what I write? I write to forget about life, and I publish because that’s one of the rules of the game.

Page 136:

I’m astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed.

hoto by  Kenji Tanimura on Scopio

Fernando Pessoa wasn’t playing around. I love that.

Pessoa put his life where his mouth was, or more correctly, where his pen was - or perhaps the other way around - the life and the illegibly-scrawled prose dovetailed closely, if not perfectly or neatly: I don’t think he claimed to have perfected his chosen way of life, but then again, it was a way of life that needed no perfecting. All it needed was his commitment, which he certainly gave in his actions, or more specifically his commitment to the absence of any action, in both his personal life and in the corpus of the text.

The sheer nakedness of this undertaking is arresting. There is nothing clothing the bareness of Pessoa’s prose or the bareness of the life he lived. Well perhaps not quite nothing, there is a single contradiction here: almost nothing clothed the bareness of his existence except, of course, the proliferation of heteronyms that were undoubtedly masks and clothing of a kind.

Pessoa is my gateway. Long sought, lovingly received.

It’s a curious thing.

Over the course of my fifty years of life (so far), I have always been a reader - I still remember the first book I read myself, an adorable illustrated tale about a bear and his little furry friend (A rabbit? A squirrel?) in a snowy wood. I recall the illustrations. I must have been four or five, at least I think so.

Since childhood I have been been a constant reader and at various moments I have been captured by different writers who spoke to me at the different stages of my life. There has been Baroness Karen Blixen who also wrote as Isak Dinesen, Italo Calvino, Josep Luis Borges, Stanislaw Lem - earlier there were the science fiction giants such as Aasimov and the now-condemned Arthur C. Clarke, as well as some English writers such as George Orwell, Robert Graves and the more recent (but still late) John Mortimer.

My reading habits of a lifetime are peppered by a big mix of greats and not-so-greats, many remarkable and many other not particularly remarkable writers mixed together over five decades of reading. I have been ecumenical: Not Only Geniuses need apply. This is because I primarily have read for entertainment and engagement rather than literary edification, and my habit of reading constantly has been supported by a parallel habit of never forcing myself to finish anything that wasn’t engaging my interest. Many books remain unfinished and neglected in the litter of my personal library.

However, things had slowed down over time. Even while my impulse to write had only grown I had been increasingly finding that nothing I read was speaking directly to me. This went on on for quite some time, a period of more than ten years, in lockstep with the intensification of my writing habits.

I had continued to read and to write during this time, often daily, but little engaged my attention or fired my imagination for very long. Nothing much captured me the way books had in my earlier reading career. I found myself returning to old favourites having become frustrated with new discoveries that did little for me. I was stale, in both reading and writing: I had no model to inspire me, nothing to aspire to in my own writing and no master or pattern to emulate.

However, there were some notable exceptions. Pandaemonium was one, a book by notable British post-war social realist (and socialist) documentary film maker Humphrey Jennings. This astonishing volume is a collection of writings of many different kinds that contemporaneously observed and documented the dawning of the machine in Britain, from a variety of different perspectives. The texts are drawn from a period from 1660 to 1886. Personal letters and correspondence, poetry, articles, journal entries, essays, newspaper snippets and literary fragments taken from many different kinds of manuscript have been assembled to form the book, arranged and presented chronologically. The result is astonishing.

I discovered that book in 1996. Also about that time I discovered Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, but more on that and other Calvino gems, such as Six Memos for the Next Millennium, later.

And so to my recent discovery of the Book of Disquiet - a mid-pandemic discovery of 2021.

The parallels between Pandaemonium and the Book of Disquiet are several and distinct. Both books are assemblages of fragments of text (Pandaemonium of different actual authors - the Book of Disquiet of different _heteronymic_ authors). Both books were finalised and assembled, and only published, posthumously, by a good many decades. Both books were also almost Sisyphean labours: the not-quite-lifelong projects of their two progenitors.

Both books are remarkable and both books defy easy categorisation. In fact they make a joyous mockery of categorisation; the effort becomes entirely redundant, a futile and pointless labour - far too reductive in the face of such abundant riches to serve any meaningful purpose.

So that is where I have arrived. The next challenge is the next logical step: the departure.

Photo by Liga Kalnina on Scopio

In a very simplistic sense, structure can be considered as an organising principle (among many other things, of course). In the case of the Book of Disquiet, the organising principle is linked to the activities of assembly and curation (verbs) - in that specific case tasks that occurred decades after the author’s death, and that can never resolve into a definitive outcome, they can never be completed, and they can never be undertaken with anything like objectivity. The substance of the raw material - 25,000 loose fragments, a number of which are practically illegible and only a portion of which are dated - denies these three conditions and much besides.

There is something deeply comforting in this, in the contemplation of both the task and the ‘finished’ product of the task. Contemplating assembling the constituent parts of a similar work from scratch - writing the very fragments that could lead to such a challenge, over a lifetime or shorter period - feels liberating, inspiring and stimulating to the imagination.

What is an artistic work? Is it ever complete? Well, certainly it can be finished; however, I suspect it is never complete, even when ‘completed’ by the artist. Marguerite Duras said:

“I don’t know what a book is. No one knows. But we know when there is one”.

I have that on a sign pinned up in my bedroom. I note that she said, simply, ‘book’, rather than ‘written work’. The point is to make a book, not something as ill-defined or ephemeral as a ‘written work’, which could be argued as having existence independent of its form, assembly, binding, commitment to paper. No, this fight is about books. It is called the ‘Book of Disquiet’, after all - not ‘Ideas of Disquiet’, ‘Thoughts on Disquiet’, or even ‘Meditations on Disquiet’, as the consolidation of the fragments into a book is a precondition of its transformation into existence in the absence of any other relevant organising principle.

I have been published more than a hundred and fifty times, in Australian and foreign publications. Articles, reviews and essays ranging from 500 words to several thousand, nothing longer than that. Nevertheless, the publication itch is satisfied, it is thoroughly scratched.

My personal project, the nascent topic of this blog, is the writing of a book. Publication is not a condition of its existence or its success: it is nothing so fragile or contingent. It is tough, stubborn and resilient, impervious to both my frequent attentions and my equally frequent neglect. The work will exist as a book, or not exist, regardless of whether it is published, in or after my lifetime. As Duras has said - I, too, don’t know what the book is, but I will know when there is one.

There is not one yet.