The Other Shore. Michael Jackson
space, time, and personhood. We stretch the limits of what is humanly possible. And we overcome the loneliness of being separated from the other, the stranger in whose shadowy presence we dwell. “Again and again, writes Octavio Paz, “we try to lay hold upon him. Again and again he eludes us. He has no face or name, but he is always there, hiding. Each night for a few hours he fuses with us again. Each morning he breaks away. Are we his hollow, the trace of his absence?”10
These boundless waters into which writers, like fishermen, cast their lines or, like shipwrecked mariners, consign their bottled messages, are the haunts of lost soul mates, remote societies, other epochs, myriad divinities, half-forgotten events, and unconscious processes. But in every case, what moves us to write (and read what others have written) is an impulse to broaden our horizons, to reincarnate ourselves, and “satisfy our perpetual longing to be another.”11
Although Maurice Blanchot wrote of the impossibility of literature12 and Walter Ong dismissed the writer’s audience as “always a fiction,”13 the passion and paradox of writing lies in its attempt to achieve the impossible14—a leap of faith that bears comparison with the mystic’s dark night of the soul, unrequited love, nostalgic or utopian longing, or an ethnographer’s attempt to know the world from the standpoint of others, to put himself or herself in their place. For every writer—whether of ethnography or fiction—presumes that his or her own experiences echo the experiences of others, and that despite the need for isolation and silence his or her work consummates a relationship with them.
For Orhan Pamuk, a writer “is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table and alone turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.” But no sooner have we shut ourselves away, Pamuk says, than we “discover that we are not as alone as we thought.” We are in the company of others who have shared our experiences. “My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble each other, that others carry wounds like mine—that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that all people resemble each other. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a centre.”15 Asked whether solitude was essential to a writer, Paul Auster answered in a similar vein. “What is so startling to me, finally, is that you don’t begin to understand your connection to others until you are alone. And the more intensely you are alone, the more deeply you plunge into a state of solitude, the more deeply you feel that connection.”16
D. H. Lawrence pursues a similar train of thought in a letter to his friend the barrister Gordon Campbell in March 1915.
I wish I could express myself—this feeling that one is not only a little individual living a little individual life, but that one is in oneself the whole of mankind, and one’s fate is the fate of the whole of mankind, and one’s charge is the charge of the whole of mankind. Not me—the little, vain, personal D. H. Lawrence—but that unnameable me which is not vain nor personal.17
In the same letter, Lawrence says, “each of us is in himself humanity,” an opinion shared by some anthropologists,18 myself among them.
But the gap between particularizing and universalizing perspectives is notoriously difficult to close. How can we be sure that the connections and continuities we posit between ourselves and others are not projections of our own limited view of the world? And how can we overcome the suspicion that often stays a writer’s hand, that the words and ideas he or she deploys with such artistry constitute a sleight of hand that creates the appearance of connectedness where there is none?
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been.19
TWO
The Red Road
I WAS NOT THE FIRST ADOLESCENT POET, nor will I be the last, to adopt Arthur Rimbaud as an alter ego. In Rimbaud’s resolve to be other than he was, I found legitimacy for my own revolt against bourgeois values. Oft en drunk and confrontational, and possessed by a perverse desire to be different, I cultivated an uncouth and anarchic persona, yet all the while unclear as to what kind of metamorphosis I wished for myself.
It is not possible, of course, to simply walk out on yourself, discarding your first identity as a snake sloughs off its skin. You do not know the secrets for changing your life; all you can do is search for them.1 What governs you is a craving for “new affections, new noises”,2 and you are aware that this work you do on yourself is more fundamental than any work of art. Indeed, Rimbaud’s writing may be read as a commentary on this oeuvre vie, in which poetry will be written only for as long as it takes for the personal change to be effected, whereupon the work of language will come to an end.
For several years you are in limbo. Breaking free, hitting the road, living rough, only to return to the place you set out from to lick your wounds and prepare for another journey into the unknown. But you are stricken by the realization that no matter how far you travel from home, the old self goes with you, refusing to be shaken off by the trick of changing your environs. As Horace put it, ‘Those who chase across the sea change their skies but not their souls.’3 And so you resemble one of Joseph Conrad’s restive characters, drifting from one remote island or port to another, no sooner arrived than departed—whether in flight from or in search of something, no one knows.
At twenty-four, Rimbaud is working as an overseer in a quarry on Cyprus. “The heat is oppressive,” he writes in a letter to his family, and the work is hard—dynamiting rocks, loading stones onto barges, living miles away from the nearest village, tormented by mosquitoes, sleeping in the open by the sea. His life is like a rehearsal for Africa.4
At twenty-four, and without the benefit of any rehearsal, I went to Africa as a volunteer with the United Nations Operation in the Congo. I had expected some kind of conversion. Watching the lurid sunsets from the Stanley Memorial high above the Congo River or hearing alarmist reports of insurgencies in the interior, my imagination took fire. But my thoughts turned constantly to home. When the rains came, I retreated to the Palace Hotel overlooking the Congo River and wrote a novel as much to prove myself capable of the sustained and lonely labor demanded of any writer as to unburden myself of recurring dreams of my grandparents’ early married life after their migration from England to New Zealand in 1906. I imagined that in abandoning what they called “the old country,” they were oppressed by nostalgia as well as unsettled by the backwater town in which they now had to make their home. In their separation trauma I wrote about my own, for was I not both enthralled and intimidated by the vast hinterland out of which the great river flowed? And were not my dreams of New Zealand daily reminders of how deeply I resisted the ordeal of passing from the life I had known into this new but unknown life that I associated with Africa? Day after day I wrote in my hotel room as islands of hyacinth slipped past in the swift -flowing river and refugees gathered at a landing stage shaded by mango trees, waiting for the rusty ferry that would return them, by order of the Congolese government, to Brazzaville, whose white colonial buildings were barely discernible through the haze.
When you are starting out as a writer, you tend to write about the inner turmoil and difficulty of expressing yourself, even when appearing to be writing on some entirely objective topic. This was certainly true of my early piece called The Livingstone Falls that conjures the thunderous and unnavigable stretch of water between the Stanley Pool and the lower reaches of the Congo.
I cross a fragile and swaying bridge between two islands, buffeted by spray. I greet two women who are gathering driftwood, their babies asleep on their backs, their voices drowned by the noise of the river. I find myself in a disused quarry and wonder if I have stumbled on that “vast artificial hole” that Conrad describes in Heart of Darkness,5 whose purpose was “impossible to divine,” but whose remorseless excavation had cost the lives of countless Congolese, chained together in forced labor and in death. A dead Mamba lies on the trail, an embodiment of that old injustice. I drive back to the city and a café on the Boulevard