Text 2. Backwards Glance
I is here. But above: “ABOVE IS THE LIGHT, the elements, a kind of light, sufficient to see by, the living find their ways….” (105) Above is there, not here – “The things too must still be there, a little more worn…. Here you are under a different glass, not long habitable either….” (105)
I has come to know himself as here, recognizes himself as here before this journey in Texts for Nothing, before The Unnamable (i.e., this is not a journey to here, I is here with nowhere to go) – “Go then, no, better stay, for where would you go, now that you know? Back above? There are limits. Back in that kind of light…. Seek, by the excessive light of night, a demand commensurate with the offer….” (105) I laments: “To have suffered under that miserable light, what a blunder. It let nothing show…. And now here, what now here, one enormous second, as in Paradise….” (106) The sun, the moon, the stars: they are all too bright, revealing nothing. Past it in the depths of night,//Even in the dark//I had to close my eyes. Here it is as if all dark, no experience of time or space.
Here, in Texts for Nothing as in The Unnamable, it seems to I that there are no others, no things, in “this place,” only I. Others, including the other I is adhered to, are above in the light. “And the absence of others, does that count for so little? Pah others, that’s nothing, others never inconvenienced anyone, and there must be a few here too, other others, invisible, mute, what does it matter.” (106) The lack of the experience or knowledge of others here – it might be like this: a kind of illumination in darkness, a wilderness, a vast, no image of self, no image of others, no image of people; individuation is blurred, nearer to nonexistence. And yet I is here, individuated to an extent, experiencing this vast dark in bewilderment as here, and not there.
I has memories, useless, of little help, of others, of stories, words, his only spoils, nighttime images, daytime images, winter images. If he went above, if he tried to “seek” above again “by the excessive light of night,” what could he possibly hope to find? – see Mother Calvet again, creaming off the garbage with her dog. “She wavered through the night, a kind of trident in her hand….” (105) Above, if he were “to go” back above: “And beauty, strength, intelligence, the latest, daily, action, poetry, all one price for one and all.” (106) No, he cannot return: “If only it could be wiped from knowledge. To have suffered under that miserable light, what a blunder. It let nothing show.” (106)
Still, I blends with I here and I above; he is one who once believed he lived above in the light and who now understands he lives here. He speaks to himself in the third person, the impersonal self. As to others: “It’s true you hid from them, hugged their walls, you miss that here, you miss the derivatives, here it’s pure ache, pah you were saying that above and you a living mustard-plaster.” (106) No, it’s all just words, “Utter, there’s nothing else, utter, void yourself of them, here as always, nothing else.” (106)
There are differences between here and there. He has a memory of Mr. Joly in the belfry on a Sunday. “Here at least none of that, no talk of a creator and nothing very definite in the way of a creation.” (107)
I has a last memory. Of Piers from Langland’s 14th century Piers The Ploughman, but as noted in Annotations, blended with the Red Cross Knight of the first line of Canto I of Spencer’s The Faerie Queene (1596), pricking his oxen o’er the plan, he raised his eyes to the sky. The night was black, soon snow. The night, even winter night, is bright, is still an excessive light. There is a kind of imaginary return: Piers’ return, but also I’s return to the “place” of Text 1, the den, the sea thundering from afar beneath the snow. “It was none the less the return, to what no matter, the return, unscathed, always a matter for wonder.” (107) An experience above, perhaps Piers’: “opposite the lamplit window. A glow, red, afar, at night, in winter, that’s worth having, that must have been worth having.” (107, 108) He is an outsider, in winter, looking in. Show him a bright, warm house,//And a beloved soul within.//Only delusion is the prize for me!
“A far memory….” (108) And above, a kind of longing in spite of the hopelessness, in spite of no-return possible: “How one hoped above, on and off. With what diversity.” (108) Last Hope
No Return, paltry spoils. Beckett’s story, The Calmative, inverts the old tale of the medieval knights: take the adventure and return as hero. In The Calmative, the man is (possibly) dying in bed – in horror of those assassins who will kill him (i.e., ordinary life). The “adventure” is a story in skull, a story he tells himself, an absurd headlong journey at night, to a walled city, to the sea where he encounters a boy with a goat, he finds “love” – a kiss with a disgusting man – he has spoils, memories, words said, sights, the phial the man gave him. Horses are “carcasses of the gutted horses hanging from hooks.” There is the story of Breem or Bream, a boy’s heroic journey in the sea and his return. In The Calmative, the true return is to the tragic sorrows of being alone in a terrifying death bed. Text for Nothing plays with the idea of the knights’ tale. In Text 2 there is “no return” to there, above. I lived above before recognizing himself as here, always been here. He has spoils from above: bits of memory, sights, words read, images. But these are paltry spoils. Where is he to go? he can’t return there, if he has a small hopeless longing. No, it was worse there. In Text 1 the knight’s horse is: I feels his body is like an “old hack floundered in the street, struggling no more.” (100) In Text 1, the story of Joe Breem or Breen “a knife between his teeth, did what was to be done and came back.” (103)
No return to the cave, after one’s journey, as in Plato’s Republic, to live in the city and teach and share what one knows. No return, like Jesus from the wilderness of the desert to the city to teach the crowds. No return, no going back to Ireland, Beckett’s homeland, “the city in its haze.” (Text 1 101 and The Calmative “there was never any city but the one”) No return above, no heroic return.