Text 3. Dream of Spring

“[T]his time it’s I must go.” (110) No return, no going on. And yet, there is going to be a departure, it’s just words, it’s a journey, an imaginary story forward, future-looking (above) not an imaginary memory backward (above) as in Text 2. I must go, and a man with body must come, but fails to come in this story, this mere story. My eyes woke up;//It was cold and dark

The words, voices, say there’s going to be a story. First, build a body, with “a cluther of limbs and organs” (109) “then back here, this inextricable place far from the days” (110). Again, the possibility or impossibility of adventure and return, a mere phantom story and return to here. Words build a body, feet, hands, skull. “I’ll wait for you here, no, I’m alone, I alone am, this time it’s I must go.” (110) I will build a man, he will be a man. He’ll have a nanny, no responsibility, “if only it could be like that.” (110) I dreamt of love returned. I must use words, or the voices speak, “it’s time to go, to say so anyway.” 

I wonders: “What matter how you describe yourself, here or elsewhere, fixed or mobile, without form or oblong like man, in the dark or the light of the heavens, I don’t know, it seems to matter….” (110, 111) It matters: there is a great difference between I here (here, without form, in the dark) and He there (mobile, oblong like man, under the light of the heavens) – if I and He are two sides of the same “being.” I and He live different lives, have different characters, if they are one body, a similar but not the same nothingness, man above mere appearance, moving about with arms and legs and motives, I below phantom-like, closer to reality perhaps or to nothing, but here, unseen, beyond what is or can be visible. The Mock Suns. I’d be better off in the dark.

And again, as in Text 2, I cannot go back above: “And if I went back to where all went out and on from there, no, that would lead nowhere, never led anywhere, the memory of it has gone out too, a great flame and then blackness, a great spasm and then no more weight or traversable space.” (111) There led nowhere, the memory of it gone too; there a great flame (light), and then, here, after I recognized himself, blackness; there a great spasm (of motion) and then here, no weight or space (no experience of body, time, space).

“I’ll speak now of the future, I’ll speak in the future, as when I used to say, in the night, to myself….” (111) I or the voices invent a bare embodied I above and a “crony,” a friend, but no, a crony would “prevent discouragement from sapping my foundations.” This crony, by his encouragements, would distract I who otherwise, as invented man above, might be able to concentrate on his own no-horizons, “which might have enabled me to throw them under a lorry.” (112) But the obligations! of living a life, to call this living, no escape, even if one just stands in line at the bar to make a bet day after day. One has to always be somewhere above, doing something.

No, back to here, see “what’s happening here, where there’s no one, where nothing happens, get something to happen here, someone to be here….” (112) Story versus here, just words, voices. Wouldn’t it be nice – to have a head and the two legs, to “set out from Duggan’s door, on a spring morning of rain and shine, not knowing if you’ll ever get to evening, what’s wrong with that?” (113) “It would be so easy. To be bedded in that flesh or in another… what’s wrong with that? I don’t know, I’m here, that’s all I know, and that it’s still not me, it’s of that the best has to be made. There is no flesh anywhere, nor any way to die…. Here, nothing will happen here, no one will be here…. Departures, stories, they are not for tomorrow.” (113) And when the cocks crowed//My heart woke up;//Now I sit here alone//And think about my dream.

“And the voices, wherever they come from, have no life in them” – no body, no past, no future, a no-man’s land, as opposed to I, I here, if bare, having nothing to do with words, behind words.

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 14^th 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.