Magic Carpet Ride

Sometimes the hotel bed looks like something in fact. An odd glimpse, — Yeah, not bad; appropriate. Looks like something. A bed after love-making on the other hand looks like nothing. Uninteresting. A writer's bed is something else. Bunched pillows, cleared rumpled space neat more or less. Pen and notebook within reach, the pad, glasses. You read Heidegger there through, fifty-four pages of the Cambridge edition free online. Hard copy well-spaced with pencil would have been preferable of course—impossible to procure anywhere in Malaysia no doubt, even Kinokuniya Singapore you would need to be lucky. The bed was a magic carpet on those pages: Van G., the Greek temple, the peasants in the Black Forest where Heidegger lived the last part of his life. You saw the photograph of his house once, the tall timber back rearing up. The forest was one thing, the famous Schwartzwald with its inevitable spirit and wondrousness. But in fact it was the peasants above all that claimed H.'s admiration, their fortitude and steady patience. It was a peasant woman in Van G.'s shoes collecting clods of earth and standing over new life and the old that had passed. Joyce Carol Oates was damn good too on the American gothic female writer Jackson. The first sentences for a preliminary taste a few days prior had irritated: something was inevitable like water curling down a plug-hole. (Unconscious Hitchcock.) Literary, forced and unnecessary. Heidegger would not have had it creating the space for the art-work's disclosure. In fact it turned out a wonderful summation of a stressful writerly life. No need to read Jackson really, she might not amount to so very much. But the sketch of the life, the domestic situation, the eating disorder, battle with mother and husband — first rate encapsulation that sent you. You read it there on those sheets late afternoon and after supper, slowly paragraph by paragraph and always looking for the break of segments when a pause could be taken, chew and mull, put it aside, ramble and range. Many people didn't know how to read. One needed to make the discovery. Keith Thomas on Brexit in the same NYRB issue as the Oates was another brilliant summation. All the man said fitted and carried the line of hope at the base of European and indeed global union now with the shared contemporary condition and problems of life. An old piece of your own writing sung a bit on that bed and those sheets too this afternoon. Not damn bad. A bit over formal and traditional the diction, but there was some point to following one of the main character's exemplification of Confucius's suggestion that one ought to bear a benign demeanour. The lesser, looser and more grim countenance could only compound hardship. Not a bad piece of travel and artistic exploration — a pair of older, committed painters in Malacca from mid-2012. Where to send it now into the larger world?

NB. Heidegger: The Origin of the Work of Art