At the plain’s far edge, an unpitied corpse is torn by hungry dogs. It speaks. Brother, it is true you really grieve for me. It is true you are in mourning. But brother, isn’t there also something else in your heart, another passion pushing up through your loss? Why are you squabbling with the authorities as if they might replace your sister as your life’s worthy opponent? Could it be that you want to lever the world with your affliction? Perhaps you wish for a reason to go to war, and the images of suffering and death that you evoke with such articulacy are both the trigger for the playing out the demonstration of your self, and a retrospective justification for whatever atrocious measures you are prepared to take. I ask now if I am really lost to you? Or is it that I am more useful to you than I have ever been? More loved? More here? Did you care so much before? I trust you feel, but you have turned towards and not away from the world, you are angry not sorrowful, and I do not remember why. My sister, how you needle and complain. Why do you demand that I should not take my own path? Why do you want me to not act in accordance with my will? Whenever I agreed, for reason of my love for you, to your changes, acceding my space to you, bowing to your command of my actions, then we both lost all sense of where we were, we both become directionless. If you had your way, the ground I once held for both of us would not be occupied at all. Why should I listen to you if it ends in catastrophe for our house? Where before you said you found me unresponsive, remote and inflexible, suddenly, by agreeing to listen to your demands, I become reduced, enfeebled and characterless. You immediately lost respect for me whenever I gave way to your fury, I became weightless and fey under your gaze. Do you not recognise, you have nothing to say to the one who is ready to hear you? Where I give my ground to you, because as you say, I have no right to it, because as you say where I am is itself a crime, you do not then take the space but seem to forget it, and it becomes unviable. Wheresoever I am removed from the sphere of action, you do not step forward to replace me - the only change is that I am no longer the man to whom complaints are directed but the less-than-man about whom complaints are made. For you, I am either in error or I am irrelevant. Brother, in our house we do not yet know the work of unwork. We were born too soon. We do not yet know unweaving. Even so, our truth will be brought to our door, to our fences and to our walls, it is brought by the neighbour and we are made by what he brings. We do not yet know the other cheek which we do not offer him, his severed ear which we do not heal with a good word, or a gentle touch. The neighbour is bearer of the truth of our house. But our code says we may not admit him without also injuring ourselves. We may not know our truth which he brings. Our work is directed towards forcing the world to know our house. But we do not yet know ourselves, which is our undoing, and the world will not know us until we know ourselves as the truth of our house. But then our truth is withheld from us, it is carried towards us from out of the hazy fields, from the far and unclean edge, by one who approaches and never arrives, the one who cramps us, restricts us, moves our boundaries, scatters our sheep, denies us the path to our pastures. And we may not include or acknowledge the house of the neighbour because it cannot be included or acknowledged. Nobody speaks in our house from the position of our neighbour, there is no voice there. We may not hear it. It is not silent. The neighbour is unheard but he is not silent. He does not arrive but approaches endlessly, bringing the truth of our house, of our wells, our pastures, our vines, our sons. We are in no position to negotiate the demands we are unable to admit. Let the stranger approach, the other one, but the neighbour, never! The neighbour makes demands upon us. He is implacable. He presses against our pressing from the other side. He is bound to us but we only become ourselves where our house refuses to recognise his demands. That is how we are made. But the neighbour’s neighbourliness is irreducible, he is always there - and it offends our eyes. We can’t escape him, can we escape ourselves? He is fixed by our partiality for our house, the place to which we return at the end of the day. He is fixed by the law of our preference for our house which cannot acknowledge or include him. The neighbour is not fixed as himself. He is not black, nor woman, nor foreign, nor Muslim. He is not sick nor unclean. Nor is he our distant enemy. He is not fixed as himself but by our own fixity. He is the neighbour because of house. All that we might say of him is that he is what we direct our critique and rivalry at, and what we seek to separate ourselves from. We separate the perfection of our house in life as that set of agreed-to statements and rules written to prevent the influence of all that we do not want the world to see as belonging to us. The neighbour belongs to what we do not want to see in the world. The neighbour conforms to those forces and tendencies from which we desire to break away, those forces which we cannot acknowledge as belonging to us. He bears the truth of our adhesion to that which we would disavow if we could recognise it. And we escape the neighbour’s hold over us only where his reality is translated into symbols, it is only there that we escape the truth of our selves, and of our house to which we otherwise must adhere. Sister, that is because the neighbour is not the neighbour, the neighbour is in the arrangement, and is not the one arranged. All that is arranged, also adheres. I remember you said adhesion is the last viable form-of-life. It is where traumatised tissue, injured in illness, operation or violence, heals by adhering to, that is growing into, neighbouring tissues - wrong healing elicits a peculiar pain from ordinary movement. Brother, adhesion is scar tissue, a sort of living bridge across a space such as the peritoneal cavity, and between organs. Similarly, in what is written, traumatised fragments, traumatised by the compulsion inherent to free associating, adhere each to each and emerging as an abominable unity of scars, begin to walk on the earth - every lurching and difficult step, expressing that discomfort and complaint of things grown together. Sister, what we complain of is not what afflicts us. Brother, I don’t know what afflicts me. Sister, I do not know it but know I should know it. Brother, because I complain of it, I should know what it is. Sister, I don’t know what it is that afflicts me that I should know, I don’t know what it is that I don’t know. Brother, I pretend to know what afflicts me to hide from myself my not knowing it. Sister, I complain so as to hide what I am not complaining of because I do not know what it is. Brother, I complain because I feel I should know what it is that afflicts me before I complain of it, that knowledge should act as my right to complain, but my complaint hides my not knowing what I am complaining of, and so betrays my true affliction. Sister, I complain to you because I think you know what it is that afflicts me but I do not want you to know that I do not know what it is. Brother, I complain to you because my complaint expresses what I think you think afflicts me, I complain so that you recognise my affliction that I might recognise it in your recognition. Sister, I complain so that I might recognise my affliction in your recognition of my complaint as my affliction and that we might join in common cause around it. Brother, do you now press your complaint into a tightened fist to be rid of it sooner? Without that pressing, would it so soon be scattered amongst your other worries? Is rage all that remains of grief? Remember a day before today. You, brother and I, sister. Free as the grass. We sailed feathers on the stream. We saved bees from puddles. We swung in the tree that still stands. With bright faces bound each to each with a natural piety. But now, now I am gone and you desire to serve the dish of your grief to Creon, and by force of arms make him eat it. Who is he to us? Yes, you mourn but you want it to count for something. You want to snatch something of your loss back from death. But it counts for nothing, you will leave with nothing. You will draw not even the smallest victory from my death. Or, tell me I am wrong. Tell me that in your distress, you are drawn even now bare footed across the stony field, you are flying ragged over the dangerous ground, your frantic eyes searching amongst the dead for me. Tell me you are forever approaching the unforgiving ground of my falling, the dreaded place on the far edge of the plain where I must lie. And how eagerly you seek to separate me out again, draw me up again, from this state of contiguity into which I must decay, forgetting and forgotten in death’s hollow marriage chamber, a chamber maiden, a chamber martyr, caught in the noose of her own linen veiling. You say, memory play is the predicament set out by Tennessee Williams. I say, it describes the frame in which plays such as The Glass Menagerie operate. You say, characters adhere to a repetitive cycle of behaviours located in the here and now but held in place by inescapable past traumas. I say, that traumatic event itself is either poorly remembered because of its painful associations or cannot be directly addressed by the characters because it is deeply disputed. You say, characters will not free themselves from self-destructiveness in the present until the events of the past are directly confronted – and yet even the prospect of release is coloured by apprehension as the dissolution of repressive binds impies a resultant directionlessness, and loss of meaning. I say, the memory play presents the ambivalence generated between two equally unappealing alternatives: continuing with abusive but familiar relations; or fleeing into cold isolation. You say, there is no prospect of redemption, only a chance of release from the eros of our protesting against our own dependency, those endless repeating patterns of adjustment, orientation, adaptation: the old arguments, the old tensions, the old fury. I say, I have no sense of what might fill the hole left by our relinquished relations. I say, I do not know how to leave this world. I say, I have left this world. I say, stay brother. Stay your mad flight to me, I am not here. I say, I am teasing fondly as sisters must tease their little brothers. I say, forget me, leave me to the dogs. I say something banal. I say, I do not curse you, nor do I do mock you. I say, loss is grievous long and not a moment’s thing, it is long and goes on again. I say, it is a shock to the core but not an event. You say, an event is the collision of convergent series, each finding its limit at the place of dead roads, and what triggers convergence can be anything, anything at all, anything so small - and all lines end at the end of the line. I say, in what is continuous there are ends but no origins, the continuous is all ends, ends without ends. You say, if resistance is the limit that is set upon the work of the subject, where the limit fixes how far it has got in working things out for itself, and the subject is nothing but the sum of all resistances, then the event is the limit placed upon resistance, the resistance to the resistance and by implication, the inevitably squalid end of the road for the subject. I say, there is time yet for mourning to complete itself, please don’t press it into this short moment, this sudden outburst. You say, you hear me. I say, you won’t listen, so before we part forever, answer my question, my too cruel but sisterly question, mocking and yet needy, needling, fearful and appealing, answer me, before I lose the world, tell me how it will go with you, after this pantomime has ended, how many times will you feel impelled to come back to visit me where I lie, or how long will you tend my grave, the intervals always longer each time, and when exactly, in number of years, or if in months, how many exactly, will you stop coming back, when will you abandon this broken place, our memory play, forever?
