Notes to the Unwritten

Lennon, Brian. "Notes to the Unwritten." Fence 1.2 (Fall/Winter 1998): 97-100.

Subsequently included, in revised form, in the following publication:
Lennon, Brian. City: An Essay. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2002.

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version.

Notes to the Unwritten

Brian Lennon

¹fording

STRESSED HERE IS THE "FORDING"---i.e., striving toward continuity---enacted by the reader, on whom as much responsibility rests as rests on the writer. As a child, I waited with my mother for my father, returning by train from the school in the City. Kneeling on the seat of the car, viewing the illumined platform, I knew that we---my mother, my father, and me---formed a unit that divided and combined each day, and that this was an arrangement of some consequence. I had no understanding---that came later---but I had impressions.

²loss

THE CHARACTER AND PROPORTION of "loss" differs among the bereaved (the taken-from, the robbed). For example: A, pulling her jeans on, catches a toe in the hole worn through one knee. The small hole becomes a large one. A is overjoyed: an unforced disaster lends her a rakish air. B, performing the same action, suffers chagrin: now his knee will be exposed to drafts, etc.

³participation mystique

HERE, I SUPPOSE, I am toying with the notion of participation mystique: "imaginative identification with people and objects outside oneself, regarded as an attribute of primitive peoples by the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruel (1857-1939); merging of the individual consciousness with that of a group or with the external world. 1966 J. B. Priestly Moments 228 In our early childhood... we exist in a state that a French anthropologist has called participation mystique" (O. E. D.).

⁴truth

STATED ANOTHER WAY: "because" is as real as a blank look. On these magically dark evenings, I had a feeling of immersion, of participation in the greater world---a "taking place," providing the link between my father's train and our home---that delighted me obscurely, and which still makes riding out to the airport for someone I love (especially at night) inexplicably enjoyable. Inexplicably, because I don't know what I relish more: the meeting, or the velvet solitude of its approach.

⁵lonely

ALTHOUGH THE TWO are usually designated "estrangement" and "integration," other vocabularies are useful. You don't always know, for instance, that you are lonely. You may feel free, or stoical, or intrepid.

⁶waking dreams

DURRELL---OTHERWISE, A PIG---knew this perfectly. E.g, Justine: "At this time he had already begun to experience that great cycle of historical dreams which now replaced the dreams of his childhood in his mind, and into which the City now threw itself-as if at last it had found a responsive subject through which to express the collective desires, the collective wishes, which informed its culture.... These disturbed him for they were not at all the dreams of the night-hours. They overlapped reality and interrupted his waking mind as if the membrane of his consciousness had been suddenly torn in places to admit them."

⁷summer

THIS BLOCK OF Two Hundred Fifty Sixth Street: sunny; treeless, but lawned; lined with houses raised on foundations; chain-link fences boxing in the yards. Children: everywhere---on bicycles, on roller skates, on Big Wheels, on hands and knees. In summer: we splashed in tiny plastic pools; mothers on beach chairs reading magazines; the ice cream truck tinkling a melancholy "Ode to Joy."

⁸repetition

I CONFESS THAT I HAVE NO IDEA what Kierkegaard (or his persona, Constantin Constantius) meant by "repetition." Here, however, I mean to say that successive iterations of one single event multiply its existing points of entry. I was born: on the eastmost fringe of the City, in an enclave at the foot of the Airport, and I learned to sleep through the scream of jets, which I knew traveled over the ocean. My earliest awareness of the City: at the station, where I waited with my mother, in the idling car, for my father. At one end of the block: "the creek"---a tract of spongy undeveloped land, beyond which stretched the runways. From the creek: the frogs that filled our yards; Gina Ragazza, two doors down, pressed sharpened sticks through their bodies---twitch, twitch---as airliners floated roaring overhead.

⁹falling

Cf. HEIDEGGER, SEIN UND ZEIT, ś38: "The phenomenon of falling does not give us something like a 'night view' of being.... Far from determining its nocturnal side, it constitutes all being's days in their everydayness."

¹⁰sleeping

A SOMEWHAT MORE EXPANSIVE formula has been offered by Nietzschenstein: "What we cannot speak about, we may nonetheless utter through a mask." This happens all the time. For example: "I have never been so lonely in my whole life." Or: "Your friend is sleeping."

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