Mitchelmore’s Fear of reading
Steve Mitchelmore delivers a post worthy of Beckett, about epiphany, and impossibility, during recovery from a serious bicycling accident. From which:
"Akhenaten had ordered that the capital city be moved from Thebes into the desert 200 miles away. The documentary featured new archeological discoveries that revealed the disastrous consequences for his subjects. What stirred me was not these human facts but the glorious and terrifying absurdity of Akhenaten’s project. It demonstrates the same impressive or horrendous folly as those in fictional works: William Golding’s The Spire for example, and Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and, more familiar to me, those of the many characters created by Bernhard: Roithamer who builds a cone-shaped house in the middle of a forest, Reger who studies every masterpiece in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna until he finds a flaw, even Bernhard himself aged eight deciding to cycle to his aunt’s house in Salzburg, twenty-two miles away. A creative writer may respond by sketching a novel idea based on the crazy plans of an individual – perhaps Naguib Mahfouz’s Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth is it as far as the pharaoh is concerned – but, in my sedated condition, I imagined a writing project that would itself be the absurdity, something itself animated by impossibility."
July 29th, 2009 at 9:31 AM
I read this on This Space. A tough and moving post… not sure the connection you see with Beckett, but no matter–perhaps because my associations were more personal than literary. I was struck by a car while crossing a street in 2004. Concussion and multiple fractures and nerve damage. I woke in the ambulance, but have only the vaguest memories of the first few days, or the seven times in and out the OR. Even the 5 months I spent in a wheelchair (most of it in hospital bed in the living room of a friend) are more like something from a dream. I’m told I was thrown through the windshield but have not been able to find an eyewitness–an absence of memory from an experience so intense that I feel compelled to tell stories about it–stories that feel feel as though they have been invented about someone else. I’m told that I’m fortunate that I don’t remember the accident itself, that this would only be a source of nightmares, but I do have dreams about it–like the stories, as though there were a need to fill that blank. The absense of memory of an event that has left one visibly scared can itself be a form of trauma.
Steve Mitchelmore’s account of how he has dealt with his injuries gives me courage.
July 29th, 2009 at 9:50 AM
Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.
–Saint Augustine
July 29th, 2009 at 11:19 AM
I’m glad it was some help Jacob. You had it a lot worse than me. The dream-like quality of the experience preoccupies me now more than ever. I turn everything towards (if not into) literature. That helps me at least.
Also, thanks for the link Nigel. Much appreciated.