Recognition
From
Things that Happen When Reading Rilke
A
man called Aherne from Clonakilty stopped me on a zebra crossing, and said,
‘Are you the author the Nicotine Cat and Other People? I’ve just read it
in two nights.’ I commiserated with him, and he quoted back a phrase from it,
‘Only a fool or me’.
I
asked him how did he recognise me? ‘My daughter lives in Bras de Venus, and she
said, ‘You can’t miss him. He’s the worst dressed man in town’. I forgot about
the homage to my last neglected work, wanting to protest that, though I dress
down, I’m always clean. But the patience of the drivers watching us chat in the
middle of the road was at breaking point. Ever since that encounter, I’ve been
wearing my Sunday best on weekdays. I’m hoping in future not to be recognised,
like the blind man in Rilke’s The Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge.
Malte
is aware of him selling newspapers at the gate of the Luxembourg Gardens, so
self-effacing nobody notices him. He is one dimensional, flattened against the
railings with his back to the world. Malte can’t bring himself to look closer,
and reconstructs his appearance from conjecture, a task which preoccupies him
until he has a complete picture – high hat, slack tie, low collar sprouting a
chicken neck… In sum, a man with the power of making himself invisible.
Malte
is satisfied there’s no need to look as he bounds past. But the flap of his
frockcoat alerts the blind man, who turns round and cries out half-heartedly, ‘Le
Journal, Le Journal’. Malte even thinks of stopping to buy a paper, but
thinks again, fearing that his feigned indifference would be blown, and that he
could somehow be made responsible for this unfortunate.
His
talent for imagining things outside his experience is becoming a liability. He
begins to see the newspaper seller as a figure of fate, akin to the crapulous
blind man in Madame Bovary, who Emma wanted to avoid, but was strangely
drawn to. And so he resolves to force himself to look at the blind man. Each
attempt brings him out in a cold sweat. But on Pentecost Sunday he decides to
face the truth.
The
blind man doesn’t look anything like his imaginary portrait. He’s a pathetic
wreck, whose angle of inclination is that of a scarecrow carelessly posted.
Terror bulges behind his eyelids and drools out of his shrunken mouth like a
frothing chute. Yet, on closer examination, he sports a straw hat with a red
ribbon, a yellow-scarlet cravat, and a new raincoat. The blind man is wearing
his Sunday best for the holiday, and the bright colours are clearly for other
people. Not that it attracts any more attention than usual.
No,
Baudelaire is wrong, Malte thinks. In ‘Les Aveugles’, he sees blind men as
merely lost souls, eyesores. ‘What are they looking for in the sky? These
matchstick-men, vaguely ridiculous, frightening children with the whites of
their sockets. The divine spark has been extinguished. Always staring upwards,
and not where they’re going, plunging further into the infinite silence of
their boundless dark. They never stop to take in their surroundings, and nod
their heads wearily, thinking the worst. All around them the city laughs,
sings, cries out, bent on pleasure. I too drag myself along, feeling stupid,
asking the same question, what do they see?’
Baudelaire
contemplates the blind men as failed poets, who have given up on all the senses
for the tantalisations of thought. That the ideas constantly recede before them
doesn’t warrant contempt, Malte opines. Blindness is above and beyond words,
and defies the philosopher’s gaze. He doesn’t needs to tear out his eyes to see
what the blind man doesn’t, only to give him due recognition for standing there
before him in his festive clothes.
And
so Malte exults, ‘My God, You exist! What grace, what suffering! The man still
believes in himself, and birds of paradise! He’s an example to us all. Putting up with everything and not judging
others...’ And Malte promises himself that if he can afford a new raincoat this
winter he’ll wear it like that. Blindly, invisibly, like the Holy Ghost. But at
heart he knows, whether he’s destined for Higher Things or the lower depths,
disguising himself in fine feathers won’t help him in the least. He has no wish
to dress better than the vagrants standing every day at the same street corner,
until winter comes and they disappear into the fog. When it lifts they’ll still
be there, ever present and uncomplaining. ‘I live from meal to meal, from day
to day, from hope to hope, from journey to journey, from illness to illness,
from the cradle to the grave. But they remain the same. Endure.
As though they
are immortal.’
