The Extreme Discipline of Breathing

My mind has been a pile of mush for almost a year now due to a serious misfortune that unfolded in my life. Consequently I stopped reading regularly like I had been since my teens. I don't remember completing a novel or any nonfiction since maybe last year. I don't even remember the last few books I completed. Actually, I had read most of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness at some point last year, though, but that's the only exception.

Just recently a friend of mine recommended that I take a look at an excerpt from Janet Frame’s posthumously published 1963 novel Towards Another Summer. Here's a little of what I read:

"Yet here, in the attic, Grace decided, little effort or encouragement would be needed to draw aside the curtains of the secret window, to smash the glass, enter the View; fearful, hopeful, lonely; disciplining one's breath to meet the demands of the new element; facing again and again the mermaiden's conflict – to go or stay; to return through the window whose one side is a mirror, or inhabit the blood-cave and slowly change from one who gazed at the view to one who is a part or whole of the view itself; and from there (for creation is movement) when all the mirror is a distorted image of oneself, bobbing in the dark waves with stripes of light like silver and gold bars imprisoning one's face and body, to pass beyond the view, beyond oneself to – where? Not to the narrow source that a speck of dust, a full-stop, an insect's foot can block for ever, but to some bountiful coastline with as many waves as beginning fish or sperm before the choice is made, the life decided, and the endowed drop of water shining with its power and pride perfects its lonely hazard under the threat of dust, full-stops, insects' feet; only a multiplicity of wave provides a horizon, a coastline, a land; beyond the view, beyond the narrow vain chosen speck of life to the true source – the boundless billionaire coastline of eternity; from ceaseless rivalries and rhythms and patterns of beginning, to silence and stillness; no wind in the trees – no trees; no sky or people or buildings; to reach there one may need the extreme discipline of breathing: that is, death."

These two radically punctuated sentences blew my mushy mind away. But I wasn't about to rush out to Borders to buy a copy.


Coincidental sidebar: I had watched Jean Cocteu's 1930 film The Blood of a Poet only a week or two before being pointed in the direction of Janet Frame. Cocteu's film was not as interesting as I had hoped, but its themes of life and death are very similar to what Frame describes above.

Anyhow, the same friend that had recommended the Frame excerpt to me gave me a copy of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace early this week. I'm hooked. I've never read Coetzee before, but I will end up reading all of his novels even if they turn out to be only half as good as Disgrace. This novel makes me think of a cross between Kenzaburo Oe and Julio Cortazar, but with a desert-dry beat-like poetry in the writing. The cover of the edition I was given has on it a photograph of an emaciated brindle dog of some sort, two of its legs blurred with motion. The stray is beside a rusted black piece of unidentifiable junk metal at the edge of a dirt road. The scrawny animal appears to be following the dirt road into the background of a distance left out of focus.

I'm not sure what it is about this image that is so compelling, and I'm not far enough into the book to sort out what its correlation to the story is. But I know what I like, and as far as I can see this image tells a story of alienation and spiritual poverty. The story within the book seems headed in that direction, but it is much more unsettling and disturbing than the image on the cover. If you happen to be drawn to unsettling and disturbing qualities in stories, maybe I'll let you borrow my copy of Disgrace when I'm done reading it.

Hey, Lynne - thanks. It feels damn good to be reading again.