Invisible and Dumb

"Bad art is more tragically beautiful than good art, because it documents human failure." Henry Letham, quoting the imaginary artist Tristan Reveur.

As a writer, I find that ideas somehow converge at certain times in my life, coalescing into a story. I tend to link this phenomenon with ideas of synchronicity and Jung's group unconscious. I can see that process happening very clearly in my current story, 'Shrike'. I have no idea if the story will be interesting for the reader, but it is satisfying to me as a writer, because I know I am mining a rich seam of the unconscious and of my own personal synchronicity. I feel as if I am really expressing myself. Now, that's rather paradoxical, as this blog post is about the impossibility of expressing oneself, as is the story I am writing.

My ideas on the matter at the moment are somewhat in confusion, so I am using this blog ad hoc, so to speak, as a kind of notebook for a work in progress. First of all, not chronologically, but arbitrarily, there is the quote heading this blog entry in bold letters. I discovered this recently on the Ligotti website, in the forum of writer, Mark Samuels. It is one of his new signature quotations. Apparently it comes from a film called Stay. I haven't seen the film, and I haven't read a plot summary, because I now intend to watch it. I thought it was a wonderful quote, summing up something I have felt for a long time. I left a message in Mark's forum as follows:

"This is a great quote. There's a section in the story I'm writing at the moment that deals with this theme.

"Of course, being the artistic failure that I am, this quote (and theme) have great resonance for me.

"The two quotes put together could be applied to two of my favourite writers.

"Nagai Kafu is often considered a 'close, but no cigar' kind of artistic failure (personally, I think he's a god), and Mishima Yukio certainly made suicide into art.

Who is Tristan Reveur?"

The artistic failure dealt with in 'Shrike' is largely represented by the Japanese writer Tayama Katai. He is considered very influential in Japanese literature, and yet, today, critics generally deride his work as naive, boring, lacking in substance and so on. When I was studying Japanese literature in Kyoto, I read Katai's most famous work, Futon. Apparently, I'm one of the few people who has. My tutor at Kyoto University commented as follows: "Are you really reading that novel? That's a truly lamentable piece of work. Is there any work in English literature, I wonder, that is so influential whilst being so utterly without value?" At the time I could not answer that question, though today I might say something like Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, which is undoubtedly a very poor piece of work, but of which I am rather fond, just as I am of Futon.

Well, now, going back two or three weeks, I spent the weekend with Mr Wu, famous on this blog as my companion at a Morrissey and a Momus gig. Now, there is something of an alcoholic haze hanging over that weekend, but I do remember that on the Saturday we listened to a CD called David Bowie: Early On (1964-1966). In fact, I still have that Cd, because Mr Wu kindly leant it to me. The material on the CD predates Space Oddity and even The Laughing Gnome. Being something of a Bowiephile, I was familiar with some, but not all of it. There's a peculiar kind of attraction to listening to the work of an artist before he became famous. The work is not yet 'mature'. It has that intriguing imperfection that is suggested by the Tristan Reveur quote. But what, exactly, is the nature of this fascination?

I have a few ideas on the subject, but perhaps it is appropriate that I feel a supreme lack of confidence about my ability to express them here (that expression is going rather better in 'Shrike'). Nonetheless, I will have a go at framing those ideas.

I remember that drunken night with Mr Wu rather fondly. I wonder why, exactly. Of course, we were both indulging an interest that we knew was not appreciated by everyone – the connoisseurship of obscure David Bowie tracks. Perhaps, because we were inebriated, our expressions of appreciation for the imperfections of the songs were themselves imperfect. And yet there was understanding in such imperfection. It was not an evening spent in pursuits recognised by the world as constructive, and yet I find few things of more value than such evenings.

As we discussed Bowie's early music, the title of a particular song came up that has been haunting me rather of late. That song is Conversation Piece, an out-take from the Space Oddity album.

I suppose that I've been very much in the mood conjured by these lyrics recently. I particularly relate to the lines: "I'm invisible and dumb/And no one will recall me."

This seems a very powerful statement of a certain feeling that I rather suspect is universal. At the era in which the song was made, Bowie had been struggling for fame for a number of years, and it had continued to elude him. He probably did not know it, however, but he was on the very threshold of fame. I say he probably did not know it, but it seems in this song almost as if he did know, unconsciously. "I'm invisible and dumb/And no one will recall me." These seem, on the surface, like the words of someone who believes he will never be famous, or never be profoundly known in a relationship with another human being. Some people might think that the words proved false. I rather suspect that they were spot on.

There is a part of all of us, I think, an authentic part, that is alone and vulnerable, and feels like it has no place in the world. Bowie is attempting to express this part of himself by saying that he cannot express it. It almost seems as if there is a purity to this failure and isolation. Then he became famous and successful. Did people then know that person who had been invisible and dumb? I rather think they knew instead the mask that was necessary to success. It was inevitable that the invisible and dumb true self would never be known. The song, then, seems almost a farewell to that self because Bowie takes the stage of success and gives the immaculate performance that will prevent us from knowing him forever. It is a precious song that gives the merest glimpse of the hesitating true self just before it takes the stage. (The concept of the mask of success is also expressed in an early mime piece by Bowie available on the video Love You Till Tuesday.)

And for us that hesitating true self exists before every situation where we have to meet the world and don the mask of success or happiness or mental health – in work or in love, in all of these things. That true self is left outside the door, invisible and dumb, where no one will recall. I only wish there was some way that these true selves could meet each other. Their purity seems to be the purity of death. The mask of success that banishes them is the sordid mask of life. Death, and its relation to the true self, is, of course, something else that has been concerning me lately. Death, failure, purity – this is how the themes are linked in my mind.