Reality Hunger (57 page)

When it is suggested that acting can also fuel neurosis and self-involvement, Ms. Leigh suddenly exudes the polish and intensity she displays on the screen. She’s decided, for a moment, to perform. “Well,” she says with a toss of her head and a wave of her hand, “of course, but who isn’t self-involved?”

Contemporary culture makes pilgrimage impossible. Experience is always secondhand, planned and described for one’s consumption by others in advance. Even the rare, authentically direct experience is spoiled by self-consciousness. We’re doomed to an imitation of life.

I took Tomaž Šalamun to see the Hans Hoffmann show at the Berkeley museum. We walked through Hoffmann trying on everybody’s form of abstract expressionism, the de Kooning—like paintings, the Newman-like paintings, the Gottlieb-like paintings, and the Pollock and the Rothko types, all of them done with great boldness and vigor. We came back out into the sunlight, and Tomaž said, “Poor man, he had no fate.”

risk

It is not instruction but provocation that I can receive from another soul.

Lionel Trilling, unwilling to pay the cost of exposing himself to ridicule, envied the sacrifice—in Hemingway—of all the usual grounds of personal pride and self-respect.

I thought of myself as an imperfect writer who needed to perfect himself, perfect his language and style, and all of a sudden that was a suffocating project that I had to break with.

It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart
in order to get at the things, or the Nothingness, behind it. Grammar and Style—to me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it (be it something or nothing) begins to seep through: I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.

Literary intensity is inseparable from self-indulgence and self-exposure.

You want to put in a little bit of David—the safe part of David—the David that you wouldn’t be afraid to show anybody, but there is a David that you don’t want to be in the film, and that’s what you should try to put in, if you don’t dare face yourself other ways. Confess things to the camera. Say the things you’re most ashamed of, things you don’t want to remember, things you don’t want anybody to know. Maybe that way there’ll be some truth.

If your picture isn’t any good, you’re not standing close enough.

Purity of heart is to will one thing.