Wolfing It

This is not an essay - except in the sense that all my writings are attempts. It is a holiday appropriate to the Sabbath, on which it is being written.  It is an indulgence.

Yesterday, I reached half-way point in my Partial India, 13 letters down of my abecedary voyage through the memory of a voyage.  At this midway point, I feel poised, as if the rest were downhill.  (I know it is not.)  For one of the first times in my own writing - as opposed to my journalism, though the only real gulf is that I get paid for one and not the other - I have a sense of getting somewhere, because there is somewhere to get. The problem with these short pieces is that they are intentionally self-contained. As such, they define their own minute universe, and refer only to ideas in it, never my other writings, except possibly by implication.

In fact, I need these constraints.  Just as Mozart, Beethoven and many lesser luminaries turned increasingly to fugal procedures in their later works, feeling the need for some musical roughage, some resistance to compose against, I too need the sense of compression, of words being strictly and inexorably limited. The other side of the same coin is that I could not face writing a 300-page novel.  I am a child, and need immediate rewards; I would certainly lose heart shortly after embarking on a full-length fiction.

Writing these one-pagers may be necessary for me, but the form does have its advantages.  Apart from the convenience of time - I can knock one off more or less whenever I feel like it - there is the sense of achievement once the filled page has been honed.  And in enterprises likes my Partial India, there is a kind of avalanche or magnifying effect. As the elements pile, the sum steadily becomes greater than the parts. It is like building a house instead of making bricks.  And so my 13 bricks, or half a house, feel more substantial than their bare quantity might suggest. 

I have always wondered what it felt like to compose in the manner of Hugo Wolf.  When he was working on the Mörike Lieder, he would frequently produce several songs a day.  Listening to them, they sound like uniquely individual creations, as if each masterpiece took months to craft.  Now, over the last week, I have found myself doing something slightly similar.  Thus a week ago I wrote my A and B; on Monday D; Tuesday H; C, Q and S on Wednesday, F on Thursday; K, L, M and Y on Friday, and yesterday I wrote Z.
 
The experience is strange but rather wonderful. While I am writing, I am totally immersed in the matter to hand.  However small and trivial, it expands until it fills my mental horizon.  What I have written before, or will write, does not exist.  Once I have finished - or rather stopped – I can then begin again, with the same pristine sense of being pastless and futureless.  In this way it is possible to construct four worlds a day which are quite separate.  Or at least should be: inevitably there is spillage from one to another.  But at least I have achieved some glimmering of an understanding into the exultation which Wolf experienced.  I only hope it does not have the same effect.

(28.12.86)

See also A Partial India

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