~

This month at Christies,
Brando's library.
Up for auction.
Some of his copies contain
portions of underlined text.
Highlighted.
With notes in the margin.
In Brando's own hand.

Included in this collection
is Lawrence DURRELL's Justine (New York, 1960).
Perhaps the randomness of this auction-event
will thrust Durrell back into a scholarly light.

Durrell.
A departure from the current trends in canon-curricula.

So I wonder (like all of his admirors)...
What specific confluence of educational politics
sabotaged his reputation?
Who funnelled him into the spill of Deep Six?
Did he not revise his work enough?
Or was he (too) sensible towards writing-as-a-profession?
Was he so totally uncategorizable that he could not be
neatly-slid into a 'school'?
Could National Tradition not blend him smooth?
Or perhaps, he was too preoccupied by the question of God?
God. These questions are the stuff of a conference.

Regardless.

Durrell.

Poet and novelist.
Infusing a writerly sense of place into every relationship.
Defining his notion of modern love with geographied words.
And his a-linear form.
His Alexandria-Quarteted-sense-of-time
bending back on itself.
The time of the aeon.

His form.
Best described by George Landow
as a print proto hypertext.

The writer-as-exile.
Expatriate (if only to self).
Comparable to Wiesel.
And there are others
that come to mind.
Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
Eliot, Joyce, Milosz and Rushdie.
Kazantzakis.
Genet.

The exile-as-travel-writer.
Their marginalia.
Written against the thrust of the canon.
Mapping personal terrain into imaginary homelands.
Adopting places, both real and hauntingly invisible
while building communities-of-memory.
Regard-less of time.
And the role of translation layered
onto their original notion of 'what is modernity?'.

But especially the free-range of Durrell.
How he moves across cultures, languages, literary movements.
To someplace beyond.
Even while he is under-represented
in the current image of Academe,
his voice is anchored somewhere securely beyond.
And between.


His deleuzoguattarian flows.
Like his notion of love
(which is comparable to theirs).

And those last few lines from Justine.
The writer's self examination
funneled through a filtered lens.
Our rare glimpse.

"...for I too have been changing in some curious way.
The old self-sufficient life has transformed itself
into something a little hollow, a little empty...
It no longer answers my deepest needs.
Somewhere deep inside, a tide seems to have turned
in my nature."

I reread this carefully.
And each time,
readily identify.

He continues,

"I do not know why but it is towards you,
my dear friend, that my thoughts have turned more
and more of late. Can one be frank? Is there a
friendship possible this side of love which could be
sought and found? I speak no more of love - the word
and its conventions have become odious to me. But is
there a friendship possible to attain which is deeper,
even limitlessly deep, and yet wordless, idealess?
It seems somehow necessary to find a human being
to whom one can be faithful, not in the body
(I leave that to the priests) but in the culprit mind?
But perhaps this is not the sort of problem which will
interest you much these days."

* * *

"The cicadas are throbbing in the great planes,
and the summer Mediterranean lies before me
in all its magnetic blueness. Somewhere out there,
beyond the mauve throbbing line of the horizon
lies Africa, lies Alexandria, maintaining its tenuous
grasp on one's affections through memories which are
already refunding themselves slowly into forgetfulness;
memory of friends, of incidents long past.
The slow unreality of time begins to grip them,
blurring the outlines - so that sometimes I wonder
whether these pages record the actions of real
human beings; or whether this is not simply a story
of a few inanimate objects which precipitated drama
around them - I mean a black patch, a watch-key and
a couple of dispossessed wedding-rings..."

"Soon it will be evening and the clear night sky
will be dusted thickly with summer stars.
I shall be here, as always, smoking by the water.
I have decided to leave Clea's last letter unanswered.
I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises,
to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions,
convenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my
silence according to her own needs and desires,
to come to me if she has need or not, as the case
may be. Does not everything depend on our
interpretation of the silence around us?"

From: Justine, Lawrence DURRELL, 1960.

So many words
for (post) modern love.

"To have dismantled one's self in order finally
to be alone and meet the true double
at the other end of the line.
A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage."
(D&G, ATP)