March 2000

LS,

Hopefully the Society doesn't mind a few words on herself as an opening of this text. Part of your aim, I understand, is to prick up Lawrence Durrell on the brightest star of our literary universe (boots polished), to stabilize his position in the canon, make school of his art, manifest what his authorship may mean in the 21th century and pray for the future of our alphabetical fiction. Adaptations and interpretations on the work will flourish and (so?) adjectives and titles will be glued on his name. Nice industry! And since the oeuvre has taught me more or less how to rotate (but the world around me doesn't really want to move along), I am willing to change borders. To begin with a very nasty public related question: has anybody thought about Cyborg Teri Smith Tyler and what will happen if she reads about Durrell's Trash? ....

My best friend has phoned me about this essay to ask whether he would be excluded from the content. For him - and others - let me briefly explain. Trash can be traced out as a character in Durrell's Avignon Quartet, in any case in Monsieur or The Prince of Darkness, a book starting up with a mysterious death case: Piers - a character - is found with his head missing. That book is lying here on my burro and to do a quick falsification on the characters configuration, I have just randomly turned over some leaves to end up in Akkad (the Egyptian religious leader who more or less persuaded Piers to have his head chopped off), saying softly that Jesus was a Gnostic and his death not theological but poetical. Hurray For Hippiedom, I unconsciously associate, and throw my eyes inwards. A civilized linguistic upbringing would want this text now to dig deeper, but it's agenda has to say no. But one night to write something down, nay, not so little! Therefore to continue the taxonomy and feed the first proposition : Trash is the - em - "negress" mistress of the "sexually betrayed" writer's alter ego Sutcliffe's wife Pia: the pretty Swiss schoolgirl who's doll collection is set into fire by Suthclife, only to catalyze their Freudian of perhaps rather Ibsian therapy.
Of all the a-synchronical marriages in both the Alexandria and Avignon Quartet, this triangle describes the happiest relationship in my mirroring mind. A quote:

"Meanwhile (I am quoting him) he has lost his "tone of voice" in writing, which he compared to the sudden loss of a higher register by a concert soprano. His voice had broken. This must have been after the failure of Pia's analysis, and her defection with the negress." *

Trash the negress (I am quoting Suthclife) "falls asleep when one uttered a word or more than one syllable, to croon "my, my", turn over lazily on one side and fall into a coma" and Cyborg Teri Smith Tyler can be visited on the Internet on a Conspiracy Site (tipped this afternoon by one of my lesbian sisters, serious but by chance). Cyborg Teri Smith Tyler in a seemingly official juridical rapport, claims that a "bizarre conspiracy enslaves and oppresses certain segments of her society". She or it finds her life ruled by governmental clans and perceives this as proved by air-planes and songs about social pariah's in the air and, worse, the death hunting of at least ten million black women in concentration camps. Hallelujah! Let the two items form a cultural paradigm and serve as a narrow entrance of a workshop - I don't want to be part in - about referential writing. Wrong angle and a bridge to a very complicated field, sorry, I'm a fiction writer myself, not a scientific builder, no time to unravel the proposition. And as an untied Saint Bernard dog just clarified during a coffee break in the Vondelpark: I haven't even read all the books of the Avignon Quartet. Next essay.

(Teri Smith Tyler, Plaintiff-Cyborg http://www.teleport.com/~dkossy/newscorr.html)

* Lawrence Durrell, Monsieur or The Prince of Darkness, Faber and Faber, 1976, p172.

trial nr 2

"Lawrence Durrell The Worlds Wittiest Writing Diplomat"

It happened in May 1999, and the option was uttered in my ear through a yellow mobile telephone on the airport of Skopje, Macedonia, where I had just arrived.
`The duty driver will bring you to the Contingency Center,' the voice had said.
And recognizing the word only from another context, I asked (much too loud):
`Contingency Center? What is that suppose to mean: a reservoir for false sentences?'
And then it happened:
`******** please,' the voice said, `try to look at it as a Lawrence Durrell.'

This scene frames the special moment in which the oeuvre of Durrell became recommended as a key to the world. What happened!? you hopefully wonder. Well, I had been asked to write a theater play about an international war conflict in Holland around1428, and during the research of this pre-modern European tragedy a similar action occurred elsewhere in present time, which we all saw on television. The "voice", then, worked as a refugee transporter in the Kosovo Verification Mission and now is a media development coordinator in Pristine. It's my darley brother William who invited me to come over and see what war conflicts can be on a human scale. These flat ingredients may be filled up once (in the Kosovo Quartet with lot's of horny Pombals), but to follow up the sequence: now that I have been involved in such a (military) mission, by effect the oeuvre of Durrell has become more realistic and a strange deconstruction is starting. Whereas before I would only clap and cry for the well wrapped artistic significance, today I weep on the etymological meaning of heraldry and wonder on certain points: but perhaps it was just a memory. If a tourist guide from Amsterdam (me) after two days in wartime Skopje is conceptually involved in a project that - sponsored by Bill Gates - aims to implant chips in people who can't live in their homes twenty kilometers away, my my, why shouldn't Lord Galen have acted a true performance in Mrs. Gilchrist whorehouse?

Again a small paradigm. For my friend: the intoxicated cultural exploration of Lord Galen in a European governmental project named Culture as a Cornerstone, can be read in Sebastian Or Ruling Passion A Novel by Lawrence Durrell (1983).

TRIAL 3

Flag! New Heraldic Ground! ON!

Is it allowed in the Society to kiss the dad mayor's photo from the behinds of old pockets, and study the heraldic trick of narration, not to serve the audience, not to blow your mind and ruin your back, but to write down the output of an inner dialogue, or create "the invaginated pocket", as Derrida puts it?

When a text folds back upon itself it creates an invaginated pocket in which an outside becomes an inside. The secret center that appears to explain everything folds back on the work incorporating an external position from which to elucidate the whole in which it also figures. Boxing itself in, a text does not produce closure.

Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction, 1982, p.198.

Actually I should be send straight into the Society's Hospital as a refugee cut off from reality, knowing nothing about the discours amongst the organized readers. A frustrated snake, yes, that must be me and the oeuvre a living loot inside that after ten years of isolated rest suddenly - in one afternoon - has to be minced, digested and analysed. To put his name in a search engine is the true blasphemy ofcourse but then to find out that in sunny California readers have founded a Durrell Society and will spend a holliday together this summer in Greece, it, well, toot toot boing boing made me read Henry Miller's Colossus of Maroussi actually, where in between many manly metabollucks was to be found a touching discription of our darling Durrell: 28 years old on a Greek beach quarreling in real swet with his wife (Black Book Boredom Ninny?) Nancy about wether to sign in and fight for the Greek army or not. Ofource in my privatised love I connect some biographical things together. Yet to put Durrell in a European tradition of post-war literature, call him a writing diplomat, say: if you like John le Carré, you can read him too? No thanks for a start.

Yet a curious question pops up: are the diplomatic rapports of Durrell preserved? And if there was a tone; was it loose or formal? Did he drive his superiors mad, was he indeed a fish swimming against the stream (like I think) like Ludwig Pursewarden?
And who was Purswarden actually : the old heart of Habsburg?

500 dollars for a new light on the fiction work of Durrell. The Durrellians! Are they writers? Thinkers? Do they talk biblically, like (indeed!) disciples, are they the dramaturgs of The Alexandria Quartet, the casters, the storyadapters? Should I give them my card, beg them to call me? I would like to be involved with the dramaturgy of the filmed epos. Defend ALL THE FYSICALLITY of the mind.

Not all the books traveled with me during the last years. Justine, Balthasar, Mountolive and Clea are all left in the old house. Four fables picturesquely printed by Faber and Faber. Pope Joan I gave away this autumn to a contemporary Pombal (Meneer Balzak or Mister Scrotum as I named him in front of his own eyes. ) Tunc and Nunquam I gave away to friends who then studied "globalism". They couldn't catch up with the suffering subject Felix, I suppose, and never read it. Dark Labyrinth is here.

******** ******
Amsterdam March 20th 2000

LABYRINTH

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