Isolation.
Physical isolation.
I’ve wanted to write about this for a while, and was planning something longer, but maybe it’s better to chunk this — assemble it later.
The last couple of days I’ve been staying in a flat, by myself, by the seaside.
Perfect writing conditions.
But I’m not really all that isolated.
Franz Kafka said something about perfect writing conditions — which started me off thinking about this, years ago.
‘Writing means revealing ones self to excess… This is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why even night is not night enough… I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp. Food would be brought and always put down far away from my room, outside the cellar’s outermost door. The walk to my food, in my dressing gown, through the vaulted cellars, would be my only exercise. I would then return to my table, eat slowly and with deliberation, then start writing again at once. And how I would write! From what depths I would drag it up! without effort!’
(Franz Kafka, ‘Letter, 14–15 January 1913’, in Letters to Felice (trans. James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth; Minerva: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1992), 184.)
But who brings the food?
And what is the food?
Here is where a properly Marxist analysis would be a very good thing.
Kafka in his cosy cellar, is negating or neglecting his supply chain. In order to be ideally alone, he has to pretend to be more independent than he is. He already has the means of production, pen and ink and paper, although they remain invisible in this paragraph — they are just writing things.
Each of them is the result of a complex coming together of manufactured elements. Each is an accumulation of collective cultural knowledge.
For Journey into Space, I researched the making of iron oak gall ink. Of course the ink I use isn’t made this way, but, even so, the chemical process behind it is far from simple. It’s possible to make a black liquid with which one could write from soot and water, and egg white, but it doesn’t really do the job.
This might explain Daniel Defoe’s catch-up paragraph in Robinson Crusoe.
How does his castaway — archetypal man-by-himself — have what he needs to write?
In the next place, we are to observe that among the many things which I brought out of the ship, in the several voyages which, as above mentioned, I made to it, I got several things of less value, but not at all less useful to me, which I omitted setting down before; as, in particular, pens, ink, and paper…
Handy that.
This is why so many writers, going on Desert Island Discs, choose an infinite supply of writing materials. They’re not going to be able to make ink, let alone paper.
But it’s Kafka’s food I’ve been thinking about.
Someone cooks it, and someone — perhaps the same someone — brings it.
Let’s imagine them at their most basic.
They are a person and have a name.
They have access to a kitchen. They can bring the food on a plate on a tray with cutlery. The food is simple Czech fare — meat, dumplings, sauerkraut.
So far so basic.
But think of the number of people — in 1913 — who would have been involved in the creation of flour to make the bread for the dumplings.
Kafka is alone, and yet he is surrounded by supply lines that shoot in towards him from around the world. And these aren’t abstract lines, they are also the wheat farmer, the ploughman, the farmhand, the cart-driver, the miller, the merchant, the storesman, the grocer, the grocer’s assistant.
This is true of all of us.
Nowadays, it’s headspinning how many invisible connections and dependencies each of us has.
That may be why I’m so fascinated by books in which people, usually men, isolate themselves as much as possible.
To write.
It’s a fantasy — I know it’s as much a fantasy as Kafka’s — but a yearning of independence is also a desire for resilience.
I can survive.
I’ve just given up midway through Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga by Sylvain Tesson. This is mainly because Tesson, as he describes himself, isn’t sufficiently alone. He’s constantly hiking off along the subzero lake shore to drink vodka with his friendly neighbours.
That’s not what I’m after.
Far better is a book I re-read about once a year, Bernard Moitessier’s The Long Way — translated from the French of La Longue route; seul entre mers et ciels.
Alone between seas and skies.
But with a boat crammed full of supplies.
I’ll write about Bernard soon. He renders himself more isolated than almost anyone in history, and is ecstatic about it.
Interesting as a metaphor. A Buddhist might say nothing exists in and of itself. The table I'm sitting at is only a table by virtue of its function. It consists of many things, cellulose from the tree, the forester, the woodcutter, the manufacturer, painter, polisher, the transporter, retailer and so on. We do not ourselves 'exist' as such, but only in relation to other people and things, stretching out in their millions in space and time. Everything is 'conditioned' by everything else. Nothing is permanent. All is change, ephemeral, momentary. Remove the 'conditioning' as Buddhists call it, and you are left with 'pure' consciousness. Which is nothing. Poor old Kafka was never truly alone and never could be, no matter how hard he might try. He might have found a greater sense of being solitary in a busy cafe or noisy football crowd.
Cf Thoreau having his washing done and food delivered by his mother.