Ah‑Sen and I

Scholarly Style of Recitation

The one they call Ah‑Sen is aggrieved by everything I do. My movements are marked by languor, unless ratified by our countless driven obsessions. For this, I am both feted and objurgated by the silence of a breath. I detest flattering gatekeepers for drops of their borrowed time, or puffing my chest out to castigators masquerading as writers; he endures these abasements, and at times, with rather good humour. I am better occupied in the company of my children, the films of Berlanga, the prose of Sitwell and Cendrars (Stevenson trailing not far behind). Ah‑Sen validates these habits, but presides over them with the oppugnancy of a judge. I read for pleasure, while he labours under the scriptible sun of a bastard formalism, having been born under a mad sign. He would go years without finishing books, drowning at the level of the sentence, until I liberated him from the prison of his foolishness. I provide him with workaday sustenance, and keep vigilant watch over neglected pocketbook, and still find a never-ending reckoning of drink and debt threatening to make a mockery of my resolve. He is regularly absent when a question of manual labour arises. There will come a time of obeisance to his custom of warping the world and populating it with our enemies’ drolleries. Voltaire wrote well when he said that if attacked on a matter of style, it is for the work alone to make its rejoinder. A style eternally grapples with the impossibility of its existence, the necessity of its destruction; it is an exercise in the parametrics of purity, the dialectics of forgetfulness. It is a belonging of oblivion and a flight of life. My grandfather incarnated Ah‑Sen in 1949 to sustain himself in Africa. I incarnated him to sustain my appetite for vulgarism. I have no reason to unbridle myself from this tautological character who marshals my existence into something that is as “twisty and as hard to unravel as a Gordian knot.”

I do not care which of us has written this page.