A Book of Days

PoE 1: HISTORY CONTRA CHRONICLE | AN OPENING

One day they awake to despair: the first day of the diary.¹

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There are days when the words do not come. Walter Benjamin: “Nulla dies sine linea (‘No day without a line’) —but there may well be weeks.”² Which is to say, if the day succeeds in passing, if we are unable to arrest its movement with a thought or so much as an admirable attempt, all we can do is walk. During a day like this (it can feel like a week), I will read indulgently until my eyes strain everything into a tight blur. I go for another, blurrier walk.

A notebook (the site of this invisible struggle), or a diary, is not a story, not a history, but a chronicle. Again, Benjamin:

The historian is constrained to explain one way or another the events he is describing; under no circumstances can he content himself with presenting them as samples of what occurs in the world. Yet this is precisely what the chronicler does and none more strikingly than his classical representatives, the chroniclers of the Middle Ages, precursors of the modern historians. By basing their accounts of historical events on the inscrutable design of providence, they threw off from the start the burden of providing a verifiable explanation. Instead, they offer explication [Auslegung], which does not aim to accurately link together specific events, but to embed them in the inscrutable course of the world.³

A diary is a collection of rainy mornings, rainy evenings, a handful of days seen through ten thousand and one raindrops, each the same in their cool, tiny curvature, their broken palettes of glassy gray light. The fascination of colored marbles in a child’s hand. If sad, then calming. If happy, fleeting. Hildegard von Bingen: “Every creature is a glittering, glistening mirror of Divinity.” And every mirror, each of these raindrops, is an intro-flected entry in the notebook, a glittering, isolated creature.

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Yellow and Blue

One cannot help but read Rimbaud’s letters as a kind of externalized diary; it is not exactly the same with Van Gogh’s letters. Just compare people’s experiences of reading the two: the latter is experienced as a novelistic autobiography, the former as a mystery or a frustration—as evidence.

In Dear Theo, e.g. (Van Gogh’s letters to his brother edited by Irving Stone into a readable “autobiography”), there is an intense interiority even when the painter describes the most usual problems of life, money problems, women problems, and so on. There is a narrative-likeness that proceeds gradually, stops, thrashes around, poses, feints, strikes ahead and rests again, and this over and over in different variations. His work rises out of the tribulation of the last ten years of his life like a demiurge forcibly produced by the oscillations of a world—Genesis in rapid reverse. And this demiurgic world undergoes its Cambrian explosion in the final two years, with most of Van Gogh’s paintings appearing in this brief window—an apocalypse of new life.

With Rimbaud, the bareness of his letters—these come after his absolutely singular supernova of poetic creation—is what makes them feel so starkly present. We read his requests for books, his complaints, his isolated descriptions of the Gulf of Aden, his lists—all an oblique chronicle. We are presented with explication rather than explanation, “embedded in the inscrutable course of the world.” But doesn’t the same hold for his poetry, so often dubiously separated from the equally real event of his travels in Africa?

In the eyes of a historian, every event carries a mark, a signature of sorts linking it to a broader historical current. The chronicler, on the other hand, adduces reasons whose sole aim is to allow him to catch his breath before launching back into his narration, which has no broader purpose.⁴

Rimbaud, here, is the chronicler, his life the narration “which has no broader purpose.”

And yet I am less clear about how this applies to Van Gogh—the main reason that I think of the two together so automatically is Henry Miller’s great little book, The Time of the Assassins (New Directions, 1946), which takes the polar (or parallel) relation of their lives and deaths as its subject, not unlike blue and yellow in Goethe’s Theory of Colors, the poles of light and color mixed with darkness around which a whole world is created.

And yet, I suspect that the polar relation that I am suggesting here between the poet and the painter is defined precisely by their equal status’ as chronicler rather than storyteller (or historian).

The chronicler doesn’t invent a thing, nor needs to verify the authenticity of their sources, whereas the historian simply must verify each and every source. The chronicler’s only document is the spoken word—their own voice, as well as the voices from which they’ve happened to hear the adventure, be it happy or sad, that they then retell.⁵

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There is something axiomatic and strange about the beginning of a diaristic work. First, there is only welter and waste.⁶ Then, a blast, a voice out of nothing, and everything—a handful of letters—falls into existence.

The believer writes his diary. He writes it at intervals and will never complete it, because he will die. What is an interval in a diary? It does not occur in developmental time, for that has been abrogated. It does not occur in time at all, for time has vanished. Instead, it is a book of time: a book of days. A diary does not contain a chain of experiences, for then it would exist without intervals.⁷

A diary is at its best—or is this its only condition? —when nothing happens.⁸ And this nothing rises up as a great exception, an opening where time can finally be entered by spirit.

A diary and a “diaristic” text are not always the same: some diaries, for instance, are almost closer to storytelling (a literary production with incidental or constructed narrative). Kafka’s diaries sometimes fall into this category—he often begins his fiction within his diary—and yet consider a section like the following:

If I should reach the age of 40, I will probably marry an old maid with protruding upper teeth somewhat exposed by the upper lip. The upper front teeth of Frl. Kaufmann, who was in Paris & London, are shifted against each other like legs crossed hastily at the knees. But I’ll hardly live to be forty years old, against that prospect speaks, for example, the tension that often lies over the left half of my skull, which feels like an inner leprosy and which, when I disregard the unpleasantness and try only to contemplate it, makes the same impression on me as the sight of the skull cross sections in textbooks or as an almost painless dissection while alive, where the knife a little bit cooling, careful, often stopping and turning back, sometimes lying at rest slices paper-thin coverings into even finer divisions very close to working brain parts.⁹

This belongs to the chronicle entirely. And that Kafka died at forty from Tuberculosis, “an inner leprosy,” is an example of what I would call personal hyperstition, to be defined in the next installment of this essay.

To anticipate: this personal hyperstition comes in through the paratactic opening created by the diaristic work. The parataxis of the chronicle/diary invokes the spectre of the future (cf. Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life¹⁰).

A diaristic work often includes inventories, lists, drawings, half-finished diagrams and so on. (Cf. Rimbaud’s school notebooks.) Its very essence is the incidental.

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1. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, Harvard University Press. 10.

2. “But each day at least one line should be pointed at me as people are now pointing telescopes at the comet.” Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, trans. Ross Benjamin, Penguin. 6.

3. Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller Essays. 60. Quoted by Giorgio Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, Chronicle of a Dwelling Life, 1806–1843, trans. Alta L. Price, Seagull Books, 2023. 5.

4. Giorgio Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, Chronicle of a Dwelling Life, 1806–1843, trans. Alta L. Price, Seagull Books, 2023. 8.

5. Ibid. 10.

6. Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew words “Tohu Va-Vohu” at the beginning of his Genesis.

7. Ibid. 11.

8. Hӧlderlin: “Es geschieht mir nichts.” Ibid.

9. Kafka, The Diaries. 35.

10. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, Zero Books. I’m thinking specifically of the early section (16–25) “Why hauntology?”