Eye of the child: “Human nature seeks constantly to know the world around it, but the desire decreases over time. As we grow older the world loses its beauty and brilliance, but we can reclaim our acuity of vision, the sunrise of the world, by way of the child who observes the world around him with wide and curious eyes.”
September
September 2, afternoon: I dreamed of my father. He was walking and he put his arm around my shoulder and embraced me. He seemed strong, solid. He complained to me about the troubles and pains of last year. I told him that as for myself, I’d been in pain since turning eighteen. It made me happy to complain to him and expect some kind of relief. But he pointed to the crowded tram and said, smiling kindly, “They’re going to pick each other’s pockets,” and I realized he wanted to change the subject. Then he disappeared and Adel H. took his place.****** We walked next to each other with his arm on my shoulder and I began to complain to him, too. He sympathized, then left me when we reached a playing field. I was angry, because he had listened to me only so that I’d accompany him to the playing field, not because he was especially interested in what I was saying. I went away, after taking his towel in revenge. I woke up and felt happy about seeing my father. I recalled my feelings of delight, gladness, comfort at being able to complain to him and have his help. I thought, if only there were no science of dreams. How wonderful it would have been if this were a visit from my father’s spirit — a consolation, a prophecy!
Read an article, “The Dialectic of Nature.” Planets in motion, the earth cooling, establishing the conditions of life, the first cell, the vertebrates, mankind, mankind in its most advanced stage, the extinction of the earth (its cooling, its collapse into the sun), the persistence of matter in alternate forms in an infinite universe. Subject for a great novel.
Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse has opened up a new world for me. Her idea of art seems to be the same as that given in her novel by the painter: “One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy.” This is what Woolf does in the novel, handling everything that is simple, ordinary, quotidian. She writes by magic, elegantly and simply, without artifice: “But he did not ask them anything. He sat and looked at the island and he might be thinking, We perished, each alone, or he might be thinking, I have reached it. I have found it; but he said nothing.”
Anything that takes us beyond the limits of the conventional novel, now exhausted, is worth doing. I believe writing, the practice itself, will reveal the ingredients of experimentation, will be the incarnation of its content.
How shall I write? I don’t think I have to write about any given topic — that is, sit down to write it and find a suitable form. Not at all. My feelings are set in motion by an idea, an experience, a memory, a style, a form, and they demand release. In releasing them, they interact with my rational mind, which determines their form and content.
Depths of the sea: a book by William Beebe, A Half Mile Down — “At a depth of eighteen meters, red light vanishes. Yellow vanishes at one hundred. Two hundred and forty meters down, green and blue also vanish from the spectrum, giving way to a deep blackish blue. Between 520 and 580 meters, we were enclosed in utter blackness.” A battle in the deep dark waters between a whale. and a nine-meter squid. With its snaky, suckered tentacles it measures 15 meters. A strange world, where darkness reigns, unsafe, unchanging, ice-cold, almost without oxygen. But there is life. About the Japanese shrimp, Dr. Noginama says that the act of insemination occurs between midnight and eight in the morning on mild and calm summer nights, in fresh water: “The male pursues the female. gripping her as she tries to flee him. and tears off her outer shell. He then embraces the naked female and she takes his organ of reproduction, brutally and coarsely, inside her, then rips it off. so that he remains in a state of impotency until a new organ takes the place of the old.”
The rest of Yevtushenko’s article in L’Express:
— Prose is far less tractable than poetry. A novel can’t be written in a few days, nor read aloud to the public.
— Realism is the greatest ism of art. But realism, as I understand it, can assume hundreds if not thousands of different forms. Each work that moves the spirit of man, whether or not it represents houses, people, and trees, I take to be a work of realism.
— Once a tired woman worker came up to me and said, “Just write the truth, son, just the truth. Look for the truth in yourself and take it to the people. Look for the truth in the people and store it within yourself.”
November
Eliot’s “objective correlative”: he means an image through which the poet articulates his emotion, so that the image provokes a similar emotion in the reader. This emotion is not a feeling but rather the transformation of feeling into an image, for poetry is not an expression of feelings but rather an escape from them. It is the poet’s effort to transform his personal pains into something strange and fertile, something universal that accords with a general rather than selfish interest.
Can I unify the personal with the objective in my writing? Set off in three directions at the same time: subject, style, and form.
My father taught me to put no store in anything whose only justification was custom. I learned from him that I must think about everything for myself, on my own terms.
Naguib Mahfouz’s style in The Search is the same style I used last year in my own writing. It’s also derived from Joyce and Woolf. Mahfouz’s novel, of which only four parts have so far appeared, will be the beginning of the modern Egyptian novel.
December
“I projected The Battleship Potemkin as a consecutive series of events, a dramatic totality. The secret of the work’s unity lies in my having arranged the events according to the laws of tragedy, a classical tragedy in five acts. I divided the events of the film into five acts and in each act treated specific events, whose meaning was dependent on the events that preceded and followed them, with the stipulation that each shot add something new to what came before. Each shot has a particular meaning and the general idea of the film does not lie in the film itself, but is rather created by the spectator through his tracking of the events, which were selected from among the facts of the historical narrative.” “A Director’s Thoughts,” Sergei Eisenstein.
Friday, December 20, 1963. How wonderful suddenly to hear a word of praise directed at something of yours which no one else found value in. A. said something that’s turned my head; I don’t know what to say or to think. It’s a beautiful thing to have someone call you a kind of genius, or to say that you will make something truly new. But is it true? I’ve been searching for the new, which is why I was so irritated to discover Naguib Mahfouz using stream-of-consciousness in The Search, just as I had. Well then, will I repeat him?. Must look for something new. I have just realized that stream-of-consciousness, in the novel and in the short story, is on the march all over the world, including Egypt. And I’ve become irritated by all those ready-made phrases, now turned into fossils: He walked, he went, he said. Can our country innovate in the novel on a world scale?