Biodegradable Paper

I conceived the second book as an act of contrition for the first, disastrous book. A kind of overwriting, whose every word would erase a word for the former disaster and then leaving a whole book of blank pages. And when you find you’ve written two disasters? When you’ve filled two books with nonsense?

Youth: you have the future, you dream and the future is the space in which to dream. Age: the future is now, it is here, time to work, and you must earn your way by the sweat of your brow. So you work, with all the dreams of youth pushing you forward. You write, filling blank page after page; you write quickly and you think for this reason you write well.

And when you read the disaster? When you read back what you wrote at speed and, you thought, in inspiration? When you felt the future rushing by you and thought: I am alive in the future?

Tonight, I have a print out of a draft of the second book beside me. And I borrowed my first book from the library (I don’t have my own copy). The horror: this is my ‘oeuvre’. It isn’t even funny. Still, I laughed with W. about it on the phone. ‘I’ve never had a single idea’. ‘Nor have I’.

Steve of This Space (although he does not remember this and perhaps it wasn’t Steve at all) once wrote to me our first books should be written on biodegradable paper. Let the pages rot; tear them off and throw them into the breeze. Or feed them into the river. Let the water read them.