Some days you can work, some not. Today is a day without work; I am at my desk, ready, but nothing comes. I ask myself: who is the ‘subject’ of this inability to work? Who is the one who waits to write? It is as though the day itself, the blank grey sky, had somehow turned itself inside out, rediscovering itself in my inability to write.
I would like to commemorate this unpropitious day which did not burst into flame, in which nothing in particular was possible, this millionth dead day of empty time-space that laughs gently at the idea of work. ‘It’s too late’, said the day, ‘nothing will happen’. – ‘But I’ve been here ready since the morning’. ‘But you’ve forgotten, haven’t you, what it was you were to work on?’ – ‘I’ve forgotten everything’.
My desk is crowded: Duras’s Practicalities, from which I’ve transcribed the line, ‘A man who drinks is interplanetary. He moves through interstellar space. It’s from there he looks down’, Bernhard’s Correction (I’m up to p. 200), a pile of CDs (The Low boxset, orchestral works by Strauss), chapters from W.’s book and from mine.
January 15th 2005: I wonder how I will remember this time? I know that today and all the days like it – so many – will be what I forget when I remember, even as such days make up the substance of my life. My secret history: life lived in the infinitive, a ‘to live’ without subject. What has happened today? Is it possible to write of an event that does not occur – that, as it were, reverberates through everything even as it leaves it intact?
When I come to myself I think: this is what the executives do not know – not those for whom time is scarce and a day will never stretch forever. Not the ones for whom all time is accounted for. Then I think: I belong to old Europe, to what crumbles like the buildings in one of Max Ernst’s paintings. Whatever happening, I think to myself, is not happening here. Nothing is happening, I think, and then, pretentiously: but that is a sign of the event. I’ve caught it out and here it is, happening without happening.
Nothing happens. To say this ‘nothing is happening’ is corrosive, that it is meaninglessness, even absurd is not to assimilate it to nihilism. It is nothing, diffuse nothing which has as though spread everywhere. What does it reveal? Now I think of a scene from a film I show sixth formers when they visit the university: a bag swirls up into the air. The voiceover: it was as if I saw God and he looked right back at me. And I think: only what I see is the blind gaze of the day, and the gaze with which I meet it has as though congealed somewhere in between the office and the sky.
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