Fraying

I have borrowed an edition of Kafka’s Wedding Preparations in the Country which includes other posthumous prose writings including the Octavo notebooks which I remember once photocopying one lunch hour when I used to work for Hewlett-Packard. Sad memory: the hopelessness of my position at that time: young but also futureless, reading and dreaming but also bound by a series of trivial jobs. I remember them still: covering for a man who had had a stroke, being there to help him, all the while reading Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility for the second time. Then a period in administration when there was little to do. I read Hollier’s Against Architecture in that period. Then there was a time on the assembly line when nothing was being sent down the line to us. I read plays instead: Strindberg, Tennesee Williams….

It was hard to make one’s way in those days just as my friends who work in such places tell me it is today. You can expect, they tell me, upon getting your job, seven years of difficulty, of idiot co-workers and tyannical bosses, seven years of pettiness and short-term contracts, until you find a decent position. Meanwhile, for me, then, there was reading which existed at a strange angle to my present. How was it possible that Mishima’s tetralogy and Hewlett-Packard could co-exist? In a corner of the office, there was even a picture of Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard, shaking hands. And elsewhere, in the coffee rooms, there were motivational posters. Read Runaway Horses in such an office and of what else could you dream of the great conflagration which would destroy everything? Read the Octavo notebooks and dream of the rebellion of office equipment and temporary workers – the faculty photocopier, the glitched computer, the crashed network (I would like one day to write of the strange allies I made in the office, those who belonged to the Outside even as they were inside, strange beings who were stronger than the office and yet consented to remain inside it) …

What purpose do these reflections serve? I am alone in the office, R.M. having become Dr. R.M. and returned to the South (she does not like to be written about and I will say nothing here, not even to offer my congratulations (ah R.M. with the roses on your hairclip and your new jeans!)). In the space where she was, silence, emptiness, and it is as though nothing begins in my lonely office. As though the world were unspinning itself, fraying, coming apart, and I were stretched across those same unpleasant afternoons when, as a temp worker, I would watch the clock and wait for five-thirty.