I woke just now after uneasy dreams, but I didn’t find myself transformed into a giant insect. Of Neighbours, which I haven’t watched for many years. I turned on the television and there was … Neighbours (Susan has cut her hair – she looks severe). Then R.M. rang and spoke to me of Darcey Bussell. The best CD to put on to ease you into the day is Mark Kozelek’s What’s Next to the Moon?; it’s playing now, but I am much too late for the day. Why so late? Because I woke at 3.00 AM and read Leiris’s Manhood for several hours. I thought to myself: I wonder if this is how Blanchot woke to read the books he had under review?
Lightness now the book is done. Confession: last night (this morning), before I read Leiris, I read my first book. Why? Sudden horror, after reading an online version of James Williams’s Lyotard and the Political that it (my book) was all ripped off Lyotard. What does it matter? But the second book is off with the publisher, and that is what is important. Lightness, as I say. Oh there’s plenty to do; I am busy, with piles of administration, reports to write and so on. But beyond that … I’ve ordered two bottles of Tequila. I have a new stack of books to read (the new biography of Kierkegaard arrived yesterday); the gym beckons.
Yesterday, walking in to work, I remembered my plan to write 50 short essays on Smog. I’d seen, by chance, 50 Short Films on Glenn Gould on my first few days in San Francisco, as I finished the book in front of the television. But how would I begin? I put this to R., one of my musical friends. ‘I don’t have any musical knowledge’, I told him, and said I would like at least to know the names of some chords, or what a vamp was (I was thinking of Reynolds’ book on the Smiths). He reassured me, and I dreamed again of an unpublished book called Bill Callahan and the Everyday, in the style of some of the posts here and here.
I had two strong dreams last night. I woke and jotted down some notes in my new Moleskine reporter’s notebook as I imagined Michel Leiris would have done. Firstly, remembering, no doubt, my sister’s comments on having few friends from her childhood who’d followed her through life, I dreamt of the friend who brought with him all of the past. The friend who was your past, such that when you came close to him it was your own past you approached, only now your past had become foreign to you, unfamiliar, the steady burning of a curtain of flame.
Secondly, a dream which was more like a dream of a dream, or a dream which could only be dreamt by one who was insomniac (a waking dream, a half-awake dream): I dreamt of the nakedness of time passing, all of time and feeling a dull fear at its passing. I was old, I thought, and by that I meant: aging is fearful because everything in the world remains the same and meanwhile time passes. Everything remains the same, but time is rushing inside me. And I thought: insomnia is what presses me up against the passing of all of time. But then: it was time pressing up against me. Time spoke. Time murmured through me.
The second dream was an indication of my philosophical intentions this summer: to grasp Deleuze’s general account of time, of being, in contradistinction to that of phenomenology. I told W. I understood it all in outline. ‘Explain then’, he said, mercilessly, ‘tell me about Spinoza’. He’s teaching a course on Spinoza, he told me, 12 weeks long. I had no such intention and I was never any good at explaining anything when put on the spot. But that is this summer’s project.
W. and I are planning our Dogma Philosophy papers for September. Will it be a fiasco? Of course. What were the rules of Dogma again? I’ve forgotten. But Badiou has beaten us to it. The magnificent preface to the English version of Ethics … it’s like drinking a pure draft of water. Drinking from the highest spring, the head of all waters. Suspicion: that this is itself an effect. That’s it too late to drink from such a spring. Annoyance: why did Derrida never write on Being and Event? Why the book Archive Theory instead of a book on Badiou. But isn’t there an unspoken code among the French not to write a book on anyone else until they die? Lacoue-Labarthe’s haste in producing a book on Blanchot in the wake of his death …Besides, I have it from A. who has it from Paris, from X., that ‘Faith and Knowledge’ was addressed to Steigler, so presumably there would be a way of reading Paper Machine or some other book … Stop! This is the opposite of Dogma Philosophy (or is it Philosophy Dogma?).
Empty loquacity. How nice to write, as Moominpappa would say (a post on the use of the word, nice, as it is found in the translations of the Moomintroll books. Passages on the use of incidental detail in Jansson’s books, for example, ‘mermaids followed us. We fed them oatmeal’ as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world to encounter mermaids and that it is the most obvious thing in the world to feed them oatmeal). Today, what will happen today? I have to write a report, fairly lengthy. What else? Plenty of things. But a gentle light is falling everywhere, it is beneficient. All is favourable; I slept and now I’m awake. What’s Next to the Moon? is finished and now it’s time to go out into the world.
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