Rooms

Nearly midnight. I’ve opened a bottle of wine from Marks and Spencers. How could I resist? There were three bottles lined up on the shelf; now there are two. I am thinking of cheese, but, knowing myself too well, I do not keep any food in the flat. Today I went to the gym, but couldn’t manage more than half an hour; I do not deserve a square meal.

Freedom! What it is, even on a Friday night, to write whatever I like! Where will the blind desire to write lead me? How many times the same situation and the same question? A question asked by writing, in writing. I know I’d like to write on the figure of the golem, following some reflections at Charlotte Street a while back, but my notes are in the office. I deliberately stripped my flat of books; there’s only a dozen or so here, kept so R.M. can see at one glance what I bought on my trip to America. They are in the other room, one I rarely use. It is there, open, barely filled, empty as though it were thinking for me, in my place. This room is where everything happens when I am alone. But what happens?

I wonder to myself: what if I were to attempt to uncover the latent structure of my world? What would I uncover? And my first response: rooms, a succession of rooms where writing was succesful or unsuccesful. But why is my memory as though snagged so it is always in a room I think of myself? If I had it to hand, I would reread Flusser’s beautiful essay on architecture, on a house which did not enclose a place but opened it, offered it to the air. I think of Rilke’s Open, too and even as I write the word Rilke, I feel both calmer and as though an animal were watching me.

In Monterey, we sat in the morning sun, my sister, her husband and I, and discussed what animals they were to get when they returned to London. A puppy? A kitten and a puppy? Or – best of all – a kitten, a puppy, a pony and a parrot? Drew said I could keep the parrot, and I thought to myself: I would rather not have an animal at all. To have the eyes of an animal on you is to be interpellated, called, such that writing is difficult. Yes, to write with an animal near is to do so as an ‘I’, as an intact and self-present ‘I’, sure of itself as one who is responsible for animals, who keeps them, tends to them, in that space where he is master.

A second glass of wine. Now I think to myself: you were a reader of speculative fiction, of science and fiction and science fact – what happened? You started this blog to broaden your field of interests, to write on what you had not written, but what did you find? A narrowing – there was an intensity of focus, it is true, but on themes which were already entrenched. Ballard writes his imagination were as though hardwired at age 15; he had survived a prisoner of war camp, of course, where he had witnessed the weaknesses of his parents. His father, he recalls, although physically affectionate, was one to whom Ballard felt less close after the war. He had seen too much weakness! The film-set world of old Shanghai fell apart rapidly.

‘All you can do is cling to your own obsessions – all of them, to the end. Be honest with them; identify them. Construct your own personal mythology out of them and follow that mythology; follow those obsessions like stepping stones in front of a sleepwalker’. That was Ballard. One of the great idiocies of Eco was to claim the novelist is trapped in her memories and her psyche. Why didn’t he understand how our world, for each of us, is full of a latent content which outstrips anything personal? My gratitude to Ballard is immense; I read him at an early age and immediately loved his work. I will not speak of it today, except to note that it attests to the infinite opening of the world to each of us, of a private pathology which breaks all our horizons. It is the key to blogging, do you understand that?

I listen to A Bed of Roses by Lal Waterson and Oliver Knight as I type. I am waiting for ‘The Last Days of Disco’ to start and turning through Ballard’s Quotes. ‘Inner Space: that’s the name to which Ballard linked his fictions in the 60s – as opposed, of course, to outer space. ‘My characters are almost all engaged in mythologising themselves and in then exploding that mythology to the furthest end, whatever the price’. To explode one’s mythology – but what does that mean?

Understand that The Kindness of Women was where I stopped reading Ballard. This book made me shudder. I saw him speak around that time and that ended forever my desire to meet authors. I asked him to sign my copy of one of his books, ‘TIME ZONE’ in capital letters, remembering what he wrote of deep time and archaeopsychic time – of private time systems and synthetic psychologies, of space time and the halfworlds which can be glimpsed in the paintings of the mad.

(I am thinking of the piece of sheep’s cheese I left in the fridge in the apartment in San Francisco. The Fall are performing ‘Blindness’ on Jools Holland. It’s as fine as ‘Sister Ray’. Mark E. Smith is wearing one glove. His wife is beautiful, with the beauty of R.M. whom, as I type, is attending a military ball in London.)

Half past midnight. Today, exercising in the gym, a collection of images occurred to me I did not want to lose: 1) the idea of a turn, or of taking a turn which would turn me over to what is normally missed, 2) the old cliche of the play of nearness and distance, that the near is the farthest etc. This image: a turn which would bring me close to what blazes in the present instant. As though, in that instant, the universe itself was fire.

‘Religions emerge too early in human evolution  – they set up symbols that people took literally, and they’re as dead as a line of totem poles. Religions should have come later, when the human race begins to near its end’. Ballard again. But I am thinking of what Holderlin knew: the sky is empty, the gods flown, and what remains is the time between the god’s absence and their return. Yes, their return, for there are old gods and there are young gods …