I can smell the toast from next door; it is a pleasant smell. But this afternoon, I had four discounted wraps from boots, priced 75p each. That should have been enough; and I’ve just drank two glasses of wine, finishing off the bottle I opened last night. Why did I drink? To repeat last night’s magic. Last night – already it seems impossible. Why? Because it was possible to write anything, everything. Of course it couldn’t last; I knew I had to rise early this morning, to go to the office – there’s work to be done, a great deal of work. A report to write; examining to finish. Of course, when I got to the office, I couldn’t begin. Nothing could begin; I was stalled in the afternoon; I went to the gym and managed only 25 minutes. It was lamentable.
Lyotard: ‘And for each connection, a divine name, for each cry, intensity and multiplication brought about by experiences both expected and unexpected, a little god a little goddess, which has the appearance of being useless when one looks at it with globulous, sad, platonic eyes, which in fact is of no use, but which is a name for the passage of emotions’ (Libidinal Economy). Is there a god of boredom, of the everyday? Ah, but there is no intensity, but only its dispersal – there is nothing to be marked which is why I write posts like this. To mark – what? To stamp the everyday with the mark of time. To draw the dispersal of time back into the calendar.
There is no god, pagan or Christian, of the non-leap, of the fall from the tightrope. Recall Zarathustra: the tightrope walker falls because a buffoon leaps over him. Yes, the passage across the rope to the overman is not completed. The tightrope walker has a double, the one who leaps, who causes him to tumble. He falls and dies; Zarathustra drags his dead body with him. The gravediggers laugh at him. Eventually, having left the city, he leaves the body in a hollowed out tree. What of the buffoon? He will return as Zarathustra’s doubles – there are many of them, parodying his way of speaking, of prophesying. He returns from the mountain at the end of Book 2 (or is it Book 3?) when a child shows him in a mirror that his teachings are being distorted. He must return because a buffoon might leap over him.
Denton Welch, the short story writer who died marvelously young, leaving us with his drawings and his exquisite fictions (what writer has written more vividly of food – but I am thinking of toast again), writes in a tale in which, I know, he pictured himself as protagonist, a young woman trips over. What does she see? The whole sky, spread above her. Later she meets a young woodcutter. The other great moment of a fall comes in Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, when the postman falls in the house of the protagonist. Oh the postman! He is a holy fool, familiar from Dostoevsky, but now reborn on one of the little islands, I think, which lie around Stockholm. A postma- fool, who falls – tumbles – on the wooden floor. And laughs in a way that suggests he knew he would fall. Yes, he knew, as he knows everything in Tarkovsky’s film.
A third fall. Bataille’s Blue of Noon. The narrator tumbles; it’s night, and -. Well, that’s enough. A great deal has happened. To fall, to become horizontal – it’s similar to the way in which Tarkovsky’s protagonists are allowed to become muddy. Mud does not concern them. They are far beyond notions of cleaniness and dirtiness by the time we have met them. Water pours from their ceilings; they are already Outside. To watch one of his films is to join them, yes – the evening parts, the television screen parts, the movie film is like an opening sea. Now you go between the shores, and all because a character has fallen, is caked in mud.
Patriot Games is on television. It is the opposite of everything I would like to think about. Harrison Ford is in bed, injured; there is his wife, his child. Outside, late, it is growing dark. I should draw the curtains on my unlovely garden. How is it I feel stranded in life, and not gathered up into a larger movement? Because a buffoon has leapt over me and I am falling. Which is a way of saying that I have fallen from writing, and writing lies impossibly far above me.
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