Morning again and I am listening to Mark Kozelek’s What’s Next to the Moon as custom dictates (it is a morning album just as The Complete Brass Monkey, to which I was listening before is an evening one). Yes, morning, but it was difficult to sleep and I wake tired, drained and with an ache in my stomach. But one thing makes me want to write (but my prose is already disappointing): last night, insomniac, I began Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and in a couple of hours had read nearly a hundred pages.
How I would like, now, the sails of my prose to fill with that wind which billows through his! I am two fifths of my way through his book and already I fear reaching the end; I am in suspense just as the narrative is suspended in the Russia before the Revolution (is the word this suspense: interregnum). I know terrible times are afoot for the Nabokov family and no doubt they deserve to lose their wealth but for a time, they are happily prosperous. Happy, yes – but Nabokov is narrating their tale from another time, from America, much later.
But I do not want to write about Nabokov now, let alone begin a new category called ‘Nabokov’. This is going to be a lengthy love affair, I think – there are many books to read – and I will need to see what happens to the books in my memory. What will happen to them? Don’t write on a book for sixth months – that’s the new rule, which I have already broken with respect to Leiris’s Manhood.
Piles or ricecakes, some solo, cylinders of Oat and Rice Cakes (it says on the label) some twinned (one cylinder bound to another with yellow tape) and discounted (only £1.25): they are plain Rice Cakes. In the other corner of the room, 29p fizzy water bottles from Tescos. A half drunk bottle of Marks and Spencer’s wine on the table beside me (£3.49) … This morning the lounge seems rather wretched as though a battle had been fought and this were the aftermath.
Why was it I wanted to write? Perhaps to mark a place for the post on Bernhard’s A Child I’ve written, which Typepad will not publish without peculiar paragraph breaks whenever I use the word ‘every’ or ‘Salzburg’ (I can’t erase them, even when I play with the html). But no – that’s not the reason for writing. I dreamt, but the content of what I dreamt does not matter so much as the prose with which they were bound up. Yes, strands of prose entwined themselves in whatever it was I dreamt about and I wanted to attest to them here. Alas, I’ve failed and what I’ve writtten today is only an attempt to mark a place where writing, real writing could have begun.
To keep place – this is already a reason for blogging. To press the ‘save’ button and publish these words onto the internet, subjecting them to that great detour which takes them out of my mediocre morning and into something like the world. I will forget them as soon as I write them, it is true, but it allows me to think: I could have begun today that book which would have allowed everything to have been said. Such is my version of Roubaud’s Project and these words a poor imitation of the book called Destruction.
In truth, this week, where I have written a great deal, is an in-between time (I would like to use the word interregnum, but I am not sure if it is the right one; there is no dictionary here and my dial up connection is too slow to search for an online dictionary and then for this word): there was work to be done (the book, now finished), and there will be more work to be done (a revision of the book, once it has been proofread, but more importantly, the papers which will have to delivered at the end of the long summer). I have a sense of urgency – now is a time without project, in which a smaller writing is allowed. Write a great deal, I say to myself, mark this interregnum in the passing of days just as, when a child, you would be asked to write a few words of your ‘news’ (this weekend, I …)
A new project will begin, no doubt. But I have a sense of a new apocalypse – a devastation of the world – after which the calm sentences I have set down here will seem as full of a lost security and well-being as the pre-Revolutionary interregnum Nabokov recounts.
I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch were my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the celing. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
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