Trap a wasp in a jar and in a day it will begin to look ragged. It stops buzzing and stands still, energyless and waiting. So do I feel today – ravaged by the Westerlies which bring hot and humid weather to this country. I feel sorry for W., who is that much more exposed to them on the south west coast of our island and remember how D.M. and I, back in Manchester, used to sit back in our armchairs and say to one another: nothing can be done today. But I am on the other coast now, and it usually much cooler and fresher here.
Conversation with W. He’s reading Rosensweig still, in German, each page taking him an hour. ‘I don’t know whether I don’t understand because it’s in German or because it’s really hard’, he says. Then the conversation takes the usual turn. ‘Your tanks dry‘ says W. to me, after asking me what I’m reading. W. is busy preparing his Spinoza course and thinking loftily about Michel Henry; I’m not reading a line, nothing at all. It’s all admin, admin spreading everywhere, piles of it and more to come.
In between, I’m writing a little essay on Bernhard, rereading bits and pieces by him, and … It’s at this point this post should lift off like an old Wright brothers aeroplane, but it’s not lifting. How tiresome to count on writing to mark something done in a long day like this one! W. is one of those people who thinks then writes. But I never have a thought in my head …
I know I’d like to write about Dizzee Rascal, who I saw last weekend (though I didn’t see him walk down the quayside with his posse; nor did I see Mark Eitzel strolling in his hat, though I’d heard him sing earlier, coming forward and backing away from the microphone, moving from the side to side the better to exploit his powerful voice.) Dizzee Rascal: lazily, without thinking, I would want to write about the way he intimates a bass line, keeping a place for where it should be without it being quite there. The same goes for melody which is fractured across the soundscape.
H. and I, watching him, were awed. He is so restained with the tempo, I think to myself. Until one of the last songs, which really pumps. Back to H.’s to listen to both albums again. ‘He’s like Rimbaud’ I said, amazed by his age and reading the liner notes on the album over and again. ‘It’s all there, complete, intact … How is it possible?’
Repetition sits on my office desk unread. I am still on chapter five on the book I have at home, Speak, Memory. I know I’d like to write a post which include my friend’s report of his new neighbour, a woman in a full burkha whose sons he teaches to play cricket. She’s attracted to him, he thinks and keeps tugging the burkha down over her eyebrows. ‘But her eyes …’ he said on the phone, ‘her eyes say everything’.
But that is back in Manchester. It’s already late and tonight I’ll treat myself to sleeping on the wooden floor of my living room. There is Speak, Memory waiting for me. These hours, just before sleep, are when reading becomes most pleasant as the rhythms of the book intermesh with those of the body preparing itself for sleep. To have come through a long day, as this one has been, is like having lived a whole life. The day’s wisdom, life’s wisdom, both are most present just before the end, in the peace of old age or of the hour before sleep, all desires dispersed evenly across the body.
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