Swimming

This raw book (Love’s Work), this book about love and about illness, is stripping me raw in turn. Unbearable to read an untranslated book, to be carried by an original syntax which has not been made to cross from one language to another. When I first read this book, it was 1997, a colleague said: she (Gillian Rose) was very indiscreet. It’s true, there are names, many of them, and reported incidents some of which will be embarassing or worse to those who will read them (or their friends, or their relatives). But what a book this is!

Scholasticus, said Sheridan, learnt to swim without entering water. So too the academic who writes at a distance from that of which she writes. Can I swim? I don’t think so. Unless what I am writing here is a swimming. But I don’t think it is; or if it is one, I remain in the shallows. How secure my life is, really! This is the afternoon of my life; I am no longer young, but I am not old. Years pass; slowly, I think, life improves, the horizon broadens, I hold on to a little more security; the world becomes stiller. Years pass, but what if serious illness broke the horizon of my broad contentedness? What if I were killed or maimed and half-killed in a bomb?

I like to write in morning. I don’t mind anymore if it is scholarly or non-scholarly; the proofs of my new book bore me; that work is done. And now? How old am I? impossibly old, it seems, though I am still enough to feel confident that I have decades of work before me. Always the feeling of leading a life snatched from others who would take time from me. Strange urgency that means I am always in rush, that I learn slapdashedly and approximinately, that I can call no field of knowledge mine. What do I know? What can I do? I don’t cook, but buy discounted sandwiches and salads from Boots. I live with no one, though I speak on the phone to R.M. And I don’t garden though when I open the curtains the blank back yard stares back at me.

Life lived undercover, paranoid. The post I always wanted to write would have been on that paranoia, mine, which means to write, for me, is always to do so urgently, at full speed, with no time for redrafts and revisions. Everything must be written now, for the disaster could have happened by the end of the day. Everything now, for there is no time and this office in which you write will be swept from you and your job will be swept from you and you will be just another wanderer in the street, half-dazed, wondering where it was to which his life had disappeared.

So I put a two pound coin in the palm of the beggar thinking: he is also who I am. I knew he would drink, but I thought that appropriate, as he had the whole of the day to deal with and not a day cut in sections of meetings and teaching and the evening at the pub as had I. A single evening is too long for me, and this morning – what is left of this morning – has already been stuffed with activities. Writing to avoid unmeasured time. Writing on a Saturday because it is not, officially a workday. Bliss that my office is open. Bliss that my office is here in town. I am here with my book and my satsumas, the blog window open. Typing on the wave of the book I am reading. Swimming, perhaps, in my own way.