Everyday Notes

1.

London, three weeks after the first bombing, one week after the failed bombing. I was reading Handke’s Across in R.M.’s bedroom, thinking as I read: what’s this about?, what holds it together?, and reading the flyleaf to help me find myself with respect to the narrative. Then I thought: but this apparently plotlessness, this falling apart of narrative into what seem to be disconnected sentences is the mirror of my life. Only Across has an energy of narration I do not possess. It runs ahead of me; I follow, knowing the flyleaf will be no help.

Soon, Handke-like sentences began to form in my head and I thought: I have to write these down. I left the flat and went out onto the street, turning left onto the main road and passing Earl’s Court tube station and all the police. The sentences in my head were already breaking apart. I knew I’d be too tired by the time I reached the internet cafe, so I drank a third of a can of Irn-Bru. Sugar and caffeine would let the sentences come again, I thought.

As I walked, I thought of the proofs of the new book I had brought down to London with me to read and reread. The proof-readers had, as usual ‘corrected’ the typescript I had sent them. The phrase ‘self-identification’ became ‘self – identification’, rendering a sentence ungrammatical; a section break had been ommitted by the printer, running one topic into another and quotes within quotes had been changed and messed about with.

My helpless book! But it deserves its helplessness. My attempt to write long, sweeping chapters is a way to avoid explaining clearly and simply what I mean. Dream: write a series of short essays, mentioning no authors in particular, freeing my writing from association with any particular text, to subject myself to the test of clear writing. Dream: change my name and begin over. Begin writing completely anew. Everything I have written, everything I write here is a slug’s trail across the everyday.

2.

Every morning I read the proofs of the book. I spread the pages before me as I watch the O.C. which, joyfully has returned at 9.00 because the schoolchildren are on holiday. And as I read I find myself indifferent to all this empty verbiage and wonder how I can transform myself into someone like Flusser (whose book on photography had been reprinted and which I found to my delight in the university Waterstones near Goodge Street yesterday).

What is it I lack?, I wonder to myself, but I think I know the answer: soundness of knowledge. Philosophy is a quicksand into which I have half-sunk, but I have not found bottom and cannot move with real steps. What would it be to advance philosophically, to find the boots that would allow me to walk nine leagues with one stride? Or should I find a way of crossing philosophy at an angle, of finding another trajectory, another way of writing?

But chapter three of my new book is okay, I remember as I walk. W. said so, too. His verdict on my book: ‘not bad …’ What does it matter? I know that I haven’t written a line of philosophy, not one, and remember what W. said the other day: if our books were destroyed it would actually add something to the world. True, all true.

3.

I read Across in R.M.’s bedroom. I’ve reached page 100, and I don’t know what’s happening. There was the discussion of thresholds between the card players – a fine scene. But the book tells of the narrator’s wandering. He wanders through his city, Salzburg (salt city). He writes of tiny details as he remembers were linked in Virgil’s Georgics to the image of salt. He writes of small things, this unemployed teacher; he encounters the tiny details of the world – he writes of nature, but not only that – of drunks and cars and housing projects.

Sentence follows sentence; I am not sure how, or why. In fact, they lose me. Where are they going? Still, my attention is held. I am lost, but I follow and not because I want to solve their mystery but because their momentum, their sense of forward movement is something I lack today more than anything else. I want to follow each sentence as it follows another, to connect the disconnected incidents of today and every other day I pass in the everyday.

As I walk to the internet cafe, Handke-sentences form inside me – someone comments in me on the world as I pass through it. There is a limping pigeon, there a staggering drunk, there the police car parts traffic with its sirens. I have a witness; a writer-witness has be born in me, and what I exprerience is translated into a voice that is like Handke’s. Now, as I type, I feel myself to have been as though invaded. I do not want the echo of Handke’s voice to speak in my own. I push it away irritatedly.

I know what it obscures: that experience which is most my own, the everyday which draws me close and dissolves me as it does so: that same everyday which extended tendrils into me this afternoon in R.M.’s room. I had wanted to sleep; I thought: I’m tired, and I should sleep. The book was open on the book and I rested my head beside it. Then I thought: how is it I can be this tired? How is the everyday can find me every time? Why can’t I put up the least resistance?

4.

Across does not speak of the everyday, I decide. Does Afternoon of the Writer? I won’t consider Repetition, since it is concerned with the experiences of a young man, and the young do not know the everyday, I decide. Crossing R.M.’s flat, I think to myself: I can’t operate the DVD player, I don’t know how to open the door to the garden. What can I do? I can’t drive, but this is as it should be. As though I were nothing but the membrane the everyday could fill – the sail strewn across the afternoon that could catch its wind. But then there is no wind to the everyday. I am the ship without sails, adrft.

Perhaps there is a kind of consolation open to Handke, I think to myself, half-resentfully. Perhaps it lies in the natural world. Perhaps it lies in the expanses of nature. Perhaps it lies in the words that he supposes let speak that expanse. I thought: I don’t know what he means when he writes of thresholds. It’s too late for me, I thought. I pass through a world whose doors I cannot unlock. I pass across the surface of a world which does not admit me. No sentences join themselves together for me. Everything comes apart – that is always my experience, and it is why I can never write in continuous prose. Every tone is faked, every voice is inherited from one writer or another, and nothing is mine. Only the first emptiness is mine and that is the difficulty, for it is inextinguishable from the everyday whose essence it is to disperse me to the four winds. That first emptiness which invades me as soon as sugar and caffeine leave my bloodstream.

Then I wonder about the escaped terrorists of last thursday, the would-be suicide bombers whose detonators did not link to the explosives. They lay down on their rucksack-bombs which did not explode then rose, then fled. I thought of the passengers left alive. What would it be to appear in the little profiles of the casualites the Guardian have been running? The passengers escaped and the bombers are, for the most part, still at large. London has absorbed them; they are hiding in the everyday.

5.

I’ve written nothing of consequence today, only unfurling those sails filled with no wind – these paragraphs through which the everyday, perhaps, is allowed to shine. Is that the case? You can’t explain the everyday, I thought to myself the other day, it has to be experienced. It is a question of election. Laughter: but what a mediocre election! And then: is it the everyday that makes all my movements in philosophy so sluggish and heavy? Or is it that nourishing non-philosophy from which one day a writing adequate to its mysteries will come into definition?