Weak coffee, weak tea, barely any caffeine to sustain me. As I left the flat, I thought: I should have read a little Handke to keep me going, to allow some sentences to form in order as I passed through the world. To give some continuity to my experience, even if that continuity is borrowed. Why don’t they serve coffee at the internet cafe? But I think to myself: no coffee. You’ll not take the easy way out. Today you will have to let experiences accrete, to come together and not seek, through caffeine, to leap ahead of what happens.
Let happen, then, those events that gradually accrete into a narrative, a telling. Let purpose emerge from the immanence of those experiences. That, in some ways, is what I imagine happened to Handke as he wrote Across. He began to write without knowing where the book was headed. He just began, moving out, as a boat pushes away from the jetty and gives itself to the river-current. Handke wrote; the book was seized by the current. He wrote and discovered he had written of a murder. He wrote and learnt by writing that his book was a threshold, and that the one who writes in the first person in Across stands at the doorway. When I think of thresholds it is of that avatar of Vishnu of whom it was said he could not be killed inside or out, by day or by night. He was murdered at the threshold of his house at dusk – or was it dawn. He was murdered at the threshold, which was the only place he could die.
A couple of hours before I set off to meet R.M. for lunch. I told myself I would read Spinoza this morning, but I picked up the proofs of the book instead. I began to read the fifth chapter, the last one, and thought: this is a terrible mistake. How could I have let myself publish this? Really, the first book was bad enough, and now this? What overwrought prose! How self-conscious it is in its twists and convolutions! I thought: there really is no hope, if for all my complaining here I was unable to change in my second book what was so bad in the first.
Fortunately, it will be published in hardback and will be buried in hardback. Fortunately like a little coffin it will be lowered into the earth and forgotten. I would add, melodramatically, like the coffin that bears what’s left of my talent, but the coffin holds nothing, I know that. I finished the book from boredom. It just stops, without concluding. Out of boredom or out of disgust? It is true that while I was writing it, I felt little disgust. Disgust was what awaited me and it comes to me now like acid reflux. I can taste the stomach acid at the back of my throat.
I would like, as Beckett said once, to know how stupid I am. To know and then to be free to write with a new simplicity. But as W. would tell me, you have to read, you have to work. Of course he is right. I brought Spinoza and Leibniz to London with me to read. I’ve made a little bookshelf in the flat R.M. shares. Spinoza’s Ethics, then the Routledge Guide to the Ethics, Leibniz’s writings, then the Routledge Guide to the Monadology. And didn’t I mean to read the Critique of Practical Reason again? It is a warm day and a kind of boredom passes through me. It does not frustrate me. It is a boredom that asks for waiting, which says: you will not find the plot of today until later. Which says: wait and do nothing, seek nothing.
But I say in turn: I would like to mark this day somehow. Even to say that it seems to take no form. Imagine it, I say to myself: a prose whose prolixity hides what it wants to say: simply, here I am, here I am. A prose which is supposed only to mark a moment in time, to sign it as the graffiti artists tag the walls. But then, daydreaming, I think: it is as though the spraypainted tag wrote itself, that my tag spoke of what I was not, that it was not my sign but just the refusal of signs. As though the day had closed to me like the door before the man from the country in Kafka’s parable. I am before the law, and the law says: you will be unable to write a thing.
The law, I know it, is the everyday, but what does this mean? The sentences I usually string together when I write the word everyday come easily to me. Light falls everywhere etc. etc. But what I write of the everyday already protects me from the everyday. It is not that it is ineffable. It can be spoken of; indeed it speaks, it is very loquacious. I can hear it now. But how to I translate its incessant droning which takes the form of this voice and then that?
I admit it, what I’ve always wanted to be able to write is a free floating discourse which alights on this and then that, but in the end on nothing: a writing with no themes that do not dissolve almost at once, a writing in which nothing happens, but that drifts and disperses as a cloud disperses into the air. Yes, I would like to attach myself to that kind of discourse, to seize it and to be seized by it. To wander in writing as the narrator of Across seems to wander. I would like to begin what I write, I remember …, and then to write of a kind of forgetting that hides itself in memory, to set down what cannot be linked to my name but which, nevertheless, seemed to occur.
Last night, in the theatre bookshop before the performance, I flicked through a book called Dramatic Monologues. I did not find the wandering discourse I sought and why should I? These past couple of days belong to prose, and the prose of Across. This thought: prose is the language of the between, the language of passing. It is what is written when you expect nothing and hope for nothing. There are days when you can work, and days where the great task is to cross from minute to minute.
Usually, I pass the latter by eating – by going here and then there, gathering snacks as I go. I measure the day in snacks – and how delighted I am to find a new chain store, Benjy’s, here in London, which discounts its food products to £1 and below everyday from 3.00-5.00! I eat there as I eat in the Arab newsagents that sell falafels in pitta bread. My new habit, quite despicable: I want a sit down lunch – one, it is true, which will cost me no more than £5 – but that allows me to spend an hour or so set back from the street, looking at it through a pane of glass, and, by that pane, protected.
I have a bag of Marks and Spencers nuts beside me. You can’t eat in the internet cafe, and they don’t serve drinks (what kind of cafe is this?). The traffic roars past outside. I remembered I wanted to write a post about old men and the collapse of the world in which old men once felt at home. I wanted to write about the collapse of the distinction between high and low culture and of the despair of the old man of culture before the chattering of the everyday. Yes, that is what I was thinking about last night, reading that book of dramatic monologues in the National Theatre bookshop. But what is there to write today except of enduring the everyday? What but the task of joining sentence to sentence just as sentence is joined to sentence in Handke’s Across?
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