On the Way
Walking between my flat and the office is always a trial; I am tested by the sentences which form themselves in me as I walk. Sometimes they are from books; sometimes they seem to have come together all by themselves, forming by their own initiative phrases I would never have been able to come up with by myself. Sentences, phrases, which I will have forgotten by the time I’ve reached my destination, for there is always something which makes me forget them, just as, in the morning, I forget the dream that a moment before seemed more real than the day into which I had awoken.
These phrases often take the form of absurd questions, a child’s questions. Where am I? But I know where I am; I am passing from one place to another; I am on the way – but then it is as though my walking had found an infinite space in which to wander, that I was crossing a desert greater than the Biblical one, and I will never find the other side. As though, then, a slackening had occurred, a stretching of time and of space, so that what was once passable has become impassable, so that to be on the way is to wander forever.
Where am I? Nowhere in particular – lost in time, lost in space and lost to yourself, that first of all: this is what I hear inside me. Who am I? But I know who I am; I am the one employed by the university; I am to cross the field and then to follow the road past the medical school; I am a worker; I am a son, a friend, a brother, a partner: a network of relationships hold me in place. But then it is as though those relationships slacken, that they give so much I cannot remember who I am. I pass, but this passage consumes me; what should take fifteen minutes now takes all eternity; I pass, but this passage requires I give up my identity until I become only a shapeless drifting without a past and without a present, and one whose future is simply that of being unable to begin, unable to pass, unable to find my way across the bridge of the moment.
Drifting, dispersal: to lose hold of space and time is not to float through time and space, detached body, but to disperse the body itself, to allow it to be torn apart as Orpheus was torn apart by the Maenads. But still to survive that dispersal, to remain aware in some way, as though dispersal were at once limitable and unlimitable, unlimiting itself even as it returns to itself; returning such that the unlimited is once again limited. And indeed that is what must happen for memory to happen; it is the condition of memory and recounting. I am writing here, after all, of what happened to me then; I have remembered; I have retrieved a memory from forgetting.
But in truth, the power to remember thus is not mine; it is not a power I possess. Then am I possessed like the child in the Exorcist? Or is it that I am dispossessed, that what is remembered comes unbidden, that arrives as though from itself, as if it were not a memory but a call, as though I were being asked a question, as though an answer were demanded of me. But what answer can I give? Perhaps it is given in my dispersal. Perhaps it is for dispersal that the questions call. I respond; I am dispersed, the questions come, Where am I? What time is it?
I Can Speak Now
Yes, what time? It is the 18th September. I’ve just written that. It is 11.20; I have just written that. Hungover, I am fit only for writing. But I am fitted to writing by my hangover, by my tiredness; they are what allow me to approach writing at the level of writing. As though my tiredness has delivered me into that trance in which everything can be said (the opening of Mirror, when the cured stutterer says, loudly and clearly, I can speak now). But I am not sure. I can write now: no, I cannot write that. Of what am I writing? Of barely anything at all. Barely anything; writing spins itself from itself, asking to be written.
How pretentious! How vague! I have always dreamed of a gossamer-writing without theme, without incident, without anecdote; I wanted to write with a tiny palette of words, with barely anything; to engage a writing in which nothing was at stake and which spoke only of itself, of the ‘there is’ of writing. Of the nudity of writing even as it sought to clothe itself in what was related, even though it were made entirely of details. This is why the occasional seizes writing, and why to write of nothing in particular is to write of everything. Is there a way of telling, of blogging, which would remain at the threshold of the occasional?
There is writing, there is blogging; so does the occasional ask itself to be marked in writing. This morning (it is 11.27; I am listening to Vespertine) wants to be remembered. But what is it that remembers itself here? The day recalls itself, its slackening; the day sags, the day forgets its self-relation and comes to rest here, in these words. Yes, in these words, by means of them, the day is resting, it lays down its head.
The Deserter
I always wanted to write with the word deserter. Of the one who left the world behind, who deserted the world. Recall Bob Hoskins’ character in 247; recall how he passes through the woods. Recall how he arrives and then disappears; how he loses himself, how he is lost in advance such that when he first appears it is as though he were the day coalesced! Bob Hoskins motivates the unemployed to open a boxing club. He has the gift of hope; he gives hope to the long-term unemployed. Gives them hope, but then hope is lost and he must lose himself again. He disappears. When he is found again, he is dying. That is how it should be. He is the day, and the day which knew itself in him dies with him, it dies in his death.
Peter Handke will sometimes allow hymns to telling and to the power of telling to break into the prose of his narratives. So too would I like to sing a hallelujah to what allows the day to write of itself here; so would I want to die from these pages as Bob Hoskins dies in 247; I do not need to be here; hope was given through me; the day spoke of itself, but now it is time for my desertion.
Where goes the one who writes here, writer born of the merciful strength of a hangover? Slowly the caffeine is being absorbed by my bloodstream and strength begins to fail me. It is the 18th September, 11.43: I write these words to mark the one I was when I wrote, to mark myself the day’s servant, the one who came forward like Hari in Solaris, the messenger who does not understand the message she is.
HARI: Am I a lot like her?
CHRIS: No, you used to be a lot like her, but now you – not she are the real Hari.
HARI: You know I’ve got a feeling that I’ve forgotten something … I can’t understand …
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