Morning. What to write about? The double-glazed window that separates me from the yard. The cone of light from my desktop lamp, my keyboard and my monitor. The backyard, the damp concrete, the weed growing out of the wall, the dying plants. What will I write? Begin with nothing, or nearly nothing. Make a beginning. Mark your presence in the day. Make a mark to show you have been there in the day, as the days that open behind you each bear a mark.
I thought once that every day was the last day – thought there would be no more time, and the end was coming. Once I was one of the unemployed and the early retired, one of the sick and the stay-at-homes, each of us stranded in a world upon which we could find no purchase. I tried to forget the eventlessness of the morning in the eventfulness of television. And now?
With what confidence now do I rise each morning expecting to write and that there will be other such mornings in which I will write! With what temerity! I wonder if I have become what I would have once despised: bourgeois writer, the marker of days, confident that each morning he will stand once again at the head of the day. But I wonder, too, if it is only for such a bourgeois that writing is possible.
Bourgeois, liar, I am braced against non-eventfulness; soon I will roll my bike onto the pavement and cycle to work. Liar, faker, I will let the memory of unemployment return to me, rolling it around in my writing as a drinker rolls brandy in a glass. Vacant days, I know you, I remember you, but I am braced against you, and you will not find me now.
Vacant days, stagnant days, I could never have written of you then; you were too close; you were everywhere. But now you and I are not close; now I am separate from you and, in the morning, possessed of equal strength to you. In the afternoon, true, you will find me. The afternoon’s fog, my vagueness is your revenge. But understand that I will already have had the morning; I will already have marked my place by writing at the head of the day.
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