The Interval

1

I am happy that the month is so long – happy there are so many days, eleven more, in which to make up for the days I was absent. In lieu of writing, writing to catch up – but how is that each day I write the same thing? The month is long; I am glad, but of what did I fall short? Days missing, days not underlined in the calendar; a great deal happened – everything -, I was on the other side of the world, but it is of the same I write, which is to say, of nothing at all.

Nothing begins, but this is fitting. I live in the interval; real work has not begun; there is work, to be sure – tomorrow (Saturday) I will be in the office as I am in every day, but I know I will push even the few tasks I have left away from me. Those affairs do not concern me. It is not because I resent them in particular that I push them aside, but their urgency offends me. Nothing is urgent. My attention is elsewhere. But what is it, my attention? What is it, this salt-marsh of the interior? Am I stagnant? Has life ceased to flow? Why then do I imagine of my heart that what was once closed is now opened, and opened beyond itself so that it becomes a new organ? My heart – and this is what I am – is all surface, and that surface is touched at every place by the outside.

Is it jet-lag? I am out of synch with the world; it is five hours behind me. Five hours: what might I perceive in this, the interval?

2

I’ve just finished a book. I took two hours and finished it off, the novel that lies face down on my pillow. I lived and died with its protagonist; right now, because I accompanied her to death, I feel wise. We died together, she and I, we lived a long life, she and I; but I also survived in the man who was with her.

I died; now I am alive; I have passed from one room to another. How is it that the flat is now large enough for me? How is it that I do not feel the usual claustrophobia? ‘I pass from one room to another’: in truth, I have wanted to write this sentence for a long time. Wanted to write of my passage through a room, as though that room were infinitely large, or the crossing infinitely long. As though the room was the desert, and I would never reached the promised land. Or was the room to be desert and promised land at once; that to wander was also to discover, and that this was the meaning of the diaspora which occurred across my sanded floors?

3

In the pub, a tall Zimbabwean presses his fist to my cheek when I ask when he and his friends come to sit around me that he reserve a seat for my friend. ‘Of course I will keep a seat’, he says, and now they sit, the ‘Z-club’, talking of their country. I thought, I would like to record this moment. I thought, is this what the interval requires: that I should remember the small events of the day?

I remember. My attention slackens; memories float indifferently like dust in the air. What else should I write? Where are you, interval? Now I know I cannot reach you by writing, even though it is by writing that you call. How to write of the failure of events, of the drifting air in which the dust motes move? I would like to stuff a book with details, that is true; but how then to remember what must fall between them?

Interval, hinge, it is you who open between each post; it is you who interpose yourself so that no continuous narrative is possible. Always a break; always white space between posts, even when they are written as they are here at the moment three times a day.

Three times! But there were sins of omission; I did not fulfil my quota; there is a pressure of writing behind me and I must write. Interval, it is of you I must speak. Who waits? Who waits inside me? It is my inside-out heart, which aches along its surface. Three times – but my heart asks because it waits; the marsh is open beneath the sky. Asks – and there is a landscape that is a question, like the exposed wood of the floorboards in the flat.