Indifference

Am I lazy? I am not sure. Certainly my old ambitions have withered from me. I no longer write; I do not read difficult books as I used to, and whereas once I would copy out a fifth of the book I was reading to lay bare its arguments, its strategy and the way theory and practice came together, I take no notes other than a few phrases here and there. Laziness! I do not practice French; German is long since out of my grasp. I do not keep up with films; my television is never on, and slowly I fall from the surface of current events. Why have I no kept up with the elections in Latin America? But I have not, just as I no longer watch the news or read the better papers and weblogs on the news. How is it that my world has collapsed upon itself, until it assumes no more than the dimensions of this room?

Indifference – it is true I feel a great tiredness, especially in the afternoons. How many afternoons have been wiped out this way! I read novels, it is true, but only short ones, easy ones and of those I keep no record. I can hardly say I’m reading; a whole oeuvre passes before my eyes in a week, but what have I learnt? What I captured from that reading that I can bring back to my life? Nothing. I leave no record of my reading. Sometimes, I will read the essay of a friend, or write a brief essay for a friend, but that is all. My friends are noticing. – ‘What are you reading?’ – ‘Nothing’. – ‘What are you working on?’ – ‘Nothing’.

And what has this blog become? Once, it was a place for the play of voices – an experience, an experiment, when different tones and voices were allowed to vie with another. That was the thought: I would learnt to write, learn to make idioms, and speak in a happy idiocy that was not allowed elsewhere. And now? Those voices have fallen back upon this one, with which I am least satisfied. Reading back in the evenings, I know a disappointment: where has it gone, the outrage voice, the voice of sweeps and gales? Where is it, the comic voice – and above all, that was what I seeking: the comic, a writing that sweeps with black, bilious laugher?

Is this the voice left to me? Is this the one which remains, amalgam of author’s voices, pale and imitatory, residue of too much reading and not enough living? This, I know is the voice of this room which spreads out indifferently around me. Indifference: I used to think there was a curse on the weblog for whenever I tried to write of it, this room, the prose would go wrong. Whenever I tried to write of crossing this room, I would have to abandon the post. Of course you could cross it in two steps – but when those two steps become an eternity? And I used to avoid the phrase ‘the head of the day’ for the same reason: those were my writerly superstitions, even as I dreamt from the first, of a writing without topic and without speaker; a writing whose ‘neither … nor’ gave and withdrew that of which it spoke.

Sceptical writing that allowed nothing to stand. Could it be that my indifference is the path to that? But there are no paths, not here. Just as Bela Tarr sometimes leaves the plot to bring us close to beer glasses, to a concrete wall, this weblog voids itself. There is nothing here but this room, and, before it the yard. Nothing but the room and the yard as though they stood at the head of creation as the stuff from which everything was made. Indifference – wasn’t this the state Krishna commends in the Bhagavad Gita (a clod of earth, a lump of gold, a beautiful woman: all mean the same to the wise man)? Ah, but that was indifference coupled with an awareness of a supersensible God. What, then, the indifference of one without God?

Sometimes I rebel against it, this indifference. Looking back over long posts, I see a desire desperate to fill itself with content. But how hollow those posts! How unpersuasive! I will have to delete them just as this post, in turn, will have to be deleted. My new dream – how naive – is to marry in each post form and content so that an idiom is born in which there crystallises a writing that embodies and speaks of what there is to say. Each post or string of posts will become a universe enclosed upon itself like Schlegel’s hedgehog. How foolish! Is this the last dream? Is it the last remnant of the dreams I had? But it only spreads itself, this dream, like the aurora borealis above the frozen earth. And in truth, this writing room and the yard before are that earth and I am like the traveller of Basho’s poem who has fallen asleep while his dreams wander on.