Here I am

What day is it? What night is it? The curtains were closed when I came home; I opened them and then opened the window. Now to write something, I told myself. To write – what? I began to write on a topic to which I felt attuned by my sadness. I gave up; it gave me up. I saved what I had written and opened a new window. Again, start again.

I pour a glass of Cava. Sadness. But the question comes, what can I make from this sadness? Where will it lead me? Silence in the flat, but for how long? My student neighbours absent, but for how long? Make the most of these hours, I tell myself. Write. But why write? Why the desire to live as it were over again – to record this moment, if only the moment of writing?

Begin with nothing at all, I tell myself. Write; form nothing, seek nothing. Just as the yard out there in the night is open, so should writing should be open. Just as it is open, the yard to the whole sky, to the night, so too must this writing be roofless, open to the night like the Roman temples to the sun and the moon.

How many times have I sat thus, and not only since I started writing the blog? For a time, I wrote letters to friends, and then imaginary letters to friends who were too busy in their own lives to write back to me. Letters like the one which open Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet in the Quartet Encounters edition which seem to say very little, nothing at all – letters which, like Blanchot’s to Monique Antelme, contain barely anything but a greeting, a ‘here I am’. But who is here?

The temptation to begin writing by noting the date, the time, and my own age. It is February 17th, ten minutes to eight, and I am —. Surprise, always, that it is as late as it is, that it is 2006. How could it be? How have I grown so old? And how is it, as I begin to write, that nothing has happened – that nothing seems to separate these acts of writing, these dates I would mark, from one another.

Once, I wrote, it is 1994, February 17th and I am —. What age was I then? I remember the letter; I remember a whole stream of letters; they’re all lost now. I didn’t keep copies and my recipient, I knew, burnt the letters a few years afterwards. Burnt those letters and others as she sought to purge life of her presence. To purge the world of herself. Happily, she didn’t succeed – she is alive as I am alive. And doesn’t she still write – she did so just the other day – to say ‘here I am’?

She is there, in the South, and I am here in North. It was ever thus, always distance for letters to cross. That distance is what gave us hope; we never met – but one day, we would meet. One day – we would meet, and what would happen then? We met and nothing happened – or rather, we met, and what did not happen was enough to make that distance that separated us a kind of closeness. We knew what we would not be to one another; that was just. The issue was settled; justice was done to us both. But there were to be no more letters; e-mails, yes, but letters, which reach the other by way of distance and in the discretion of an envelope – no.

So I gave it up, writing, even as I took it up again here a few years later. Writing – I can hardly call it that. Writing that only marks itself and speaks of this marking; writing that is no more than a record: I was here. But who was there? Who was it who wrote letters in 1994 and posts in 2006? Who would mark his presence by way of writing?

It is already too late. 2006 – I should have stopped years ago. 2006 – why haven’t I stopped, why couldn’t I have brought it all to an end? I’ve missed some vital stage in life, I took the wrong turn. Here I am – but who is here?

Why this need to clear a space, to smooth down the page, to open the Post Introduction? A kind of worship perhaps – an act of prayer. But to whom? To what gods? Perhaps to what, too, ruins the gods, to the darkness like that above the yard in which there is neither sun nor moon.