Everything in the day points beyond itself; it is a means, and the end is not yet in sight. Urgency: rise, and get to work. Rise early – seven o’clock, – and get to the computer. There’s only so much time. It’s Saturday, and you mustn’t waste Saturdays. And then Sunday tomorrow. Two days for work! A weekend of work! From Saturday morning to Sunday night you will be the clean arrow that is shot through the hours.
Rise early. It’s snowed. No matter. Open up Typepad. Should I write something? Should I accompany the other work, the real work, with another writing? It should be forbidden, I tell myself. How much time did I waste yesterday, cutting down a post that had got out of hand? An hour – too long. I do not have an hour. But the desire, nevertheless, to make, and not in academic prose. Desire to make, to pause in this hour, to keep something of the day that will otherwise disappear as pure means. Keep the day, but how?
Write of the snow that seems to stick to the wall around the kitchen window. Write of the plant whose veins, you imagine, are frozen so that it hunches rather than spreads out – hunched plant, contracted around its pot, down whose leaves the snow would slid were it not so strangely sticky. Write of the blue sky, lighter this time than yesterday morning – is it the light reflected up from the snow. Write of the top of the truck that you see passing to and fro above the yard wall. Write of the open bin lids, of the little forest of potted firs. Write, and then keep time for yourself. Shelter the day that it does not become pure means. Hold it back, this time before my neighbours wake up.
I am writing chapter two of the new book. Chapter two! As though chapter one were already done! I finished a draft of the latter last weekend. It wrote itself across two weeks, in the morning before work. The second chapter is more unruly. Why hasn’t it come together? Why, this morning, has it not formed itself as by one stroke. But I have only intermittent energy. As I woke this morning, I thought: tired again. Just as I knew yesterday I was tired again.
I had only one day of clarity in the last fortnight. One day – Thursday. It was a marvellous day; I was reborn. I was too busy to write, it is true, but I knew that I could have written that day. Written here at the blog, pushing beyond the bottom of the page so many of my recent posts I so dislike, or written, in one gesture a five thousand word draft of the second chapter. Thursday!
But yesterday, the tiredness returned. An afternoon dazed. I was busy, and then I went to the library, still dazed. I forced myself to read a long article, but as I read, I thought, I’m too tired for this, the article’s too long. I thought, it’s too much for me; there are other articles to which it refers that are too much. What is sociolinguistics? What are codes? How is it that there is so much to read? Friday began to disappear. I thought, I’ll go home and work, but then: I’m too tired to work.
But then the phonecall came: pub, and then a film. So the pub, and then a black-and-white film in which men in darkened rooms smoked and talked all at once. I walked back over a snowy pavement. There was music thudding upstairs. Should I work? Should I write something now, I asked myself, though it was already late. But the thudding music. No: go to bed, I told myself. To bed on the sheet that was fresh this morning. To bed beneath two duvets for the cold. To bed and then up early, to work.
But as I woke this morning, I knew I was tired again. Double urgency, then: I should work straight after my morning coffee! Get to work, straightaway! You’ll have only one hour of working time today, no matter how hard you try, so work now! Begin now! White light behind the curtains. I opened them, and: an inch of snow. The forest of little firs. Snow! Who was I to work? Who was I to write, this morning?
And then the blog: all these awful posts. A sequence of awful posts, so tentative, so half formed! I knew I had to drive them down the page. I knew they had to go, and beyond the edge of the page. I had to write at the blog, and that first of all. Write here, if only to make my mark in this, the day. Write to say: I was here, it snowed this morning, and I’m going to write chapter two!
Have I kept the day? Is it kept? But soon I will have forgotten this post. Soon, it too will fall below the bottom of the page. Put it in a category then. Day by day, that’s the category. Different from Today, which marks impossible days, agonising days. Different from the Everyday, which is a name for dissolution, for days which undo themselves. Different from Stagnant Lives, which record defeat. The Day to Day: notes to say, I was there, and that simply. But was I here?
Lars Iyer's Blog 