No, this is not life, this is not living. Still early, still before eight o’clock, and you’ve drawn the quiet day around you like a shawl. Work time, but you are not working. You’re supposed to be working, but instead you’re blogging. And isn’t there a sense of triumph in this? Isn’t there a sense of struggle and triumph. As if you were welcoming the very waste of time that this is?
I am testing my strength against tiredness. Struggle: what is written here is written against tiredness. It sets itself against it, it requires it, as the cloudy paleness of the skin of Japanese women was once set against bilious green lipstick and blackened teeth. Tiredness pushed back, tiredness pushed against. The triumph of a writing which must achieve itself simply to be marked here. Triumph of writing against the old burden, against the weight of tiredness that should have kept me in my bed.
And the other writing – the new book on which I should be working? What of it, the other writing, that which would achieve and finish itself in a book? The real writing, not this phantom-writing – the writing that completes and finishes itself and closes itself into a book? It will be the third book, after two others. The third – after the other two, which were hardly books. The first, I’m told, is selling steadily, but the second is not selling as well. I would that the second – which is better – sold and not the first, but it is the other way around. No matter, there is the third book, in which I’ve placed my hopes. But have I placed them there?
Tiredness laughs: you’ll fail in the third book as you failed in the others. Tiredness, the old enemy, says: nothing will change, the third book will be like the second book, as the second book is like the first book. Tiredness, the oldest adversary, says: the only drama is the one I permit you. Tiredness: drama is your struggle to escape me and your falling back to me. Escape – every morning, early – and falling back – every morning, slightly less early. You have an hour, says tiredness, I’ll give you an hour each morning, and through the rest of the day you will wander like a dazed ox.
Tiredness is already clouding my thoughts. Vagueness is settling into me. But I must keep vigilance – I must watch out, even from this vagueness. There must be something of me that does not disappear into the fog. As in Flowers for Algernon, there is a time of strength, of intelligence – an hour in which anything might be written, but then there are the many hours when nothing is possible. One hour of strength, and then the long decline. And already it’s beginning, the decline. Eight fifteen, and already beginning, and what I’m writing here is written against it, that decline.
Is this life? Is this living? I have friends here, who I see every night. The pub, and last night the cinema: friends with whom to pass those hours of decline, those evening hours were stength deserts itself once and for all. And other friends, more distant ones? I can’t phone them – too tired. I can email them, that’s true, but I can’t phone them, I don’t want to phone them. Don’t want to talk as one person to another.
Better, the pub and a few people, all talking. Better the pub, and the general hubbub, where nothing needs to be said, but conversation passes between us like a beachball. Keep it up in the air, that’s what required. Nothing needs to be said; there is conversation, laughter, and the conversation is kept up in the air. No one to one talk. No explaining myself. No news to give. No effort to talk. No struggle. Nothing worse than the struggle on the phone to talk, to drag the words out. As though I were called to account. As though I had to confront the whole of my life and account for it.
No, I will not talk in that way, I will not be called to account. Email me, I tell them inside. Let them email, and then I can reply as it suits me to reply. No urgency; let a few days pass, and when in a part of the day when I am once again awake, I can write a few lines. Emails! Let the days pass, and reply. I keep the phone unplugged. Dialup, not broadband, so no one can ring when I’m online. Because these are the dazed hours, the wanderer’s hours, when every act is set against tiredness. These are hours where I’ve lost my way, and there are only a few books for company, a bottle of fizzy water, the desklamp.
And writing? – True, I keep the Post Introduction box open; true, there is a unmarked page opened in Word. Pages on which nothing is written. Pages which wait for me even when I go into the other room to lie down. Which wait as I pass into the other room to read a few pages of this, of that. Eight thirty. Should I go back to sleep? Should I go into the other room, where there are always a few books, four or five, which are likewise, I tell myself, written against tiredness? The other room, through the bevelled glass. The other room, through the pane of glass installed to let light from one end of the flat to another. Should I go there, where the curtains are not yet drawn and the day can cancel itself out? Should I lie down, and let the day scratch itself out?
Lars Iyer's Blog 