Today

A coffee, then a tea. Write something, I tell myself. Hadn’t I thought of something to write when I went to bed last night? Hadn’t I had an idea, or at least the beginning of one? But I’d been reading The Rings of Saturn, and was carried along by Sebald’s prose. Was it my idea? His? I opened the book again this morning, but it was no help. What should I write?

I thought again of Mirror, and the historical footage that comprises part of the narrative. What footage would I show, were I making a similar film?, I asked myself. And the passage where the boy reads from Pushkin’s letter to the ghost in another room, whose coffee cup leaves a ring on the polished wooden table which fades even after the ghost has disappeared – from what would I have the boy in my film read?

Sebald’s narrator, like Tarkovsky’s, does not disappear behind historical events. Their recounting is also his way of appearing. Have I been long enough away from Manchester to allow a narrative of the regeneration of that city to allow me to appear? Long enough away – five years. And in five years time, where will I be? Unemployed again? What story will I tell then? Perhaps another phase, a whole five year bloc, is rounding itself off. I’ve always been surprised that time moves forward, that there are events which complete themselves in the world. Or that surprise is the one which reveals itself only as I write – as I struggle to bring an act of writing to completion.

I am in the South. Radio 2 plays in the other room. Dido, Coldplay: these songs obliterate memory. Bridge Over Troubled Water: the theft of memory. Then to write against Radio 2, against the DJ whose afternoon show we used to hear on the schoolbus. Obliteration: how to remember otherwise? How to receive the counter-memories that would turn those afternoons inside out?

Is it a kind of revenge I want?, I ask myself. A kind of apocalypse – a retrospective apocalypse that will have revealed that things were never as they seemed? As though those relationships which bound me to what I took to be ordinary and familiar were refracted through the great strangeness of the world? Then write of that strangeness – from it, as though it was by way of an infinite detour that the world has always come to itself. Come to itself? No – failed to so come, missing its appointment. That is what should be remembered: the failure of the coherency of the world, the self-coincidence it was never able to achieve.

That is what I hear in a word as simple as today. Strange word that I find myself saying to myself now and again. As a ward? As a litany? As what turns the day from itself. As the self-division of the day, its unbinding. The world is not itself; the day will not finish happening. How to think of the past, the whole past, as a day that has never dawned, yet that is dawning?

Event, non-event: when will it happen, the incompletion of the day? When will it succeed, this failure to come to itself? When will it arrive in its non-arrival? When will you come, you who cannot come? The Messiah will not come until the last day, the very last – but how is it that what is last is also what has always happened, and that the word, today, is also the sound of great bells that seem to ring from the depths of time?