Doom

Yesterday, in the office and then wandering out into the city, I really did feel like the doomed character in the Ice Storm, the one you know is going to die. No work done, the day too heavy – I’ve written about it too many times. I thought I should read Sebald’s Vertigo, thought that then I would feel at least accompanied.

I went to the library, and found a volume of Nabokov’s novels instead. That will do, I thought; but then there was a problem with my ticket and I left with nothing. I found a Muriel Spark novel to read in the gym, instead, but that was no good: where was the book-companion, where the book that would divide doom in itself, opening it to me as a surface over which I could pass?

In the end, I found nothing; later that night, visiting a friend, he showed a ten volume collection of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets: so many names with which I was familiar, but that I had never read altogether, like this. The feeling of doom had gone; I’d brought round The Drift to play to my friend – in particular, the track Clara. He was impressed. We listened to Xenakis and then he burned me a disc of Berio.

Cycling home, I was glad to have made it to the other shore of the day. My friend had given me a volume of Milosz: that was welcome. I stayed up late and read, listening to The Drift. That percussion! I thought, doom has divided itself – doom has given itself to me in another way: now it is aestheticised, it has become a work. I listened; yes, there was doom – the thud of fists punching meat -, there it was, outside of me. And who was I now, alone, after midnight?

For a long time, I couldn’t sleep. I had to plan, to think ahead. I thought, I will have to clear up the flat, to get everything in order. Things are getting away from me again; so that’s what I did, when I woke up, and now the flat is calm and still around me. I’m ready – but for what? I should be working, I know that. I should be writing, I know that. And instead?

The sewage is long gone from the yard. I moved the plants to the centre, where they form a kind of island. They look less sickly. There is still the scar along the wall, where the pipe was pulled out. The weather will get through there, I was told, and it is true; mould grows everywhere in the kitchen, and the slugs still get through.

Has the doom lifted? I phone R.M., in her new house in Clapham. We talk about the lecturers’ strike. She’s been reading the biography of Henry Green I left down there. What should she do, revise for another insurance exam, or write a paper? Write a paper, I said, and told her about all the trouble up here. She sympathises: doom is contagious. Her stomach did a flipflop when I told her, she said.

We’re doomed, W. always says, and he’s right. The last of a kind, the very last. Doomed whichever way you look at it. Gin on the train and the great, calm see. ‘The sea makes me happy’, says W., ‘get some more gin’. ‘How come it always happens to you?’, says W., ‘Why do you think you bring it out in people?’

Those were sunny days, visiting the South, the weekend before last. We listened to the Scott Walker boxset. ‘There’s a new album coming out soon’, I said. I’m listening to Clara again. Those drums!