The Fire Balloon

To be lost in the middle of life, that’s it. Wasn’t that what X. said to me this evening, outside my office? He, too was lost. Very well, he should come out with us more often; what is the summer for but the pub, the sun? That’s how every evening must pass, and all the way to autumn.

But to be lost – or at least in a phase uncharted, that new, long period of crawling out of debt. I have a mobile phone contract, my first; next week, broadband, and the week after, a DVD player, a TV: this my reward for reaching my mid 30s (for clearing my debts). And I look back and say to myself, what have I done?

But I have an idea of prose that would bear everything that happened. Bear it – but be more than what is borne. More: and what could be borne would be borne along with everything, the whole world. Everything would speak; all would be spoken, in a prose, I imagine, that would intersperse great historical events with the most intimate occurrences.

But do not confuse it, this prose, with what is written here. It all goes wrong, I won’t labour the point, but it’s all botched – all this writing. But I’ve worn out that theme: writing botched and broken. Still, I tell myself that it is necessary to write because life isn’t yet itself. Because it hasn’t arrived, living. And what is lived repeats that non-arrival, it lives it, it is borne by it.

That is why the smallness of a life – mine – does not matter. I can’t write anymore about failure. W. thought I’d be melancholy after our return from Freiburg. No, not anymore, I told him. I’m too weak for that. Weakness, but in more than one sense.

A kind of indifference: the affairs of the day no longer bother me. What should I expect? It is as I would expect. And then, in the still nights at the flat now the students have moved out, a bland tiredness. The day has gone, and the evening in the pub, and now the night. Now what? Sleep; wake up again.

The earth turns into the light, and once again, morning. Gone that sense of urgency I once had. It will all end soon, I thought. You only have so much time. So I rose earlier and earlier, to get a headstart on the day. And now?

But still, an idea of prose. By what massive book could I let the smallness of a life be borne away? What epic could be written of this, my everyday? Mine – but it is not mine. Anyone’s; no one in particular’s. All lives are small; no one’s has begun. Life in lieu of itself: that too is life, and the life of life.

Nine o’clock, and it’s still light. The longest day of the year, and its vague and grey. Tilt your head back and look at the sky, my brother in law told me, it’s good for you. So that’s what I do, and there it is, the whole sky. The whole: you know it only by walking, and through an open space – the field, my field, where they keep cows over the summer, though it is so close to the city.

An idea of prose. No themes, no characters. A kind of wandering speech. Like the voiceover in Eloge de l’amour when the camera is still by the river. A still camera, speech. What are they speaking about? Oh I could find out; I could work out the plot. But better that they just speak, better that plot no longer carries them, better than they are not even characters, but just nodes of speech, senders, addressees, and then not even that, as what they say is not even said to one another, but to the whole night, the whole sky and the river.

Worse for them, perhaps, that they speak by that river, and in that city.  I’m fortunate to live nowhere in particular, in the high latitudes, where there is light on the horizon at midnight. And now it’s time to round off this post, to finish it. Think instead of that prose that could not end, laying itself in short paragraphs across a large page.

I think of the opening pages of The Decay of the Angel, in the collected Sea of Fertility. An absolute book. The book of the end, that’s what I think to myself. Mishima was already beyond death when he wrote it. He wrote to us from the other side of death; and how could he mark its completion by his extinction? But I wonder if that wasn’t his impatience: that he should have been condemned to live and condemned to write a prose that could never end.

Write. Write until nothing is said, or when what is said does not matter. Write until indifference blows through your words as through the fields. Write like a stone, or the river as it speaks back to the nameless speakers of Eloge de l’amour. What does it say, the river, the whole night, the whole sky?

There is a way that writing might come apart in writing. That by writing, what is held by writing would itself disappear. There is a way of lightening speech, the whole of speech, until it floats into the air like a fire-balloon.