‘And Then?’

You’re never happier, says W., than when you’re planning something. A collaboration – a conference – yes, what is happier than having a plan, and of gaining thereby an orientation to those half-thoughts with gather inside me as iron fillings are shaped by the presence of a magnet: for a time those thoughts imitate form; for a time they point in a single direction.

It is as though those half-thoughts were streamlined, honed in a wind tunnel to the sleekest form that could then bear me to the future. Or it is as though it is from the future those half-thoughts come, welcoming me, reaching for my hand. Yes: I have a path to the future. Or it is the future that unrolls a path back to me, and says: come on: that is what my plan is.

An escape from the present, which turns my present into a threshold. I have a future; the future hasn’t forgotten me: that’s what it is to have a plan. In February, I spoke on Country Music; in March on New Wave music, and then on tragedy in Schelling and others, and then on philosophy and idiocy; in April on … I don’t remember. A paper for each month; I approach the future from a dozen directions.

And now, in July, I have to speak on – … but its content does not matter. How many days do I have left for my research? I ordered that book, and read that one; I looked up that article on the web, and Googled that topic. And then? And then?

A future without plans, what would that mean? To fall from all plans, all projects? ‘And then’: that’s what the future says. But what if there was no ‘and then’? Here, I write of little else, but there – in the world? I plan; I write, busily.

And then?: the other future, or the future furled within the future, like God speaking from the whirlwind. You will have no name. You will be no one in particular; every moment is a threshold. I will appoach the condition of Peter Handke’s protagonists: Andreas Loser in Across, the wanderers of Absence, the woman of The Left Handed Woman, who are blessedly lost from the course of their lives.

‘Only through walking do spaces open up and the spaces between them sing’; ‘rid of his name, yet certain that he is at last present‘; ‘the emptiness here no longer promises you anything’; ‘getting rid of our history, escaping into geography’; ‘… human clouds … we kept arriving …’

Blessed work, the effort to write the epic of the everyday, My Year in No Man’s Bay. How can a book be so boring and so necessary? I tell myself: do not keep your appointment with tomorrow. Miss the nexus of next morning’s writing. I tell myself: but miss it in writing, in another writing. Is it possible to turn a forgotten corner, to open a door miraculously unlocked, so that something of me stops, even if I go on?

I have time; I pause and look up in my work. No: time gives itself; it pauses and looks through my eyes. ‘Emptiness! The word was equivalent to the invocation of the Muse at the beginning of an epic.’ Yes, emptiness, which unlocks the door. ‘The present seemed so pure and uniquely luminous’. And then? And then?