If I survived most of the instructors at my gym, this is not testament to my determination. In truth, I am the laziest of gym attendees; if I visit regularly, it is only to read on those cross trainers that allow me to wedge a paperback open. For a long time, I would write down the number of calories I expended over one hour on the inside cover of the books I read.
Thus, Gathering Evidence has 833 10/10, 851, 12/10; Extinction has 900 (but no date). But then long overdue, I changed my routine; I began to use the free weights as well as the resistance machines. I am still lazy, but today, I was pleased to put the largest weights on my barbell. Had I made progress? According to new research, I read in a gym magazine, aerobic exercise is much more effective when it follows severe anaerobic exertion.
So after warming up, I go straight to the weights, but now, on the cross trainer, I’m really too tired to read, and reading slows until books take much too long too finish. How many times did I carry Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting to gym? Long enough to forget the freshness of its beginning; long enough to tire of gratuitous intrigue. So many characters! So many scenes! And always that same authorial voice, too sure of itself, too steady; and the predictable sideswipes at popular culture.
But I remember starting the book a sunny afternoon a few weeks ago at St Margaret’s station in London; I continued to read on my journey back to the north along the East coast of England. As we passed the last of the hills of Yorkshire, I was already halfway through. But then my reading, confined to the gym, since I was busy at work, and my evenings were taken up with reading and writing things academic, stalled.
Finally, I finished the novel impatiently in my office; it was long overdue; now I could pick something new from the shelf. But what? My Muriel Spark novels had long since arrived, but I didn’t finish The Public Image. I went to the bookshop, wondering if Slow Man had come out in paperback. But then I remembered the book that I’d lost as soon as I’d finished it: Vertigo, Sebald’s Vertigo. Thankfully, they had a copy in one of the local bookshops; I took it to the gym, and after the weights, started reading it for a second time.
And what a marvel it remains! Happiness as I followed the vicissitudes of a single character, and the rise and fall of what seems a single continuum of mood; relief to be left along with the forward impulse of the narrative as it runs on into the dark; relief there are no authorial asides, and the text is not broken up, but seems to fall into itself, carry it with me. As I shower, it is as though Sebald’s voice continues inside me; I speak to myself of gym, of showering, of vanished instructors.
I have been given a voice, I think to myself, and the happiness of narration. MacIntyre would have it that life without narrative is chaos and noise, and it is true that if I am not in the company of a strong novel, the events of the day do not seem to settle in sequence. I want to be alone with a book, that’s what I say to myself, then, and am grateful for long train journeys, the voyage north or the voyage south, four hours as I am borne forward by what I read just as the train bears itself forward.
But what kind of narrative do I want to tell? Like Sebald’s narrator’s, Handke’s too are usually of a man apart, a wandering man. Is that what I want, then – to tell a story of being alone, or of coming to a wandering solitude, where neither word, wandering, solitude, can be thought apart from the other. But I am no wanderer. Only once in this city have I ever gone walking without a purpose in mind.
That was a few months ago, in the midst of turmoil and indecision. I discovered a route from here to there, a new secondhand bookshop, but I never revisited it, or retaken that walk. When I was young, it is true, I walked without purpose – across the square in front of the town hall in Manchester, across to the old warehouses behind Piccadilly Station, or to the wastelands still unregenerated along the ship canal.
But now I am older? No journey without purpose. No psychogeography, no drifting. A sense that there will soon be no chance to work, to write. Of urgency – or as if I had wasted most of my early life, as if I had lived in the wrong direction, and it was only now I had found a path. This is why I rise early; it is why I like to spend evenings after the pub reading, focusing upon what is to be written tomorrow.
Life lived in a single direction; the right one, and perhaps, in its way, a kind of wandering – but one, if this is possible, along only two dimensions. Life as a line, as the attempt to follow a line. Yes, that is the solitary wandering that can only be travelled alone. But then, too, there is always the pub, and company – my friends – about whom I do not write enough.
What is more wonderful than the evening drink with X. and Y. where X says, come and eat at my house, and we have an impromptu meal of whatever we can find in his fridge and the cupboard, or forage from the supermarket on the corner? Then we sit out in the little garden amidst the potted plants, and life is fine, the evening opens before us; it is summer; we are in the middle of our lives, and all is well, everything can be talked about, there will be no disagreement.
Remembering those times, I admire the lightness of The Girls of Slender Means: what a gift to be able to write like, so lightly! But even then, the day that follows such nights begins with the same demand: find again the unwavering line; follow it, attempt to follow it, as it breaks into the future. Or rather, receive it from the future, that line along which you travel; experience it as fate, as what is marked out only for you.
And then I think of the journeys of the protagonist’s seven friends in My Year in No Man’s Land – friends who seem only aspects of Handke himself, just as the characters of Mishima’s Kyoto’s House, dramatised in Schrader’s films, are aspects of the narrator. Seven friends – how to split yourself into seven pieces and let them wander on separate journeys?
But I am reading Vertigo, I must remember that. Vertigo will provide the orientation – and hasn’t it already given me this voice, the one in which I am writing now? But who is the ‘I’ that writes, and whose voice is this? To MacIntyre always the objection that there are so many stories that could be told, and so many narrators I might find myself to be.
But I know which narrator I want to be. Urgency, the single line to be followed: what distance is that I see myself crossing? Only that between the future and the present, as if I were bringing something back, not living forwards. As though I were protecting something I’d brought from there, the future.
I think of the ogre’s heart in fairytales, that is hidden far from the ogre’s living body. In a chest, at the bottom of a lake – and isn’t it possible to live from something of you that is buried in the future?
How many kilograms did I lift today? I barely lifted them. 5 repetitions, 6, and only 3 times over. That was nothing, but after, my left arm ached. I had an excuse: no more. Back to the cross trainer, back to Vertigo, relieved that with this narrative, my life lifts itself out of chaos and noise.
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