I should be working, of course – when else to work than at this time of year, which rises like a plateau above the forests of business in which I am usually lost? Working – no doubt, but an infection, and then a weary tiredness – the same tiredness, its eternal return, means that work is impossible, and the day is only something to cross.
How to get through the day? How to link hour to hour? To work: no, that’s impossible. I can’t concentrate; can’t gather myself together; the hours do not offer themselves as that propitious pathway along which work can progress. One day, another – and something might be written.
What is written here, of course, never counts for me as work, but nor too as its opposite. A kind of supplement, that comes with work. With it, set in motion by it like a spinning top. Something incidental the wind of work touches and sets into motion. Only it is always a borrowed motion; it does not exist for itself. Like the moon, it is bright only because of the sun.
And when there is no sun? Then writing is lost in the thickets. No plateau; no space to breathe. And no chance of that intake of breath that would precede creation. Lost in the hours, as hour fails to bind itself to hour, as time sags and breaks from itself like an ox-bow lake that separates itself from a meandering river.
Stagnancy, forest swamps – what is possible without work, without the superhighway that leads out to the heights? How to join hour to hour? Computer games, yes, that is true; and even the games on my new mobile phone: old games, games a decade old: Sonic the Hedgehog, Doom, the former too difficult; the Marble Zone (Act 3) being unconquerable.
Books, of course – simple books, biographies. I can read them, biographies; can live another’s life by proxy. But nothing rises our of the swamp of hours. Sometimes I clear up the flat; sometimes I make phonecalls to the installation team who are supposed to be transforming the kitchen and the bathroom. Damp proof specialists visit; this is welcome.
Something has been done; once again, time has offered itself to work. But then the long hours without work, the old tiredness, the same tiredness. For a time, I took Day Nurse, half-knowing that caffeine was one of its ingredients – oh that caffeine lift! But a lift is followed by a fall, and I have to relearn the old lesson: no overdosing on caffeine. No more than one coffee and a half cup of green tea; and nothing after noon.
The old lesson – how much what has happened to me could be narrated as a neuropharmalogical case study: the effects of caffeine. An espresso and a Red Bull on the way home from work! And then up all night, and the next day – Saturday! – destroyed. I like to bore my friends with these stories. It is the kind of thing I think about: caffeine, and the effects of caffeine, and I think I could happily break off my current life to proselytise for the reduction of caffeine.
Even as I type, of course, the caffeine from my morning cup of coffee has long crossed the blood-brain barrier, and this is why I can type – why my day always unfolds like Flowers For Algernon: first morning dullness, then the morning caffeine boost, then the long and slow decline.
How much more intelligent you used to seem, said W. But that was a result of a different regime of caffeine; it was a neuropharmalogical condition, and now I’m brave enough not to overdose myself, but to wander in that vague fog which seems to be a family inheritance: the fog is genetic fog, it has reached me from generations of fogbound ancestors, for whom, likewise, the day includes tracts it is difficult to cross.
What should I be doing? I know; it is the purpose for which my new laptop in the other room is meant to serve. Work, the Great Work, the lofty striding from peak to peak, the blessed path in the air. Sometimes I wake at night with burning sentences in my head. I should write, I know that, but then – get a good night’s sleep, I tell myself, else more tiredness. Go to sleep; fall further into sleep in sleep, and then write in the morning.
But I can never lie in. I never rise late. Up by eight, always. Up and working by eight, that is usual, and often seven, and sometimes six. Up at six – but awake for a whole hour before! Up early and more wretchedly tired as my mornings grow longer. So they begin as the summer light calls me through the curtains, and I am up, tired at the computer, tired again before the yard, curtains opened: the mediocre yard.
Up, and for what? Another botched day. Another day in the swamps, leading nowhere. I dreamt of this time, all year I waited to gain the plateau – and now? But I have at least written this, and left my trace, my slug’s trail across these forty minutes. This – substitute for work, the work of anti-work, that can at least say, I was here, I was ready at the head of the day.
And isn’t that true of the whole of my life? Haven’t I always been ready, pencils sharpened, notebook open, for the Great Work that has never actually begun? Haven’t I made time, always time, for the Great Work to withhold itself and grant me only the miserable consolation of writing of what I cannot do?
But then I know I owe what I am – what little I am – to this withholding. I throw a shadow ahead of myself, I make dark that patch of time in which the Work could begin. Ah, it is possible, the Work, but not for me. Yes, it is possible – it must come – but never to me.
Lars Iyer's Blog 