A day waiting for a delivery. Waiting, until waiting falls from itself. No longer is it a matter of the time I might have spent doing something else – of what I have lost by waiting. That still presumes a time in which tasks orientate me towards the future, and behind them, the projection that is my relation to time. A relation that withers as waiting falls from waiting, and time is no longer lost, nor gained.
Errant time, time unemployed: I pass from one room to another, boredly lying on the bed and watch The Simpsons on my laptop, and then up again to check my downloads. And there is the yard, no longer disappointing, though there is still the big tear in the wall that will soon be repaired. And the day – white, blank, in which nothing at all can happen. Or the day is that non-happening, the passing of time wiped out.
Time without project, time that does not live from the future: the day spreads out indifferently beneath the sky. Stagnancy: time is going nowhere. I’m waiting – but for what? Waiting without object. Superfluous time, that lacks its sense. Do I ever wait for waiting, wondering when time will return to its course?
Eventually, waiting draws itself back to itself, the day, stretched, begins to stretch back to itself. I think to myself, I should write something. Think: I should at least mark the moment when the time began to flow again, and waiting no longer waited for itself.
Now the day is spread before me like a plateau. What is to happen? The delivery will come – now that event exists on the same plane as me. Yes, I am certain of that. And I can write, too – I’m certain of that. But how to bear without betrayal that waiting that no goal could alleviate? How to write of what loses itself before it is found?
Sometimes, I want to awaken in myself a sense of urgency. How old am I?, I ask myself. And then: What ought I have done? But this ‘ought’, which used to awaken me, leaves me indifferent. How old am I, anyway? This is the plateau, the long afternoon that opens out into middle age. A decline so gentle it can hardly be felt. The long afternoon – I know how I’ll pass it; my world is secure enough, stable enough; it turns steadily on its axis.
A delivery is coming: even that is enough. To wait as a customer, to have afforded to buy what is arriving. To wait as one to whom things are owed: yes that is already a great deal; I know it, as it can only be known from the perspective of one to whom this chance might not have been granted.
Wasn’t there a time, after all, when all the doors were shut? A time – scarcely a time. Waiting fallen from waiting, waiting lost from itself: unemployment, illness, the one turning into the other. Illness, unemployment, and a great weariness that crossed out the sky.
That’s what returned today, when waiting fell from itself. Returned – as it also returned then, the first time (was their a first time?) Strange autobiography that would have to include long tracts where moment unjoined itself from moment. Strange testimony that would keep fidelity with what failed to occur.
Before, one task gave itself into another; there was a struggle, a series of struggles – to find a job, to keep it; and now? Tasks are worn away from themselves; projects fail before they begin, and this is happiness. Adrift in life – life, completely adrift, with no desire to leave my name behind when night comes after the long afternoon and the evening.
But the act of writing has caught me out. The faith that carries all acts as they belong to time carries the words in which I would answer to waiting as it falls away from waiting. How then to attenuate this faith, to wear it away? Let it wander without course. Set it adrift; give it to chance. Write without thought, or without forethought.
Nothing is to happen here; nothing is to gather itself into an event. Blanched writing, etiolated writing – worn away until the act falters, until the step forward is also a step away. How old am I?, I ask myself that. What am I doing here?: I ask myself that. No answer – today is any day, and I am anyone.
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