Runs

Sometimes there come runs of posts that seem to be important. Waking, I already hear sentences that seem borne from yesterday’s posting, as though it were the secret work of dreams to push forward what was thought the day before: that it is dreams which work, or perhaps that they have been made to do so, being transformed from a mess of impressions to an indication of what is to be written in the morning.

And a sense of the fragility of such runs – that the visitor from Porlock (was it Porlock?) might interrupt them; that some illness might come, rising as out of the water like a whale’s back; that I must make a trip to another part of the country and come back exhausted. And then the more general urgency – why do I feel this? – that there is not much time, and everything must be written now.

Foolish superstition: those who write much will die young. But mightn’t death be brought about by writing much – too much? Foolish thoughts, foolish superstition. And when there is no run? When the morning beaches you without thoughts, without phrases that call our promiscuously for the company of other phrases? No thought – nothing to be said, to be written, but only the desire to say, to mark my passage.

Because my sleep is never unbroken, and I awaken, usually, much too early, sometimes looking at the clock to find it was only two hours since I went to sleep, I regard it as an achievement to sleep late – to reach eight o’clock, say, or – but this never happens – nine. I always think that when I have no thoughts, when no run of posts bears me from morning to morning, I deserve to awaken later, beached guiltless and thoughtless on the shore. But this never happens, and without such a run, the hours before daylight are more hollow – for with what am I to fill them?

To live on one’s own is to know well the strangeness of the illnesses and fatigues of the body – but also those moments of strength, of possibility. How was it, for a time, that my evenings woke up because of writing? For a few weeks, tired, I’d gone to bed at eight and watched episodes of The Simpsons streamed on the laptop. And then – some posts that let the evening broaden and spread outwards: now the early darkness did not bother me, and behind the curtains, this room was a cave in which, sitting upwards at my desk, typing, I was moving and the room through time, through my past, which came alive again, and so to the future.

For a few evenings, it continued in this way, and I was eager to come home, rather than staying out to drink. Home – and to write, because for a few days at least, writing was possible and it gave me the possible; the evening was thrown like a spear into the future. And then, of course, it fell away as it must do, and I was left only with a sense of energy unbound. Not work, then, and the steadiness of work, but a scattering, and in all directions. What was there to do but to retreat to the other room, behind the bevelled glass and lie there as the hours passed unmarked, all the way up to sleep?

I decided instead to drive my evenings on by reading, and so ordered many books – some difficult, some easy because they were books I had before, and that I’d read before, and to read was to glide, as I was doing last night, when I finished two thirds of the first book of Gene Wolfe’s tetralogy. I made it all the way to midnight: fabulous achievement, burrowing through the night.

Possibility was mine; hadn’t I already braced myself for this new reading – my first in 15 years, I think – by reading speculative critical studies by Robert Borski and others? I don’t think I can resist a mystery, and the detective work that comes from working things out; braced by Borski I would read attentive for the clues that would guide me in understanding the mystery of the book (or would only lead me deeper into the mystery, as I know it is not bound up, say with the question of Severian’s ancestry, so much as what gives and withholds itself by way of Wolfe’s prose).

Always there is the writing – Wolfe’s supple, strong-limbed prose – and those asides which make the fiction come alive: those lovely pauses in the story that I think I like more than the story itself. But I made it all the way to midnight, and to the brink of this day, today – and wasn’t that what I wanted: to be carried by reading through evening to night?

Of course there is also my review to think about; I should be writing that – but sometimes it is sufficient just to get through days and nights as I imagine does an ordinary person: one who lives according to normal rhythms, who has strength and then rests in the evening when his strength is exhausted. Are there any such people? And besides, what do I know of exhaustion? Didn’t the weights have to be lifted from me when the other day I loaded too much by chance upon the barbell?

In the gym, I allow myself to read Saul Bellow as I train, but I’ve lost the plot of Humboldt’s Gift so infrequently have I gone lately. I think it will be necessary to turn a new page in my life, to begin again, in some new way. And that requires travelling back to the head of the day, to the place where resolutions might be made, or renewed.

But what resolutions have I? It is enough, today, just to write. Enough that in the hours before dawn (but dawn comes very late; it is winter) that I can make my mark, or rather make it again, having forgotten what was written yesterday, or remembering only that a mark was made and must be made anew. Isn’t that enough? To open up an evening, or a morning, to live, or only to mark that moment where a sense of living opens up? But why is it necessary? Why writing, and why here?

It is morning now, and bright. Perhaps the coming of light in winter cannot be called dawn – or at least that dawn should be something unshared, with the sense that only a few of us are awake at this time, very few. Morning, then, just that, and the busyness of the day. Am I braced for it now, and ready for the office? But I would rather the day was forgotten and I knew only the latest in a run of posts, not for what it said, but for the urgency of its saying, that seemed to let fate direct me as soon as I awoke, and gave a single orientation to my dreams, which otherwise tend to linger where I would rather they did not.