We are entertaining Blah-Feme, who’s been pressing me about the damp. ‘Is it getting better or worse?’ It’s not that simple, I tell him. ‘It must be – better, or worse – which is it?’ He has a look. Small coarse flakes are forming over part of the wall. ‘It’s the lime,’ says Blah-Feme confidently, ‘it’s leaching through the wall.’
I’m impressed; Blah-Feme is immensely positive. But when I ask him to place his hand against other parts of the wall, his expression changes. ‘It is very wet.’ – ‘I told you!’ And it is wet, perhaps as wet as ever, or perhaps not. Either way, the Loss Adjuster rang me to say she wasn’t sure the damp came from a single source. She sounds tender. ‘I’m not sure we’ll be able to cover it.’
She’s going to bring in dehumidifiers to see whether that makes a difference. ‘If it doesn’t, I’m not sure what we can do.’ She’ll be around herself in a week. How tender she is! The workmen she hired tell me she’s very stern. And yet she’s tender with me! I thank her.
W. always tells me how craven I am with waiters in restaurants. ‘You have to be more forceful.’ I always surprise him by my unassertiveness. ‘You’re essentially weak. You’re a weak person.’ The loss adjuster, who I’m told – and I can believe it – is normally stern, is being tender with me: how can I help my weakness?
I tell her I look forward to seeing her, and hope we can resolve the matter. My best business voice. ‘How do you think we can go forward with this?’, I ask her at another point in the conversation. ‘Go forward’ – we’re in it together, the Loss Adjuster and I. We have a shared project, about which we both care. ‘How can we go forward with this?’
How indeed? If the workmen are right, the insurers will do their best to get out of paying. What should I do – scrape the lime (if it’s lime from the walls)? Let it stay there, if, as Blah-Feme says, it’s evidence of the wall drying? For a time, I’m lightly panicked. I decide to eat everything in the kitchen. Thankfully there’s very little. I sit back on the sofa, bloated.
The damp! What is to be done! Nothing is to be done, I tell myself, not now. Be calm. But I wake up at four this morning, with damp on my mind, as well as that old schoolfriend of mine who turned out to be a paedophile. I lie awake think of damp, then the paedophile, in his secure unit and back again. And I think of the year behind me, and the year spreading out before me.
Disaster, and right at the beginning of the year! Fortunately, there is the great consolation (oh, it’s better than that!) announced in the word ‘We’ at the beginning of this post. I’ll be discreet. But tonight (last night), there’s no one lying beside me. I’m alone with my idiocy. Four AM! Why is it always four AM? For a week, I was able to sleep, I slept like a normal person, but then, after her departure?
I am not to speak of my decline, she says. And Blah-Feme agreed: ‘you’ll have to get him to stop that.’ That was over Blah-Feme’s table at New Year’s Eve. I had said, ‘more disaster. It’ll be terrible, a terrible year, just like the last one.’ No one was impressed. ‘You’ll have to get him to stop that.’ I did stop; that was the last such pronouncement from me. Where was W. when I needed him?
For a whole week I could sleep; it was beautiful. I used the phrase ‘it’s beautiful’, too often. That was tiresome, too. I said of blogging, ‘it’s beautiful’; of Youtube, ‘it’s beautiful’, of our Dogma rules, ‘they’re beautiful’, and all the way a small look of rapture crossing my face. I was lost, for a moment. But then there was her face (my Visitor’s) as I played the video of ‘Mr Me Too’ by Clipse. We watched excerpts of an old Nina Simone concert from the 70s. ‘What was she on?’ Her audience were terrified; we were terrified. She asked them to sing along; we felt commanded to sing along. The next day on the moor, I was still singing. ‘Feelings … nothing else but feelings …’
A whole week of sleeping. Of ales in the 15 good pubs in town. Of a hundred played CDs. Of six cooked breakfasts. Of empty bottles of wine and one of Plymouth Gin. A day in the bath. A day at the coast. Five viewings of ‘Drop It Like it’s Hot’. Two of Michael Jackson’s moonwalk. Karen Dalton. Fred Neil …
And meanwhile, the damp either drying or getting worse – which was it? ‘It’s going to be the year of psychoanalysis’, I told anyone who would listen. Fink has broken through the hard shell of my idiocy. The obsessive versus the hysteric. The psychotic. Pointers on therapy: beautiful, all of this. I feel lightened – less like an idiot – a psychoanalytic universe opens before me.
Satantango is out on triple DVD. It’s an omen. I should buy copies for all my friends. This will be the year for watching films again, I tell myself. A new TV, a DVD player (I’ve never had one). But isn’t it enough to hold on from one day to another? What can plans be to me? No plans: one day, then another; one step, another.
In the other room, The Sportswriter open face down on the pillow. The prose of Richard Ford will calm me, I tell myself. It will carry me safely from hour to hour: a bed of prose, a moving slow river. To be borne, and to let the calm line of his prose to run forward through me: calmness, continuity.
I want to flatten my hours, to smooth the day like a page. I’ll talk to no one, I tell myself. No conversation; there’s nothing to say. And let the line of prose run ahead of me inside me like a lifeline, but one thrown from the future, a calm future. That will carry me ahead of myself, in silence. A line of prose is a lifeline.
And to write here – what is that? Why that? Over Christmas, the great mistake of reading early journals. What foolishness to keep them? But I keep them, or they are kept for me piled horizontally on a shelf in the room I stay at my mum’s. Old journals – what pain! Prose that believed for me, that I thought spread itself like a wave on the shore of a future that would be completely different from my present.
Didn’t I stay in most nights, back then, as an undergraduate? Stay in, and for what? To be alone in a room, I think. To let calmness come back to find me, stretching out a hand from the future. But my prose then as now was that of an idiot; no – more so, because my failure was not marked across it, because, still young, I thought my prose really stretched back a hand.
In truth, I wrote because I was unsociable, and couldn’t bear that my days and nights might not be honed into an arrow to be shot who knows where. Separated from others I also wanted to pare down my aloneness, to make of it that missile before which the clouds would part. But the arrow that is shot must split your own heart open, the Zen master said.
But how to bare your breast to the future except as Mishima did – to slash it open? That was the question I asked myself a couple of years later, jobless and without prospect, and wasn’t that the purest thought: of a future without me? But I could never write those few lines Mishima celebrates in his remarks on the suicide pilots in the war, to whom a poetic sentence or two was necessary before they flew their missles into a ship. What idiocy!
Fortunately, or unfortunately, I couldn’t finish with writing – then, as now, I didn’t know when to stop, and what insolence there was in starting. Who asked for it? Who asked for a line? Or was it only my lifeline, feeble as it was, parasitic as it was, reaching forward only as a hand of prose reached back.
The Sportswriter upside down on my pillow, as Herzog once was, or The Loser, or Caught: books that believe more than I can, and perhaps more than poor old Green and the perpetually dying Bernhard, and arrogant old Bellow with his flyleaf boasts (‘the only person to be granted doctorates from Harvard and Yale’) and Richard Ford (but I don’t know anything about him). Books that believe more than any of us, including their authors.
It is enough for me to write something everyday, let alone continuous prose, let alone a story with plot and characters, let alone something theoretical. That new impasse began more recently. How is it I seem to forget everything the morning I begin to write – that my task can only be to bring myself to the brink of writing without writing a line?
Preparatory prose; prose that cannot begin: again, what foolishness. Prose interrupted by the nightly forgetting such that I might begin again, over again, in the eternal morning of my idiocy. And prose that never gathers to itself the assurance of a style: whose continuity, such as it is, is illusory, running ahead only as it apes the running ahead of the prose of others.
Who knows what I want? And who is the ‘I’ at the centre of everything written, and written here? Ah, I know him only by his alibis. Sometimes I call him Spurious, sometimes with my own name: which is he, the one who believes in nothing I do, but only in others, or in the books of others, that will survive all of us?
I think Sinthome (another saint-homme) canonised him recently – or was it me?, I’m confused. (Note: ‘to be anyone at all – what kind of question is that?’ was a question directed towards myself; there was no mockery there.) The saint whose writing – mine – in its near infinite seriality (one million useless words …) becomes what Lacan calls the Thing, without need of authorisation or recognition. Of course Sinthome was writing of himself – but also of me, on the other side (the same side) of the Mobius strip.
Another memory, this time of the last pages of Mishima’s Sea of Fertility, delivered, as part of the fourth volume of this massive tetralogy, on the day of his suicide. The elderly Honda goes to pay tribute to the Abbess of a nunnery to which she went sixty years earlier, after a failed engagement to Honda’s close friend.
Or did she? She remembers nothing of Honda nor his friend; and this lack of memory is the ‘Sea of Fertility’ of Mishima’s title – a four part novel that, at this point, seems to unravel itself. Honda turns back. And Mishima, who, in truth, finished his book a few weeks before, goes to his ridiculous, melodramatic suicide.
There is only the Thing, the image that, like the tain of the mirror, reflects nothing, even as it lets everything be seen. The Sea of Fertility: isn’t that a name for what the blog turns around, with its tales of damp, of my lovely Visitor, of the books that have been successively splayed and upturned on my pillow? And a name for that black hole at the middle of this new year and all years, that means that every day by writing, I will have to catch a lifeline.
Mishima died, the better to avoid the lack of authority and recognition that is our condition. Even the Emperor, for him, was unsatisfactory: shouldn’t he have resigned after the surrender of Japan in World War Two? The hari kari pilots, plunging their missles into ships after writing a few desultory lines of verse for those who survived them, died for nothing; Japan was dishonoured: how to remove this stain?
But it cannot be removed, and it seems there is nothing for which it is worth dying, and that is our truth, a terrible one. There is nothing for which to die; no way to draw a line under our writing. On, as Beckett wrote over and again. On – but what for, for what purpose? Nohow on: a beautiful phrase.
Take a spacewalk and sever the line that binds you to your craft. Drift away and watch the line snake away from you: isn’t that how you’d know silence? But open your inner ears and you will hear the roaring of suns and the ache of empty space. Open them, and noise will miraculously cross the vacuum.
Write. No how – on. There’s no way to mark the way. No canons of taste to guide you. Every day is the first day. You’re an idiot each morning. Every day, for the first time, you’re an idiot, and a saint writes in your place.
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