A husk of a day, which I finish by watching Ullman’s Faithless, from a script by Bergman, and hoping by watching I will keep Bergman living for a few years more. Is he still alone on his island? Does he still spend the day writing? I am alone here, but I cannot write for a whole day, or read. But I open a notebook as I watch the film, in hope.
I write, Zarathustra’s beard, remembering how it turned white at the end of Book Four, but how he strides out again as though young. I write, the unalterable, thinking of the field across which I walked alone, and the great cloud I saw above the city – ten miles wide, or twenty – and felt assured that the weather pays no heed to me, and nor do the laws of physics; they are what they are: unalterable.
And I write, the witness, thinking of Isabelle, the suffering child of Ullman’s film, who cries in her bed, surrounded by toys, as her parents row, then break up, as her father kills herself, as her mother screams when she is cheated upon by her new lover. The witness: thinking, too, of Duras’s remarks on the drafting of Destroy, She Said, where it was the presence of Stein, who barely acts, that allowed her to write the story. The witness, she says, who is present in Lol V. Stein and The Vice-Consul, though in different ways.
And I wrote, the suicide note, thinking again of the film: what is it supposed to explain? To write and finish writing; to draw a line under your life. A note: to whom is it left to decipher, and what can they make of it? And I thought of a failed note, begun and never finished, so that no line can be drawn and the suicide lives as a survivor. And my penultimate note, Rush-That-Speaks, remembering again the narrator of Crowley’s Engine Summer who is alive to speak to an unknown audience, just as Ullman’s Marianne is made to speak of her life to the old man, the old director, alone on his island.
It is Sunday, 7th January 2006, and the year is very young. Young, but I’ve already lost hold on the onward movement of days. The kitchen fitter comes Tuesday morning, early. The Loss Adjuster, so unlike Egoyan’s character, on Friday at 10.00, along with the company she’s employed to take care of the damp. Then, at some point, dehumidifiers will be installed, to suck the damp out of the air, and see if it is improving, as a whole, or getting worse.
Very well – and I am thankful that my week is marked out thus, that a morning will be allowed to be a morning. How is it I’ve thought in the past days of my old friend who is also, in some way, an outsider? What a dramatic term! But isn’t it the case there are those whom life has surprised by being what it is? By giving him a wife, and children, and a house. A marvellous gift – he wouldn’t deny that – but one which comes from far, and obscurely; which has reached him by some kind of chance. It chose him: very well, he said, and he’s a good husband and father. But how is it I feel he lives his life, as I do, at one remove?
My beard is getting white: two white patches, where there was one. There is red there, among the dark brown, in my beard: Nordic ancestry. Erik the Red. Alone in the middle of life, just as Bergman is alone at the end. All those dramas about rich actresses and directors, I say to myself of him. All those rich, spoilt Swedes in their great houses. So successful, all of them, I tell myself. When they fall, they do not fall very far.
But there is always more to Bergman, that’s for sure. I don’t like her, your Marianne, says Marianne to the old director in the film. And so Marianne, this Marianne (the real one drowned, we learn almost at the end of the film) is not the one who lived. Isn’t this what we saw at the beginning, when the old director called her into being, in her flesh and blood (her voice trembles, coming from nowhere: Who am I?)?
She is beautiful, of course. Too beautiful, always that. Beautiful enough that her beauty runs ahead of her in the world. She will not fall very far. Or what she calls falling is only a sham. Always, still, her beauty. This I tell myself, but also that the Marianne who speaks to him, the old director, is not the real Marianne, but a ghost, an image. He has called her into existence. She came to him, but she is unreal.
We dammed up a few days for ourselves at the beginning of the year, my Visitor and I. That’s how I thought of it: a few days, running thickly into one another like treacle: I can barely separate one incident from another: on what day did we …? when did we …? But now the year begins again; the water is pouring over the brink, and I must be ready.
Tomorrow is Monday. Tomorrow, work must begin. Write the review; finish it; it’s not a big task, after all. It’s nothing; in the old days, three or four years ago, it would take you no more than a fortnight, but now? Now, I would say, I’m someone else; I’m like the old director, though I can never quite summon him, the one who should work, who lives in the day, who is to do my bidding. He has never quite arrived, and is only here in outline.
Work!, I command him. Work for me! But I can barely reply to emails from my friends. Barely write to them, and it is not only that part of me lives back then, in the sweet, lush thickness of days. What is this weakness, as after a hot bath? What is this new reluctance, this laying down of all work in me?
Say this: for the first time, I have money enough to … Say this: for the first time, free of all debts, I’ll … There’s a stack of new books on my desk: all those I could not afford before, new, unread. Will I read them? I have tried, and failed, to harden resolutions for myself. To say: I will undertake this course or action, or that, and put on my seven league boots to stride through the year.
Once again – this year, like the last, such resolutions are blown away like grain from an open hand. You’ll achieve nothing and less than nothing, says the new year. And I’ll write from my failure and from my falling, even though I can no longer fall very far.
Once, I think I would have given a good deal to be able to write like this, such as this writing is. A good deal – but didn’t I know that it can come only in neglect, only when a shadow falls over the whole of your life, like that from the dark cloud I saw spread over the city?
Write by way of carelessness. Write as you know failure on the real field of your achievement; in truth, writing must be what you come to last, having failed elsewhere, even if writing was what you wanted from the first. Come to it then when it means nothing to you, or you know you could say in perfect honesty that you might give it up tomorrow.
Writing, I would give you up. Writing, it would be nothing at all. And once, to think, in front of every film, I sat with a notebook. Once, it wasn’t enough to carry vague ideas in my head like fireflies, but had to trap them before me in the sealed jar of a notebook.
And of what is there to write? Of failure, and of that gap in failure that lets writing begin. The ‘merciful surplus’, as Kafka called it, that let despair bloom and weariness leap joyfully into the air.
What have I done today? Failed. Failed, but what else? Filled the flat with the smell of bacon. Finished, mournfully the last of my Visitor’s pie. Texted her in mourning and then in joy when she texted back. Set a course for the office over the field. Sat by my unheated desk in an office block wrapped in scaffolding. Walked back listening to The Fall on my headphones.
And all the time, a life in lieu, a life echoing with what it was not. And then I thanked the laws of physics for being what they were, and I thanked the leafless branches that seem to curve around the street lamp, and I thanked the hardness of the pavement I walked alone: something is certain, something unalterable.
The occasional, I wrote, earlier today – just that. The day, the occasion of writing, which may or may not be marked there – think, for example, of the rules governing the composition of haiku: a word for the time of day, a word for the season … but compare that to the conference paper that is to have no reference to the circumstances under which it was written, drawing life into its orbit only to send it out as an example.
How the occasional suffers in academic writing! Haven’t I the chance to unsnap its iron collar here? Isn’t that the gift I give the occasional, that it is not the genie I can summon and dismiss at will? Give shelter to the day, give it shelter. Shelter it that it can come close to you, the day, the everyday, as it remains blank and remote like an autistic child.
In what language does it speak? Within what labyrinth is it lost? I would write its suicide note, if I could, to finish it off. But writing can never trap the day, it cannot catch it. A dream catcher is not built like a net, and writing must not be a cage for an occasional, but show it freedom, show it that it is free on all sides. Only then might it come and lie down like a cat at the heart of your writing (turning around in a circle first, then another, and then tucking up its paws …). Only then, in its freedom, might it give your writing a reciprocal freedom, as the fairy gave life to Pinocchio.
The life of writing lies only in its idiom, and in the movement into the idiom. Lies only in that contraction of sense before it is breathed out, in the drawing of dull blood into the heart to be pumped out afresh. No resolutions. Only to lead writing like a horse back into itself. Only to disappear, like de Niro’s character in the final scene of The Last Tycoon, into the darkness.
How far can I fall? Not very far. But haven’t I been falling for a long time? All of my life? I ate too much bacon today – two packets. I didn’t read my books. I ate until I was too full, and walked out, and walked back. The warm flat, music playing from the computer: back, and to what?
A pool of light in the darkness. My desk at home, different to my desk at work. Two empty bottles of wine. A squeezed out tube of honey, shaped like a beehive. An old television without Freeview: all the items by which I navigate my life, landmarks familiar and unfamiliar, which fall under the protection of the occasional.
The Furies became the Eumenides, who guarded every home. And I think it is the Eumenides who are watching over me now. Do you see me?, I ask them. Do you see in your blindness, which lets you see only what you cannot? As I walk from the bed to the toilet in the night, I spread my hand on my belly. You’re getting fat, I tell myself. I’m getting fat, but my belly is round and hard, like my uncle’s. But how old was he then, when I saw him spreading a hand on his belly?
A husk of a day, when nothing happened, and everything did. The occasional is close, I tell myself. The occasional watches me, the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, from the CD remote and the television guide; from the empty bowl of cereal and Fink’s book beside me. And now I hope Bergman is also watched, and I ask the Kindly Ones to give him blessing, he at the end of his life, and I in the middle of mine.
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