My teacher friend tells me that when it blows about out, the children are as if blown along the classrooms and corridors inside – blown about in their heads too, unable to settle, the wind still bearing them along. Tonight, the wind howls in the old chimney breast, where the back boiler is now. And I can hear it outside – no doubt it’s overturned some of the plants in the yard, including the one whose pot broke a few weeks back, and that stands, a cone of earth held together by roots.
In my vagueness I sometimes tell myself I should go down to B & Q for a new pot; nothing happens, though. And nothing ever does, not really, vagueness having turned my life into a glassy surface remote from whatever vague place I occupy. Yesterday a long post, botched. A long, sprawling post, replying to everyone. And today? Enough to get through the day. Enough to link moment to moment and live all at once, in a forwards direction.
Did it matter that I finally let myself hear Self Portrait – there’s a few artists whose LPs I ration myself, so there will always be new things to be discover as the decades pass?; Bob Dylan is one – The Fall are another, old constants, to whom I’ve been listening almost as long as I’ve been listening to music, but things to get by both of them, still. What kind of faith in time does that reveal? A faith that my life will spread out, decade after decade?
Lately I’ve felt farther from work that ever before. Vagueness keeps me from it; a kind of mist descends; it is not unpleasant, or not merely so. I thought to myself today: it’s 12 days old, but I’m already lost in this year. It’s as though I cannot break the surface, cannot breathe, or act. A single clean sentence, I tell myself. A single simple action – a gesture arising of itself, natural. But it doesn’t come; it doesn’t happen.
The same, and again. The same, with which I used to be content: remember when you were unemployed, and took the same walk over and again. Remember it, and X., always exasperated at me for taking that same walk, and wanting her to take it with me. Ah, what secret autobiography could be written of those who I disappoint. Didn’t she leave me in disgust? Or did I leave her? But I’m not capable of that.
I remember accepting a ride home from her from town, and just getting out, and never seeing her again. Stranded, jobless, what kind of prospect was I? I never complained, I said to her, I wasn’t that type. And I was looking for work back at Hewlett Packard, where I was before I went to study. She kissed me on the cheek when I said that, in pity. She pitied me, but what of herself, when a year and a half before she’d told me breathlessly of her great plans? At least I never had such plans, I thought to myself then. Never – I knew they couldn’t happen, and to me above all.
But I shouldn’t follow the winding course of autobiography any further. Discretion. Respect that. Ah but to follow it and to write of those who looked at me in disappointment, when I’d told them from the first how it was going to be. And I was right, always. And contentedly so. What a curse is ambition, and how happy I am without, living at the periphery, where we all should live! That reassurance at least in the midst of that vagueness that dissolves ambition.
Yesterday, an expert on drying came out to look at the kitchen. Hack away the plaster and expose the brick; put in the dryers for a fortnight, and then see. I agreed. And today, the loss adjuster agreed, and met in my kitchen with the manager of the workmen who were to carry out the job. How impersonal it became, my flat! The meeting place of strangers, the damp a problem others were to solve.
Mould forms on the wet walls. And there’s a layer of salt at the damp’s edges: I like it, and wonder what metamorphosis it signifies. Does it mean the plaster’s drying? The damp’s not in the air as it used to be. But the drying expert said my damp was off the meter – he’s only seen a few cases like it, he said, very friendly. We went into the yard, past the plants, and looked up at the wall.
He didn’t know what was causing it. It was a mystery to him as to everyone. But still the sound of rushing water. Still that sound, which perhaps only I can hear. Is that the source: a burst pipe, an underground river flooding through concrete and into the brick? What does it matter? Vagueness descends, and I forget everything but the struggle to join minute to minute.
Later, having spent a whole day adrift, wandering from here to there, unable to focus or to concentrate, I copied a chunk of posts from Larval Subjects to annotate: I gave myself that job. Saturate yourself with Lacan, I told myself; become damp with it – let it seep into your hidden places and then leach out of you, leaving a fine crust of salt on your skin. Hadn’t I made a plan to write a post on each of the types Fink analyses in his Clinical Introduction?
This is the Year of Psychoanalysis, I said to myself a few days ago, just as other years have meant other things. Didn’t I saturate myself, once, in Heidegger? And then the others? It came to end with Deleuze, something failed in me. That was three years ago, The Great Summer of Work, when everything began to fail, and I knew myself to have been cast adrift, becalmed in the great wideness of the vague. I tried to work; I remember it – everyday, across the field and back, eight to eight in the office, and wanting only to read, and write.
Weeks passed; months; a whole summer. But something had failed in me, and I was back again disappointing X. back in my years of unemployment. Work was a ritual to hold myself together. But it was only an empty form. I was open somewhere else just like the field. Somewhere else I was lying down and the clouds were passing, and a blank and sightless sky beyond.
Is vagueness the grounding mood to which I’m attuned? The ground of all my moods, the obscure centre about which they turn: I know it only when they seem to come apart, those other moods and there is only vagueness behind. I remember vague days in Manchester, David and I in facing arm chairs, rain outside. ‘Let’s give up!’ he said, of his attempt to work, and mine. What point was there? It was raining again, the weather was heavy again. And here, on the other coast, where it is nearly always fresh? How can vagueness survive here, when it should be blown away in those coastal winds that take the clouds very quickly across the sky?
The whole sky seemed to be moving tonight, as I walked home. The whole sky: and I could tilt back my head to see it, not being on my bike, wanting to walk and be reassured by the measure of walking. To walk and in my steps join moment to moment and succeed in entering the rhythm of time, observing its external form, if nothing else. Its form and not the strange matter of time torn apart, of moments that never achieve themselves.
Do we really desire to desire (Lacan)? I wonder if it assumes a too unitary point from which desire begins, or have I misunderstood: is it from desire that we are each of us born and that tacks ahead of us? Well, that great initial gust has left me now. Or at least it does not bear me along inside, as my friend tells me it bears her schoolchildren. The wind is there only to reveal the sky behind: my vagueness, absolute, and so simple it barely seems mine.
The rivers are flooding, I see on the news. Swollen rivers, overrunning their banks: isn’t this the afternoon lost to vagueness? White light on water. The clouds tearing across reflected on water. Nothing is hidden; it’s all there: mystery, and all at once. A mystery of the surface, of the sky’s lack of depth: I would say, quite certain, that I inherited my vagueness, and my dad had it too, and, like me, he sought at one point to let himself be claimed by it yet further – he cut down on tea and coffee; he faced the evening uncaffeinated, just as I do.
I strand myself in the afternoon, but with that steady knowledge that another day is rolling round, and morning will come again, that eternal freshness in which work might begin. I think it takes a kind of wisdom to bear it as it is, without caffeine or alcohol. A man who drinks is interplanetary, says Duras. And: an alcoholic is cosmic. I think that’s true – I think to drink is to stir up the sky, to shake it and watch its patterns. To see again the cosmic and the whole afternoon, vaster than the universe with the courage of drink. The whole sky like a nebula, torn apart.
What did Pascal say? ‘The silence of infinite spaces terrifies me’ – something like that. A quote Bernhard sets at the beginning of one of his books; and don’t I remember, very clearly, telling a friend as a child that each star in the sky was a sun like our own, and that each might have planets like our own, and that someone might be looking down at us, a gaze lost in their sky, just as ours was lost in ours?
The chance of this post came after everything, after the whole day passed and I could find no way to mark it. Perhaps writing is a way in which desire gives itself to itself, playing with what it might become like a seal balancing a beach ball. Eternal youth: is that writing? Is that what writing would mark as the morning opens? Just that, at the beginning of the day: a spreading page, a page spread out, and it is enough merely to have coincided with oneself for long enough to begin.
To begin – and just that: isn’t it enough in my years of vagueness? Isn’t it enough, at the outset, at the beginning of the day, to have recorded my presence? I was there to write. Here I am: nothing more. Addressed to whom? Calling whom? Not even myself, else why would the act have to repeated – lines of writing that precede any work I might do? An act and not an act, or one that is only an indication of what it might have been. A paragraph – several – that I forget as fast as they are written. A mystery to me, a damp surface by which workmen come and go.
But the vagueness will come again, like mist. It’s always on its way, the same and always the same, as sure as the writing that struggles against it. Faith: that it will not swallow everything. Faith: that the morning will roll around, and there will be writing again, just as there are always more LPs by Bob Dylan to hear.
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