Morning, and I listen, entranced, to Paddy McAloon’s I Trawl the Megahertz for the first time. Narration over synthesised strings, loose – his own story, I think, or I would like to think, but not in his voice, and that is beautiful. A woman’s voice – whose? and why hers? – but it works, it’s glorious; it’s as Chris Marker films might be, though I’ve never seen one. Marker, to whose scripts I’ve linked and which I run through my head sometimes, wondering what the images might be like.
I’ve never had a DVD player, and my TV is too old for Freeview – no scart – so I’ve fallen away from films these past few years, though I used to watch two or three a day back in Manchester. How else to keep myself in my room, and working, or preparing to work, the non-flatscreen monitor on, keyboard ready, though I don’t think I really knew how to work, back then? How else: I watched films, and film after film, from the free library at the university.
But I stopped myself remembering them – stopped buying film magazines, or reading film websites: I wanted another kind of unconscious, and not to wake at night and know myself to be toting up pieces of information, facts running down in my head like the numbers in The Matrix. Neglect memory, don’t feed it – and besides, there’s something about film too forced, too all-at-once: better, for me, an open book, the surface of a page.
And didn’t I discover reading again, in the years of neglect, when my memory seemed to peel away from itself, as clouds unpeeled reveal the sky? Reading: and neglectfully, borrowing books from here and there, and not keeping them, and not remembering their authors, nor what they were about. Stir up memory and forgetting another way, I told myself. Stir it up, like a mixing stick in a cocktail. And let the white words set against the blackness of forgetting thread through my unconscious.
Unowned words – words from no particular source, loose phrases: stirred up, like silt from a river bed, turning – but for no particular purpose and pointing in no particular direction. But I Trawl the Megahertz is really lovely, rarely so – I’m playing it over, having listened close first of all, right up against the speakers, surprised and enthralled – concentrating – and then more distantly to the later tracks, there in the other room, where I finished Ford’s Sportswriter.
A woman’s voice – who is she? – acousmatically floating from her body – but who is she? – and behind whom, giving her lines, Paddy McAloon himself, who must live around here, somewhere. McAloon, whose songs we used to sing on the school bus, and whose band I went to see back in 1985, when we were really too young to be allowed in the venue.
It seems fitting my computer is slowing down, and you can see the cursor blinking slowly, and the words do not come onto the screen as I type them, but after a little pause. Fitting – as though the computer, too, had forgotten what it is, or its memory had been sent on some kind of detour. Perhaps it is also entranced by I Trawl the Megahertz, and isn’t there something to be written about singing computers – Grandaddy’s Jez, those back on Dazzleships?
Singing machines: how beautiful. Singing, sad machines: more beautiful still, and I think of the moving sculptures of Vermillion Sands. Her voice, not Paddy’s, though he gave her those lines, and perhaps in his home studio, not far from here. Her voice, floating, not his: how was it for him to hear her voice speaking his, her’s in the place of his, setting words afloat that he wrote, I imagine, in the midst of some illness, for there’s a crisis behind their untroubled surface? And now, in my imagination, I travel back to Robert Wyatt’s bedside, when he was dreaming up Rock Bottom.
Wow, things are really slowing up here. Window moves to window so slowly; the computer’s asleep – seduced – it’s dreaming, it’s carried along, swept, by I Trawl the Megahertz, and we are all asleep, all of us who read and write and listen.
Asleep – but awake, in life – awake, but with sleep all around us like a cape: what is this day going to give, I ask myself, when it has begun so dreamily? Saturday, and I let myself off work until later. Saturday, a blank, white sky, so unlike the usual high-up blue to which we’re used on this side of the country: don’t we always seem blessed, those of us who live here, when, on the weather forecast, cloud and rain curves round our region, but never reaches it?
Paddy McAloon isn’t far from here, I tell myself. Not far, and in his studio, with all his unreleased songs – whole albums. Everyone’s infuriated with him for not releasing more, he knows it. Does he mind? Has he been caught, like me, in a kind of falling? Has the glider slipped from its smooth streaming into a gentle movement down, but only down?
I’ve always warned myself: never store up stuff; never leave things unfinished – get it all out there, get it out, finished, however provisionally: do not be like McAloon and his tapes in his studio. And now? Nothing’s finished, and nothing’s being published. A long drifting, without hope, but without real suffering. A long numbness, a kind of anaesthetic against time and moving forward. Feel nothing. Or let feeling fall from thought, peeling itself away, until it lies, thought, in dreaming pools beneath the sky.
And now I think a kind of sickness has seized this computer, which is whole minutes behind what I type. Where is its speed? Where is speed lost? On what secret tasks is it bent, or has its energies, like mine, turned vastly on itself, moving inward, or is it outward, in a slow corriolis?
A white sky, and a wind-ravaged yard, the plants having fallen over in the night. The wind, I imagined, turned within its enclosed space like a whirlwind. Turning, and moving nowhere, not like the cartoon Tazz, who moves in a whirlwind, turning in himself as he moves hectically forward. The cursor beats slowly; words appear letter by slow letter, spelling out what I wrote tens of seconds ago.
The computer’s in a fugue, as am I, and how I have a name for my post: The Fugue or A Fugue: the definite or indefinite article? That was how Lynch presented Lost Highway, I remember: a fugue film, a film of fugues, where one becomes another and the end is the beginning. We waited five years for a new Lynch film, and that was it. ‘Bobbins’, said my friend, back in Manchester.
‘Bobbins’: ‘Song of the Siren’ thrown away, what a waste! Wasn’t it to have been used in Blue Velvet? But that would have deprived us of ‘The Mysteries of Love’, written in its stead. A fugue song. A song for a film about fugues. An a fugue post, itself a fugue, written on a dreaming computer by a man in the middle of life in whom a dream rises like the wave in Hokusai’s painting.
In the middle of life – how did that happen? How old am I now? – and the ocean reared up, all of it – all of the past in the present, as Deleuze sometimes says. All of it, and pressing forward, and pressing me forward, gathered as a wave gathers itself up to break.
A bland, white day; we haven’t escaped the weather, not this time. On the forecast, I saw wind was coming across Britain from the West. An American wind, or an Atlantic one, come from that eternally new country, or the eternally new sea that the welling ridge that runs down its middle like a seam is pushing both East and West.
The Atlantic is broadening, and the wider Pacific narrowing, but only a few feet a year it’s true, but one day the continents will have a new shape on the surface of the earth. I remember a simulation in a Time Life book of how our earth would look ten million years hence, or was it a hundred? Hadn’t the Americas been unjoined again? Hadn’t the Rift Valley broken another Madagascar like island from the body of Africa? Hadn’t the Himalayas been driven yet higher by India’s collision, a subcontinent adrift, with Asia’s long Southern edge?
And I remember the islands of Indonesia had thickened, too, and what had happened to our island, in the middle of everywhere, all maps, just as Greenwich Mean Time is the centre of time? But perhaps it will all be drowned soon, by the rising sea, or covered over by the ice sheets that will spread as far down as Nottingham, and obliterate my poor city on the northeast coast.
And now I can hear McAloon’s own silvery voice singing about a silver beard. He only sings a little on this album. ‘I’m lost – yes – I am lost’, sung slowly, over strings that rise silverly like his voice. I tell myself that he, too, was in a fugue, as he trawled the megahertz like a satellite dish that cups signals from the stars. Trawls them, and they trawl in him, unfurling like nebulas, coming apart, the universe in reverse, feeling its way within him back along the blocks and ridges of dark matter that have been mapped for the first time.
I scroll upwards to look at my post, but the computer is dreaming. Too slow – and it will take minutes to publish, and minutes to appear at the top of the blog, and how long when I read it there and pick up the typos, each of which drives a soft nail into my heart?
My day is widening like the Atlantic. And so is my life – widened, exposed, spread out like a pool reflecting nothing. In the middle of life, and no Virgil to guide me. Lead yourself by your own nose, like a horse. Go by going, as Cixous’ Lispector says, like a blind woman in the field. Turn into darkness like de Niro’s character at the end of The Last Tycoon: is it for reason of that film that I keep my rooms, at night, so dark? To disappear, to have disappeared, and only to be gathered mometarily by acts of attention, like the beam of a lighthouse searching in the dark?
Widening, a surface rawly exposed, and a wind passing across it: obscure pain. Indifferent pain, that of no one in particular. A stretched membrane of skin. The widening ocean, too large to contain itself. The vast creature that, on land, would be crushed by its own weight, ribs collapsing like a bombed cathedral.
Only ten A.M., but evening seems to lap against the shores of the day. Evening already, which means night at noon. But outside, the whiteness has passed. I see the forms of clouds going quickly above, and the blue sky that is usually our just desserts in this part of the country.
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