A square of concrete outside along the kitchen wall has been marked out in blue paint. They’ll dig there, says the man who came from the water company, though he said they were only doing it for me as a favour, since the burst pipe burst is on my land, and not in the lane, for which they’re responsible.
A favour, then, but it took them five months to come out to hear for themselves the underground river that seems to flow by my house. The workman put his ear to a long tube pressed to the concrete and listened: the pipe’s burst, he said, and then had me fill out some forms so the company could come out with a drill to see what’s what. But even then, if the pipe burst is too close to the flat, it’s my concern, not theirs; I’ll have to bring in my own plumber.
Very well, no bother, what matters is where we go from here, not what’s gone before. I say all this again to the woman from complaints who has been attached by the water company to my case. She’s extravagantly polite: ‘it was a pleasure speaking to you‘, and I think it might have been, if she is the kind of person who is happy when other people’s problems are to be solved, reminding me of my old friend in Manchester, head waitress at the cafe to which I went morning and early evening; and sometimes for the afternoon, ordering a whole pot of tea and reading this and that.
I arrived first, at eleven, when they opened, but soon there would come another man, quiet, who sat well away from me in another part of the space. Then, with his pen, he’d underline certain words in the paper – sometimes the waitresses and I would attempt to work out the pattern we supposed he was attempting to find. Was he slightly mad – ‘touched’, as they say?
That was back in the first blooming of cafe culture in this country since the 60s – hadn’t my dad reminisced about his cafe years, and the girl from English who wrote a poem about this young engineer from Madras, called ‘Anyone For Coffee’? The culture spread north to the regenerating cities, and bloomed along one street in our suburb. Bohemian life, or something like it.
I was unemployed then, or ill, or both, as others were; so many of us had been as though left behind by history and we watched in bemusement as our city was transformed around us. Did we belong in this new world? But the cafes were ours – at least at those odd ends of the day that could fall, in the cafe, to the ill and unemployed, at least before the prices rose and drove us away.
We went there, I think, to hold our day together; it was structure we lacked: a shape to time. The old squats had gone, and many of us had been displaced, ready for that long sleep that would carry us alone in our council flats through the mid nineties. For now, the cafe, and the last vestiges of society were ours.
Who spoke first? How were the lanyards extended from one table to another? I think it was when I brought our new tenant, a freshly reformed alcoholic for a morning coffee, and our happy banter again in which, he said later, I taught him by example never to talk about himself in the first person. And the cafe was no longer an archipelago of tables, each with friends talking separately, but a happy flotilla, a society.
We earned nicknames for ourselves – or, at least, they addressed by our first names, but added an initial ‘Mr’ – and they thought us a couple, the many lesbians who came there. And we became involved in their intrigues, confidantes from outside who knew nothing of the Scene.
For a time, I took tea with one friend in the garden of our house, and thought: my life is stable. But that social world was ephemeral, and began to fall apart right away. Didn’t some of us couple off? Didn’t vague enmities replace vague alliances? We were scattered again, and there were many cafes now in which to brace ourselves in the empty time of the ill and unemployed.
But how can I forget celebrating my birthday at the cafe, and going out that hot day to the Ees with one of the prettiest waitresses? Langour in the sun. She stretched white arms in the afternoon haze, the two of us in the long grass with a picnic. And as we went back again, as I thought: I should remember this. Another event to be pressed like a flower into an album.
And the time we went clubbing, and didn’t one of them, ‘the German’ we called her to each other, run her hands from the backs of my feet all the way up to my head. I was a person upon whom such moves were to be tried. Why not? Another moment, I thought; remember this – and hadn’t I learnt by then never to try to seize what was given, but to let such events fall away until everyone had forgotten them but me?
For their part, the waitresses were mostly graduates looking for work before they decided what was to be done with their lives and our joy was to share with them this brief intermission, when they hadn’t decided on their life’s course and were single, many of them, or at least in relationships they didn’t take quite seriously.
A glorious time, I thought, because their attention could be turned wholly towards you, but lightly – as they spoke, they were discovering what they said; when they joshed about it was with that lightness that comes of being released from the long chore of study, but not yet having taken on the yoke of real employment. And so they floated between our tables, all of them lovely and charming and light, sometimes sitting down with us at the end of their shifts, and sometimes ‘forgetting’ to charge us for the drinks we ordered.
They were always about to leave, and some did, but others stayed and became something like friends, since we were both stranded fortuitously together then before our lives had begun. Yes, it was our new tenant who started us talking – he was handsome and funny, and began to wear crushed velvet red trousers and a white shirt with cufflinks. We were Chorlton dandies in our stranded lives, dressing up because it was dull to dress down, and our days were very long with little to do but wander.
Somewhere far away, there was the completion of my studies, but for now, my life diffused itself across the whole of time, which I knew not as possibility, that project of the existentialists from which our tasks gain sense, but as dissipation – the flood that rose to strand me apart from myself and from anyone. A peculiar solitude, which you are hardly there to enjoy. A void into which moments fell and lost themselves. Who had charged me with pressing the essence of days?
My friend, of course, went back to drink, pissing himself as he lay half-clothed on the sofa. He left us, but there were rumours of him all about our suburb: a dandy gone to seed and separated from his companion. And the latest in an unlikely stream of girlfriends had me swept me up in madness.
She was ill, and I unemployed. Or was it the other way round? Either way, when it ended, it did so badly – I heard after from her friends the whole sad story I will not relate here. Didn’t we have, for a few brief days at the end, a semblance of a relationship? Hadn’t we made promises that didn’t seem hollow? But those promises, I think, did not so much stream in the wind that blew from our futures, as come apart in that present for which we were never quite a match.
We never sailed out under the proud flag of coupledom; we weren’t real enough, substantial enough: in what position were we to make promises? Isn’t it the pledge, for Nietzsche, that lets life become regulated? Isn’t it the contract and the promise that bind us to the time of tasks and projects?
I think I’ve always liked those who can barely keep appointments. Those who are not carried along in the stream of their life, but have found themselves becalmed in an ocean without winds or currents – ‘found themselves’, but barely even that, for it is no one in particular who has taken their place, and it is no one you meet when you meet them by chance in the street.
The question, what are you doing? finds no answer. What are you up to? likewise misses them. They speak, but perhaps they know they shouldn’t, that they do not belong to the city regenerating around us. They are of the old world, set adrift – the old welfare state, which let its ill and unemployed wander the streets. What’s become of them? Do they work? Have they been diagnosed as autistics or as depressives? Have they been prescribed a rescuing course of medicine?
Or have they fallen yet further, fallen from themselves and the what Deleuze might think as the interiority of time, as though they’d been cracked wide open, splayed to experience only time’s pure streaming? I imagine a kind of bliss might have claimed them. ‘Who are you?’ – ‘No one in particular.’ – ‘What do you do?’ – ‘Nothing.’ Suburban Bartlebys, then, with refusal in their faces and in the stubborn fragility of their bodies. Or Michael K.s, or the beatific adolescents of Korine’s Gummo.
Why, when I think of them, does Mark Kozelek’s voice come to me, and particular as it sounds live, detached from what he sings, but attached in that detachment: strange supplement that seems to void the songs from within, slow whirlwind that seizes up their words and lets them spin almost without meaning? ‘Almost’ because they are barely attached to the particularities of a life, because they express nothing lived in the first person.
And isn’t this is what is uncanny in the young Will Oldham, recording songs for the second Palace album in his kitchen, with the thunder rumbling in? And I think, too, of Cat Power’s bleached covers – songs strung out, songs washed of their colour, frayed like jeans no longer held together by their threads. Or rather, her voice gives unto no voice in particular, indifferent origin that sings without her, or with her as she is without herself, closed-eyed and singing into nothing.
And finally – the last of the holy trilogy, the presiding demigods of this blog – Bill Callahan, who records under his own name now, since even a parenthesised Smog cannot name what crumbles at the heart of his voice. Crumbles, for all the strength of his baritone, and gives itself to that streaming that he sings about on A River Ain’t Too Much To Love.
It is not his wisdom from which he sings, but from the knowledge of the simplicity of fate. A knowledge not his but that of the song that sings with him. Song, blank voiced, sings out with his voice, and though it seems continuous, and breathing, and real, it is none of those things, but the sound of a past fascinated with itself, the endless return, like fate, of the outside that hollows each of us out and opens us like a door.
These are simple experiences for me, and for which, I think, I’ve always wanted to find words. The most simple, the most obvious, and yet hidden for all that obviousness. A malady that no one suffers, or that no one suffers inside you. Inside, but there is no outside; the door is open, and through inner darkness you see a kind of landscape – a storm on the moon, ice without cease, stars driven like stigmata into the flesh of the night.
Formulations indebted, of course, to Blanchot, who is another of the demigods of the site – or is his work the soil from which it sprouts like a mushroom in the dark? Do our fascinations drive us toward our favourite authors, or are they born from that reading itself? Or are we drawn to them for what we share, strangely and at great distance, such that we choose for ourselves – or there is chosen for us – an affinity, something held in common?
To think with a thinker is more than to think about him. And it is to follow something like your fate, the destiny of a body, of a sensibility. Isn’t Nietzsche right to consider the digestive system as determining the shape and the body of thought? Strange that bodies might be joined by books. Or strange that books and songs are sloughed off like skin, drifting as you see dust motes float in a shaft of sunlight.
Stranger still that when the body sings, it is a voice that sings of the condition of singing – of a kind of power of speech that escapes your measure. As though song leaned back into Song, or singing into Singing: how to name a voice that supplements voice without belonging to it? of an initiative that began before the beginning? Of an origin that is only the interruption of origin, the present torn from itself?
But these formulations are as mysterious as any. Perhaps it can only be sung about or written. Sung, or written – or spoken, a voice that floats above images. And, each time, to let the voice – written, spoken – be caught by that Voice that speaks without words without being ineffable. A murmuring speech, an anonymous one, speech joined to all and to no one – isn’t this what is sought when writing, like speech, is thrown into the air like a kite? Another breeze. A wind above the wind, like that said to blow along the stratosphere. A kind of jet stream of song and of writing, moving in all directions in the upper atmosphere.
Perhaps I was never one of them, the ill and the unemployed. Or that my studies encased me in a bathysphere in which I could walk through our suburb with a line that fed me air from somewhere else. Was I only an anthropologist among the ill and the unemployed? Or was I like Kurtz, who had vanished among the tribes he was said to conquer? Neither, in the end; or both.
Others had faith for me. They said it would turn out well for me, but for them? They shrugged and looked at me with deep sea eyes. Sometimes I think all I am is the memory that keeps such looks, a living archive of chances not taken and barren paths. But then I know that this memorising is itself only a fold of the outside that writes of itself here, joining what cannot begin in the past and what will never happen in the future like the worn Ouroboros. Isn’t it to give a term to the interminable that writing begins? Isn’t it to give voice to the incessant?
The workmen are outside now, digging up the yard. I thought they’d bring a mechanical digger, but they are smashing the concrete with hammers. There’s no leak near the flat, they’ve discovered, and the underground river, if it flows, flows further out. But they’ll replace the pipe, they say, and have cut a long deep trench to reach the old one, summoning me out now and again to speak.
(See, on Gummo, Thomas Carl Wall’s essay Dolce Stil Novo: Harmony Korine’s Vernacular – Project Muse only)
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