I think your life needs to turn around something. What should I be doing? Head down, reading. There’s Kierkegaard on the desk beside me: Two Ages … I should be reading that, head down. Or head up, looking at the screen, writing. And writing as though the screen gave onto the sky where the future is.
A dead day like the stub of a cigarette. Too tired to do this, or that. Too tired for Kierkegaard or for the screen to become a vista. Boredom: too tired for that, too. I can hear feet pounding the stairs up to the flat and pounding down again, the door slamming.
The 17th April 2007, I tell myself: write that, write that down. How many dates like this written down in the middle of life, the great wide middle, the plains on which you’ve to make your life. And you stop and step back and … write down a date. As if to let it resound. As if to mark a mark, an inscription. To say: I was here.
But who was here, or anywhere? And who would leave their mark here, or anywhere. Very beautiful on that Paddy McAloon album when he sings, late on, having not sung on this album before, but his voice recognisable right away: I’m lost. You should be reading, I tell myself, head down. Or you should be writing, looking into the screen, looking at the words come. But what should I be doing?
Sometimes I think the whole of your life can mass up like a cloud. It comes together, gathering, almost ominous. But for what reason? And with what result? It gathers on the brink of something happening, and the whole of yourself is suddenly that: a brink. And then nothing happens, or that was the point. You step back, and write down the date on which the day was exactly like all the others. Like them, but as Borges said of Shakespeare, unlike them because it is like all the others.
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