11.30 A.M., on a Saturday I’ve kept clear for work, but little done so far. What time did I wake up? 6.00? 6.30? And what time did I sit down at my desk? The hours passed without work. What was I supposed to write? How long do I have left? But as is now usually the case, I have far exceeded any deadline. So far ahead, indeed, that work seems meaningless. I’ve failed, I want to say that. I’ve given up – to say that.
And now the dull hours, hours of falling away from the caffeine burst of the morning. Mark them, then – write something against which they can set themselves back, those hours without work and without incident. Write a foreground that they can become a background, a blank page, for by themselves they are nothing, as Dupin says of Giacometti, ‘neither white, nor void, nor space.’
And now those blank hours are contained in a work, wrapped like nori seaweed around a handroll. Wrapped – a white page that is also the whiteness of the sky. And now exhaustion is marked as it has been undergone by someone. I’ve marked my presence in these hours and drawn them around me. But not for long, though – not for long. The day is also unwrapped and unwrapping me.
When I pass through London, I walk from King’s Cross along the road with the bookshops on, and then take Charing Cross Road through Trafalgar Square to get to the sushi place by Embankment station, and there sit on a step and always fail to detach my handroll from its wrapping. And then across Waterloo Bridge, remembering all the other times I have crossed it, and how it, this crossing, seems to have detached itself from my life until the Thames streaming below is the whole of my life viewed from eternity.
When I find myself narrating portions of my life to others it is always on my folly that I focus. When I listened to this person or that; when I trusted that judgement. As if to say: I unwrapped myself from that old chrysalis. But also to say: what if my life now is not another shell that will have to have been torn away? And I recall the story my father used to tell of arriving in England and washing his hair with soap, not shampoo, for he’d not heard of it then. Why did he tell us that story?, we used to ask ourselves. Because it was the essence of the experience of a foreigner abroad. But didn’t he get to know the London streets quite quickly? Wasn’t he able, 40 years later, to show me where he lived and name the roads nearby as we drove towards the South Bank?
Either way, it is on the Embankment that the characters in Josipovici’s In a Hotel Garden have their final discussion. And it was along its edge that one year ago or two, we were told by a tour guide how far the river came inland before those concrete channels were built.
Boredom. No, not even that. Vague dissipation. What was I supposed to be writing? What books lie unfinished? The Education of the Stoic by Pessoa. Tabucchi’s Dreams of Dreams. Gustafsson’s Death of a Beekeeper – all from the excellent Waterstones in Exeter, which has books in translation where the 3 for 2 offers usually are. And I’m halfway through rereading Mrs Dalloway. And in my office, in my gym bag, Lay of the Land by Richard Ford, whose prose keeps me steady through the days, like a ship in choppy water.
Was that enough writing to set back the day? Have I set it back as the background to the hours in which I will hardly belong to myself? I eat my seaweed rice. I pile up my new books (Handke’s Once Again for Thucydides is there as well, as well as an edition of Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks – what indulgence!). And I wish to myself I had that Calder boxset of Beckett’s short prose …
But in the end, what these books and I have in common is that each of us has been unwrapped by the day, and I, like their authors, would write myself so I could know the white page, the absolute void, around the paragraphs I set down here.
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