The father gives up writing when his daughter dies in Pather Panchali. Gives up, that is, because he now thinks he was only playing, and real life has intervened. Real life – and what if he hadn’t given up? What if it was only then, when writing meant nothing to him, that he could truly write? Perhaps writing only works when your eye’s not on it. Writing as it writes itself as cobwebs gather in the corners of rooms. Making itself, weaving itself, there where no eye sees it.
I have no daughter who might die, so what of me? Look away from what you write, look elsewhere? But to what? I see the yard: my potted plants blown over in the wind. In another window, an interview by Bela Tarr is playing. Rehersals for life, I tell myself, and not life. And now I remember poor Frank Bascombe of Richard Ford’s trilogy. Poor Frank Bascombe, lambasted by everyone. Who writes – though Ford never says so. Writes – though Ford never tells us so in the text, for how else would these books have appeared. Writes, then, and does not publish. Writes and keeps his writing in a corner of the room.
There are writers who drink because they cannot write. And others who drink to write, and who can only write when drunk. ‘A man who drinks is interplanetary’, says Duras somewhere. And – rough paraphrase – one drinks because there is no God, only the sky, the whole sky. The whole sky: I think that that’s what spanned above the alcoholics who used to bother my friend who made coffee for me every morning in his cafe. They bothered him, taunted him, and he disliked walking past them.
I used to comiserate with him over coffee, when we shared a cup early on, before the other customers came. But I think my heart was with the alcoholics, who were driven mad in my imagination, by the size of the day. Just as today is not a real Sunday, not in England, but the day before Bank Holiday Monday. A non-day, that is, a day supernumerary, that does not fit into any calender. What did I do? Opened a bottle of wine. And before that? I went to the office. And before that? Woke with a sense that there was nothing to do, that this was a day outside time. Eternal day that rang with all my other days misspent, and with the day that spread itself above those poor alcoholics, back all those years ago in Manchester.
Eternity, I tell myself, that’s what I hear in the echoes from the fairgound that has set itself up not so far from here. Echoes on the walls of houses. On the backs of the houses that face me here where I write, the yard before me. The dehumidifier is working in the kitchen; the living room is still full of damp-stained kitchen cupboards; the washing machine is stranded here beside me. Has there been a flood?, some in me asks me. No, just damp, I reply. Just damp: just a swell of water, just water rising up and through the walls, and sinking down through those same walls, and through the ceiling. Damp and damp and damp …
A day in the office, in my Bela Tarr office. To organise this, then that. And an hour wandering abroad, out in the streets, looking for this present and that. Wandering – but not real wandering, since I had a goal in mind. And then, in the end, back here, where I knew the wine was waiting. And then here, where life that is not Real Life is echoing.
Who lives here? Who is alive? I have no daughter who could die. No daughter – not even those whom Artaud conjures out the air in his final poems. Isn’t that what W. said to me the other day: I want a daughter to adore me? He asked me, What would you prefer, a son or a daughter? I don’t know, I said, and he said, I want a daughter who adores me. Daughters always adore their fathers.
That was by the sea, I think – or was it when we made our ascent up the hill? Either way, last week, we drank in the sun … was that life, real life? I think it was only the interruption of life that we now live. Not life, but life’s interruption, as though we were incapable of living as others had lived. As though all life had been lived until us, who stood at the end of the land by the sea. At the end of all of Europe, I imagined. At the end of everything.
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