6.00 AM, a cup of coffee in my ragged dressing gown. 6.00 – too early, and there’s sunlight in the yard like a mockery. Too early – the days are too long. Eternal light. Light eternal, before you rise and after you sleep. When will darkness ever come? Not for 20 hours. There’ll be 20 relentless hours of light.
Nothing’s happened yet. The day opens before me. Nothing’s happened. Silence, some birdsong. Blackbirds nest in the outhouse. Waste from upstairs’ soil pipe runs down the wall. Last night in bed I saw a new dark patch beneath the white wallpaper in the bedroom. Spreading splotchily beneath. Waiting to darken the surface like a liver spot.
And the kitchen still strewn through the flat. The washing machine beside me here; the microwave; a stranded set of cupboards piled with Corwood CDs. Time to write, I tell myself. Time to draw the line from which to begin. And so I have my coffee. And I sit at my desk, ready. And I have my books at my side – a hardback, from which I read last night, and a softback, over which I’ve glanced.
Begin, then, I tell myself. It’s morning, the day has spread its billowing sails; time to catch those winds that will carry you to work. To begin – but what’s that? To be carried into beginning, becoming a worker – what’s that? To disappear into work; to write and patch up the holes in the text. To write transitional passages. And edit. And then, after a trance of work, to look out at the yard and say inwardly, I’m done. Done, and braced against the day, having made my stand. Done and the day pushed back into the beginning, the day made to make sense. The day steered, the day ridden all the way until, tired, I dismount and pat its back and return in righteous tiredness to the house of my life.
Yes, that’s what it would mean to begin. To push off from the side of the pool. To swim the lane, one length and then another; to plunge into work like Brancusi’s sculptures would plunge into the sky. To be a ship of work, held together by work, streamlined and burning off the inessential. Until your whole life would be just that: work. Until you become a projectile of work, arching through the air, inevitable. The day aimed, the day directed, every hour accounted for. Every minute burning forward like a rocket’s fiery tail, and the hours jettisoned like the unnecessary fuel tanks that boost a ship to orbit. Until, at the end, the whole earth is beneath you. Until, weightless, it is the whole earth you see spanned beneath you and you sleep in the air like a swift.
What it would be to work! To work – and to live, work and life as strokes of the same movement! To work and to live, one step and then another! The steps of a giant in the sun! Of the lusty fellow on Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, shirtsleeves rolled up, forearms tanned, ready. Of the carpenter Kafka would like to be, as he tells Janouch, who catches him in his exercises of the afternoon.
Am I ready to begin? Worthy – of the day as work, of the hours bound to one another like the carriages of a train? Ready to steer myself like a cowboy’s herd across the desert? But the herd is scattered and the carriages lie upturned. Or there was no herd and no train. Nothing began, nothing assembled itself to begin; all the forces were scattered; the army deserted in advance; the troops have joined the partisans. And so is the line of the beginning scrubbed out right away. So are life and work lost to one another. So I advance like a hemiplegic, with one side paralysed and then another: work and life, both numbed.
A line in the sand – is that what you’d like to draw? A line that would let work be work, and life, life. To make a criterion, there where you stand; to pitch a tent in the midst of exile. But the wind is rising in the desert. A sandstorm blows in these morning hours. There is no line and no chance of a line. The pitched tent has spun away. A whirlwind turns in these hours. Life and work unravelled. Life and work spun apart. What did you think you could do? Of what did you believe yourself capable? Of writing a single line? The clear stroke of a single line? Laughter: the line is lost and the desert is everywhere. No work and no life, but the desert grows.
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