The room seems so big now; the kitchen furniture that was here has been returned to its rightful place, and the damp? Gone now, apparently. Or gone enough to put the kitchen back. But the walls are fully 9" thick and being soaked for years will take years to let the water out. With the cabinets and shelves on the wall, and with rendering on outside against the rain how can it breathe? It cannot, and I can smell, in the kitchen the unmistakable smell. Perhaps the dehumidifier can keep it at bay. It is working now, as it has done for 6 months. Patient, humble, but persistent, drawing the water from the air and into the transparent container it holds like a pouch on its squat body.
Yes, the room seems large; all the rooms do, and I go from room to room, tidying up, hoovering and then polishing the floors. All this for my Visitor, who will summer here (summer as a verb, how nice – as they do in old novels), this being my last Jandek-filled night before one comes who does not like that music. I’ve bought her Clarissa to read, 1600 pages long; it waits with the other books in the bedroom. And I’ve halved the clothes in the wardrobe, taking some to Oxfam, and the chest of drawers – three now, for her (she would call them ‘presses’ as they do in her country).
Large and so is time, as term comes to an end and, after a few more meetings, conferences (a couple of weeks …), spreads out into the indefinite. I give every summer a name; what will I call this one? Or rather, every summer finds a name for itself, two years ago, for example, the Summer of Going Out, and last year – the Summer of Jazz. Wasn’t I going to do another book? I don’t think I can be bothered. Let time open itself out instead. Let it open, day after day like a waterwheel in the steady openness of summer. Day after day – and what is to be done made up each day, as befits the weather, as befits who is about and who is doing what.
I’ve bought headphones for Jandek, and to listen with if I get up earlier than my Visitor, this room separated from the other in part by an internal window through which sound passes. And I wonder if I’ll get up later now, and rise like other people at the brink of the work day and not long before? These early, very early mornings are trying. And it’s not that I get anything done. Exhaustion. I try to work out where I’ve gone wrong, I cut this and that from my diet, I stop drinking at night, and start again. I stay in to calm down, I go out, neither makes any difference …
Limes and pears in the fruitbowl (it was a loose change bowl before today), a fridge full of food that is normally bare of food. I cleared out the understairs cupboard and hoovered beneath the boiler. The sound of rocky particles rattling up the hose … I see for the first time the space beneath the water tank, cobwebbed and full of broken bricks…. This is my equivalent of Abba’s ‘The Day Before You Came.’
The space in the room is full of time, potential. Full of the summer to come, gravid with it. Space like a spread sail to catch the wind. At first, tonight, I was bored. I finished a big bottle of beer, read the paper and willed my mind to settle. Evening begins with The Simpsons. Slices of meat out of a packet … rice cakes … I’d been eating all day, too much, as always, gluttony as always … and too many things to do, to remember. Errands. Work tasks, emails to send. A correspondence to catch up on.
Focus, I told myself. Gather yourself together; aim in one direction. And so after a bit, Jandek. Another Jandek CD from the row of 50. One I haven’t listened to often. I’ll sit and listen to it, I thought, just as Bill Callahan is said to sit and listen. I’ll take my shoes off and sit, and do nothing but listen, I thought. But the temptation to move from room to room in the new space. To polish a bit of the bathroom floor I’d missed; to move the fig tree from one corner to another. To bag up more clothes for Oxfam – those too tight shirts …
But I listened as I moved and tidied. Listened, and was gradually gathered at the brink of myself, listening. Raining Down Diamonds. A devotional album, I thought. Prayerful. In its way. In Jandek’s strange way. And then wondered whether that run of albums from which it comes is his ‘Song of Songs’. Love songs of eros and agape. The erotic ascent, all the way to heaven. And blamed the conference upcoming for an inability to write, and especially on Jandek. I shouldn’t write, I told myself. Save your energies, I thought. But gradually my listening let me fall. Gradually, and all the way down so I could lie down as I move. Resting, even as I moved and tidied.
At such times, it is fitting to meditate upon life as a whole, upon the whole of one’s life. I sat on the chair and remembered, I let memory work. Conversations 20 years old. Events only I could remember – or rather, that I take myself to be able to remember directly, and not part of that great settling down, as coral reefs are built, the skeleton of one tiny creature lying upon another. That settling down out of which a more general, thicker memory accretes; a sense of a time, of a period in one’s life.
Through how many such periods have I passed? Nearly 5 years in this flat. 5 – 5 years ringing out in eternity. And those 5 years spreading around me like a beach. This flat with its still rooms a beach and I on the brink of – what? The past is here. General memories, moods that belong to long periods in time, phases, and out of which particular memories come, determinate ones.
Curious to be such an archive. Curious to have watched that archiving occur and to have watched memories settle. I will not call it introspection. There’s a way of discovering what is outside inside. Anecdote doesn’t matter so much as … what can I call them? Great impersonal mechanisms. The water wheel that is turned by time. A time wheel turned by its streaming. But then time doesn’t stream, not always. Sometimes a sense of return, of a coming back, or a retrieval. As if I’d lived this day before – this evening, or now, this writing moment. Lived it before, and as if knowing it was to come again.
What is the opposite of deja vu? Do you remember when Ignat drops something in Mirror and sits down with his mother on the wooden floor. It has happened before, he says. But what of the sense that it will happen again? Again – and in 10 years, or 20? Once I was foolish enough to write a message to myself in a journal. Foolish with youth, for only a young person would think they were braced against time so that such a message could be sent. Sent to reach – whom? And from – whom? From one who imagined himself affixed to a moment, a date. That a journal might be kept chronologically, not in eternity. That the journal was also a way of ringing bells out in eternity, or hearing them ring. And that that is what returns, that ringing, that inside to find what is outside. No journals, then. No day that does not unfold itself in the eternal Day, in the event that does not come as itself, but in every other guise.
The other day, in the office, I chanced upon Sculpting in Time and remembered the quotation that set off this theme, the day. From memory: we’ve come to the end of a day, Tarkovsky says. And what retain of it is not an event, firm and clear, but a kind of nimbus, a faint aureole. That smudges the line of the event like a Redon painting … I think it’s there I find the outside: there, in the smudge. As it burns around the image like the soft light of a candle around its flame. There are candles here, in this room, which I never light except when my Visitor is here. Thick church candles on the wooden mantlepiece. Standing unnoticed and gathering dust until – today. ‘The day before you came’.
After the damp came rats. I didn’t write about that here; it would have made a good category: Rats. I thought there was a nest of them, a mother and babies in the space outside under the stairs. Thought I heard rustling, and that the rat I saw, nose slightly in the air, stopping still for a moment and then moving quickly, was female. But there was nothing there in that space, save for the feathers and bits of nest from the blackbirds that nested there. The few pale blue eggs, deserted after we scared the mother, the plumber and I, disappeared one by one. Was it a cat?, asked one of the workmen doing the rendering. No cats here, I said. Must have been a rat, I thought, who had dislocated itself to crawl under the door to the lane. To take the untended eggs one by one.
It’s a wasted night, I tell myself. I should be working. There’s secondary literature on Rosenzweig to read. But my ears are hot – a sign I’m tired, too tired but to do … what? To write negliently. To write in that neglience that means I should not publish what is here. Thick cloud above, and in my head. I’m not really here, I tell myself. No-one is. Mist over the floorboards as in one of the rooms in Baldander’s castle (The Book of the New Sun). I would like to read a book like that again, I tell myself. To follow the story across the nights …
I still miss Frank Bascombe’s voice. How long ago did I finish The Lay of the Land, which I read following The Sportswriter (which I bought as consolation for myself after my Visitor’s first visit) and Independence Day? I’m in mourning for that voice, that book. I’d let a few days pass, and then tried Henderson the Rain King. This will be my year for the American novel, I thought to myself. After that, all of Faulkner, I thought. But I put it down; I returned it to the bookshelf. If only I had my lost copy of Mrs Dalloway, I thought, that’d do. Frost arrived, Bernhard’s Frost, and saved me, with the rough edges of its pages and calm storytelling, with spaces between paragraphs. That’s what I wanted: space. Space after the great space of The Lay of the Land …
What will I read now, in the days of my Visitor? How are we to read – side by side? Will she read Clarissa in a sofa and I Frost in a chair? We have films to watch – the whole of Satantango, that I’ve kept specially. Terrence Malick. The Singing Detective. And what will we listen to, I who am used to putting on one album after another, whenever there’s time. I have my John Coltrane boxset, the first quartet, everything presented in order of chronology (the better to hear eternity); I’ve Ayler’s Holy Ghost, all 9 CDs …
After the rats came ants. The outhouse was cleared; the yard skept clean: nothing for rats here. And I’ll keep an eye on the gap under the door. Watch for her returning, the she-rat on her rounds. But ants instead, and in every room. Exploring, sending out scouting parties. Even at night, they’re working. By the light of the monitor, or by the bed lamp. Working, searching for tiny grains of food. So I swept the floors and hoovered, and polished the floorboards until the varnish shone. No chemical trails for ants to follow. No paths through dust. And now it’s rained for two days, no ants came. What next in the sequence of 7 plagues?
The workmen thought we should leave the rendering until the blackbird was done with her eggs and chicks. Until she’d toppled the fledglings from the nest and into the air, and they’d gone out in search of nests of their own. I said, she’s not been back since we scared her. 5 blue eggs – then 4, then 3: what was taking them? cats? – No cats here, I said.
Am I focused now? Have I gathered myself up? And if so, for what task? What good is this? What use, except to blur the contours of my life? To blur them and to let burn that nimbus that blurs the determinate into indeterminacy. The sky vanishes into cloud; the wall crumbles into damp, the ants are crawling about as in a Dali painting. ‘It means seedless’ said X., a million years ago. ‘That’s what it symbolised, for him – he was seedless.’ But what did that mean, seedless – impotent? infertile?, I thought as I heard X. speak: I’ll remember this conversation. This one, and for no particular reason.
The walls are 9" thick; how long will it take for the water to come through? Sometimes I go out to touch the rendering. It’s wet in patches, despite the fillet. Is that’s how it’s spelt – fillet? And in the rain, I watch the walls closely. Is water getting in? Does it run down the inside edge of the pipes and into the gaps in the wall?
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