Inversion

To lack narrative – what does that mean? Not that the events that befall me have escaped the linear continuity of my life; incidents are arrayed along a single line – I can remember when that occurred, or that. The man who proposed to his woman via the tannoy on a plane. The woman in a cafe who mistook me for a suicide bomber, complaining to the staff when I slung a rucksack under a table and went to get a paper from the rack. A sequence of mornings without the lift coffee can give me – one after another, uninspired, full of vague dread, but for what? The manuscript on which I am supposedly working (to be finished by Friday this week).

Incidents, events, each of which rounds itself off or is to be rounded off. And yet, lacking narrative, it is as if they are incapable of doing so – that they lack some faculty of completion. Each gives indeterminately into a great vagueness. Each opens on the interminable, seeming to repeat itself, or to have been lost in itself. I think they call, each of them, to be brought to an end. I think that’s part of what they want, and this is why they ask for narrative. To be recorded here. To be marked. Not to be set aside, neglected such that they wander, lost in their own corridors, and seem each time to take all of time with them.

Lacking narrative, the capacity to narrate, I set them down only to lose them again, in another space. That is, they are lost here, on the page just as I am lost, I who had wanted to make a mark. And the page is a crossing point, an inversion, as when perceptions project themselves inverted on the back of the retina the eye. One kind of interminability is exchanged for another; incessance lives another kind of incessance.