Unimportance

One reads a biography of an artist with a happy kind of hindsight: in the early chapters, about struggle and despair, I want to reassure the artist, it will be okay; everything will come right. You’re already pressing towards the work. And then, in later ones, when the first works appear, when the writer, say, begins to emerge as an artistic force, I want to say, be patient; your great works lie ahead of you. Your early works are juvenilia; they are worthless, really; the dust of words.

And then the years of triumph; having read a few hundred pages, I feel I’ve earned the right to revel in the reception that greets the masterpieces that stream forth from his pen. I’ve suffered with him, struggled with him, watched as the early works came out, and now the masterpieces that have given him immortality: there would be no biography without them. He would have been but a minor writer, one of the forgotten.

But now? Even the years of decline and fall mean nothing. Even the marriages and divorces, even the fallings out with old friends are insignificant; for the masterpieces survive him; it is upon them that his fame will rest. Does he know his own greatness? Somewhere, it knows itself in him. He rests, somewhere, in what he has done; in what was worked by way of him.

And later, when he can write no longer – when he can no longer ascend the plateau on which he once wrote, day after day as beneath an open sky? Ah, but he has done his work. One part of him is satisfied; his life has already been rounded off. What is he but the ghost of his own authorship? In the mirror, he sees a crumpled version of that middle aged man posed seriously on the dust jackets of his books. Crumpled: you can still see it, that assurance, that fire that licked up flames behind him. Still a remnant of a writer’s confidence, of the trust writing placed in him.

But who is he but a ghost of what was one possible by his pen, by his typing fingers? He goes from room to room in the house that he earnt from his royalties; he sits in an armchair overlooking his garden. Leaves on the grass. It’s autumn, he thinks. And tomorrow a journalist is coming to photograph his work room, in which he no longer works, not really. He is a potterer; a wanderer from room to room. 17 books – isn’t that enough? Hasn’t he written enough?

And now I wonder whether there might be a biography of this wandering, of a writer who’s written enough. A biography of the aftermath, of the one beached as after a life of writing. A writer in retirement, whose workroom is only a place where dust drifts in the afternoon air, and the house that his royalties bought is a receptacle for his drifting, for mild discontent.

Outside, the everyday. Outside, and through the window, the everyday world that he fears, obscurely. He’s earned himself time; he gave up his day job long ago. He found a kind of fame, an immortality. The newspapers phone him for his year end book recommendations; his agent secures deals for memoirs and volumes of occasional writings; isn’t it time he open the old folder in which he kept his verse?

Fame and immortality; his name is trustworthy; perhaps it will coin an adjective that will join it to a sensibility. His name crowns him, but it rides above him, and when a young writer, who’s discovered his address knocks at his door to meet him, he knows he has failed his name, and he is not prepared for the world that meets him there at the doorstep. He reaches to shake the hand of his admirer; he closes the door without admitting him.

And meanwhile, outside, the everyday. Meanwhile, the street, the cars parked under the trees. He’s escaped a workaday life, that’s true. He no longer needs to make a living, that’s true. But isn’t it now that an obscure worry can reach him, a vague fear? Doesn’t it reach him now, when he’s a little weak, as though a little ill, that same world he now feels he has written against?

He supposes he could drink. He could make a whiskey and soda, or open a bottle of wine. He could drink to allay his worries, which niggle at him, which come at him from all sides. His worries: what are those? He struggled once. He had to learn his craft, to learn to write. Writing is easy to him now. He knows how to write according to the adjective that his name has formed. He can lean on his own name, and the sensibility that drifts like a fog through his writings.

He has long since substantialised himself as an author; he stands on two strong legs. He writes; he can write, and what comes out is recognisably by him. All he has to do is pull the string that miraculously pulls up the ship in a bottle of a book. How easy it is for him to write! How easy, and for that reason, how difficult! He needs something to work against, he tells himself. To struggle again.

Life’s too easy, he thinks to himself. He should uproot himself. Go and live somewhere else. To France, perhaps. To a villa. He could live in a villa in the middle of France. But this is a dream. Still there is the outside. Still the everyday, out there on the street: mothers with three wheeled push chairs; leaves on the pavements; car after car parked along the street, wheels turned in to stop them rolling down the hill.

And now I dream of the narrative that might begin now, the narrative of the everyday. I imagine what he might write, who has the gift of writing, but nothing in particular to right. The light on a windshield. The crack on a paving stone. The trees half stripped of leaves, branches and twigs upraised to the sky. What would speak itself by way of these details? What, as it seems to wear the world away, as it seems to speak of a world worn away and murmuring to itself like a softly running stream?

I imagine him in the front room, where light falls aslant on his notebook. I imagine the whiteness of the page, and his hand as he runs it across there. And the tub of sharpened pencils he keeps by him as the light falls evenly across the page. What will he write, he who has already written enough? What to write, he who now feels only the most obscure and niggling of imperatives?

Not a story, but the wearing away of stories. Not a narrative, but its absence, its absenting, like rivers in the desert that run into the sand. A hundred beginnings; a hundred endings, his is now a work that unworks itself, a way for writing to unravel itself in writing.

He writes of the least important, the negligible. He writes by way of details, and of negligible feelings. What does he feel? He feels okay. What does he see? The world, just the world. And of what is he attempting to write? Of nothing in particular. In the end, he tells himself, writing is not important. Writing, the doubling of the day, is the least important thing of all.

His is a journal of neglect, he tells himself. It relates nothing; it bears upon nothing. Except the day; except the hours of the day which the others on the street miss because their days are filled with tasks, because they divide up time. What does it mean to have been given time thus? To let writing on the page develop like a photograph from the gentle pressure of light?

He will make an impression of time. Of the neglect of time. Of time’s malaise, the way it seems to sag from itself over the course of a long afternoon. Of time as it lengthens the afternoon into all of time, as dust motes drift and moments do not seem to last, but obscurely prolong themselves. As they might have done once when when he was a real writer, when he wrote novels with plots and characters; when it seemed those characters lived a life independently of him; when they didn’t do what he wanted. As they might have done, but what did he know of it, the gentle turning of time, the moments that seemed lost in themselves?

What could he know of it then, he who stretched out time according to his projects; who marked the days in his calender according to how far along he was with the work? Only now it is as if every errant moment returned in the steady light of the afternoon. As if he knew now what had never begun in all his days, and was still not about to settle itself into a beginning. Wasn’t it this against which he struggled all along?, he wonders. Wasn’t it from this errancy that he sought to protect himself?, he thinks to himself.

For in some sense, it is unbearable. In some sense, he cannot bear it, that nothing begins in his long afternoon, that all he can do is sit in an armchair with a notebook on his knees, and a tub of pencils. Is this how he should meet it, this nothing in particular? Is this the way to experience its demand, so that the day, the everyday, insignificant but undelimitable can spread itself onto the insignificance of what he writes?

He’s begun a journal, of a kind. He’s writing, in a way. But this is an unpublishable writing, a writing without point. This a writing that leads nowhere and leads him nowhere. It beaches him just as he is beached, in the long afternoon. It runs away from him as a river disappearing into the sand, or a cloud that evaporates over the desert.

It is not real life that waited for him on the other side of writing, but the unreality of life. Not action – a life in the world – but the impossibility of living thus in the world. The erosion of time, his own erosion. The obscurity of his own name, as it seems to unravel itself. A writing that unravels itself in writing. Might he now begin the most important of his works? Might he begin it now, as he senses, obscurely, what has obsessed him all his life?

But it begins only in his absence; it reveals itself by way of the least significant of his writings. What does it matter, what he writes now? For what does it count, when it will lead to no publication? Writing adrift; errant writing. Writing that wanders along the edge of everything. That murmurs to itself, echoing with what it is not. That speaks its own nothingness, its unimportance. Is it writing he has attained? Has he come across writing, as some animal in a woodland glade that does not know it’s being watched?

He remembers the deer he saw once at dawn, crossing a field. They didn’t see him. They hadn’t sniffed him out; the wind was blowing from them to him. He saw them and they didn’t see him, and so now with writing. Writing, at last, is allowed to ignore him. To write itself by way of him, but by ignoring him. And isn’t this what he wanted? Wasn’t that what he wanted all along: to be the way of its freedom, a way of releasing writing into the distance that belongs to it?

It doesn’t matter, he tells himself, and that’s why it matters. But who will know it but him? Who will know, from the scattered notebooks that will emerge among his papers after he has gone? A few pages written in pencil; not typed. A few yellowed pages, among all the others. Not a draft of something, not something unfinished, unless it shows that everything he wrote was a draft, or something unfinished. How will they know, his readers, perhaps his executors, who will go through his papers to assemble a posthumous volume?

I don’t think writing’s very important, he says to himself, and remembers, when he was young, debating with others what a novel was for. I don’t think it matters, and recalls the despair of a correspondent, for whom the marginalisation of fiction in favour of films and videogames was something to lament. Now is the time for an insignificant writing, he murmurs to himself. For a neglected writing that streams without meaning. It doesn’t matter, he thinks, and that’s not why it matters. In the end, it is insignificance itself, even as it cannot end. Insignificance, a kind of doubling of the world. A doubling of what does not round itself off into an event. A kind of erosion instead. A kind of withering, a wearing away.

It will not become a book he tells himself. It is not part of a project, a writing project. It’s a way for the day to know itself. A way the day can read, indifferent light on the page. Can read and not read, both at once.

What kind of biography could narrate such a project? What as its unimportance joins itself to every unimportant event in the life of a writer (in anyone’s life; in the writer as anyone)? Whose life might it recount, and with what kind of recounting?