To tell the same story, over again. To tell the same and the same of the same: in this way, telling wears itself away. It becomes valueless, issueless; it begins to lift itself from the story and say nothing. Or it is as though the story floats indifferently over itself, like a soul that has left its body. And now the story doesn’t matter; telling has outlived itself and what was told has expelled itself from the realm of narrative. A few incidents, nothing more. Some incidents, buried in writing, that remain amidst writing, that cannot be smoothed away.
Cycling through the new estates: why that image? I was unemployed, I remember that. I had an uncertain future, I remember that. I went out into the day, cycled, with no particular aim. Through the new estates, charting them, following them all the way to their edge. And then to what remained of the woodland – the brook whose banks had half dissolved; the muddy track along the field-edge. Bridleways and footpaths, that led down to the quarried river. And open lakes where the quarries once were: fenced off nature reserves. Over there, on the other side of barbed wire, wild life, kingfishers and herons. Near-still water that reflected back an indifferent sky.
No story here. Incidents without story, as though outside of themselves. Stranded events – a cyclist, the bland, wide day; the nothing-is-happening of the suburbs. Stranded life, life outside itself like the same near-still lakes spreading alongside the river. Life alongside life, ox-bow lakes and eddies, currents broken from the great flow of the city: how can narrative but break itself from the old models of continuity? How can a story but tell of what withers it as story, and places it alongside itself, an ox-bow lake, an eddy?
Through the new estates, cycling. Unemployed, off sick, one of the two. Absent from work, from life, cycling past new mothers with their prams. The omnipresence of the day, the afternoon. The vast cathedral of the sky. Later it would make me shiver. Later it would make me stay indoors. I came to fear the day, and unemployed time. Feared time without structure and journeys without aim. How old was I, then? Young enough still to retain a kind of optimism, a blindness in relation to the future. Still the hope that an estate might give unto something other than an estate, that leylines passed across the golfcourse, or that it was a barrow that rose behind the new houses. Still young – and still able to catch what happened in a story. Still young enough to believe it could be told.
Ill, unemployed – I was falling from the story; unemployed and ill, narrative lost sight of me. Whose eyes watched me? Who followed me? Writing eludes itself. The story does not move forward. The calm lakes of the nature reserve, dug out by quarrying. Birdsong; silence. But, too the greater roar of the afternoon. The sound of the day, reverberating in itself. No stories here. No narratives; one footstep does not lead to another; there’s no path along which to pass. I come to the railway bridge; I carry my bike over. Piss-smelling concrete. Graffiti. And the power station by the railway. Houses and gardens higher up, stretched along the railway. The bend of the track along which trains came roaring. Was I ill? Was I unemployed?
Tell the same story, tell it again. Tell the same non-story, the same of the same, as it places what is recounted out of the reach of the story. A cancelled day; a blank and eroded sky. Was I ill – unemployed? Unemployed and ill?
Lars Iyer's Blog 