Sunday Morning

Shake out the suburbs like you would an old bedsheet, and what will you find? The long term ill, sheltered recluses blinking in the morning … the unemployed and unemployable, shaken out, lying there …

For a long time, I thought of X. when I thought of the everyday. X. – did he have a chance?When we were teenagers, he’d turn up at the house saying he’d been kicked out of his. It was his stepfather, he said. He’d kicked him out. Or it was that he’d been locked in his room by his stepfather with a bucket to piss and shit in and he’d escaped by opening the window and crawling down the roof. But there he was at the door, he needed somewhere to stay, and couldn’t he stay with us, for the weekend?

Wasn’t it comics that drew us together. Comics – he bought the relaunched Eagle and I 2000AD (I pronounced Rogue as rouge, as in make up. Rouge Trooper, that’s what I called that particular strip)? It was the illustrations we admired. Brett Ewins – our hero. We despised Cam Kennedy. X. was an artist – he’d had his comic strips serialised in the school magazine. They used to end on cliffhangers that were resolved in the next issue. Something about space, and astronauts and aliens. Didn’t we plan to write one together? With his artwork and my stories and inking (I was to ink text in the speech bubbles which he’d leave blank for me)? But like every plan when I was young, I had only the vaguest idea of what to do. Science fiction, of course – but inner space, not outer space. I was thinking of Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head … The comic came to nothing, of course. I had nothing to ink, no story to tell.

I won’t say what it was I read X. was arrested for. I think he avoided prison and got treatment instead. He was lucky. I’d thought of him over the years. We weren’t in contact – why should we be? A friendship of adolescence that had long fallen away. And went on to do A-levels, and him? Too many drugs. Burned out at … 14? 15? He lay in his bedroom read Dutch porn mags. He’d become obsessed with sex, utterly obsessed. He was very good looking, he thought. He looked at himself in the mirror. Very good looking.

He smoked away his days and nights with his brother and his friends. He lost his ability to draw – a grade 3 in his art CSE – him? He’d traced out an ABC album cover for his art project – and him, an original artist! It was ABC’s now forgotten cartoon phase. Then he disappeared – he went off to another country – reappearing 10 years later, rueful, living back with his mother and stepfather, working in a shop in town. How long did that last? Until his arrest. His treatment (I read about those in clippings from the local paper).

Life is long, not short. Today is not the same as yesterday. The Same isn’t the same. Only those unemployed or sick for years know that. The Same – a kind of corriolis force that turns in the everyday, and turns the whole everyday with it. Too many hours to live in. Too many hours, like a great house with unfurnished rooms. My then friend smoked away his days, and lay in bed with the curtains drawn reading pornography. I thought of him, later, as a kind of limit-case, as someone who lived on the edge of everyone else’s life. Y. would see him sometimes, by chance. Z. said he bumped into him in the park, by the swings.

There are some people ill equipped for life, I used to think. X. is the best example of that, I used to think. Intelligent (blurred intelligence – too much smoking), good looking (he became grey-faced, ashen), artistic (what remained of his talents?), but good for nothing (whose fault was that?). I thought of him in a deep sea diving suit, at the bottom of the ocean. He was an adventurer in the everyday. He was a kind of cosmonaut wandering out in the wide morning.

What connection had he to our commuter town? What was he looking for? To coincide with himself, I thought. To equal himself, to achieve an identity. And meanwhile? He followed himself down the street, unable to catch up. He wandered in lieu of what he was, his mind burned out. How much had he smoked, and for how many years? He was a shell, not a man.

Life is long, I thought last night as the lights dimmed and I thought the trip switch would go. Life is long, and I thought of the brownouts the economists predict, of flats and houses without power. Alone in the house, I listen to Om and eat like a maniac. I’ve finished the cheese and the savoury Indian snacks. I ate all the ricecakes. What’s wrong with me?, I thought. I live like a maniac, I thought. And this morning I had the most terrible headache. No one has headaches like this, I thought. Maybe this is how a brain tumour feels, I thought, and imagined my higher faculties switching off one by one.

I knew I should watch a film. Knew that I had to stop dissipating my binding myself to a story, any story. That’s always been my problem: I’ve lived above or below a story, never coinciding with one. You need a story, some kind of linear continuity. Need to organise the past and the present and the future, to get them all in the right place. That’s what you get from a film, or you usually do.

Last night I watched INLAND EMPIRE and it was no help whatsoever. I was more lost than usual. I rang America to speak to someone about Jandek, but he was busy. Luckily, I had a film in reserve, a thriller. I put that on and bound myself together. I sorted out my past, present and future, everything was fine, but then I went back to reading Bernhard’s Amras, which is an admirable book, one of his very best, but it scrambled up my past and my present and my future again.

I lay awake for too long, unable to sleep. I remembered the lengths I used to go to to avoid people. Upstairs and round the bending corridors instead of going through the open space of the communal areas in my student hall to reach my room – how long ago was that? Pretending to be out when people hammered on my door – how long ago was that? I’d wanted to be left alone, but for what reason? To do nothing in particular. To let absence settle like dust in my room, and who was I, around whom absence would settle?

Sometimes I’d rent the hall television for the night and watch that. Television – what had it to do with me? But TV dramas had plots – beginnings, middles and ends, and I needed that. Wanted to organise my past, my present and my future, to get everything straight. Didn’t I keep a journal, to keep everything straight? I’d try this voice and that one and then that one, none of them was natural, and didn’t inhabit any of them. Whose voice to use? Not mine – I didn’t have one, a voice. And how was it I was deprived of a voice? I wasn’t settled enough in the present, with the past behind me and the future ahead of me.

That’s what I remembered last night, after finishing Amras, and wandering back through the corridors of my memory. My memory – but it was scarcely that. I was trying to make myself out of what had happened. To select this event and then this and place them all in a sequence. But in truth, the sequence, the tale, the whole narrative was arbitrary, and I couldn’t escape that. When did I fall asleep? I woke, anyway, at five with a terrible headache. It worried me, I thought: this is too much, my head’s going to burst. I got up to make a coffee. I felt nauseous. I thought, no one should feel this way. I sat at the computer and found a film to watch on Youtube. Trust, in ten parts. Trust, now that’s a great film. But I wasn’t up to the story, I couldn’t reach it. I was remembering, instead, what I was looking for all the other times I’d seen it. I must have watched it ten times, looking for something – but what?

Outside, it had begun to snow. To snow! It’s April. Think of the Prince song. Thomas Bernhard liked Prince. Bind yourself to his life, to Thomas Bernhard’s. But the Honegger biography is in the office, not here. And besides, it’s not organised chronologically. You need that when you’re trying to organise your past, your present and your future – order, a linear unfolding. INLAND EMPIRE was entirely the wrong film to watch last night, I thought, and Amras certainly the worst book to read.

My poor head! I still had a headache. And my neck ached. I need a massage, I thought. I imagined my faculties shutting down one by one. It’s Sunday morning, I thought, and it’s all gone wrong. I thought of the Stevens poem. Complacencies of the peignor. Coffee and oranges on a Sunday chair. The holy hush of ancient sacrifice – was that a line from the poem or had it strayed in from somewhere else. The word, mintle, wasn’t that involved? Something about a rush mintle. You always have to look up words in Stevens poems. He was a man of Latinate culture. He had those words at his fingertips.

And you, what of you?, I thought. English is barely at your fingertips. You can’t find the words you want to say, I thought. There’s a lack of connection between your brain hemispheres, I thought. The left hemisphere can’t speak to the right and vice versa. That’s why you can’t find words. Your speech centres don’t link up. It’s like you’re senile, or have had a stroke. W. always says that, I thought. W. says I speak like I’ve had a stroke, as though words don’t belong to me, I thought. And all that stammering! Shouldn’t a man of my age have stopped stammering?

My head ached. My neck. I couldn’t concentrate on Trust. I left the story stranded a third of the way through. An unfinished film! Not a good omen. This doesn’t bode well, I thought. And felt nauseous again.  I was happiest on my own in the flat when the O.C. was on every morning, I thought. It must have been the school holidays, because the O.C. was on every morning – that was marvellous, a real boon. Start the day with the story. Lower yourself into the day by a story as you’d into a bath. You have to be very careful in the morning. You’ve got to get a kind of headstart on the day, or it’ll get the better of you. And you have to watch the afternoon – those in particular. A weekday afternoon – nothing worse. They’ll have you washed up like a whale on the beach. A beached whale without an element, without time as it moves forward. Beached in eternity, washed up in eternity – nothing worse. And exposed, utterly exposed. The O.C. could never protect you in the afternoon, I thought. Even you could never bring yourself to watch teen dramas in the afternoon, I thought.

I have a headache. The nausea is receding. Pilgrimage has finished, and I listen to the new Portishead album, and think if I ever finish a book it will be as scrappy and unfinished as this new album, gesturing at something without being able to reach it. Did it really take ten years? What a trap – a ten year trap, I thought. It would the worse thing in the world for me to get enough money to spend ten years on something, say writing, I thought. Ten years – it’d be a disaster, I’d finish nothing, I’d be in absolute despair, with scraps and scraps of writing all around me, I thought. The worst thing is to imagine that writing matters, I thought. That’s what ten years without work would do to you, I thought, make you think that writing mattered. What poison!, I thought. There’s nothing less relevant than writing, I thought. You’ll never give yourself a past and a present and a future in that way, I thought. You’ll never be able to sort them out.

Should I watch my thriller again? I admit, I never understood the ending. In truth, I rarely understand them, the endings of thrillers. It’s enough that things are happening in sequence. Enough that there’s some kind of progression from one scene to another, forget the rest. I can’t keep plotlines in my head. I’ve never been able to work out what happens in Tarr’s Damnation, for example. Why does that bloke dance in that weird way in the rain? Something to do with betrayal, W. told me. He’s betrayed, or he betrays someone, or something. In truth,  it’s enough to watch films where the characters are certain something’s happening.  To progress from scene to scene. I have a feeling that something’s happening, that there’s a sequence to time, that’s already a lot. To have spanned an hour or two, to have had it make sense, that’s enough for me.

The Portishead album’s okay, I think to myself, I’m the one at fault. I’m always at fault, I think. You regret writing that about the Portishead album, a voice laughs in my head. You fucking idiot, says that voice. I laugh, it laughs. What do you know about Portishead, or anything?, it says and laughs and I laugh (but quietly, in my head. In the world, I just smile). We’re all so sick of you, says the voice and there are many of them now, all laughing. You’re such a fucking idiot, they say. They spent ten years on that album. A peignor is a kind of dressing gown, they say. And a mintle is a kind of rug.