Day after day in the office. Day after day, but it is as though one day buries into another: that days, great sheets of light lose themselves in days, falling without settling. How many years have passed this week?
No meaning in work, no purpose. Administration, endless administration, wearing me away and wearing away everything. Is this the end of something? The endless end, the end that forgot to end.
This a period of unfinished posts – who could gather themselves together on an afternoon to finish something. Who'd have the belief, the drive? Meaningless, all meaningless.
Read Pessoa instead. Pessoa who has strength enough to make the afternoon into a pocket in which to write. Who folds it around him, around Bernardo Soares, the clerk, and writes a book in his name.
We share the same afternoon, I tell myself, Soares and I. Only I lack Pessoa's strength, being unfolded by the same afternoon he was able to draw around himself (around his absence in the shape of Pessoa).
Cranes outside; I'm high up – the sixth floor. All the building and rebuilding. Dust in the air. Very quietly through my computer speakers: a Shostakovich string quartet, the 5th. Books on the other side of the office – what are they? Golding's Free Fall, finished.
Didn't I mean to say the other day something about the Shakespearean distance of his prose (what a stupid phrase)? The sense of a whole other order of talent (another stupid phrase). That a kind of writing was as natural to its author as breathing (what an idiot I am!)? Never mind the plot – what plot was there? And his The Paper Men, next up to read. Aren't I still halfway through Saramago's Blindness? And shouldn't I make a start on The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis? But it's the afternoon, when nothing's possible.
Lie on the floor then, I tell myself. Open up that Cy Twombly catalogue, read that, look at the pictures. Boredom. No, far beyond boredom. In a state known only to advanced monks and administrators. You've worn yourself away, I tell myself. You're just like anyone else, anyone at all. In fact you're more like anyone than anyone.
I go out to buy some water. Dust in the air from the streets. What are they building? Big green cranes. Scaffolding. Some new frame around the station. To open up a greater station inside the station. They did the same in Manchester, I think to myself. A new station in the station, all that retail space, I think. I was there the other day, passing through, I think.
Unfinished posts – how to finish this one? Why bother?
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