Category: Journal

Afternoon, the office. Another afternoon, the office … What day is it? What was I supposed to be doing? Administration, endless administration – but isn't it a relief to have an excuse? To say: what chance did I have to do anything else? To say: I was too busy, I didn't have the time.

A kind of eternity breaks in nonetheless. Breaks apart from moment from moment, separates them and breaks the forward movement of time. The moment droops, falls. The moment contracts into itself and draws the past and future with it. A present without present.

No one here. The afternoon, another afternoon. Who's left here to do anything? Who's left to finish this task, and that one? So I try to gather myself together. Read, I tell myself. Pick up a book. Follow a line of prose. Follow a sentence as it binds itself to another. Follow a little arrow of sense that opens up again the past (what you have read) and a future (what you are going to read).

But that fails, too. I had that little Michael Chion book to read. On The Thin Red Line. I thought, it looks simple enough, I'll read that. Text and photographs. A line of argument (quite free associative, it's true, quite informal, but refreshing for that).

On the desk, far more forbidding: a book on Messianism. A book on Rosenzweig, on Cohen. I pick it up, read a few lines and put it down. What did I read? What did I understand? Nothing, nothing at all. I couldn't be bothered. I wasn't up to it. The book streams above me. The succesion of time streams above me …

Anyway, I've written this kind of thing before. Over and over again, a thousand times. Until it seems I've written nothing else. And worn writing away. And worn everything away. A thousand blank pages. A million sentences written in the wrong direction.

When's The Kindly Ones going to arrive? When's that going to bind the past and the future for me? When's the moment going to turn, roll, into another moment? When, like a waterwheel, time filling the hollow and rolling it on?

Clearing my throat to say – what? At the threshold of writing, but what to write? And now dream instead of a writing that remains at the threshold, that reports nothing, or, by way of that reportage only announces the simple fact that it was possible.

At the threshold: a crowded office. The Arbus book arrives, another Xmas present. And with it, a letter from Corwood. There's a new Jandek album being packaged: Skirting the Edge: the 60th? the 61st?

Then cardboard packaging, remnants from lunch, jumpers for the cold weather, anti-bacterial cleaner. Sun Kil Moon playing again: 'Lost Verses': wasn't I going to write about that? Wasn't I going to make it my 'song of the year'? Laughter.

Beside me the manuscript with its crossings out and annotations. I haven't worked on it for a while – for how long? There's no time. Or rather, the time you get is so short, too short for anything except standing at the threshold.

Clearing my throat – but to say – what? What was it you wanted to write? To achieve by writing? No matter. What's left: to mark the moment when you could begin, when you drew the day around you and made a space to begin. To begin – and then to end immediately. That's what the day permitted. That's what it took away.

December 12th. Five years ago (nearly five years …) I began writing here. Five years ago to mark a threshold, the same one I'm marking here. Not to say anything. No communication. Except: it was possible to write. Except: I wanted to write and I wrote.

In the office: six bottles of wine in a cardboard carrier. A post of Neal's Yard moisturiser. An El Vez poster from that shop in Knoxville, peeling from the wall. And this to say: what? That the day and this space could be gathered here. That the day folded itself into a place in which I could write. And then, almost instantaneously, could no longer write.

Unable to write, or to write anything that would convince me. Which is to say that would have its own kind of life, apart from mine. December 10th – is that the date? Don't I have a deadline for something or another? Two cranes on the skyline. A bright, clear day. I can see all the way to the clouds along the coast.

The office is too big. Too big today, when nothing happens here, when it's all for nothing. Too big – as though it were held up and exposed to something, judged – by the whole sky. I have a manuscript to work on. But it's not really a manuscript, not quite. I want to push it to that stage, when it has its own life, when it is something, apart from me. Only it's not there yet, not close. A few pages with crossings out and annotations. A few dog-eared pages, with scrawlings in pencil and pen.

But there's nothing I can say here that I haven't said better before. Nearly five years since I began – haven't I said it all? Didn't I say it better another time, a year ago, or two years ago? In truth, it's only limping along. In truth, there's nothing new to write, nothing that I haven't done before and better, which is not to say well.

Five years ago … what was happening then? A different office, three floors down. I was more solitary. No one could have lived that way for long. And now, my new life? A lack of belief in writing. An inability to join word to word. I begin and then stop. Nothing new to be said. Or nothing that does not echo in the direction of something already said, already done.

Why waste time? Why bother? And that 'why bother' disjoins word from word and sentence from sentence. It's too late, it's gone, it's finished. That Bergman Archive book open on the table in my mausoleum-office. I have the money now to buy what I would have visited a bookshop a hundred times to look through. But now I can buy it and open it there on my desk to read, to be read.

The open sky is reading. The space of the office reads. It was a Christmas present, very early. Why did I ask for it? Why did I want it? To want again what I wanted once. To let it flame up in me again, some kind of ardency, some desire. That was one with my desire to make something – a book, perhaps. A 'something' to hold out before me like a torch. Only there's no torch now. The darkness of the manuscript instead. Darkness of printed words in 12 point and crossings out and annotations.

Why bother? Why join sentence to sentence? Nothing to be done. Nothing to be said. Sometimes I read books that sweep me before them. That push me ahead of themselves like terminal moraine. And I feel I can write, that it's possible for me. That sentence might link to sentence and lead somewhere. A torch burns.

And now? Today? I'm not reading any such book. The sky reads Bergman. The near-empty office reads him. I can't read a page. 'Lost Verses' by Sun Kil Moon playing. Didn't I want to write about that, about that song, that album? Laughter: but you won't write about anything. You don't believe in writing. You can't lend it your substance.

Once you were a ghost to writing, and now? No desire to write. Only a desire to desire, to begin again. Only the dream of a reading that would carry you forward, that would give you the strength. To what? To write? You: to write? Laughter. Five years … although it's fallen away lately. In truth, it's been falling away for a while. You do not deserve an anniversary.

You fell before the line. You crashed down. You didn't last. Your only chance: to read a book that is stronger than you. A succession of books. To give you the strength. To bind sentence to sentence. Faith, belief – that's what you lack, isn't it? The substance of writing? Its content?

When's 2666 going to arrive? When's it going to appear? Because you need it, don't you? A book to believe for you. A book to believe in writing. But when's it going to come? Tomorrow? The day after? And meanwhile, the sky reads you. Meanwhile you are open, empty pages, for the day to turn through.

Cinema uses your life, not vice versa: that sentence in my notes. To be absolutely within your own creation: that as well. From Marker's film on Tarkovsky? One house – rooms opening onto one another. And: the greats leave us with our freedom. Notes written scrawlwise across the page: continuity of writing – doesn't just double up life. And then – rather pompous – difficulty even reaching a blank page. And underlined: even reaching it. Then in big letters: RINGLETS.

Difficulty of beginning again, even though that 'again' will make no difference to the surface of writing. In what book did I read: months may lie between these sentences? Think of Red Thread(s) and the days and weeks of silence that surrounds each plateau of posts (and the way you have to scroll down the page to find a new post). Is that what you miss when you read blogs through readers (Bloglines, etc.): the space in which nothing begins? But here (at this blog), there is a continuity of writing, a continuity from one block of words to another that can never be interrupted.

A lack of capacity for facial recognition: more notes. People are avoiding us: I made a post out of that … RINGLETS: next to the words, Idiot Messiah (there are all kinds of Messiahs, W. and I learnt at a conference …) Stalker – sounds appear and then vanish. Silence – sometimes called 'atmosphere' or 'room tone'. And then: poetic realism. Poetic or symbolic montage.

Red Thread(s):

Regarding sequencing: if I do not look here for awhile, wch tends to be the case — but if I use this as a notebook, transcribing things here as I might write in project-oriented notebooks — the red notebook, the blue and orange books; the green one for dialogues… I discover a process of drafting [draughting] at work; moods and breezes dictate a general climate or tone. One item suprisingly connects to its lost predecessor. Another gesture might echo across lines months from now. Somethings lost in the flurries and mists.

To proceed with doubt as a general rule,

Tuesday morning, ten minutes spare in the office. My stupid notes read: doors creak open by themselves, objects rool about and fall to the floor, they rattle, bird's wings flapping in alcoves, a bird breaks a pane of glass, a lamp goes out and relights itself. Notes from some book or another (which one?)

They continue: dialogue: few looks between people establish a relationship. Protagonists look down wearily or look away from one another. No reaction shots.

And then a quote from Dante: 'in the middle of life's path/ I found myself in a dark forest'. And a quote from Klee (what does it mean): 'distance is time'. And then Tarkovsky (and now I get it: these are all notes from a book on Tarkovsky. Still, though – which one?): 'Artistic creation is by definition a denial of death' (Tarkovsky himself …)

And a dictionary definition of chiascuro: 'darkness used to enhance sense of light'. And notes about films: Asafayev, weeping and whistling. Kris has a white streak in his hair, like Stalker, like Gorchakov. Off screen sounds used to enlarge space (a train whistle, birds, dogs barking). Flaky, scumbled, textured walls (notes from a book, but which one?).

Ten minutes: I would like to pan through the notebook as Tarkovsky pans. 360 degrees, a writing pan (a post) and take in everything, all the notes and the whole of my life. To open – what – within the day? To open the day itself around a kind of sacrifice, a writing burning. There's a kind of boredom that blows upward like methane released from permafrost. A boredom (is that the word?) that wants only to catch fire.

The effort to begin again. To mark what? To say what? Tuesday afternoon, summer. Tasks I set myself: to organise works in progress into the six drawers of a tallboy. Pompous phrase: works in progress. What does it mean? Bad half essays and bad notes towards essays. I entirely lack the temerity to finish what I've written. I've lacked it for a long time.

Do I believe in what I've done? Did I ever? How did I ever raise myself above the page (rather than being collapsed alongside of it). Above it, and in command, letting sentence follow sentence: how is that possible? How to finish a single, determinate line? Half-essays, notes towards essays, three dots constantly turning any sentence from finishing. A few phrases, and then three dots.

Incomplete thoughts. Thoughts of incompletion, unfinishable, uncontainable. Sentences cored out and worn away. I lack the temerity to finish. The belief. I believe in none of it. Still, there they are, half-essays and notes towards essays. There they are, more than essays in lieu of themselves. Perhaps they believe in me, I tell myself. Didn't I write them? Don't they attest to my power to write? A power, it is true, that has dispersed in all directions.

There's no one here, I tell myself. Perhaps the half essays, the notes towards essays, will bring me back to life, as a mirror image conjuring an original. Once you raised yourself above the page, I tell myself. Once you were capable of that. And now? Every beginning is arbitrary. Nothing can harden itself into a origin.

Half essays, notes towards essays: how to mark what does not allow a beginning? How do you mark it, the incapacity to begin?

Nothing to say. The afternoon, the desk and computer, a pile of CDs (Miles Davis' Dark Magus is playing) … It still speaks, the nothing that says itself by means of everything (the afternoon, the desk and computer …). Nothingness that exhausts plots and treatises. Nothing but the 'to say' of language as it says itself between ourselves and what we would say by means of it.

The 'to say': a murmuring before signification, a sonorousness before sense: how is it that the heaviness of language resonates with the heaviness of the day? Ceaseless rain, westerly after westerly: only language is as heavy as the day. Only the 'to say' of language as heavy as the grey clouds, full of rain.

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?

Of course there's something fussily indulgent about placing each post in a category. Nothing worse! It's pure bad faith. There's something of the collector about me – it's revolting. A collector of my own 'work' – what laughter! Work, as if I'd know the meaning of that word!

What day is it? I look at the clock like a sleeper rolling over. It's the afternoon, the afternoon. The day doesn't matter. It's any day, it's everyday. But haven't you said that before? You've said nothing else! Not a thing! And all your categories laid out, your archives! Imagine that, having archives! Who could presume to have archives but you!

But there they are, the archives, the categories, a way of pretending to yourself you've achieved something. But what have you achieved, what really? Swimming in place – is that's what it's called? A holding pattern – that's it, isn't it?

As though it were enough to mark the day by writing. A prisoner marking the wall with a line, and then another – and then, after a few, a scratched line across the others. Except you'll never get there, will you? It's the same line, the same attempt at a line every time. The same attempt to make your mark in the day, when the day is in fact the very impossibility of making such marks, a black surface and nothing else.

Back to your admin, then! Back to it! You love it! You're so good at admin! It keeps you from doing anything, from writing anything! It's a perfect excuse: I've too much admin, when in fact you're relieved that admin exists. For what else would you do in these perfect, open days, the one falling through the other? How else would you pass this expanse of time?  

No easy way to get back to writing. I had made a mental note to look up Scott Walker’s words (at the time of Tilt or The Drift?) of wanting no separation between music and his life, thinking, that’s it, that’s the beginning of something. (‘Is there an element of putting on the work clothes when it’s time to record, then?’ – ‘I’m trying to get rid of that. I’m try to reach a state of neutrality where I’m living my work, existing within it and for it. I’m trying not to make a separation between the two.’) What would I have said? No separation between writing and life. The two absolutely equivalent. To write, to live, and both at once.

And another note, this time from Balthus: ‘I wanted to paint a dreaming young girl and what passes through her, not the dream itself. The passing therefore, not the dream’. To write about the passing of writing itself, not of what might be written, that’s what I would have said. Beginning from the living room, here, the new printer to be used for printing wedding invitations, the dresser, the antique brass lamp brought back from Lisbon. Beginning only to have said it was writing of which I wanted to write – the passing of writing over these and other objects, touching them without disturbing them. Writing as it stays with them, these objects, when I am away.

Then a scribbled note to myself on an old notebook: difficulty of reaching a blank page. Even reaching it. What did I mean? That to bring oneself to the edge of a beginning is already a great deal. That it’s enough to mark that beginning, to write to say – nothing in particular. And finally, a thought last night: the impossibility of writing a diary. Of allowing one voice to still itself and speak, usurping all the others. To speak from one voice – it’s not enough. The beginning is at the brink of all voices, of any possible voice. And just because it is at that brink, the voice of writing, of writing writing itself, as it allows those voices. Stay close, then, to the possibility of a voice, of writing, where anything you might say will be arbitrary.

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.

The clocks go back an hour. You have an hour, an extra hour; eight o’clock is seven o’clock, and a whole hour has as though broken itself from the continuity of time. An hour – and what might you do with it? What as time seems to part – or a piece of time is broken into an eddy, turning around itself, fascinated with itself and with you at its heart, you its secret observer, you the one who has come across time without it knowing, as upon some wild animal in a glade. Here is the hour when time turns round itself. Here it is, the hour of time’s self-obsession. And you, what are you? The circuit that allows time to flow back to time. The secret connection between time and itself.

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.

Loss. Think of a melancholy so deep you forget your name. Who am I?, you ask. ‘Who?’, the answer comes: your question returned. In your place, echoing, the empty space of the question: ‘Who?’, ‘Who?’, ‘Who?’ … the question mocks itself and laughs at the one who asks it.

The day decays. Like bubbles popping on the beach after a wave has passed, I tell myself. The waves stroke the beach and leave it. Foam and seaweed, and the bubbles popping: that’s how it is. That’s the decay of the day.

What shall I do now?, I ask myself. No Visitor with whom to cross the Moor. No rats to chase away, the black box where they lived smashed up and in pieces (I should clear it up …) A half drunk bottle of wine. Beyond the backs of the houses opposite a tree turns in the wind. The whole tree, which still has leaves.

Didn’t my Visitor and I find the lane beyond that tree? Didn’t we find our way to the boarded-up hospital from which this part of town began (the hospital in Spital, this finger of land, outside the city, the Tounges)? And the retirement village, oddly still, no cars – we learnt that we were not supposed to be there …

Summer moves away, all of it, like some great animal. The whole of summer turning away and departing. This is the new season …

The day’s run out, winded. There’s nothing of it left. Bubbles popping on the beach. A beach of stones, as at Brighton beach. It wasn’t long ago that we sat there, on the beach. Summer pops with the popping bubbles. Half a bottle of wine …

What was it I was supposed to do this morning? My Visitor works in the other room. In this one, I can play Jandek very very quietly. Six and Six – ‘Point Judith’ and ‘I Knew You Would Leave’ from the LP, not the CD – the difference: more surface noise; more ‘distance’ to the music – or rather, that it retreats to its distance, pushing me back. As though it played to itself at some remove from me. As though Jandek sung to Jandek, and I am only overhearing.

Another difference: the noise of something being dropped – a microphone? – breaking up the song. An accident, but not of the sort Bacon would have used as the basis of the image (or the image’s deformation): the CD reissue corrects this fault, but I miss it, and listen to the older recording by preference. And now imagine such a fault across the surface of your life – life like a record, unfolding in space across time, a needle running in a groove – but the needle, now, out of its groove, scratching across the record’s surface.

A noise made by the medium. The medium’s noise – and in Jandek’s case, it is probably a dropped microphone, rolling across the floor. And imagine that life has a kind of thickness and makes its own quiet noise. That it’s like the sound you carry in your head and through which you hear everything. Through it, but not it, as though it sang to itself, that it roared distantly and to itself, and you heard it only a great distance.

40 … 50 – what day is it now? We’re back from our trip. Whitby, then Robin Hood’s Bay – an afternoon in Scarborough, too, which we tried to escape almost as soon as we there. My Visitor wanted to find the grave of Anne Brontë, but we had no guide to direct us; I wanted to visit Seaworld, so we went to see the otters and the seals but, walking back to town, fell into a malaise: we were in a town as horrible as Robin Hood’s Bay was lovely (hidden cobbled streets following the shaded stream down to the sea versus the concrete promenade in full sun; fossil hunters tapping hammers along the soft sea cliff versus deck-chaired ice-cream eaters burned red raw on the narrow strip of brown sand  …)

We rounded the hill crowned by the ruins of the castle (and, unbeknowst to us, by the graveyard in which Anne Brontë’s resting place could be found) and walked rapidly through town to escape. Then the bus back to the fish and chip paradise of Whitby, where I’d found Nadezdha Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope in its original English edition, in hardback a few days previously. And didn’t I have to debate whether to buy the first and third volumes of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy in hardback from the same shop?

I bought Under the Volcano instead – a new copy, though discounted, and it became scuffed from stuffed in my rucksack on our walks through the countryside. It was the introduction that swayed me to want to rebegin the book: it said Lowry’s novel was as difficult of access as Conrad’s Nostromo. Well then, I must make another try, I thought to myself, and bought it for £5.

In Robin Hood’s Bay, there were three small bookshops. In the last, I saw Keith Sagar’s Life Into Art, on D.H. Lawrence. Old style literary criticism, my Visitor and I agreed. Should I buy it? £7, and it would have to carried alongside the hardback Mandelstam and the softbacked Lowry through the countryside. No, I thought, though it seemed like the gods had put the book on that back shelf for me to buy.

That evening, we walked among the exposed rock of Baystown, as the locals call it, and ate at The Bramblewick. Later on, read a few pages of the Mandelstam about the poet’s bookshelf and marvelled: Osip had learned old Italian to read Dante, and the second largest section of his bookcase was reserved to the Italians: Aristo, Tasso; the prose writers Vasri, Boccaccio and Vico; there were the Latin poets too: Ovid, Horace, Tibullus, Catullus and the Germans: Goethe, the Kleists, the Romantics. The French too: Villon, Barbier – with his wife (the author of Hope Against Hope), he translated Sinclair Lewis and other English-language authors; and didn’t he have a go at producing a Russian Mallarmé?

He didn’t keep copies of the books of his contemporaries, Nadezhda notes; she also rejects the story of Osip reading Petrach in the Gulag under the light of the stars. Her voice is tough, unsentimental: what she has lived through! I read in the eaves of a Baystown B&B, the pub Ye Dolphin almost directly opposite, the view of the sea, the hills rising up …

The next morning, rising late, we take breakfast and then lunch at The Swell, and I tell my Visitor my life has peaked, for we had 5 Hellos to read, and cups of good coffee, and a Ploughman’s Lunch each. ‘It doesn’t get any better than this’, I said, though that night I think it did get better, after we had returned by bus from Scarborough (our daytrip) to Whitby, and ate at the superlative White Horse and Griffin, I having learnt to order the same as my Visitor who has an instinct about these things (she ‘s re-educating my tastes …)

This is a Sebald-style trip, I said to my Visitor. Wandering from place to place, with the vaguest plan. I’ll bet the real Sebald didn’t wander alone, I said. His wife was with him, I’ll bet, just like Naipaul’s wife was with him all along in The Enigma of Arrival (all the secondhand stores are full of Naipaul, but the wrong ones: The Mimic Men, Half a Life, and never the ones I would buy …) An Osip has a Nadezdha, and a Virginia (whose Diaries only turn up in secondhand shops in the most tatty condition) a Leonard. No one really wanders alone, I said.

We’re the living room, a sunny midmorning, tea in two mugs, the louvre doors newly painted and the fireplace creamy white now, not brown; the damp a distant memory and only the cliff-like walls in the kitchen and the bathroom to be painted. In the middle of summer – that’s where we are. In the middle, as from where grass grows in all directions – into the future, but into the present too, and into the past.

In the middle of summer – and the middle of life, there from where life spreads out, illuminated from this sole sunlit source. Not as if it reached a peak here, not really, but as though it was from here burned the light that glowed all along and hereafter under everything.

My Visitor and I are on the high seas of philosophy, our table a galley, with her at one end, reading Kant, and I at the other, reading Virno. We’ve agreed on Prince as the music perfect to accompany us on our voyage. My Visitor reads the following passage from the Anthropology:

Changing forms set in motion, which in themselves really have no significance that could arouse our attention – things like flickering flames in a fireplace, or the many twists and bubble movements of a brook rippling over stones – entertain the power of imagination with a host of representations of an entirely different sort … they play in the mind and it becomes absorbed in thought. Even music, for one who does not listen as a connoisseur, can put a poet or philosopher into a mood in which he can snatch and even master thoughts agreeable to his vocation or avocation, which he would not have caught so luckily had been sitting alone in his room.

I read Bernhard felt the same way (about Prince).

The table, that was once up against the window, one leaf folded, the other up to hold the monitor and keyboard, has been pulled out. Both leaves up, the other to accommodate my Kant reading Visitor. We work together in the living room, face to face over the table – trouble, however: I work with music playing, and she does not; and I like to listen to Jandek, which she definitely does not. She reads me this passage:

The aesthetic egoist is satisfied with his own taste, even if others find his verses, paintings, music, and similar things ever so bad, and criticise or even laugh at them. He deprives himself of progress toward that which is better when he isolates himself with his own judgement; he applauds himself and seeks the touchstone of artistic beauty only in himself.

I laugh. ‘Oh that’s priceless’. ‘It’s not meant as praise of the egoist’, says my Visitor.

The room seems so big now; the kitchen furniture that was here has been returned to its rightful place, and the damp? Gone now, apparently. Or gone enough to put the kitchen back. But the walls are fully 9" thick and being soaked for years will take years to let the water out. With the cabinets and shelves on the wall, and with rendering on outside against the rain how can it breathe? It cannot, and I can smell, in the kitchen the unmistakable smell. Perhaps the dehumidifier can keep it at bay. It is working now, as it has done for 6 months. Patient, humble, but persistent, drawing the water from the air and into the transparent container it holds like a pouch on its squat body.

Yes, the room seems large; all the rooms do, and I go from room to room, tidying up, hoovering and then polishing the floors. All this for my Visitor, who will summer here (summer as a verb, how nice – as they do in old novels), this being my last Jandek-filled night before one comes who does not like that music. I’ve bought her Clarissa to read, 1600 pages long; it waits with the other books in the bedroom. And I’ve halved the clothes in the wardrobe, taking some to Oxfam, and the chest of drawers – three now, for her (she would call them ‘presses’ as they do in her country).

Large and so is time, as term comes to an end and, after a few more meetings, conferences (a couple of weeks …), spreads out into the indefinite. I give every summer a name; what will I call this one? Or rather, every summer finds a name for itself, two years ago, for example, the Summer of Going Out, and last year – the Summer of Jazz. Wasn’t I going to do another book? I don’t think I can be bothered. Let time open itself out instead. Let it open, day after day like a waterwheel in the steady openness of summer. Day after day – and what is to be done made up each day, as befits the weather, as befits who is about and who is doing what.

I’ve bought headphones for Jandek, and to listen with if I get up earlier than my Visitor, this room separated from the other in part by an internal window through which sound passes. And I wonder if I’ll get up later now, and rise like other people at the brink of the work day and not long before? These early, very early mornings are trying. And it’s not that I get anything done. Exhaustion. I try to work out where I’ve gone wrong, I cut this and that from my diet, I stop drinking at night, and start again. I stay in to calm down, I go out, neither makes any difference …

Limes and pears in the fruitbowl (it was a loose change bowl before today), a fridge full of food that is normally bare of food. I cleared out the understairs cupboard and hoovered beneath the boiler. The sound of rocky particles rattling up the hose … I see for the first time the space beneath the water tank, cobwebbed and full of broken bricks…. This is my equivalent of Abba’s ‘The Day Before You Came.’

The space in the room is full of time, potential. Full of the summer to come, gravid with it. Space like a spread sail to catch the wind. At first, tonight, I was bored. I finished a big bottle of beer, read the paper and willed my mind to settle. Evening begins with The Simpsons. Slices of meat out of a packet … rice cakes … I’d been eating all day, too much, as always, gluttony as always … and too many things to do, to remember. Errands. Work tasks, emails to send. A correspondence to catch up on.

Focus, I told myself. Gather yourself together; aim in one direction. And so after a bit, Jandek. Another Jandek CD from the row of 50. One I haven’t listened to often. I’ll sit and listen to it, I thought, just as Bill Callahan is said to sit and listen. I’ll take my shoes off and sit, and do nothing but listen, I thought. But the temptation to move from room to room in the new space. To polish a bit of the bathroom floor I’d missed; to move the fig tree from one corner to another. To bag up more clothes for Oxfam – those too tight shirts …

But I listened as I moved and tidied. Listened, and was gradually gathered at the brink of myself, listening. Raining Down Diamonds. A devotional album, I thought. Prayerful. In its way. In Jandek’s strange way. And then wondered whether that run of albums from which it comes is his ‘Song of Songs’. Love songs of eros and agape. The erotic ascent, all the way to heaven. And blamed the conference upcoming for an inability to write, and especially on Jandek. I shouldn’t write, I told myself. Save your energies, I thought. But gradually my listening let me fall. Gradually, and all the way down so I could lie down as I move. Resting, even as I moved and tidied.

At such times, it is fitting to meditate upon life as a whole, upon the whole of one’s life. I sat on the chair and remembered, I let memory work. Conversations 20 years old. Events only I could remember – or rather, that I take myself to be able to remember directly, and not part of that great settling down, as coral reefs are built, the skeleton of one tiny creature lying upon another. That settling down out of which a more general, thicker memory accretes; a sense of a time, of a period in one’s life.

Through how many such periods have I passed? Nearly 5 years in this flat. 5 – 5 years ringing out in eternity. And those 5 years spreading around me like a beach. This flat with its still rooms a beach and I on the brink of – what? The past is here. General memories, moods that belong to long periods in time, phases, and out of which particular memories come, determinate ones.

Curious to be such an archive. Curious to have watched that archiving occur and to have watched memories settle. I will not call it introspection. There’s a way of discovering what is outside inside. Anecdote doesn’t matter so much as … what can I call them? Great impersonal mechanisms. The water wheel that is turned by time. A time wheel turned by its streaming. But then time doesn’t stream, not always. Sometimes a sense of return, of a coming back, or a retrieval. As if I’d lived this day before – this evening, or now, this writing moment. Lived it before, and as if knowing it was to come again.

What is the opposite of deja vu? Do you remember when Ignat drops something in Mirror and sits down with his mother on the wooden floor. It has happened before, he says. But what of the sense that it will happen again? Again – and in 10 years, or 20? Once I was foolish enough to write a message to myself in a journal. Foolish with youth, for only a young person would think they were braced against time so that such a message could be sent. Sent to reach – whom? And from – whom? From one who imagined himself affixed to a moment, a date. That a journal might be kept chronologically, not in eternity. That the journal was also a way of ringing bells out in eternity, or hearing them ring. And that that is what returns, that ringing, that inside to find what is outside. No journals, then. No day that does not unfold itself in the eternal Day, in the event that does not come as itself, but in every other guise.

The other day, in the office, I chanced upon Sculpting in Time and remembered the quotation that set off this theme, the day. From memory: we’ve come to the end of a day, Tarkovsky says. And what retain of it is not an event, firm and clear, but a kind of nimbus, a faint aureole. That smudges the line of the event like a Redon painting … I think it’s there I find the outside: there, in the smudge. As it burns around the image like the soft light of a candle around its flame. There are candles here, in this room, which I never light except when my Visitor is here. Thick church candles on the wooden mantlepiece. Standing unnoticed and gathering dust until – today. ‘The day before you came’.

After the damp came rats. I didn’t write about that here; it would have made a good category: Rats. I thought there was a nest of them, a mother and babies in the space outside under the stairs. Thought I heard rustling, and that the rat I saw, nose slightly in the air, stopping still for a moment and then moving quickly, was female. But there was nothing there in that space, save for the feathers and bits of nest from the blackbirds that nested there. The few pale blue eggs, deserted after we scared the mother, the plumber and I, disappeared one by one. Was it a cat?, asked one of the workmen doing the rendering. No cats here, I said. Must have been a rat, I thought, who had dislocated itself to crawl under the door to the lane. To take the untended eggs one by one.

It’s a wasted night, I tell myself. I should be working. There’s secondary literature on Rosenzweig to read. But my ears are hot – a sign I’m tired, too tired but to do … what? To write negliently. To write in that neglience that means I should not publish what is here. Thick cloud above, and in my head. I’m not really here, I tell myself. No-one is. Mist over the floorboards as in one of the rooms in Baldander’s castle (The Book of the New Sun). I would like to read a book like that again, I tell myself. To follow the story across the nights …

I still miss Frank Bascombe’s voice. How long ago did I finish The Lay of the Land, which I read following The Sportswriter (which I bought as consolation for myself after my Visitor’s first visit) and Independence Day? I’m in mourning for that voice, that book. I’d let a few days pass, and then tried Henderson the Rain King. This will be my year for the American novel, I thought to myself. After that, all of Faulkner, I thought. But I put it down; I returned it to the bookshelf. If only I had my lost copy of Mrs Dalloway, I thought, that’d do. Frost arrived, Bernhard’s Frost, and saved me, with the rough edges of its pages and calm storytelling, with spaces between paragraphs. That’s what I wanted: space. Space after the great space of The Lay of the Land …

What will I read now, in the days of my Visitor? How are we to read – side by side? Will she read Clarissa in a sofa and I Frost in a chair? We have films to watch – the whole of Satantango, that I’ve kept specially. Terrence Malick. The Singing Detective. And what will we listen to, I who am used to putting on one album after another, whenever there’s time. I have my John Coltrane boxset, the first quartet, everything presented in order of chronology (the better to hear eternity); I’ve Ayler’s Holy Ghost, all 9 CDs …

After the rats came ants. The outhouse was cleared; the yard skept clean: nothing for rats here. And I’ll keep an eye on the gap under the door. Watch for her returning, the she-rat on her rounds. But ants instead, and in every room. Exploring, sending out scouting parties. Even at night, they’re working. By the light of the monitor, or by the bed lamp. Working, searching for tiny grains of food. So I swept the floors and hoovered, and polished the floorboards until the varnish shone. No chemical trails for ants to follow. No paths through dust. And now it’s rained for two days, no ants came. What next in the sequence of 7 plagues?

The workmen thought we should leave the rendering until the blackbird was done with her eggs and chicks. Until she’d toppled the fledglings from the nest and into the air, and they’d gone out in search of nests of their own. I said, she’s not been back since we scared her. 5 blue eggs – then 4, then 3: what was taking them? cats? – No cats here, I said.

Am I focused now? Have I gathered myself up? And if so, for what task? What good is this? What use, except to blur the contours of my life? To blur them and to let burn that nimbus that blurs the determinate into indeterminacy. The sky vanishes into cloud; the wall crumbles into damp, the ants are crawling about as in a Dali painting. ‘It means seedless’ said X., a million years ago. ‘That’s what it symbolised, for him – he was seedless.’ But what did that mean, seedless – impotent? infertile?, I thought as I heard X. speak: I’ll remember this conversation. This one, and for no particular reason.

The walls are 9" thick; how long will it take for the water to come through? Sometimes I go out to touch the rendering. It’s wet in patches, despite the fillet. Is that’s how it’s spelt – fillet? And in the rain, I watch the walls closely. Is water getting in? Does it run down the inside edge of the pipes and into the gaps in the wall?

I am a little higher now than I was in the afternoon. Higher, and I can see out a little, back over this day and the few days before. I have a perspective; I can survey the landscape; I’m not the insect who scuttles along the ground, or the prisoner staked to it and quartered by four horses. A little higher, then, and for what I’ve written. Higher by virtue of those few blocks of writing – three of them, monuments to something but to what? To themselves, perhaps. No: to the blocky substance of which they were made, those three blocks. To their substance, simple as it is, unanalysable. That fell out of my sky. That lodged themselves in the desert and let me climb up a little, and look around.

It’s evening now. Seven o’clock, which means past the dangerous hours. The wine is left unopened; tonight an evening without alcohol. And it’s raining outside. And cold. And I’m inside, in my living room. Saturday night and the washing machine beside me, and all the kitchen furniture. And the imperial blue, almost indigo of the Corwood CDs in their cases. Staring up. Looking up so I can take and place them in the player.

I should get to know another phase of Jandek, I know that. I set it as a task: write about the ludic Jandek, about Modern Dances. Write about that … and this command fading into the air. Because it is small miracle there’s any writing at all. It’s enough just to surface, to breathe. Nothing needs to be done. Nothing must be; and besides, it’s a Bank Holiday, and there’s no work Monday, and I can finish the essay I’m writing tomorrow …

No commands, then. Nothing I should have to do, and not even to listen to the ludic Jandek. And I’m braced against the day, I’ve made a start – I started three times, there were three posts, three steps up the ladder. But in truth, each was the same step, just like all the posts here. A single step, and one that has to be retaken over again.

Rather tired, rather bored, I decide to invite the murk of Manhattan Tuesday, The Afternoon of Insensitivity to descend over me. I want to stay with a mood, to follow its course. To stay with it as it deepens itself into a gorge, following itself blindly. And all the way up to where it spills out, as I know this album does, to meet some greater whole. A kind of return to life. Orpheus coming out of the underworld.

And this over two discs, the first of which is beginning to play now, and the second in its jewel case on my washing machine, which is still stranded with all my kitchen furniture beside me in the living room. And with its beautiful cover, this album, that is already a promise. I am soothed by seeing it, and Glasgow Monday, The Cell, which I keep close to it. Soothed because it promises the consistency of a mood, so I will not scattered in all directions, as I am today. Scattered, and wanting to be gathered together, to follow a course, the gorge. To descend as the walls of the world rise up around me. Descending as though to uncover a truth I could not reach elsewhere.

Hadn’t I promised myself to write about persistence? How I admire so the simple act of continuing. Keep Going – it is a title of a Steven Duffy album and a Jandek song. Keep going – and I think the singer of The Afternoon sings of his own drivenness. ‘Have I always been this driven?’ But that is at the end of the suite. I’ll have to wait another hour to hear it. I’d like to open a bottle of wine, I really would. But it’s too early. And perhaps I shouldn’t drink at all. Perhaps I should wait it out, this unpleasant time that is not yet evening. If it was dark, I could close the curtains against it. Close them and enclosed this room, which is exposed, now to the outside. The white day, everywhere. The whiteness of the day that looks for me everywhere.

Tiredness, vague illness. I woke – when? at 5.00? at 6.00? – intending to – what? To work, I think. Or to write something on the way to work, that was aimed at it. A writing that has work in its cross hairs, that would let itself be cut and pasted into a finished essay. That would offer itself up like an organ donor willingly for a Frankenstein-essay to come. But I was tired. Tiredness found me and lay me out. I went to the office and ended up on the floor, reading, or trying to read. Having failed to begin. Or knowing that what should have begun had begun without me, and that I’d missed my appointment and all appointment, and the day was only a dead sea to cross.

I think I looked at my bookshelves. Thought: of what am I capable of reading today. Something short, I thought. Something I can open at any page and put it down again quickly. Something where a page or two is enough, that would say: at least you have read me today. At least you read. And then I thought: perhaps I should listen instead, really listen. Perhaps on the floor I should listen to White Box Requiem on the computer speakers, remembering that this was the album on which Jandek was no longer collaborative, when it was once again a voice, and a guitar. But that, too, fell away from me. I lacked focus. My listening fell thick carpet of the office floor. And that was where my reading fell, there in the light; there as light reached me through the filth encrusted windows.

Home again in the afternoon. I thought, am I worthy of The Cell? And thought: no, it’s The Afternoon I should pull over me like a duvet. Thought: perhaps it’s out of that murk that I took will emerge, even as the music lifts, even as the bass runs towards the end climb upwards to the sky. To be carried along, hesitantly at first, and then gathering as the current of the music gathers. As it is given to a kind of fate, discovering itself. As the music is pushed so that it seems to find itself and explore itself like a god just born. And what should I explore as I listen? How might I let myself be found, and led, like a cow with a ring through its nose? To be led out to pasture. To where the fields open beyond the houses, and the day spreads wide like palms opening in welcome.

There are days to get through, rather than live. Days that never catch fire, and whose hours are like the drawled syllables from Jandek. Pulled ahead of themselves, attenuated, so they never end, not really. So that one failed hour slops greyly into another, so the day pushes dross ahead of itself like a glacier a moraine. The trick is to wait, to force nothing. To wait as hour gives unto hour, pushing the dross ahead, for something to settle, and a beginning to open. To begin – isn’t that why I come here to write? Just that: to begin, to have followed the gorge as it opens. To plunge down to where it is dark like evening, and like a blinkered horse, you can fix your gaze only on what matters.

Get low. Get as low as you can. Keep low.  But how do you get there? Mood gets you there. Holds you to itself and drowns you. Until it is just you and the mood, and the mood everywhere. As if the mood preceded you. As if it was the mood first, and then you, or that the mood was always waiting to dissolve you and that you were only ever a perturbation of its surface.

The mood into which you cannot step into even once. And that is part of the step that draws you to it, that belongs to that same fatality. What does it take to discover such a mood? Where does it lie, waiting for you? Where is it hidden, there at the base of everything, just below? And that terrible, dreadful surging upwards. That kind of seeking as it looks for you. As it knows you’ve already gone to meet it.

I have always loved those artists who were turned somehow from the world. Turned, and let their work speak for them, or, better still, got out of the way of what they made made and let it speak of itself and not of them.

Let the work speak for itself. For itself – and in your absence, as if you had been dismissed from what you made. But in truth you dismissed yourself, and that’s why you made the work. To not be, somehow. To open a future that did not contain you.

Let it speak for itself. And speak of what you are not.  Blissful sound. To have made a place to disappear. To have opened a door through which to vanish. And the work is the door. The work is the place, the grove where no one is, and especially you.

What is the word for the opposite of narcissism? How to name not Narcissus’ gaze but the river’s as it gazed up to him? What is the name of the river that knew itself by his drowning? The word that unravels every word you would like to say. The work that unworks; that writes to turn writing away …

I lack any real discipline, I know that. I lack some faculty of application, the patience to proceed day by day on a greater work: to labour at anything where gratification is not immediate. It is enough to be able to write at all – to make a kind of mark, to sink another telegraph pole into the earth as it is attached, however tenuously to the one planted the day before.

Until a kind of continuity appears: the way behind me stitched together by what was written. A thread of writing drawn through the skin of my life. And if I were to pull it out now – to delete everything, what would have been lost? Very little, I think, for I barely remember what was written yesterday, or the day before. It seems to matter just that there was continuity, just breath enough to continue. Just to press the instrument to my lips.

Continuity – and perhaps this, in the end, why nothing should be deleted: for it is by the courage of a thousand beginnings (closer, I think, to a thousand and a half) that a beginning can be made. I’ve set an example to myself, I who lack discipline. I shown it is possible to breathe rather than gasp, that I can take in a lungful and exhale it again.

That is to say, I remember by what was written only that writing was possible. Remember that rhythm that seems to suspend the forward movement of my prose just as the cable sags between telegraph poles. A curious rhythm, that catches me just as a boat, moving into midstream, is seized by a current.

Yes, I think it is by that slackening that something here is done, by that small sag, by the lag of a cable that is never pulled taught. As though what is made here is only a series of folds into which I might crawl and sleep. Or as though writing fell asleep here, and this prose were like the turning of a cat in circles when it looks for a resting place.

To sleep in prose. Or rather, to fall asleep for a span of time. No more than a moment perhaps. No more than that, as time breaks its continuity. As it seems to spread out across the land, breaking from the river of my life like an ox-bow lake.

And perhaps writing is also that – a kind of gap in life, and what is written day by day an unstitching, a way of opening life wide, of exposing it – but to what? An ox-bow lake broken from a meander. A space – a wound – where there was only time. And that says: everything you’ve lived is accidental. Everything weighs the same. You concerns are as significant or insignificant as anything else.

I lack discipline, I know that. And what is written here is only a simulacrum of discipline; the way a life sways from its path and falls down like a drunkard. And that it does so regularly – daily – what is the significance of that? It reveals the necessity of the opposite of discipline – of that unalertness by which I fall asleep at my post, then wake, blinking, wondering what happened.

The father gives up writing when his daughter dies in Pather Panchali. Gives up, that is, because he now thinks he was only playing, and real life has intervened. Real life – and what if he hadn’t given up? What if it was only then, when writing meant nothing to him, that he could truly write? Perhaps writing only works when your eye’s not on it. Writing as it writes itself as cobwebs gather in the corners of rooms. Making itself, weaving itself, there where no eye sees it.

I have no daughter who might die, so what of me? Look away from what you write, look elsewhere? But to what? I see the yard: my potted plants blown over in the wind. In another window, an interview by Bela Tarr is playing. Rehersals for life, I tell myself, and not life. And now I remember poor Frank Bascombe of Richard Ford’s trilogy. Poor Frank Bascombe, lambasted by everyone. Who writes – though Ford never says so. Writes – though Ford never tells us so in the text, for how else would these books have appeared. Writes, then, and does not publish. Writes and keeps his writing in a corner of the room.

There are writers who drink because they cannot write. And others who drink to write, and who can only write when drunk. ‘A man who drinks is interplanetary’, says Duras somewhere. And – rough paraphrase – one drinks because there is no God, only the sky, the whole sky. The whole sky: I think that that’s what spanned above the alcoholics who used to bother my friend who made coffee for me every morning in his cafe. They bothered him, taunted him, and he disliked walking past them.

I used to comiserate with him over coffee, when we shared a cup early on, before the other customers came. But I think my heart was with the alcoholics, who were driven mad in my imagination, by the size of the day. Just as today is not a real Sunday, not in England, but the day before Bank Holiday Monday. A non-day, that is, a day supernumerary, that does not fit into any calender. What did I do? Opened a bottle of wine. And before that? I went to the office. And before that? Woke with a sense that there was nothing to do, that this was a day outside time. Eternal day that rang with all my other days misspent, and with the day that spread itself above those poor alcoholics, back all those years ago in Manchester.

Eternity, I tell myself, that’s what I hear in the echoes from the fairgound that has set itself up not so far from here. Echoes on the walls of houses. On the backs of the houses that face me here where I write, the yard before me. The dehumidifier is working in the kitchen; the living room is still full of damp-stained kitchen cupboards; the washing machine is stranded here beside me. Has there been a flood?, some in me asks me. No, just damp, I reply. Just damp: just a swell of water, just water rising up and through the walls, and sinking down through those same walls, and through the ceiling. Damp and damp and damp …

A day in the office, in my Bela Tarr office. To organise this, then that. And an hour wandering abroad, out in the streets, looking for this present and that. Wandering – but not real wandering, since I had a goal in mind. And then, in the end, back here, where I knew the wine was waiting. And then here, where life that is not Real Life is echoing.

Who lives here? Who is alive? I have no daughter who could die. No daughter – not even those whom Artaud conjures out the air in his final poems. Isn’t that what W. said to me the other day: I want a daughter to adore me? He asked me, What would you prefer, a son or a daughter? I don’t know, I said, and he said, I want a daughter who adores me. Daughters always adore their fathers.

That was by the sea, I think – or was it when we made our ascent up the hill? Either way, last week, we drank in the sun … was that life, real life? I think it was only the interruption of life that we now live. Not life, but life’s interruption, as though we were incapable of living as others had lived. As though all life had been lived until us, who stood at the end of the land by the sea. At the end of all of Europe, I imagined. At the end of everything.

11.30 A.M., on a Saturday I’ve kept clear for work, but little done so far. What time did I wake up? 6.00? 6.30? And what time did I sit down at my desk? The hours passed without work. What was I supposed to write? How long do I have left? But as is now usually the case, I have far exceeded any deadline. So far ahead, indeed, that work seems meaningless. I’ve failed, I want to say that. I’ve given up – to say that.

And now the dull hours, hours of falling away from the caffeine burst of the morning. Mark them, then – write something against which they can set themselves back, those hours without work and without incident. Write a foreground that they can become a background, a blank page, for by themselves they are nothing, as Dupin says of Giacometti, ‘neither white, nor void, nor space.’

And now those blank hours are contained in a work, wrapped like nori seaweed around a handroll. Wrapped – a white page that is also the whiteness of the sky. And now exhaustion is marked as it has been undergone by someone. I’ve marked my presence in these hours and drawn them around me. But not for long, though – not for long. The day is also unwrapped and unwrapping me.

When I pass through London, I walk from King’s Cross along the road with the bookshops on, and then take Charing Cross Road through Trafalgar Square to get to the sushi place by Embankment station, and there sit on a step and always fail to detach my handroll from its wrapping. And then across Waterloo Bridge, remembering all the other times I have crossed it, and how it, this crossing, seems to have detached itself from my life until the Thames streaming below is the whole of my life viewed from eternity.

When I find myself narrating portions of my life to others it is always on my folly that I focus. When I listened to this person or that; when I trusted that judgement. As if to say: I unwrapped myself from that old chrysalis. But also to say: what if my life now is not another shell that will have to have been torn away? And I recall the story my father used to tell of arriving in England and washing his hair with soap, not shampoo, for he’d not heard of it then. Why did he tell us that story?, we used to ask ourselves. Because it was the essence of the experience of a foreigner abroad. But didn’t he get to know the London streets quite quickly? Wasn’t he able, 40 years later, to show me where he lived and name the roads nearby as we drove towards the South Bank?

Either way, it is on the Embankment that the characters in Josipovici’s In a Hotel Garden have their final discussion. And it was along its edge that one year ago or two, we were told by a tour guide how far the river came inland before those concrete channels were built.

Boredom. No, not even that. Vague dissipation. What was I supposed to be writing? What books lie unfinished? The Education of the Stoic by Pessoa. Tabucchi’s Dreams of Dreams. Gustafsson’s Death of a Beekeeper – all from the excellent Waterstones in Exeter, which has books in translation where the 3 for 2 offers usually are. And I’m halfway through rereading Mrs Dalloway. And in my office, in my gym bag, Lay of the Land by Richard Ford, whose prose keeps me steady through the days, like a ship in choppy water.

Was that enough writing to set back the day? Have I set it back as the background to the hours in which I will hardly belong to myself? I eat my seaweed rice. I pile up my new books (Handke’s Once Again for Thucydides is there as well, as well as an edition of Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks – what indulgence!). And I wish to myself I had that Calder boxset of Beckett’s short prose …

But in the end, what these books and I have in common is that each of us has been unwrapped by the day, and I, like their authors, would write myself so I could know the white page, the absolute void, around the paragraphs I set down here.

Feyerabend lets appendices interrupt the order of his paragraphs in Against Method, at least as I remember. As though the end of the book divided itself in the book; as though it was by intercalation that the end would come, not at once. And I think of the author who points out that the apocalypse has already happened, or the other who remembers a commentator say ‘The Messiah is perhaps I’ and then comments in turn, ‘Anyone might be the Messiah – must be he, is not he.’

Anyone, everyone, and the end of times is here – the Now of the Messiah is every instant, any instant. The end is here; it’s already happened, and who noticed? The Now slipped incognito away with all the others. It’s already happened, and you’re too late. Recall that strange Ray Bradbury story about the astronauts who arrive on a planet to find the crucifixion had just happened – and then to another planet, where it had happened there, even more recently. Until all their voyaging is an attempt to reach the Now of its occurrence.

Perhaps there is an experience with which we cannot quite coincide, and that we cannot be said to undergo. Where does it happen, then? – and to whom? It’s just upstream of us, slightly higher up. Close, but also away, where experience happens to itself and what we live downstream is only a portion of its greater happening.

‘Oh, first I’m going to attend to myself!’ says Foucault to his interviewers, when they ask him about his future projects. Of course, at this point, there’s not much of a future left to him. Perhaps he means to cultivate an ethic of self-cultivation, breaking from a morality that is always tied to civic institutions. Or more simply: to strike out on his own in some bold new way. To go by going, as the blind woman in Lispector’s story says.

What might it mean to give up and walk away from writing having made a whole oevure with stops and starts and swerves and dead ends? To walk away as if writing were at last to leap from the page into life? As if it were possible to live at last what was written, when it would be necessary no more to write, only to live. But then to write is also to know that there is no end to writing. Silence needs words to form around, like moss around cool stones. And white space is a sea of milk that needs the black letters it seems to set afloat.

‘I can’t speak to others, but I very genuinely experience a lack of purposiveness in both my professional life and my intellectual life.’ ‘My theoretical identity is perpetually fluid and without fixed coordinates.’ Banal point, and probably only my fantasy: doesn’t what Sinthome has written (or perhaps I should address him directly: what you have written) at the blog already exhibit a kind of purposiveness, and even a kind of identity (a trajectory: better word)? My fantasy (used in the most ordinary sense of the word): that you will write of the relationship between pre-personal syntheses and what happens when the self comes into language (that is, of Deleuze and Lacan, Simondon and Hegel).

It’s not summer yet, though the days are warm and bright. I tell myself the days are like steps upwards, one after another. But I’ve fallen behind in some important way. Nothing begins. One day, and another, and I’ve still not opened the door.

From where does that line come, the door into summer? I remember it only as the title of one of Robert Heinlein’s juveniles, which I used to read one after another. Tonight I tell myself my whole life is an alibi for another life unlived. And when will it begin, the other life? Who is living it, on the other side of the mirror?

Bob Mould, I read somewhere, would record a whole bunch of songs in a similar mood in an evening. The song, Hair Stew had brothers and sisters, but that’s the only one we get to hear. But I’d like to hear every one, just as I would like to write five posts a night, all in the same mood, each a variant of a single post like the ones Kierkegaard’s pseudonym composes at the beginning of Fear and Trembling. But a post I can never write, unlike the story of Abraham retold by Johannes de Silentio.