Category: Journal

There are journeys you can take by reading, crossing the days and nights by way of the texts that pass beneath your eyes. And journeys by writing, too, when one day’s work seems to release itself into another’s like a bird loosed upward into the sky. One day, then another spreading itself before you like a white page to be filled with writing: what can be happier than that miraculous succession?

Imagine a summer of such days, one after another, one day falling onto another like dominoes. And imagine raising a work out of such days like a carnival tent, and all the wonders it might contain. A whole summer’s work, beginning to end, and you could stand back hands on hips and say, yes, that’s what I made.

And when nothing seems to make itself from writing? When it is the same day that begins each time over again, the same blank page upon which you’ve made no impression? And when no texts have passed beneath your eyes because you were waiting all the while for the writing that didn’t come, like a hitchhiker by the side of the road? 

I think your life needs to turn around something. What should I be doing? Head down, reading. There’s Kierkegaard on the desk beside me: Two Ages … I should be reading that, head down. Or head up, looking at the screen, writing. And writing as though the screen gave onto the sky where the future is.

A dead day like the stub of a cigarette. Too tired to do this, or that. Too tired for Kierkegaard or for the screen to become a vista. Boredom: too tired for that, too. I can hear feet pounding the stairs up to the flat and pounding down again, the door slamming.

The 17th April 2007, I tell myself: write that, write that down. How many dates like this written down in the middle of life, the great wide middle, the plains on which you’ve to make your life. And you stop and step back and … write down a date. As if to let it resound. As if to mark a mark, an inscription. To say: I was here.

But who was here, or anywhere? And who would leave their mark here, or anywhere. Very beautiful on that Paddy McAloon album when he sings, late on, having not sung on this album before, but his voice recognisable right away: I’m lost. You should be reading, I tell myself, head down. Or you should be writing, looking into the screen, looking at the words come. But what should I be doing?

Sometimes I think the whole of your life can mass up like a cloud. It comes together, gathering, almost ominous. But for what reason? And with what result? It gathers on the brink of something happening, and the whole of yourself is suddenly that: a brink. And then nothing happens, or that was the point. You step back, and write down the date on which the day was exactly like all the others. Like them, but as Borges said of Shakespeare, unlike them because it is like all the others.

Too tired, can’t write, or unless it’s just to write that: too tired, and that I cannot write. But what does that register? What does it make clear? A kind of flashing of the sky in the sea, reflected. Flashing flashed at the sky: what does it matter, and to whom?

Sunlight on the backs of the houses, opposite. One o’clock. Home for lunch, and to write a blurb – two or three sentences, no more than that. But nothing comes to mind. The yard: no scar now where the pipe was ripped from the wall. Grey rendering instead, and spreading around the corner to cover the kitchen wall. And a strip of lighter concrete along the concrete floor of the yard where the burst pipe was dug up and replaced.

Came home to write a blurb, and thinking only of that. The book I’ve read three times in typescript. The book whose pages I’ve marked and annotated. I wrote the word, tone on the title page. Tone: a sign to myself. A word I want to explore. The typescript is full of such words, such signs. My trace. The passage I have left through its pages, like the voyager in Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth follows the signs of a previous explorer. What happened to him? Lost at the earth’s heart just as I am also lost at the heart of a book for which the blurb will not come. Lost in eighty pages on my bed in the other room.

Days pass unmarked. A new leak in the kitchen? The plaster seems to be melting from the walls. Rusty paste colour on my fingers. And the smell! Something is rotting, something dying there on the other side of the wall. Books: Duras’s Lol V. Stein, Henry Green’s Back, and now Loving again, after 15 years. A new office, straight out of Bela Tarr. A clean desk as I abandon my review for a while … what to write about now? Back to what I know, and hopefully back here, soon.

A square of concrete outside along the kitchen wall has been marked out in blue paint. They’ll dig there, says the man who came from the water company, though he said they were only doing it for me as a favour, since the burst pipe burst is on my land, and not in the lane, for which they’re responsible.

A favour, then, but it took them five months to come out to hear for themselves the underground river that seems to flow by my house. The workman put his ear to a long tube pressed to the concrete and listened: the pipe’s burst, he said, and then had me fill out some forms so the company could come out with a drill to see what’s what. But even then, if the pipe burst is too close to the flat, it’s my concern, not theirs; I’ll have to bring in my own plumber.

Very well, no bother, what matters is where we go from here, not what’s gone before. I say all this again to the woman from complaints who has been attached by the water company to my case. She’s extravagantly polite: ‘it was a pleasure speaking to you‘, and I think it might have been, if she is the kind of person who is happy when other people’s problems are to be solved, reminding me of my old friend in Manchester, head waitress at the cafe to which I went morning and early evening; and sometimes for the afternoon, ordering a whole pot of tea and reading this and that.

I arrived first, at eleven, when they opened, but soon there would come another man, quiet, who sat well away from me in another part of the space. Then, with his pen, he’d underline certain words in the paper – sometimes the waitresses and I would attempt to work out the pattern we supposed he was attempting to find. Was he slightly mad – ‘touched’, as they say?

That was back in the first blooming of cafe culture in this country since the 60s – hadn’t my dad reminisced about his cafe years, and the girl from English who wrote a poem about this young engineer from Madras, called ‘Anyone For Coffee’? The culture spread north to the regenerating cities, and bloomed along one street in our suburb. Bohemian life, or something like it.

I was unemployed then, or ill, or both, as others were; so many of us had been as though left behind by history and we watched in bemusement as our city was transformed around us. Did we belong in this new world? But the cafes were ours – at least at those odd ends of the day that could fall, in the cafe, to the ill and unemployed, at least before the prices rose and drove us away.

We went there, I think, to hold our day together; it was structure we lacked: a shape to time. The old squats had gone, and many of us had been displaced, ready for that long sleep that would carry us alone in our council flats through the mid nineties. For now, the cafe, and the last vestiges of society were ours.

Who spoke first? How were the lanyards extended from one table to another? I think it was when I brought our new tenant, a freshly reformed alcoholic for a morning coffee, and our happy banter again in which, he said later, I taught him by example never to talk about himself in the first person. And the cafe was no longer an archipelago of tables, each with friends talking separately, but a happy flotilla, a society.

We earned nicknames for ourselves – or, at least, they addressed by our first names, but added an initial ‘Mr’ – and they thought us a couple, the many lesbians who came there. And we became involved in their intrigues, confidantes from outside who knew nothing of the Scene.

For a time, I took tea with one friend in the garden of our house, and thought: my life is stable. But that social world was ephemeral, and began to fall apart right away. Didn’t some of us couple off? Didn’t vague enmities replace vague alliances? We were scattered again, and there were many cafes now in which to brace ourselves in the empty time of the ill and unemployed.

But how can I forget celebrating my birthday at the cafe, and going out that hot day to the Ees with one of the prettiest waitresses? Langour in the sun. She stretched white arms in the afternoon haze, the two of us in the long grass with a picnic. And as we went back again, as I thought: I should remember this. Another event to be pressed like a flower into an album.

And the time we went clubbing, and didn’t one of them, ‘the German’ we called her to each other, run her hands from the backs of my feet all the way up to my head. I was a person upon whom such moves were to be tried. Why not? Another moment, I thought; remember this – and hadn’t I learnt by then never to try to seize what was given, but to let such events fall away until everyone had forgotten them but me?

For their part, the waitresses were mostly graduates looking for work before they decided what was to be done with their lives and our joy was to share with them this brief intermission, when they hadn’t decided on their life’s course and were single, many of them, or at least in relationships they didn’t take quite seriously.

A glorious time, I thought, because their attention could be turned wholly towards you, but lightly – as they spoke, they were discovering what they said; when they joshed about it was with that lightness that comes of being released from the long chore of study, but not yet having taken on the yoke of real employment. And so they floated between our tables, all of them lovely and charming and light, sometimes sitting down with us at the end of their shifts, and sometimes ‘forgetting’ to charge us for the drinks we ordered.

They were always about to leave, and some did, but others stayed and became something like friends, since we were both stranded fortuitously together then before our lives had begun. Yes, it was our new tenant who started us talking – he was handsome and funny, and began to wear crushed velvet red trousers and a white shirt with cufflinks. We were Chorlton dandies in our stranded lives, dressing up because it was dull to dress down, and our days were very long with little to do but wander.

Somewhere far away, there was the completion of my studies, but for now, my life diffused itself across the whole of time, which I knew not as possibility, that project of the existentialists from which our tasks gain sense, but as dissipation – the flood that rose to strand me apart from myself and from anyone. A peculiar solitude, which you are hardly there to enjoy. A void into which moments fell and lost themselves. Who had charged me with pressing the essence of days?

My friend, of course, went back to drink, pissing himself as he lay half-clothed on the sofa. He left us, but there were rumours of him all about our suburb: a dandy gone to seed and separated from his companion. And the latest in an unlikely stream of girlfriends had me swept me up in madness.

She was ill, and I unemployed. Or was it the other way round? Either way, when it ended, it did so badly – I heard after from her friends the whole sad story I will not relate here. Didn’t we have, for a few brief days at the end, a semblance of a relationship? Hadn’t we made promises that didn’t seem hollow? But those promises, I think, did not so much stream in the wind that blew from our futures, as come apart in that present for which we were never quite a match.

We never sailed out under the proud flag of coupledom; we weren’t real enough, substantial enough: in what position were we to make promises? Isn’t it the pledge, for Nietzsche, that lets life become regulated? Isn’t it the contract and the promise that bind us to the time of tasks and projects?

I think I’ve always liked those who can barely keep appointments. Those who are not carried along in the stream of their life, but have found themselves becalmed in an ocean without winds or currents – ‘found themselves’, but barely even that, for it is no one in particular who has taken their place, and it is no one you meet when you meet them by chance in the street.

The question, what are you doing? finds no answer. What are you up to? likewise misses them. They speak, but perhaps they know they shouldn’t, that they do not belong to the city regenerating around us. They are of the old world, set adrift – the old welfare state, which let its ill and unemployed wander the streets. What’s become of them? Do they work? Have they been diagnosed as autistics or as depressives? Have they been prescribed a rescuing course of medicine?

Or have they fallen yet further, fallen from themselves and the what Deleuze might think as the interiority of time, as though they’d been cracked wide open, splayed to experience only time’s pure streaming? I imagine a kind of bliss might have claimed them. ‘Who are you?’ – ‘No one in particular.’ – ‘What do you do?’ – ‘Nothing.’ Suburban Bartlebys, then, with refusal in their faces and in the stubborn fragility of their bodies. Or Michael K.s, or the beatific adolescents of Korine’s Gummo.

Why, when I think of them, does Mark Kozelek’s voice come to me, and particular as it sounds live, detached from what he sings, but attached in that detachment: strange supplement that seems to void the songs from within, slow whirlwind that seizes up their words and lets them spin almost without meaning? ‘Almost’ because they are barely attached to the particularities of a life, because they express nothing lived in the first person.

And isn’t this is what is uncanny in the young Will Oldham, recording songs for the second Palace album in his kitchen, with the thunder rumbling in? And I think, too, of Cat Power’s bleached covers – songs strung out, songs washed of their colour, frayed like jeans no longer held together by their threads. Or rather, her voice gives unto no voice in particular, indifferent origin that sings without her, or with her as she is without herself, closed-eyed and singing into nothing.

And finally – the last of the holy trilogy, the presiding demigods of this blog – Bill Callahan, who records under his own name now, since even a parenthesised Smog cannot name what crumbles at the heart of his voice. Crumbles, for all the strength of his baritone, and gives itself to that streaming that he sings about on A River Ain’t Too Much To Love.

It is not his wisdom from which he sings, but from the knowledge of the simplicity of fate. A knowledge not his but that of the song that sings with him. Song, blank voiced, sings out with his voice, and though it seems continuous, and breathing, and real, it is none of those things, but the sound of a past fascinated with itself, the endless return, like fate, of the outside that hollows each of us out and opens us like a door.

These are simple experiences for me, and for which, I think, I’ve always wanted to find words. The most simple, the most obvious, and yet hidden for all that obviousness. A malady that no one suffers, or that no one suffers inside you. Inside, but there is no outside; the door is open, and through inner darkness you see a kind of landscape – a storm on the moon, ice without cease, stars driven like stigmata into the flesh of the night.

Formulations indebted, of course, to Blanchot, who is another of the demigods of the site – or is his work the soil from which it sprouts like a mushroom in the dark? Do our fascinations drive us toward our favourite authors, or are they born from that reading itself? Or are we drawn to them for what we share, strangely and at great distance, such that we choose for ourselves – or there is chosen for us – an affinity, something held in common?

To think with a thinker is more than to think about him. And it is to follow something like your fate, the destiny of a body, of a sensibility. Isn’t Nietzsche right to consider the digestive system as determining the shape and the body of thought? Strange that bodies might be joined by books. Or strange that books and songs are sloughed off like skin, drifting as you see dust motes float in a shaft of sunlight.

Stranger still that when the body sings, it is a voice that sings of the condition of singing – of a kind of power of speech that escapes your measure. As though song leaned back into Song, or singing into Singing: how to name a voice that supplements voice without belonging to it? of an initiative that began before the beginning? Of an origin that is only the interruption of origin, the present torn from itself?

But these formulations are as mysterious as any. Perhaps it can only be sung about or written. Sung, or written – or spoken, a voice that floats above images. And, each time, to let the voice – written, spoken – be caught by that Voice that speaks without words without being ineffable. A murmuring speech, an anonymous one, speech joined to all and to no one – isn’t this what is sought when writing, like speech, is thrown into the air like a kite? Another breeze. A wind above the wind, like that said to blow along the stratosphere. A kind of jet stream of song and of writing, moving in all directions in the upper atmosphere.

Perhaps I was never one of them, the ill and the unemployed. Or that my studies encased me in a bathysphere in which I could walk through our suburb with a line that fed me air from somewhere else. Was I only an anthropologist among the ill and the unemployed? Or was I like Kurtz, who had vanished among the tribes he was said to conquer? Neither, in the end; or both.

Others had faith for me. They said it would turn out well for me, but for them? They shrugged and looked at me with deep sea eyes. Sometimes I think all I am is the memory that keeps such looks, a living archive of chances not taken and barren paths. But then I know that this memorising is itself only a fold of the outside that writes of itself here, joining what cannot begin in the past and what will never happen in the future like the worn Ouroboros. Isn’t it to give a term to the interminable that writing begins? Isn’t it to give voice to the incessant?

The workmen are outside now, digging up the yard. I thought they’d bring a mechanical digger, but they are smashing the concrete with hammers. There’s no leak near the flat, they’ve discovered, and the underground river, if it flows, flows further out. But they’ll replace the pipe, they say, and have cut a long deep trench to reach the old one, summoning me out now and again to speak.

(See, on Gummo, Thomas Carl Wall’s essay Dolce Stil Novo: Harmony Korine’s Vernacular – Project Muse only)

Do I have to note down the time and my circumstances as I begin to write? 7.30 AM, still early, another hour before I have to be in. ‘Complacencies of the pegnoir’ Stevens might say – laziness in a ragged dark green dressing gown instead; no ‘coffee and oranges on a morning chair’, but remnants of last night’s stir fry, complete with slices from a block of processed fish I bought from the Chinese supermarket, and small bright pieces of red chili to warm my throat at this cool hour.

Yesterday, I was awake – too awake – I thought: there’ll be a price for this. A good mood always has its cost; I suspect them; I want them to pass as quickly as possible, along with the delusions of ability and possibility they grant. Never walk out in a good mood: you will have to tolerate stupid fantasies unfurling in your head – half-dreams of achievement that are only the faintest double of the real thing. Fantasies like the images borne behind the fire in Plato’s Cave, and throwing shadows on the wall we take for our reality.

Never let a good mood soar you into heaven; clamp down on it, beat it, take yourself to the gym and punish your excess. Nothing worse than a mood untethered, that carries you into the sky of vague aspiration. Perhaps it was okay when you were young, walking along the road in a haze … the dreaminess of youth, of a life hardly begun, when you barely have to stand up for yourself: it is your youth that dreams, beautiful soul that it is, unconnected with having to earn a living and make your way in your foolishness into the foolishness of the world.

Of what did I dream back then? I won’t relate it here, but I think many of my friendships came from that dizzy kite-flying that came of good moods, being based on the credit of a life not yet lived, but still so far away as to be formless. A young man’s disease, and not, I think, young womens’; for the former, the latter only get in the way (and perhaps it is the same for men who love men, and women who love women): what is romance but a chance to poetise oneself from a relation whose term is blurred because hardly noticed?

She is barely anything but an empty space for projection: a sky in which vague, kite flying aspirations can dance in the breeze of fancy. Infatuation cannot deepen into love: what chance does it have when the former seeks only itself, and searching and losing what it is as it restlessly passes through infatuant? This is the Don Juanism of the beautiful soul, who lives only in what might be, in vague dreams of greatness that billows out the sails of his youth.

Leave those land-yachts to those who remain on the shores of life, and have not cast forth. I think the young are always rich in that – not time, but possibility: the sense of a life far forward and still indefinable, and still as great and wide as the sky. What will I be? And this questioning is luxuriance: a way of bathing in the light of distant planets, not yet the sighing of a life narrowed by those small choices that now make you run through a maze like a rat?

I suppose heirs and heiresses can sail their great-sailed yachts out to sea – possibility is, for a time, their milieu; to be young and rich is to have the infinite as your kingdom: isn’t anything for possible for one who do as they please, when their whole life is spread as wide as the horizon?

I used to be drawn to them, the rich, and passed through their lives when they pulled me up onto their deck. For a time, I could dream, like them, that anything was possible. But I was young, then. As soon as I made my way, we had cast each other aside, and forgotten our brief but happy alliance. Who was I, for them? I think I embodied arts and culture; I lent them books – I played them music. Of course, I was young, and barely knew anything, but it was my thirst that impressed them: here was someone really compelled to seek out that world they already knew, born, as they were, at a time when a certain cultural capital still seemed necessary to back up the real capital they possessed.

Still, the arts were dull to them, though they’d been to the best schools, and here was I, a curious fish, full of youthful ardency and fire, and I think they could project on me a different future for themselves, for it was true that though they lived like millionaires, they would have to impress their fathers and mothers of their seriousness.

To study the history of art and then waft through life was not really enough: sooner or later they would find themselves in a firm run by their family or a friend of their family. Seriousness, one day, awaited them; and for the women, a serious match: but they were not yet bent on finding their man, or at least they had time to pause and knock on my door in the student hall.

Didn’t I long for some unpleasantness to befall them – an accident, perhaps, or some great crisis? Didn’t X. know then to tell me Sloane Disaster Stories to calm me down (Y. paralysed after she drunkenly climbed on the roof of her house to throw herself off; Z.’s sliced up arms beneath her always long sleeved blouses? Not because I particularly wished them ill, but I wanted to know, for a while, that their kingdom was not the whole wide world.

I became a confidante; A. told me about B. and B. about A.; and a whole wheel of gossip began to turn around my room. I knew everything; I knew too much. One after another would surprise me reading, and I’d be pressed to hear a confession or a complaint. Once, one of their menfolk came down to be seduced, since to play Ute Lemper was enough then to signify homosexuality; he wasn’t sure of himself, not yet, though he whispered to me of the younger men he liked, and how his girlfriend was nothing to him, not really.

But I was no so daft to think I really belonged; my dreaminess let me range ahead into a future of arts and culture. I read Ted Morgan’s biography of William Burroughs and conceived for myself an itinerant’s life, setting travel before my mind’s eye and not answering my door when it was knocked. I pushed another future open for myself, and I think this is what drew them to me, the sons and daughters of the rich: wasn’t I in some sense a fellow aristocrat?

Of course my learning was not deep, although I talked a good game. I could barely write, though I thought I could. The heirs and heiresses wrote a Latinate prose: very sure and true, and I was left, as I still am, with a billowy lyricism that makes for a writing I can hardly bear to read, perhaps because it is the prose of one forever young – who cannot help but dream as he writes, and throw those dreams ahead of him.

What gives the desire to write?, asks Sinthome. The answer I want to give this early morning is that I would like youth and chance and possibility be reborn in me, not because I regret my life or mourn it – everything’s turned out very well, I can’t deny that – but because it is still a kind of maze in which only writing lets me look up.

Lyricism, luxuriance: I deeply regret it in myself: a blowy, undisciplined prose, and I always agree with those trolls who write to castigate me for pretension. And yet how can I help it when the early morning stretches arms in me of hope? When the rising sun – it is rising now – carries hope above me like a kite whose tail trails out in the breeze.

I distrust good moods; I do not like them. Better the end of day blankness that makes my tongue thick. Better the melancholy of the threshold, 5.00-6.00 PM, when the caffeine of my day departs my body and leaves it limp. Better quietness in the pub, and letting the eloquence of others displace my silence.

But I will say this: the lone kite of writing in the morning is not my vague and giddy transference. I project nothing of myself, I should say that: writing before content, and not the other way around, as Sinthome puts it. Writing first, before there’s anything to say (and didn’t I sit down this morning with Frank Bascombe’s voice as my topic?) and not to throw ahead a possibility from which I might live – a widening of life, a chance to become a beautiful soul once again -but to leave a furrow that said I was there and that writing broke the crust of my life and spilled over.

For a time I am only part-rat; or it is a chance to lie down in the maze and look up: the sky, imperturbably remote, does not spread wide a horizon into which I can rise. That’s why I never dream of making a book out of this occasional writing – why I will not let aspiration ride out ahead of me, and keep a firm grip on the halter of the donkey I fitfully ride.

And that’s why I never – bitter lesson – confuse the feeling of lightness in writing – the happiness of breaking through – with the merit of what is written: what is worse than reading my own prose after being carried along, say, by Frank Bascombe’s voice in The Sportswriter or Independence Day (which I’ve just begun)?

Let those rich in dreams do that. The young, and the young at heart – whose youth, I would also say, is not yet the youth of a writing that has broken from being merely their possibility. And that is why I think failure is necessary for writing – that it must begin in collapse, and that I do not believe the merits and accolades Saul Bellow lists on the flap of Humboldt’s Gift: mustn’t he have failed once? Mustn’t he have been crushed by failure?

This is what Kafka knew – and Bernhard – and Beckett. It’s what Duras knew, with her drinking, and perhaps even Henry Green, although he is always opaque for me. And it is what makes the other writers dull, or at least unnecessary – I won’t list their names here.

My own prose – what laughter! My own writing – laughter again! Nothing is justified in what I put down here. Nothing, made in the hobby shed at the end of the garden of my life. A question mark hovers above Brod in the margins of Kafka’s life, writes Benjamin, very beautifully. And a question mark hovers above this excuse for prose, this endless blowy lyricism. But I laugh at that, too, and this, I think, is why I am a man of joy: nothing is sought here except to make a mark. Nothing: except the laughter of writing that opens a small stream for itself, like lava breaking open a new flow.

Morning, and I listen, entranced, to Paddy McAloon’s I Trawl the Megahertz for the first time. Narration over synthesised strings, loose – his own story, I think, or I would like to think, but not in his voice, and that is beautiful. A woman’s voice – whose? and why hers? – but it works, it’s glorious; it’s as Chris Marker films might be, though I’ve never seen one. Marker, to whose scripts I’ve linked and which I run through my head sometimes, wondering what the images might be like.

I’ve never had a DVD player, and my TV is too old for Freeview – no scart – so I’ve fallen away from films these past few years, though I used to watch two or three a day back in Manchester. How else to keep myself in my room, and working, or preparing to work, the non-flatscreen monitor on, keyboard ready, though I don’t think I really knew how to work, back then? How else: I watched films, and film after film, from the free library at the university.

But I stopped myself remembering them – stopped buying film magazines, or reading film websites: I wanted another kind of unconscious, and not to wake at night and know myself to be toting up pieces of information, facts running down in my head like the numbers in The Matrix. Neglect memory, don’t feed it – and besides, there’s something about film too forced, too all-at-once: better, for me, an open book, the surface of a page.

And didn’t I discover reading again, in the years of neglect, when my memory seemed to peel away from itself, as clouds unpeeled reveal the sky? Reading: and neglectfully, borrowing books from here and there, and not keeping them, and not remembering their authors, nor what they were about. Stir up memory and forgetting another way, I told myself. Stir it up, like a mixing stick in a cocktail. And let the white words set against the blackness of forgetting thread through my unconscious.

Unowned words – words from no particular source, loose phrases: stirred up, like silt from a river bed, turning – but for no particular purpose and pointing in no particular direction. But I Trawl the Megahertz is really lovely, rarely so – I’m playing it over, having listened close first of all, right up against the speakers, surprised and enthralled – concentrating – and then more distantly to the later tracks, there in the other room, where I finished Ford’s Sportswriter.

A woman’s voice – who is she? – acousmatically floating from her body – but who is she? – and behind whom, giving her lines, Paddy McAloon himself, who must live around here, somewhere. McAloon, whose songs we used to sing on the school bus, and whose band I went to see back in 1985, when we were really too young to be allowed in the venue.

It seems fitting my computer is slowing down, and you can see the cursor blinking slowly, and the words do not come onto the screen as I type them, but after a little pause. Fitting – as though the computer, too, had forgotten what it is, or its memory had been sent on some kind of detour. Perhaps it is also entranced by I Trawl the Megahertz, and isn’t there something to be written about singing computers – Grandaddy’s Jez, those back on Dazzleships?

Singing machines: how beautiful. Singing, sad machines: more beautiful still, and I think of the moving sculptures of Vermillion Sands. Her voice, not Paddy’s, though he gave her those lines, and perhaps in his home studio, not far from here. Her voice, floating, not his: how was it for him to hear her voice speaking his, her’s in the place of his, setting words afloat that he wrote, I imagine, in the midst of some illness, for there’s a crisis behind their untroubled surface? And now, in my imagination, I travel back to Robert Wyatt’s bedside, when he was dreaming up Rock Bottom.

Wow, things are really slowing up here. Window moves to window so slowly; the computer’s asleep – seduced – it’s dreaming, it’s carried along, swept, by I Trawl the Megahertz, and we are all asleep, all of us who read and write and listen.

Asleep – but awake, in life – awake, but with sleep all around us like a cape: what is this day going to give, I ask myself, when it has begun so dreamily? Saturday, and I let myself off work until later. Saturday, a blank, white sky, so unlike the usual high-up blue to which we’re used on this side of the country: don’t we always seem blessed, those of us who live here, when, on the weather forecast, cloud and rain curves round our region, but never reaches it?

Paddy McAloon isn’t far from here, I tell myself. Not far, and in his studio, with all his unreleased songs – whole albums. Everyone’s infuriated with him for not releasing more, he knows it. Does he mind? Has he been caught, like me, in a kind of falling? Has the glider slipped from its smooth streaming into a gentle movement down, but only down?

I’ve always warned myself: never store up stuff; never leave things unfinished – get it all out there, get it out, finished, however provisionally: do not be like McAloon and his tapes in his studio. And now? Nothing’s finished, and nothing’s being published. A long drifting, without hope, but without real suffering. A long numbness, a kind of anaesthetic against time and moving forward. Feel nothing. Or let feeling fall from thought, peeling itself away, until it lies, thought, in dreaming pools beneath the sky.

And now I think a kind of sickness has seized this computer, which is whole minutes behind what I type. Where is its speed? Where is speed lost? On what secret tasks is it bent, or has its energies, like mine, turned vastly on itself, moving inward, or is it outward, in a slow corriolis?

A white sky, and a wind-ravaged yard, the plants having fallen over in the night. The wind, I imagined, turned within its enclosed space like a whirlwind. Turning, and moving nowhere, not like the cartoon Tazz, who moves in a whirlwind, turning in himself as he moves hectically forward. The cursor beats slowly; words appear letter by slow letter, spelling out what I wrote tens of seconds ago.

The computer’s in a fugue, as am I, and how I have a name for my post: The Fugue or A Fugue: the definite or indefinite article? That was how Lynch presented Lost Highway, I remember: a fugue film, a film of fugues, where one becomes another and the end is the beginning. We waited five years for a new Lynch film, and that was it. ‘Bobbins’, said my friend, back in Manchester.

‘Bobbins’: ‘Song of the Siren’ thrown away, what a waste! Wasn’t it to have been used in Blue Velvet? But that would have deprived us of ‘The Mysteries of Love’, written in its stead. A fugue song. A song for a film about fugues. An a fugue post, itself a fugue, written on a dreaming computer by a man in the middle of life in whom a dream rises like the wave in Hokusai’s painting.

In the middle of life – how did that happen? How old am I now? – and the ocean reared up, all of it – all of the past in the present, as Deleuze sometimes says. All of it, and pressing forward, and pressing me forward, gathered as a wave gathers itself up to break.

A bland, white day; we haven’t escaped the weather, not this time. On the forecast, I saw wind was coming across Britain from the West. An American wind, or an Atlantic one, come from that eternally new country, or the eternally new sea that the welling ridge that runs down its middle like a seam is pushing both East and West.

The Atlantic is broadening, and the wider Pacific narrowing, but only a few feet a year it’s true, but one day the continents will have a new shape on the surface of the earth. I remember a simulation in a Time Life book of how our earth would look ten million years hence, or was it a hundred? Hadn’t the Americas been unjoined again? Hadn’t the Rift Valley broken another Madagascar like island from the body of Africa? Hadn’t the Himalayas been driven yet higher by India’s collision, a subcontinent adrift, with Asia’s long Southern edge?

And I remember the islands of Indonesia had thickened, too, and what had happened to our island, in the middle of everywhere, all maps, just as Greenwich Mean Time is the centre of time? But perhaps it will all be drowned soon, by the rising sea, or covered over by the ice sheets that will spread as far down as Nottingham, and obliterate my poor city on the northeast coast.

And now I can hear McAloon’s own silvery voice singing about a silver beard. He only sings a little on this album. ‘I’m lost – yes – I am lost’, sung slowly, over strings that rise silverly like his voice. I tell myself that he, too, was in a fugue, as he trawled the megahertz like a satellite dish that cups signals from the stars. Trawls them, and they trawl in him, unfurling like nebulas, coming apart, the universe in reverse, feeling its way within him back along the blocks and ridges of dark matter that have been mapped for the first time.

I scroll upwards to look at my post, but the computer is dreaming. Too slow – and it will take minutes to publish, and minutes to appear at the top of the blog, and how long when I read it there and pick up the typos, each of which drives a soft nail into my heart?

My day is widening like the Atlantic. And so is my life – widened, exposed, spread out like a pool reflecting nothing. In the middle of life, and no Virgil to guide me. Lead yourself by your own nose, like a horse. Go by going, as Cixous’ Lispector says, like a blind woman in the field. Turn into darkness like de Niro’s character at the end of The Last Tycoon: is it for reason of that film that I keep my rooms, at night, so dark? To disappear, to have disappeared, and only to be gathered mometarily by acts of attention, like the beam of a lighthouse searching in the dark?

Widening, a surface rawly exposed, and a wind passing across it: obscure pain. Indifferent pain, that of no one in particular. A stretched membrane of skin. The widening ocean, too large to contain itself. The vast creature that, on land, would be crushed by its own weight, ribs collapsing like a bombed cathedral.

Only ten A.M., but evening seems to lap against the shores of the day. Evening already, which means night at noon. But outside, the whiteness has passed. I see the forms of clouds going quickly above, and the blue sky that is usually our just desserts in this part of the country.

My teacher friend tells me that when it blows about out, the children are as if blown along the classrooms and corridors inside – blown about in their heads too, unable to settle, the wind still bearing them along. Tonight, the wind howls in the old chimney breast, where the back boiler is now. And I can hear it outside – no doubt it’s overturned some of the plants in the yard, including the one whose pot broke a few weeks back, and that stands, a cone of earth held together by roots.

In my vagueness I sometimes tell myself I should go down to B & Q for a new pot; nothing happens, though. And nothing ever does, not really, vagueness having turned my life into a glassy surface remote from whatever vague place I occupy. Yesterday a long post, botched. A long, sprawling post, replying to everyone. And today? Enough to get through the day. Enough to link moment to moment and live all at once, in a forwards direction.

Did it matter that I finally let myself hear Self Portrait – there’s a few artists whose LPs I ration myself, so there will always be new things to be discover as the decades pass?; Bob Dylan is one – The Fall are another, old constants, to whom I’ve been listening almost as long as I’ve been listening to music, but things to get by both of them, still. What kind of faith in time does that reveal? A faith that my life will spread out, decade after decade?

Lately I’ve felt farther from work that ever before. Vagueness keeps me from it; a kind of mist descends; it is not unpleasant, or not merely so. I thought to myself today: it’s 12 days old, but I’m already lost in this year. It’s as though I cannot break the surface, cannot breathe, or act. A single clean sentence, I tell myself. A single simple action – a gesture arising of itself, natural. But it doesn’t come; it doesn’t happen.

The same, and again. The same, with which I used to be content: remember when you were unemployed, and took the same walk over and again. Remember it, and X., always exasperated at me for taking that same walk, and wanting her to take it with me. Ah, what secret autobiography could be written of those who I disappoint. Didn’t she leave me in disgust? Or did I leave her? But I’m not capable of that.

I remember accepting a ride home from her from town, and just getting out, and never seeing her again. Stranded, jobless, what kind of prospect was I? I never complained, I said to her, I wasn’t that type. And I was looking for work back at Hewlett Packard, where I was before I went to study. She kissed me on the cheek when I said that, in pity. She pitied me, but what of herself, when a year and a half before she’d told me breathlessly of her great plans? At least I never had such plans, I thought to myself then. Never – I knew they couldn’t happen, and to me above all.

But I shouldn’t follow the winding course of autobiography any further. Discretion. Respect that. Ah but to follow it and to write of those who looked at me in disappointment, when I’d told them from the first how it was going to be. And I was right, always. And contentedly so. What a curse is ambition, and how happy I am without, living at the periphery, where we all should live! That reassurance at least in the midst of that vagueness that dissolves ambition.

Yesterday, an expert on drying came out to look at the kitchen. Hack away the plaster and expose the brick; put in the dryers for a fortnight, and then see. I agreed. And today, the loss adjuster agreed, and met in my kitchen with the manager of the workmen who were to carry out the job. How impersonal it became, my flat! The meeting place of strangers, the damp a problem others were to solve.

Mould forms on the wet walls. And there’s a layer of salt at the damp’s edges: I like it, and wonder what metamorphosis it signifies. Does it mean the plaster’s drying? The damp’s not in the air as it used to be. But the drying expert said my damp was off the meter – he’s only seen a few cases like it, he said, very friendly. We went into the yard, past the plants, and looked up at the wall.

He didn’t know what was causing it. It was a mystery to him as to everyone. But still the sound of rushing water. Still that sound, which perhaps only I can hear. Is that the source: a burst pipe, an underground river flooding through concrete and into the brick? What does it matter? Vagueness descends, and I forget everything but the struggle to join minute to minute.

Later, having spent a whole day adrift, wandering from here to there, unable to focus or to concentrate, I copied a chunk of posts from Larval Subjects to annotate: I gave myself that job. Saturate yourself with Lacan, I told myself; become damp with it – let it seep into your hidden places and then leach out of you, leaving a fine crust of salt on your skin. Hadn’t I made a plan to write a post on each of the types Fink analyses in his Clinical Introduction?

This is the Year of Psychoanalysis, I said to myself a few days ago, just as other years have meant other things. Didn’t I saturate myself, once, in Heidegger? And then the others? It came to end with Deleuze, something failed in me. That was three years ago, The Great Summer of Work, when everything began to fail, and I knew myself to have been cast adrift, becalmed in the great wideness of the vague. I tried to work; I remember it – everyday, across the field and back, eight to eight in the office, and wanting only to read, and write.

Weeks passed; months; a whole summer. But something had failed in me, and I was back again disappointing X. back in my years of unemployment. Work was a ritual to hold myself together. But it was only an empty form. I was open somewhere else just like the field. Somewhere else I was lying down and the clouds were passing, and a blank and sightless sky beyond.

Is vagueness the grounding mood to which I’m attuned? The ground of all my moods, the obscure centre about which they turn: I know it only when they seem to come apart, those other moods and there is only vagueness behind. I remember vague days in Manchester, David and I in facing arm chairs, rain outside. ‘Let’s give up!’ he said, of his attempt to work, and mine. What point was there? It was raining again, the weather was heavy again. And here, on the other coast, where it is nearly always fresh? How can vagueness survive here, when it should be blown away in those coastal winds that take the clouds very quickly across the sky?

The whole sky seemed to be moving tonight, as I walked home. The whole sky: and I could tilt back my head to see it, not being on my bike, wanting to walk and be reassured by the measure of walking. To walk and in my steps join moment to moment and succeed in entering the rhythm of time, observing its external form, if nothing else. Its form and not the strange matter of time torn apart, of moments that never achieve themselves.

Do we really desire to desire (Lacan)? I wonder if it assumes a too unitary point from which desire begins, or have I misunderstood: is it from desire that we are each of us born and that tacks ahead of us? Well, that great initial gust has left me now. Or at least it does not bear me along inside, as my friend tells me it bears her schoolchildren. The wind is there only to reveal the sky behind: my vagueness, absolute, and so simple it barely seems mine.

The rivers are flooding, I see on the news. Swollen rivers, overrunning their banks: isn’t this the afternoon lost to vagueness? White light on water. The clouds tearing across reflected on water. Nothing is hidden; it’s all there: mystery, and all at once. A mystery of the surface, of the sky’s lack of depth: I would say, quite certain, that I inherited my vagueness, and my dad had it too, and, like me, he sought at one point to let himself be claimed by it yet further – he cut down on tea and coffee; he faced the evening uncaffeinated, just as I do.

I strand myself in the afternoon, but with that steady knowledge that another day is rolling round, and morning will come again, that eternal freshness in which work might begin. I think it takes a kind of wisdom to bear it as it is, without caffeine or alcohol. A man who drinks is interplanetary, says Duras. And: an alcoholic is cosmic. I think that’s true – I think to drink is to stir up the sky, to shake it and watch its patterns. To see again the cosmic and the whole afternoon, vaster than the universe with the courage of drink. The whole sky like a nebula, torn apart.

What did Pascal say? ‘The silence of infinite spaces terrifies me’ – something like that. A quote Bernhard sets at the beginning of one of his books; and don’t I remember, very clearly, telling a friend as a child that each star in the sky was a sun like our own, and that each might have planets like our own, and that someone might be looking down at us, a gaze lost in their sky, just as ours was lost in ours?

The chance of this post came after everything, after the whole day passed and I could find no way to mark it. Perhaps writing is a way in which desire gives itself to itself, playing with what it might become like a seal balancing a beach ball. Eternal youth: is that writing? Is that what writing would mark as the morning opens? Just that, at the beginning of the day: a spreading page, a page spread out, and it is enough merely to have coincided with oneself for long enough to begin.

To begin – and just that: isn’t it enough in my years of vagueness? Isn’t it enough, at the outset, at the beginning of the day, to have recorded my presence? I was there to write. Here I am: nothing more. Addressed to whom? Calling whom? Not even myself, else why would the act have to repeated – lines of writing that precede any work I might do? An act and not an act, or one that is only an indication of what it might have been. A paragraph – several – that I forget as fast as they are written. A mystery to me, a damp surface by which workmen come and go.

But the vagueness will come again, like mist. It’s always on its way, the same and always the same, as sure as the writing that struggles against it. Faith: that it will not swallow everything. Faith: that the morning will roll around, and there will be writing again, just as there are always more LPs by Bob Dylan to hear.

A husk of a day, which I finish by watching Ullman’s Faithless, from a script by Bergman, and hoping by watching I will keep Bergman living for a few years more. Is he still alone on his island? Does he still spend the day writing? I am alone here, but I cannot write for a whole day, or read. But I open a notebook as I watch the film, in hope.

I write, Zarathustra’s beard, remembering how it turned white at the end of Book Four, but how he strides out again as though young. I write, the unalterable, thinking of the field across which I walked alone, and the great cloud I saw above the city – ten miles wide, or twenty – and felt assured that the weather pays no heed to me, and nor do the laws of physics; they are what they are: unalterable.

And I write, the witness, thinking of Isabelle, the suffering child of Ullman’s film, who cries in her bed, surrounded by toys, as her parents row, then break up, as her father kills herself, as her mother screams when she is cheated upon by her new lover. The witness: thinking, too, of Duras’s remarks on the drafting of Destroy, She Said, where it was the presence of Stein, who barely acts, that allowed her to write the story. The witness, she says, who is present in Lol V. Stein and The Vice-Consul, though in different ways.

And I wrote, the suicide note, thinking again of the film: what is it supposed to explain? To write and finish writing; to draw a line under your life. A note: to whom is it left to decipher, and what can they make of it? And I thought of a failed note, begun and never finished, so that no line can be drawn and the suicide lives as a survivor. And my penultimate note, Rush-That-Speaks, remembering again the narrator of Crowley’s Engine Summer who is alive to speak to an unknown audience, just as Ullman’s Marianne is made to speak of her life to the old man, the old director, alone on his island.

It is Sunday, 7th January 2006, and the year is very young. Young, but I’ve already lost hold on the onward movement of days. The kitchen fitter comes Tuesday morning, early. The Loss Adjuster, so unlike Egoyan’s character, on Friday at 10.00, along with the company she’s employed to take care of the damp. Then, at some point, dehumidifiers will be installed, to suck the damp out of the air, and see if it is improving, as a whole, or getting worse.

Very well – and I am thankful that my week is marked out thus, that a morning will be allowed to be a morning. How is it I’ve thought in the past days of my old friend who is also, in some way, an outsider? What a dramatic term! But isn’t it the case there are those whom life has surprised by being what it is? By giving him a wife, and children, and a house. A marvellous gift – he wouldn’t deny that – but one which comes from far, and obscurely; which has reached him by some kind of chance. It chose him: very well, he said, and he’s a good husband and father. But how is it I feel he lives his life, as I do, at one remove?

My beard is getting white: two white patches, where there was one. There is red there, among the dark brown, in my beard: Nordic ancestry. Erik the Red. Alone in the middle of life, just as Bergman is alone at the end. All those dramas about rich actresses and directors, I say to myself of him. All those rich, spoilt Swedes in their great houses. So successful, all of them, I tell myself. When they fall, they do not fall very far.

But there is always more to Bergman, that’s for sure. I don’t like her, your Marianne, says Marianne to the old director in the film. And so Marianne, this Marianne (the real one drowned, we learn almost at the end of the film) is not the one who lived. Isn’t this what we saw at the beginning, when the old director called her into being, in her flesh and blood (her voice trembles, coming from nowhere: Who am I?)?

She is beautiful, of course. Too beautiful, always that. Beautiful enough that her beauty runs ahead of her in the world. She will not fall very far. Or what she calls falling is only a sham. Always, still, her beauty. This I tell myself, but also that the Marianne who speaks to him, the old director, is not the real Marianne, but a ghost, an image. He has called her into existence. She came to him, but she is unreal.

We dammed up a few days for ourselves at the beginning of the year, my Visitor and I. That’s how I thought of it: a few days, running thickly into one another like treacle: I can barely separate one incident from another: on what day did we …? when did we …? But now the year begins again; the water is pouring over the brink, and I must be ready.

Tomorrow is Monday. Tomorrow, work must begin. Write the review; finish it; it’s not a big task, after all. It’s nothing; in the old days, three or four years ago, it would take you no more than a fortnight, but now? Now, I would say, I’m someone else; I’m like the old director, though I can never quite summon him, the one who should work, who lives in the day, who is to do my bidding. He has never quite arrived, and is only here in outline.

Work!, I command him. Work for me! But I can barely reply to emails from my friends. Barely write to them, and it is not only that part of me lives back then, in the sweet, lush thickness of days. What is this weakness, as after a hot bath? What is this new reluctance, this laying down of all work in me?

Say this: for the first time, I have money enough to … Say this: for the first time, free of all debts, I’ll … There’s a stack of new books on my desk: all those I could not afford before, new, unread. Will I read them? I have tried, and failed, to harden resolutions for myself. To say: I will undertake this course or action, or that, and put on my seven league boots to stride through the year.

Once again – this year, like the last, such resolutions are blown away like grain from an open hand. You’ll achieve nothing and less than nothing, says the new year. And I’ll write from my failure and from my falling, even though I can no longer fall very far.

Once, I think I would have given a good deal to be able to write like this, such as this writing is. A good deal – but didn’t I know that it can come only in neglect, only when a shadow falls over the whole of your life, like that from the dark cloud I saw spread over the city?

Write by way of carelessness. Write as you know failure on the real field of your achievement; in truth, writing must be what you come to last, having failed elsewhere, even if writing was what you wanted from the first. Come to it then when it means nothing to you, or you know you could say in perfect honesty that you might give it up tomorrow.

Writing, I would give you up. Writing, it would be nothing at all. And once, to think, in front of every film, I sat with a notebook. Once, it wasn’t enough to carry vague ideas in my head like fireflies, but had to trap them before me in the sealed jar of a notebook.

And of what is there to write? Of failure, and of that gap in failure that lets writing begin. The ‘merciful surplus’, as Kafka called it, that let despair bloom and weariness leap joyfully into the air.

What have I done today? Failed. Failed, but what else? Filled the flat with the smell of bacon. Finished, mournfully the last of my Visitor’s pie. Texted her in mourning and then in joy when she texted back. Set a course for the office over the field. Sat by my unheated desk in an office block wrapped in scaffolding. Walked back listening to The Fall on my headphones.

And all the time, a life in lieu, a life echoing with what it was not. And then I thanked the laws of physics for being what they were, and I thanked the leafless branches that seem to curve around the street lamp, and I thanked the hardness of the pavement I walked alone: something is certain, something unalterable.

The occasional, I wrote, earlier today – just that. The day, the occasion of writing, which may or may not be marked there – think, for example, of the rules governing the composition of haiku: a word for the time of day, a word for the season … but compare that to the conference paper that is to have no reference to the circumstances under which it was written, drawing life into its orbit only to send it out as an example.

How the occasional suffers in academic writing! Haven’t I the chance to unsnap its iron collar here? Isn’t that the gift I give the occasional, that it is not the genie I can summon and dismiss at will? Give shelter to the day, give it shelter. Shelter it that it can come close to you, the day, the everyday, as it remains blank and remote like an autistic child.

In what language does it speak? Within what labyrinth is it lost? I would write its suicide note, if I could, to finish it off. But writing can never trap the day, it cannot catch it. A dream catcher is not built like a net, and writing must not be a cage for an occasional, but show it freedom, show it that it is free on all sides. Only then might it come and lie down like a cat at the heart of your writing (turning around in a circle first, then another, and then tucking up its paws …). Only then, in its freedom, might it give your writing a reciprocal freedom, as the fairy gave life to Pinocchio.

The life of writing lies only in its idiom, and in the movement into the idiom. Lies only in that contraction of sense before it is breathed out, in the drawing of dull blood into the heart to be pumped out afresh. No resolutions. Only to lead writing like a horse back into itself. Only to disappear, like de Niro’s character in the final scene of The Last Tycoon, into the darkness.

How far can I fall? Not very far. But haven’t I been falling for a long time? All of my life? I ate too much bacon today – two packets. I didn’t read my books. I ate until I was too full, and walked out, and walked back. The warm flat, music playing from the computer: back, and to what?

A pool of light in the darkness. My desk at home, different to my desk at work. Two empty bottles of wine. A squeezed out tube of honey, shaped like a beehive. An old television without Freeview: all the items by which I navigate my life, landmarks familiar and unfamiliar, which fall under the protection of the occasional.

The Furies became the Eumenides, who guarded every home. And I think it is the Eumenides who are watching over me now. Do you see me?, I ask them. Do you see in your blindness, which lets you see only what you cannot? As I walk from the bed to the toilet in the night, I spread my hand on my belly. You’re getting fat, I tell myself. I’m getting fat, but my belly is round and hard, like my uncle’s. But how old was he then, when I saw him spreading a hand on his belly?

A husk of a day, when nothing happened, and everything did. The occasional is close, I tell myself. The occasional watches me, the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, from the CD remote and the television guide; from the empty bowl of cereal and Fink’s book beside me. And now I hope Bergman is also watched, and I ask the Kindly Ones to give him blessing, he at the end of his life, and I in the middle of mine.

A swig of Lucozade one day is enough to ruin the next one; energy gained one early evening is energy lost the next morning. What was it I intended to do? But I’m lost from that and any task; I cannot rise to the day. Honey on ricecakes instead. I keep the curtains drawn.

Should I go into the office and read my email? But there’s email unanswered at my private address, too, and the eternal debt of letters to write. Other debts, too – abstracts and whole papers to put together. Why did I agree to speak there, and there, and on those topics?

Why should I have anything in common with other Jews, Kafka asks, when I’ve nothing in common with myself? But that ‘nothing in common’ need not be anguished. Isn’t it pleasant to be relieved from the tasks you have been set, and even from catching up with correspondence?

You’ve been let off, I tell myself, and now the day, and a year of such days opens in another way. This line from Handke’s journals: ‘I am deathly afraid, I pick up my pencil and am surprised how calm everything becomes. Afraid? No, not that. Vague. Lost somehow. ‘Dreamy’ as Richard Ford’s character would have it: is that the word? In lieu of – something.

Whence the book the character writes. Whence Handke’s mighty oeuvre. But from that first being-in-lieu – not a debt as such, but that hollowing that allows a call to echo inside you. To be called – is that right? Called – but only as you fall. To fall and be called as you fall; to place a few words side by side even as you forget them. Even as you’ve forgotten already what was written yesterday, and the act of writing of them.

But you can imagine day pressed upon day, one day, another, and each hollowed out exactly alike. Hollowed out in you, who become the echo chamber of what does not cease to reverberate. Perhaps there is a kind of speech that is the interruption of speech – that silence which places parentheses around the chatter of the day.

Isn’t this what Heidegger calls the call of conscience? But it is the converse I imagine: a kind of rumour, a movement of unsubstantiated gossip so light that it drifts willy-nilly from speaker to speaker. A speech that no one owns, such as the one Duras allows her characters to speak at the long party in The Vice-Consul – and shouldn’t I add the speech of the Grandmother in her apartments to the old antiquarian in Fanny and Alexander?

The interruption of firm and directed speech, then. A kind of gossip, then: a speech so light that it only bows the tips of the wheat in the field. A wind you hardly knew that passed, but it passed. And now I remember Red Thread(s)’ glacial writing, vast but also ignorable in its tiny forward movement. ‘Constant, incremental movement’: that’s how he thinks a daily act of writing.

An act as transparent as the day and that lets the day shine there. Shine? But the day is only transparency, that medium through which light might pass. Unless the day, like Duchamp’s large glass only slows light down, and now the medium is no longer a medium, and your writing is like the whiteness of a cataract. The day cannot see, not anymore. Blind day, that sees only what it cannot.

I think last year was made of such days, one lying down upon another. I imagine a flowerpress, and then a distillery – and the distilled essence of the day, opaque like ouzo mixed with water. Pressed days, one upon another until they hint at some kind of final, definitive shape: what is it I know that forms in a writing that begins anew day after day? But perhaps it is my curse not to know it, and it’s under that curse that I write. What does it mean to become a rorshach to oneself?

Analysis is supposed to allow affect to be reunited with thought – no longer will you feel without knowing how you feel. You’ll live in common with yourself once again – no more will your feelings drift like low cloud over the moors. But what when thought is only that drifting, the movement of clouds in the white sky? What when thought has opened wider than itself, and affects are so diffuse as no longer to be able to name particular moods?

Are you alive, and for whom? Do you live anymore, or are you only the image of the same white sky that looks at you without being able to see you? Under no one’s gaze you are nothing at all. A rumour on everyone’s lips. A kind of sigh that bears all speech, but that disappears when you try to hear it. And now you are neglected like that neglected speech of which you dream.

Word is placed against word, sentence against sentence; you write quickly, all at once, and only later do you break them apart into separate paragraphs. First of all, that rush of words, that drifting rush, obscure urgency. A passing in which no one passes: what does it mean to have fallen?

Idle speech, chattering speech: do not think you can draw it back to itself, Gerede to Rede. Do not think you can bear it in common, that which turns each of you from what is said to its whispering to-say.

I think this is what The Sportswriter does, and remarkably: to let what is written wear thin that of which is so brilliantly written about. Bascombe’s light joy, his insouciance, his dreaminess which, he says, he has in common with all sportswriters: the events he reports (but I am only 100 pages into the book) seem to speak without settling into the firmness of a plot.

Events retold only to give substance to the demand to write, to the call that comes only as he has fallen from his marriage. Fallen – and now he hears, for he is hollowed out, the imperative to set down events as they are given. Given – as he gives them again in writing, letting them push themselves forward as the tips of wheat might be bowed by the wind.

This is a writing that bows to writing. Like the second part of Blanchot’s Death Sentence what matters is to set down those events which allow the redoubling of the world, producing its image and not the world itself. No longer will day pass simply into day. Something must be kept, some opacity, a glass of cloudy water.

Drink! as Derrida commands at the end of his second long essay on Levinas. Drink, then – let the passing of days congeal in you. Let it clot your arteries and kill you. What does it mean to die without knowing that you’re dying? What does it mean to survive death? 

And now I remember D.H. Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Died’: he remembers his past life at a distance, Lawrence’s dead man. It’s far away from him now, and he can begin again, this reborn Jesus, who is no longer the Christ. Of whom, now is he the Messiah, when he has nothing in common with himself? Messianicity without messianism – is that the expression?

I think there is a kind of speaking that lets that same messianicity resound. I think you can hear it at the back of our throat (Lyotard on Malraux). I think it can be heard in the breath, which is only the continuation of that which we recieved from our Maker. But what if there is no Maker, and no one to animated the damp clay from which we are made? That clay, too, can speak – the body’s words, like a mouth full of blood, speaking to say nothing in blood bubbles, letting a life dribble from your lips.

Speech is prophecy; it runs ahead of us. Speech as it thickens and kills us by its clot. Speech as blood dribbles from our mouths. What is the line from Trakl? A cut on the forehead. Speaking of far things. But speech that is called speaks always of the far, and brings it close.

The future is here – but it is not mine. The future – but it is not mine. To have died and still to know the future, to know it dimly, like Lawrence’s character. To stretch dead limbs. To take air into the bottom of dead lungs. Smoothen the page with your dead man’s palm; take up your pen with your dead man’s hand. Write; speak.

To know a year of such days; to awaken dead and write from it each morning; to forget, with the forgetting of death. What is the future Lawrence’s character knows for himself? I open my curtains: the yard, the dried out soil of the potted plants. I go into the kitchen and run the edge of my hand along the damp walls. I switch the kettle on for tea: events, non-events, curling open like molluscs from their shells.

To what do they bear witness? To whose call do they respond? The sky is blue behind white. It’s five years and one day since I moved to this city, I tell myself. Five years and one day since we drove up in a hired van. It’s nearly one year since I came back from India, I tell myself. It’s a handful of days since my Visitor departed, opening this whole flat to me anew in her wake.

Anew: memory is thick in me. Memory like molasses, where no event stands out from the streaming of the others. It’s a few hours since I awoke, tired, into this Sunday, and forty minutes since I began this post. Separate your prose into paragraphs, I tell myself. Pull up your writing and let it stand by itself, like a ship that is pulled up to stand up in a bottle.

Have I spoken? Have I let speaking speak? (I’ll awaken my trolls with those kinds of questions. ‘You’re so pretentious’, etc …) Never mind those questions that ask for a judgement of which I am incapable. Never mind the answers that arise only to come apart in the turbulence of a call. This morning I know my year to have failed just as last year failed. Failed – and I fell, across the days, and opened my eyes as I fell, and unclenched my hands. And saw what failed to see me: the opaque sky, light that burned from nowhere.

Shouldn’t I write, I ask myself, until my hour is done? I am listening to Espers – the first and second albums. Richard Ford’s book is open in the other room. Hadn’t I dressed to go into the office? Shouldn’t I be there now, answering emails and tidying my desk? First of all, a title for my post. Idle Speech, I consider. No: too bland. Glacial Writing?  Too derivative. And now I know: Pressed Writing, as I remember the twin flower presses that were bought for us once, my sister and me.

Pressed Writing: and why do I also remember the musical box I wanted as a child to buy for my mum? What would I want one of those for?, she said, and I thought: small things are always secret, and it is nice to share a small thing with a small tune.

What made me think of that? Idle thoughts, drifting thoughts that unbraid themselves like a river that splits into distributaries: is that what has happened to my life, such that I can barely write to plan? Has its course become silted up – has its long streaming given way to islands of silt and the choking of channels? And isn’t that another way to understand this blog, and all of my blogging: clots in my arteries, silt-islands in the stream?

We are entertaining Blah-Feme, who’s been pressing me about the damp. ‘Is it getting better or worse?’ It’s not that simple, I tell him. ‘It must be – better, or worse – which is it?’ He has a look. Small coarse flakes are forming over part of the wall. ‘It’s the lime,’ says Blah-Feme confidently, ‘it’s leaching through the wall.’

I’m impressed; Blah-Feme is immensely positive. But when I ask him to place his hand against other parts of the wall, his expression changes. ‘It is very wet.’ – ‘I told you!’ And it is wet, perhaps as wet as ever, or perhaps not. Either way, the Loss Adjuster rang me to say she wasn’t sure the damp came from a single source. She sounds tender. ‘I’m not sure we’ll be able to cover it.’

She’s going to bring in dehumidifiers to see whether that makes a difference. ‘If it doesn’t, I’m not sure what we can do.’ She’ll be around herself in a week. How tender she is! The workmen she hired tell me she’s very stern. And yet she’s tender with me! I thank her.

W. always tells me how craven I am with waiters in restaurants. ‘You have to be more forceful.’ I always surprise him by my unassertiveness. ‘You’re essentially weak. You’re a weak person.’ The loss adjuster, who I’m told – and I can believe it – is normally stern, is being tender with me: how can I help my weakness?

I tell her I look forward to seeing her, and hope we can resolve the matter. My best business voice. ‘How do you think we can go forward with this?’, I ask her at another point in the conversation. ‘Go forward’ – we’re in it together, the Loss Adjuster and I. We have a shared project, about which we both care. ‘How can we go forward with this?’

How indeed? If the workmen are right, the insurers will do their best to get out of paying. What should I do – scrape the lime (if it’s lime from the walls)? Let it stay there, if, as Blah-Feme says, it’s evidence of the wall drying? For a time, I’m lightly panicked. I decide to eat everything in the kitchen. Thankfully there’s very little. I sit back on the sofa, bloated.

The damp! What is to be done! Nothing is to be done, I tell myself, not now. Be calm. But I wake up at four this morning, with damp on my mind, as well as that old schoolfriend of mine who turned out to be a paedophile. I lie awake think of damp, then the paedophile, in his secure unit and back again. And I think of the year behind me, and the year spreading out before me.

Disaster, and right at the beginning of the year! Fortunately, there is the great consolation (oh, it’s better than that!) announced in the word ‘We’ at the beginning of this post. I’ll be discreet. But tonight (last night), there’s no one lying beside me. I’m alone with my idiocy. Four AM! Why is it always four AM? For a week, I was able to sleep, I slept like a normal person, but then, after her departure?

I am not to speak of my decline, she says. And Blah-Feme agreed: ‘you’ll have to get him to stop that.’ That was over Blah-Feme’s table at New Year’s Eve. I had said, ‘more disaster. It’ll be terrible, a terrible year, just like the last one.’ No one was impressed. ‘You’ll have to get him to stop that.’ I did stop; that was the last such pronouncement from me. Where was W. when I needed him?

For a whole week I could sleep; it was beautiful. I used the phrase ‘it’s beautiful’, too often. That was tiresome, too. I said of blogging, ‘it’s beautiful’; of Youtube, ‘it’s beautiful’, of our Dogma rules, ‘they’re beautiful’, and all the way a small look of rapture crossing my face. I was lost, for a moment. But then there was her face (my Visitor’s) as I played the video of ‘Mr Me Too’ by Clipse. We watched excerpts of an old Nina Simone concert from the 70s. ‘What was she on?’ Her audience were terrified; we were terrified. She asked them to sing along; we felt commanded to sing along. The next day on the moor, I was still singing. ‘Feelings … nothing else but feelings …’

A whole week of sleeping. Of ales in the 15 good pubs in town. Of a hundred played CDs. Of six cooked breakfasts. Of empty bottles of wine and one of Plymouth Gin. A day in the bath. A day at the coast. Five viewings of ‘Drop It Like it’s Hot’. Two of Michael Jackson’s moonwalk. Karen Dalton. Fred Neil …

And meanwhile, the damp either drying or getting worse – which was it? ‘It’s going to be the year of psychoanalysis’, I told anyone who would listen. Fink has broken through the hard shell of my idiocy. The obsessive versus the hysteric. The psychotic. Pointers on therapy: beautiful, all of this. I feel lightened – less like an idiot – a psychoanalytic universe opens before me.

Satantango is out on triple DVD. It’s an omen. I should buy copies for all my friends. This will be the year for watching films again, I tell myself. A new TV, a DVD player (I’ve never had one). But isn’t it enough to hold on from one day to another? What can plans be to me? No plans: one day, then another; one step, another.

In the other room, The Sportswriter open face down on the pillow. The prose of Richard Ford will calm me, I tell myself. It will carry me safely from hour to hour: a bed of prose, a moving slow river. To be borne, and to let the calm line of his prose to run forward through me: calmness, continuity.

I want to flatten my hours, to smooth the day like a page. I’ll talk to no one, I tell myself. No conversation; there’s nothing to say. And let the line of prose run ahead of me inside me like a lifeline, but one thrown from the future, a calm future. That will carry me ahead of myself, in silence. A line of prose is a lifeline.

And to write here – what is that? Why that? Over Christmas, the great mistake of reading early journals. What foolishness to keep them? But I keep them, or they are kept for me piled horizontally on a shelf in the room I stay at my mum’s. Old journals – what pain! Prose that believed for me, that I thought spread itself like a wave on the shore of a future that would be completely different from my present.

Didn’t I stay in most nights, back then, as an undergraduate? Stay in, and for what? To be alone in a room, I think. To let calmness come back to find me, stretching out a hand from the future. But my prose then as now was that of an idiot; no – more so, because my failure was not marked across it, because, still young, I thought my prose really stretched back a hand.

In truth, I wrote because I was unsociable, and couldn’t bear that my days and nights might not be honed into an arrow to be shot who knows where. Separated from others I also wanted to pare down my aloneness, to make of it that missile before which the clouds would part. But the arrow that is shot must split your own heart open, the Zen master said.

But how to bare your breast to the future except as Mishima did – to slash it open? That was the question I asked myself a couple of years later, jobless and without prospect, and wasn’t that the purest thought: of a future without me? But I could never write those few lines Mishima celebrates in his remarks on the suicide pilots in the war, to whom a poetic sentence or two was necessary before they flew their missles into a ship. What idiocy!

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I couldn’t finish with writing – then, as now, I didn’t know when to stop, and what insolence there was in starting. Who asked for it? Who asked for a line? Or was it only my lifeline, feeble as it was, parasitic as it was, reaching forward only as a hand of prose reached back.

The Sportswriter upside down on my pillow, as Herzog once was, or The Loser, or Caught: books that believe more than I can, and perhaps more than poor old Green and the perpetually dying Bernhard, and arrogant old Bellow with his flyleaf boasts (‘the only person to be granted doctorates from Harvard and Yale’) and Richard Ford (but I don’t know anything about him). Books that believe more than any of us, including their authors.

It is enough for me to write something everyday, let alone continuous prose, let alone a story with plot and characters, let alone something theoretical. That new impasse began more recently. How is it I seem to forget everything the morning I begin to write – that my task can only be to bring myself to the brink of writing without writing a line?

Preparatory prose; prose that cannot begin: again, what foolishness. Prose interrupted by the nightly forgetting such that I might begin again, over again, in the eternal morning of my idiocy. And prose that never gathers to itself the assurance of a style: whose continuity, such as it is, is illusory, running ahead only as it apes the running ahead of the prose of others.

Who knows what I want? And who is the ‘I’ at the centre of everything written, and written here? Ah, I know him only by his alibis. Sometimes I call him Spurious, sometimes with my own name: which is he, the one who believes in nothing I do, but only in others, or in the books of others, that will survive all of us?

I think Sinthome (another saint-homme) canonised him recently – or was it me?, I’m confused. (Note: ‘to be anyone at all – what kind of question is that?’ was a question directed towards myself; there was no mockery there.) The saint whose writing – mine – in its near infinite seriality (one million useless words …) becomes what Lacan calls the Thing, without need of authorisation or recognition. Of course Sinthome was writing of himself – but also of me, on the other side (the same side) of the Mobius strip.

Another memory, this time of the last pages of Mishima’s Sea of Fertility, delivered, as part of the fourth volume of this massive tetralogy, on the day of his suicide. The elderly Honda goes to pay tribute to the Abbess of a nunnery to which she went sixty years earlier, after a failed engagement to Honda’s close friend.

Or did she? She remembers nothing of Honda nor his friend; and this lack of memory is the ‘Sea of Fertility’ of Mishima’s title – a four part novel that, at this point, seems to unravel itself. Honda turns back. And Mishima, who, in truth, finished his book a few weeks before, goes to his ridiculous, melodramatic suicide.

There is only the Thing, the image that, like the tain of the mirror, reflects nothing, even as it lets everything be seen. The Sea of Fertility: isn’t that a name for what the blog turns around, with its tales of damp, of my lovely Visitor, of the books that have been successively splayed and upturned on my pillow? And a name for that black hole at the middle of this new year and all years, that means that every day by writing, I will have to catch a lifeline.

Mishima died, the better to avoid the lack of authority and recognition that is our condition. Even the Emperor, for him, was unsatisfactory: shouldn’t he have resigned after the surrender of Japan in World War Two? The hari kari pilots, plunging their missles into ships after writing a few desultory lines of verse for those who survived them, died for nothing; Japan was dishonoured: how to remove this stain?

But it cannot be removed, and it seems there is nothing for which it is worth dying, and that is our truth, a terrible one. There is nothing for which to die; no way to draw a line under our writing. On, as Beckett wrote over and again. On – but what for, for what purpose? Nohow on: a beautiful phrase.

Take a spacewalk and sever the line that binds you to your craft. Drift away and watch the line snake away from you: isn’t that how you’d know silence? But open your inner ears and you will hear the roaring of suns and the ache of empty space. Open them, and noise will miraculously cross the vacuum.

Write. No how – on. There’s no way to mark the way. No canons of taste to guide you. Every day is the first day. You’re an idiot each morning. Every day, for the first time, you’re an idiot, and a saint writes in your place.

How to write my pages today? (True, the box in which I see my writing on the monitor is not a page – but when I copy and paste these lines into Word, solely to take advantage of the spellchecker, it is pages I see, black lines running through paragraphs). How to write, if only to push the dross of my life a little further on?

This is how I will deploy the glacial metaphor: what leaves itself of writing at the blog is the terminal moraine pushed by a glacer’s snout: a landscape over which the desire to write has passed, leaving strange formations in its wake. What leaves itself, what is left here, but desire has already passed, it is always passing, and where it seems to be it has already left, although it leaves its absence quivering in the air.

A morning like any other; another morning when I’ve risen too early and am lost in those hours where no one is awake. Is it morning? Only to those monks who rise at two. But they rise together and sing together, and who is awake with me at this time? This is no time to be awake. Bury yourself, then. Forget you’re awake. Write – call up writing like the sandworms in Dune, and hook open the gap between the worm’s plates that stops it from plunging back into the sand.

But write of what, as you ride along? Isn’t this the curse, that writing demands substance to become real? But then what of your life can you give it, when you’ve risen too early, there’s no day yet to reflect upon; no experience – and doesn’t that thought always come to me: that to rise early is to rise very young, whereas to write at the end of the day, when the rolling body of the earth has already tipped into darkness, is to write as an old man?

Two A.M. is a time of absolute youth. Absolute – separate – and burning unto itself like a star. But a star, now, that has nothing to consume – that does not live through that great, controlled explosion that keeps a sun burning for five billion years. Nothing to burn, and there is no burning – only the husk of a sun; the cinder after the nova’s explosion: what is there to write, before and after everything? Can I call it insomnia, this vigil that has outlasted the world and was born before it? An insomnia in which something else stirs itself and awakens in me, looking up in blindness to stars that burn in blindness?

I think it is at this time that the magnificent child in me is dead – Freud’s His-Majesty-the-baby: the one who rises in his parents’ eyes: the glorious child who, says Serge Leclair, has to be killed over and again. Over and again – but in this suspended moment, the edge of the plow as it pushes forward the snow, there is no child, not yet.

No one watches him, and he does not watch; if eyes open in him, they are blind, and they open only from the centre of his forehead: Bataille’s pineal eye, perhaps, or the third eye that opened on Shiva’s forehead, say the Puranas, when Parvathi playfully placed her hands over his other eyes, and the universe was plunged into darkness. That is why his worshippers have horizontal lines traced across their brow: a third eye intimates itself there – the god’s eye that is the condition of our sight.

What is that element that allows us to see?, asks someone in Plato’s Republic: what is it that allows our sight? The sun of intelligibility – the noetic sun that rises over reason: so it is our sight is given its measure. But for those other eyes, the eyes of vigilance? Sight goes mad; ‘night is also a sun’ (Zarathustra), and the lines across the brow remember the eye that cannot see but that rolls in blindness.

Isn’t that what is intimated when the eyes roll back into the head in orgasm, perhaps, or as another speaks in the seer’s place? Let the eyes roll back into the centre of the skull. Let them open themselves towards that darkness which also floods the universe. What is the element that allows our blindness? What unjoins the intelligible relation to the world?

To speak is not to see, says Blanchot. The Other is invisible, says Levinas. But you, too, are invisible – or it is that when the night burns like the sun, it also burns from where you should be; it takes your place. You are a piece of the night, dreaming of night. Or you are where the night has come to know itself, joining a future that has not begun and a past not yet finished at the moment’s edge.

And isn’t that what happens at two A.M.? You are part of the circuit of the night – part of that flow from future to past, and vice versa: of that great loop of the serpent on whose body burns what we see as stars. And the dross of your life is what burns itself up to reach there, and joins your body to the body of everything.

I send back the power of memory like a fisherman’s net. And like the great nets I use now, it is as if they scrape the whole seabed clear, and along with what I would catch – discreet memories – I have brought everything else along, too. Muddied water. Black water. And what I remember has blackness behind it as when you look at your room reflected in the window at night.

‘I can speak now’ says the stutterer cured by hypnosis at the beginning of Mirror. ‘I can see’: but what is seen? Think of it aurally – a great roaring or mumbling out of which only traces of forms arise, and even then, the same roaring. Think of a touch that passes through everything, but knows, still, the pressure of something like a countertouch.

Isn’t this what is spoken of in the oldest cosmogonies: the universe that comes out of chaos, determining itself, giving itself form? But dream of the chaos to come, and the great unloosening: isn’t that what happens when you wake at two A.M., at the moment’s edge? To come – or it was already here, suspending those relations that are measured by light.

‘I can see now’: you are seen; night watches at your heart; night hears itself; night has reached a hand through the void and found you, a pleat of the void. What is the opposite of a cosmogony? What names the coming apart of time, of space? Whose hand unfolds the folds and lays everything as flat and simple as a blank page? The opposite of God: God’s opposite, or a god gone mad: I think of Shiva’s great rages when he breaks from his hair grotesque grey beasts with clubs of nails and sticking out tongues to exact his vengeance.

I think my favourite writing moves by jolts from one image to another, and arrives at that way, carelessly, neglectfully, at ideas. Carelessly, because they are not the motive of writing, but an epiphenomenon; they arrive by way of writing, that is true, but only as those words lurch, jolt from image to image. I want to be surprised by the way in which one paragraph is joined to another, and even by the movement from sentence to sentence within the paragraph, and even in the sentence itself, which Henry Green in particular can open in such a way that its last phrase is not pregiven.

I tell myself such writing, such thinking, is possible only for creative writers – for novelists, perhaps, but can’t it also be found when artists or musicians speak of their work? But novelists first of all, or poets, when they write about writing, when it is their practice that is their focus, in its nudity, its simplicity: to write, to let words come on a page; to type; to jot words like Handke’s narrator in No Man’s Bay who goes out into the day with a stub of pencil and a notebook.

Perhaps there are thinkers who write this way. Doesn’t Derrida say he spent the 70s learning to wager his own idiom by attempting to give body to the idiom of that upon which he would write? I think the texts he wrote then, in the 70s, when the problem of writing was not simply the object of his thinking, but was performed in his writing, exasperate everyone but me.

My relationship to them is secret, or nearly so – I won’t be their defender, nor his – and neglectful, for how often do I read them, really? Aren’t they an example of what Sinthome told us a few weeks ago, can have no interest for us. No interest – in themselves (if I understand Sinthome properly) – but only as they allow us to write, to live in a new way.

It is the same, for me at least, for the films of Godard: they give me permission to live differently – yes, just, that, to live: I wake up, but as though to a life that is greater than mine, even though it was furled within it; for a time – freedom, a great opening, a flag in the wind, fluttering. And wasn’t that the old punk ethos: do not listen, act – play without knowing how to play, sing without being able to sing – that I would like to think should rule our blogosphere?: writing written without knowing how, or why.

Write – and for what purpose? To let others find their own interest? Not even that, for this is not missionary work. What was it Nin wrote about finding our own legitimate strangeness? Is that the goal: to seek an idiom which, if it is not ours, summons us to the space it opens, like a garden, or a grove. And to wander in the corridors it opens for us. The question comes at once of what is to made thus, as a collective? Or will idioms (‘specific voices’) proliferate as the cane toad did in Australia? Shouldn’t we call it the rhizosphere?

Too tired to work this morning – to continue, as I ought to, my review, or at least with the reading that should direct me towards it – I pick up those books I now have piled against my bedroom wall, about a 100 of them. Necessary books? I did not pick them deliberately, but brought them piecemeal, as according to my whim, from the office – but perhaps they are necessary all the same.

Duras’s essays; a compendium of Green’s articles and abandoned writings, some critical work on Gene Wolfe: do they interest me? Or is it something else I seek in their mirror – the idiom that calls me to the space it opens. To write: I think that’s what I want, and by way of reading. And to write neglectfully, without forethought. To wander in writing for an hour or two as this part of the world turns into the sun.

You can be pretty – beautiful – enough to feel a responsibility towards your beauty: what does it deserve? how might I curate it? Hasn’t it marked you out for an extraordinary destiny? High cheekbones, let’s say, a slim waist, let’s say, a soft skin: haven’t they come to live their own lives, those cheekbones, that waist and that skin? Hasn’t beauty become, for you, a kind of fate, demanding to be curated and bestowed to the world?

‘I owe it to myself’: no, you owe it to your beauty, and it is as though you lived in a National Trust property. There are rules to be followed; what is yours should also be for the good of all. What beauty! they will say when they see you, and even you are surprised. But doesn’t beauty also demand a kind of modesty, that you efface yourself before what you have been given by chance?

Beauty lives its own life; it unfolds a fate for you of which you are part. ‘I was beautiful then’: said when you were very old, meaning: in me, across me, beauty led its life. But what beauty can ever say to herself: I am beautiful? Whoever admires their own limbs, or the brightness of their face? True, these limbs, this brightness can become part of an armory: a device to ensnare whomever will give you what you want. But still, even then, your beauty precedes you; it advances ahead of you into a room; it catches you in intrigue. And don’t you owe it to your beauty to be intriguing?

When I remembered, with her, the immense beauty of X. (another X. – those posts are gone), she said, everyone young is beautiful, and perhaps she was right about that. Perhaps it meant, beauty travels through the faces of the young; it seeks itself there – it finds itself and doesn’t beauty seek out beauty to mirror itself, to play lightly across bodies? Those faces are so young they haven’t an expression of their own – they’re not owned, not particularised. Who is responsible for them?

Then beauty can be caprice, cruelty. A single look and you are slain. Better not to be hypnotised by beauty – better not to be lost where it leads you. Everyone young is beautiful, said X., and didn’t this mean everyone was also no one, and that a young face, as yet uncarved by smiles or frowns, as yet ungrooved, unwrinkled, was also everyone’s face, anyone’s face?

No doubt beauty’s wasted on the young, like youth: what do they know of what, for a time, will possess them? What do they know of it, the beauty that passes through their faces, their bodies, giving them the chance of a great destiny? Do you really want to be picked out by your beauty? Selected, as though light was always shining on you?

What was the name of that beautiful nun who held a hot iron to her face? Beauty was her trial; she wanted to sink into another anonymity, far deeper than the anonymity of beauty. And this is what X. said, modestly refusing to acknowledge the beauty that once played across her and even condemning herself for letting what she called her prettiness lead her through life like a unbridled horse: hadn’t it led to to risky adventures, to misery in a foreign country, where she was whisked away like a prize?

This is what she said, although her beauty had taken her everywhere, all around the world: she wanted to be the anonymity of obscurity, wanted all eyes, all attention to turn away from her. She was happily obscure, she said; still beautiful, although her beauty was softer, more dispersed. Although it was like a mist through which also shone a great benevolence.

A little girl, alone on an island, will make jewellery for herself: where did I read that? and isn’t it nonsense? Still, beauty asks to be supplemented – ornamented. It asks – and don’t you deserve to give it what it asks – to be set into that frame that will let it shine still more brightly? Eyeliner and mascara make the eye into something to be watched – the most delicate register of passing mood.

She looked away – she looked at me – each time it is as though the whole universe had turned away from you, or turned towards you. I’ve been selected, picked out – to be seen, and by her, a beauty. Or I was selected not to be picked out, for her glance to pass over me, and forget me. Divine forgetting! Divine neglect!

And mustn’t it be a dreadful pest to be bothered for your beauty? Who’s sent over champagne? Who’s dancing next to you? Who spoke to you on the train? ‘I wanted to stab his eyes out,’ said X. many years ago, of man who looked lasciviously at her on a train. Not to be seen, to subtract sight from sight, to be allowed, for a short time, relief from your beauty: but that isn’t part of the deal.

You are exposed to sight all the time. You are beautiful when you wake, and when you fall asleep, beautiful dressed up or scruffy; your neglect only sets beauty off more strongly; your indifference increases the charm of your beauty, its insouciance. What will you ever know of the world? Who will ever tell you of anything bad, or dark? You charm everyone, they want to see you laugh, and your eyes to shine out yet more brightly.

His aunts, David told me, used to take turns to comb the hair of the prettiest sister. And didn’t I see it for myself, girls grooming another girl, the most beautiful one, as though they would each have a share in its brightness, its light? Console yourself with this: the beauty will learn little of a world that is drawn to its best whenever she is seen. It will part for her; the world will make way, and she will think it is the kindness of the world and not the kindness of her beauty to which she owes her life.

The women of Blanchot’s novels are often called beautiful – and young. Each time, beauty and youth live their own lives, unfold their own destinies. Blanchot often writes of the way the corpse seems to absent itself from the world and draw the world with it: this is the source of its fascination. But doesn’t he write, even more often, of beauty, of youth? For both, each time, are impersonal – both are possessing; both become a kind of fate, a way you survive without yourself. For neither can be kept, youth, beauty. They keep you; their play is that keeping, remembering and forgetting itself in your face, your limbs.

Divine sport! Divine caprice! – and isn’t it cruel to you from whom beauty begins to withdraw, whose face is like the world that is made by God’s absence, even as it still remembers him, and dreams of him. Beauty’s withdrawal can also be seen, like a beach at low tide, stretched out, expansive. Yes, that is where beauty was; it is there that beauty loses itself and dreams of itself, in those shallow pools that look upward to the sky.

Beauty withdraws – and who are you now, half-beautiful, quarter-beautiful, in whom others can see only traces of what once possessed you? But X., like the former Miss Yugoslavia in Handke’s No Man’s Bay, welcomes beauty’s retreat, her new anonymity. Who is she? One who can lose herself anywhere. One who is happily lost, one among others, and she could not have been before.

Who was she, then – all those years ago – when her beauty was sufficient to turn the world from its axis? Who was she, for whom an adventure might begin as she walked up the street? It came to her, the world – it ran up to her like a puppy, or a child: trusting, wanting your love, wanting to be bathed in it.

The adventure could begin today, or tomorrow, and you were young even as anything could begin, and at any moment. But this, too, was the temptation: couldn’t beauty lead her from where she should remain? Couldn’t it chase ahead of her, her fate, leading her away from what was most certain? But while she was young, she was also this will o’ the wisp. Wasn’t that her youth? Wasn’t it what let the world hover on the brink of adventure?

Dangerous adventures, though. Quagmires. Happily, in the end, she was rescued – she rescued herself; she stayed in the room in which I am writing with a worthy beloved, and I thought, beauty has released her. Beauty is leaving her behind, and I could see she was happy.

What is happier than watching beauty anoint itself – those ceremonies of perfuming and the application of make up? Once, in my naivety, I asked Y. why she made herself up at all, and in that high Manchester bedroom, she said, ‘watch’ and I did watch as she talked me through her beauty ritual. She had become beautiful; she’d assisted beauty, letting it come to herself. I was impressed; in a few minutes, I had learnt a great deal. She sprayed perfume on her wrists and she was done; beauty was in the room. Beauty was the third, the other one, accompanying us. ‘Do you see?’ Yes, I saw.

Nearly three years of the blog, the three years of my mid 30s, recording how I gradually fell away from academic work, from writing papers and books, and to my current fallen state, writing nothing in particular, doing nothing in particular, barely reading anymore. How do the days pass? Administration? Bureaucracy? Not even that.

Was it this time last year I enjoyed writing autobiographically? I remember writing a great deal; I haven’t reread those long posts, written as summer became autumn, and finishing (I think) as winter came. Then the time after I returned from India, my jet lag waking me very early in the morning, long before dawn. And then, another phase – the drama of job applications earlier this year, intense work on papers, stress of every kind.

And then, the long phase which brings me to the present – the pretentious phase, as I like to think of it, which I  seemed to arrive at through a kind of ascesis. Other forms of writing fell away; I deleted many older posts. What is going on here now? I don’t think that question is easy to answer.

Sometimes, especially early in the morning, after a coffee, I feel a great certainty about what is perhaps ridiculous to regard as a ‘project’ (a project of what kind?) I need nothing else, I am carried along, from one post to another. But then, there come quite suddenly, great waves of tiredness, when writing is impossible. Tiredness, especially, in the late afternoon, as everything seems to be for nothing, as though I had already lived a whole life.

I admit I’m still surprised that I have not been able to turn out a book a year. I lost interest. Perhaps, as my job became more secure, I discovered a sense of shame. No more books, I thought. And no papers. Read; work in private. And so I did – two years ago, Marx, Deleuze … – for a whole summer. X. was here; we played tennis in the evening, and crossed the cowfield home. Was that a happy time? Either way, the reading didn’t continue. How intensely I used to work! Night and day! This morning, finishing something like an article, I thought: you’ve already peaked. I thought: that was it, your peak. How laughable!

How strange to move into a new life, without work! Without the great struggle to find a job, and then to keep it. After the struggle – what? ‘What are you working on?’ – ‘Nothing, nothing.’ Last summer was the great summer of going out. Every night, and until late; the Ouseburn Valley. A sundowner at The Free Trade, then to The Cumberland to sit outside in the evening.

Every night! I’d never lived like that! It was marvellous. This summer was its echo; so many nights out, but then the sadness, too, of the long breakup with X. And then to find myself alone, and in the middle of life. We drank Cava and cassis in the evenings; we ate together – again, the happiness of life, its substance. I said to Blah-feme to write about food, but I should have done so myself.

Yes, that was the summer, which ended as the workmen came to transform the flat, at last, at last. A new ceiling, a new bathroom; the central heating fixed, the electricity made to work again, the damp driven away, the drains cleared … of course it came back, the damp, and worse than ever. And then we found it, the swearing plumber and I, a great leak from upstairs.

An insurance job. Phone the insurers, then. And phone B & Q to pick up the dishwasher they misdelivered. And write a letter of complaint to the dampproofers for ruining the floor. And to Comet for not the delivering the fridge until all the food had rotted. Banal, bourgeois dramas, of which I feel ashamed to write. I always remember, rather stupidly, that line from Thoreau: ‘I went to the woods to live deliberately …’

And all the time, the blog. Ceaselessly, blogging. To escape life? But it is not that simple. To work? No – it is not that, either. The explanation lies in the posts themselves, which I have to reread to remember. Why does it seem that I’m a ghost of the certainty I feel as I write, early in the morning?

A curiosity: I cannot help linking the posts I write to particular places. That bridge by Plymouth station which reminds me of ‘The Arm of the Sun.’ The roundabout by Morrisons, which recalls the long piece I never finished, on Kafka and the everyday. As I walk round town, I will suddenly remember a post.

‘To live deliberately …’: but what can that mean? I only give Dogma papers now, and almost always collabaratively. Nothing to publish. I’ve written about love, friendship, my favourite music, my favourite book. But I could barely finish the last paper, the one to which only one person came. I had the whole of August, but for half the month, I was exhausted, and for the other half, I lost myself writing here, I think only because I’d been so tired before, because I’d fallen away even from writing about falling, that old stalwart …

Richard Wollheim’s Germs lies on the floor by the bed. I should read it, I though, to reawaken memories. To give myself, as I did last year, the vastness of the past. Because in truth, my present is narrow; the nights are very long. For a long time, earlier this month, I went to bed as soon as I came in from work, and watch episodes of The Simpsons, the whole lot, from series 18 back to series 1.

Exhaustion. Was it the change of seasons? Something else? This weekend, I stayed in, rather than going out to the countyside as I had intended. In, passing from room to room, eating tinned fish then bowls of plain yoghurt and jam. A coffee first thing, and half a green tea, later. Tuna and brinjal pickel. Hard boiled eggs with pepper. Ikea crispbread with good olive oil.

Passing from room to room, my new neighbours quiet, and all the while thinking, what should I write? How to live deliberately? A pile of books arrived this morning. The Marx I don’t already know. And another pile of books to arrive soon, by or on Lacan, to help my with a long review I’m writing. Piles of books, but I have to force myself to read.

How to live deliberately? There are many friends from whom I don’t take phonecalls. Write, I tell them, I don’t want to talk. It’s true I am out most evenings. To talk – no, that’s no good. But to write instead …

In the summer, I got a new mobile phone and a new phone with caller ID. I got broadband at last, and I was given a mini ipod and a laptop. Everything was to work, I told myself. Everything, at last had to function; and so it did. Next, a new television, one that takes freeview and a scart plug to play DVDs. All to clear the space for a deliberate life …

It is a kind of indifferent speech that has come to obsess me. An indifferent speech, an indifferent writing – without know what is meant by either phrase. As though I could smooth down writing. Or as though, by writing, I could reach an absolute smoothness, the ice on which nothing can live.

To write: what might it mean to achieve that: the bare infinitive. To write … Do I think I’ll find my way to it tonight, that to write without forethought, to ramble, is a way to surprise writing writing? Laughter: I’ve caught writing out in me. Writing wants to write, to say nothing in particular. And I should be glad it will keep me up – it’s nine o’clock, nine bells, and I must not give in to sleep.

Papa M playing in the other room. Succeeding John Fahey, one album after another on the computer. Live from a Shark Cage. You can still hear Slint in his playing. I have so much music now. All the music I want. But how to live deliberately?

Some posts I wrote were very popular. I do not write in those styles now. Pare it down – less styles, always less. No more Bernhard-isms. And shouldn’t I drop Blanchot, the last companion? And what about these kinds of questions, stolen from Handke to enliven a line of prose, to awaken it?

There’s no doubt: I was much more careless when I began. I hadn’t written in this way for a number of years, not since all my correspondences finally fell away. It was a struggle to begin, and even to find my way to a beginning. I remember I made datelines of the activities of this or that member of the Rue Saint-Benoit group.

Yes, that’s how it began. And then, very slowly, completely alone in the days after Christmas here in the city, I began to write of the narrative voice in Blanchot, and found my way to quote Kafka on the ‘merciful surplus of strength’. That was the beginning, the barest beginning, and these are still my concerns, although I am not alone in the city anymore. And still I ask myself, how can I live deliberately?

And I’ve lived in the city for nearly five years. Five years, up and down the passage that runs to the back entrance to the office. It is a peaceful city, a benevolent place. Will I be here forever? Moving around is no good. To begin again, to start over again – it’s no good. But didn’t I come close, this year, to getting a job in X.? And mightn’t I chance, soon enough, on a job in Y.?

I’m keeping myself awake. By writing, I’m awake; I’m even thinking of the future, of that little place I might hollow for myself in these hours before sleep, like a kind of snow burrow. Freezing to death is like sleeping, I’m told. You’ll be given the choice: sleep and die, or keep awake. And to sleep is to fall sweetly into death.

I read an interview over the weekend with Terrence Davies and felt great anger. The interviewer wrote of X.’s campness, of his upset as though he was a specimen under a microscope. I like X.’s films very much. It means a great deal to me that he is British, as I am.

I remember his three early shorts, the last part of which showed the death of the man we had met as a boy in the first short, and as a young man in the second. Now he was dying, and it was not a pretty death – sputtering, coughing. A black and white film.

And I remembered, long ago, at university, watching a South Bank Show on him in the television room in student halls. The others were laughing at him. He was so camp! The director spoke of recreating a street from his childhood. There it was, the street. The Long Day Closes: was that it?

I think again of the interviewer and sudder. I feel a great rage – Davies is to be admired first of all, and unconditionally. For what was the interviewer fit for, who would separate himself from Davies as a scientist does from a specimen? Typical Guardian rubbish, I told myself.

And then another memory: the wordless refrain at the beginning of Vaughan Williams’s third symphony, and a shot of black water. Everyone sang in those Davies films! Always singing. And another scene: fists through glass, yes that was beautiful. Like the arms of the prisoners in Genet’s film, that reach one another through the bars.

Genet. Say that name and you are protected. He sought to live deliberately. He lived deliberately, exemplarily. Five novels, a few plays – he knew when to stop. And then Prisoner of Love, the coda. And then death. A beautiful life.

And now I know what I want tonight. To write a post that would resemble one of the songs John Cale and Lou Reed wrote for their tribute to Andy Warhol, Songs for Drella. The song is called ‘A Dream’, and Cale narrates it. ‘It was a very crisp, clear Fall night …’: its supposed to resemble a diary entry by Warhol. Who knows, it might have been one of those entries! It is desperately moving, because Warhol is already dead, and I fancy I can hear something of him in his words, spoken in Cale’s Welsh accent. Warhol who is another figure close to me, someone else who lived deliberately. Now I know what I want to write.

Sometimes, readers write to me. Emails, making connection – a flurry at first, and then nothing, and then, perhaps, another flurry. Most of it forgotten straightaway. I have an enemy, who likes to write to berate me. I have allies, who want to tell me they appreciate me. I reply to them simply. I think in addition to writing, these readers should start blogs of their own. Everyone should start blogs of their own, that’s what I tell myself, in what I imagine is Warhol’s voice.

I used to have a copy of his Diaries, Warhol. But like so many books, it couldn’t come with me from place to place. You can’t keep all the books you buy, nor all the photographs you take. The Diaries were too big, anyway – and too inconsequential. But I admit it was the inconsequential that drew me to them. Nothing was said, never anything in particular.

Warhol would ring his friends every morning and speak, just speak. I like this, too. Cixous used to ring Derrida and just speak. He would keep quietly. Sometimes, Derrida would ring Blanchot. And Blanchot wrote to Monique Antelme that she should call him whenever something good happened to her, or something bad.

Letters! Do you remember when they used to arrive? Do you remember the last letter you ever sent? I used to wait for letters every day. Letters from … yes, every day, for years on end. And then – how many years ago? 5? 6? that desire came to an end. It stopped, simply.

Was I free? I gave myself to academic writing. Several hundred thousand words – it kept me busy. Nothing I wrote was very good. Did I learn about writing? What I learnt, I forgot; I can barely put together a paper.

The last letter. An interval; academic writing, and then – the first posts on a blog. And then, a few months later, my own blog, now that I was free from waiting for letters, or desiring to send them.

Isn’t this where it was all coming, to the blog? Wasn’t it all leading here? As though a gathering wave had finally met a shore to break against. It broke and spread – so much writing! Not necessarily good, nor bad, but – there could be writing!

Laughter, incredulous voice: and you are proud of this? With all that’s going on in the world, you are proud of – this? W.’s apocalypticism. He made me listen to Godspeed’s Dead Flag Blues in silence. ‘These are truly the last days.’ The last days: ‘we’re finished,’ says W., ‘it’s over. We’re fucked. We – are – fucked.’

Papa M.’s cover of ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’: play until the tape ends, he decided. Write until your hour’s up, I tell myself; and it almost is. I’ll finish when he finishes. I’ll finish – now.

(‘This is an idiotic voice. It’s inane.’ – ‘But I like it’s inanity. I like it’s idiocy.’)

Five years, and nothing happened. Nothing happened – that’s what we decided as we walked down the stairwell. And wasn’t it doomed – five years ago, it nearly coincided with …? It ‘began’ the day after the catastrophe. A bad sign. Everything that has happened since has done so under a bad sign.

Events want to complete themselves, to fall into linear sequence. Each episode wants to be caused by the one before it, as in a novel. How then to narrate those moments that seem to slip out of time, that are not allowed to come to completion?

The récit, the tale is supposed to bear upon what happened in the past – a single event, that a narrator mulls over in the present. But what happens when that event never completed itself, and thus never really happened, detaching itself from all linearity?

Did it happen? You cannot be sure. It has not coalesced, has not rounded itself off into an episode. What happened? But even that is unknown. It was not allowed to happen; it was not supposed to. But what did not happen broke into the order of time, it turned there. The détourned instant, the fragment broken from time’s course: what does it want but completion, the future in which it could arrive?

It hasn’t happened yet. It isn’t finished. Or: it still hasn’t happened, and that is what is happening. So we came to incarnate that non-event, the future of what will not happen. Until what happens is trapped by what does not, unfolding against it, a tragic struggle, freedom against necessity.

Time has passed. How old are we now? How impossibly old? We have outlived the event, missed our appointment. Or it is that it has outlived us, but not in time, not in our order of time.

Somewhere else, in another life, we are becoming younger, together. Younger: and all the way to the inception of the event.

And meanwhile? I miss you even when I’m with you. Or: am I ever with you when I’m with you?

Faith: it will happen. It will be brought to completion, now as for the first time. Yes, that is our freedom, lived somewhere else.

And meanwhile, this ‘other’ freedom, the instant stranded by time, which asks for mercy. You said – or was it me – ‘is it ever going to happen?’ I said – or was it you? – ‘another five years …?’ Each time, it was the unfinished instant that spoke, we knew it.

Was it pitiful? Resigned? I’ll use this word instead: indifferent. It was indifferent to us. And wasn’t that its charm?

Charm: the ‘background’ of speech, always there. Indifferent, but there. We could depend upon it. Everything we said it tore apart, gently. Everything said was dispersed across its surface.

Like the wind that passes among the table things in Mirror, turning them over. A bottle rolls and falls to the ground. Isn’t that the miracle of Mirror – that it is made up of the continuity shots that are supposed to pass unnoticed in a film? Continuity – when a camera is held onto a face for too long, when it lingers over a detail. What happens then? What fails to happen?

Isn’t it very beautiful, the sense that what happens does not do so for you? Indifference: that I do not possess the world, or myself. That I barely possess myself – and you? – who are you?

As though you can only see it from the corner of your eye. As though it is reached only by indirection. – ‘I cannot find my way there.’ – ‘Ah, but it will find you.’ To be found – but by what? By what is indifferent to you. Finding you as it would find anyone. But you, now, are this anyone. Happiness: to be no one in particular.

It is His-Majesty-the-Baby, as Freud calls him, who must be killed. The brilliant, charming child, centre of the world. But how is the child – the child who still lives within you – to be found by someone other than his parents, or those around him who are like his parents? How to live an obscure life? How to be found by the obscure?

Write not to find, but to lose. No: write to be found – write every day so it will find you, what does not approach directly. Then a blog is like one of Ernst’s Garden Aeroplane Traps.

Five years: waiting waits beside us, without object. Waiting turns in itself.

Write until you are neglected by writing. Until writing writes itself. ‘Itself’: there where it is not, and you are not.

Wait until it does not know you are waiting. Until waiting loses itself object and all transitivity. Only then will it come. Only then will I be able to say to you, come.

Carelessness: is there a way we might have been said to catch time out, to have found time when it was gathering itself without going forward? When time has stopped going forward except in a kind of duplication of the world, as though everything was caught in its eddying? Suspended time: time without momentum; time that does not find its way to succession. Stranded moments, without continuity. Moments that remain, as though outside themselves. Thickening themselves, doubling themselves, undergoing a strange crystallisation.

I remember; I always remember. Coming again and again: those times, those moments. But I do not bring them; time gives them to me. Gives them, but only as they have fallen outside linear continuity. Moments that should have gone to sleep. Have disappeared into forgetting. And yet moments, too, that seem to be linked to a kind of forgetting – that seem to have forgotten me.

Nonchalance: this is the word that comes to me when I think of those moments that will not pass. The carelessness of time, time’s drifting. It’s true I kept a diary, that I thought those days had to be remembered. But I was only doubling what remembered itself in me. Came to itself, but as though without regard for me. As though I hadn’t lived them yet; as though I’d only begun to live what turned me aside.

Was I there, with you? But I was barely with myself. Memory does not enclose time, but is opened by it. Memory opens like an oyster’s shell. The pearl: the moment thickened, the opacity of time. I do not keep what I remember; it keeps me. Nonchalance: but without regard for me; turning aside. Kept by what turns aside, by a moment that ignores me, but for all that, enlists me as a witness.

I saw, I heard; I touched you. No: it was you that touched me; the affect came from without; it arrived as from a great distance. And you saw yourself in me, by way of me. Sometimes I flatter yourself that you found peace in me; that you lay down inside me and closed your eyes, that I provided a shelter for what does not rest, but turns in itself. But you never stopped turning, and turning away from me. You never stopped forgetting me.

And I think that’s what you do again, here, as I write. Sometimes, memories lose their force when I record them. I am relieved; they lose their hold on me. Writing remembers them for me. But other memories return by way of writing, surprising me. As I record those moments, I also realise I’ve recorded nothing at all. Eluding me, indifferent to me, they summon writing, they ask to be written, only to slip away once again.

The stars in Van Gogh’s paintings turn in great wells in the sky, and that’s how I imagine these moments turn in the great sky of memory. Stars burn as they consume themselves; they ask for nothing else, no substance. And so too these memories are nothing but themselves, burning in solitary passion. And just as stars can collapse on themselves, devouring their own light and drawing the space around them across their threshold, I imagine memories that will attenuate all the others, fraying them, wearing them down to nothing.

Until everything that happened becomes a gauzy veil through which that pale sun burns. But a sun, now, that is the source of no life; that drains life from the world rather than nourishing it. Just the sky, a blank and indifferent sky on a day just like other days. A day like any other, a sky like any other: you wait for me there. Patience, the land beneath the sky. The whole plain, waiting, and the sky above.

She sorts us according to type, to series. Seeing my brother-in-law, she thinks: he is one of those who will play with me. Seeing me, she thinks: and there is another. For her, one person is always nearly another; she understands the rules vary, and that she must open her mouth for a pill when my mum holds her jaws (‘swallow’!), just as she is always allowed to play-gnaw my hand when I put it out to her.

And when the one died who tilted the mirror so that she, paws skidding on the linoleum floor in her eagerness, could chase light around the kitchen? A cat’s optimism: another will come to tilt the mirror. She waits. Don’t I know the rules?

Narrate; remember what happened, and what did not happen. Bringing home from school a story that my parents saw. ‘It’s supposed to have a beginning, middle and end’, said my dad. The end was lacking – and the beginning. An old man reminisced, that was my non-story. Reminisced – and reawoke what happened, and also what did not.

These difficult days, I have wanted another past. I buy CDs, and cover the counter in my living room with Blue Note reissues. Reading the history of jazz, and the autobiographies of performers. I want another history. I enfold myself in their past, and in the world of their past.

And so the days have a forward momentum. To the office, where the CDs I bought online await me. To the books that list and rate recordings. Reassurance: the past classified, the past weighed. And the other past, my own? Know that it is the past, forget it. Forget what could have been your future.

Write to experience the withdrawal of writing. Write – and it is the withdrawal of writing, that great writing in which anything is possible, writing as the fulfilment of life – that you would mark.

Read a biography, read of the travails of Kafka. In his darkest hours, when he’d written nothing for months and you know, as he does not, that he would write again, but not for months, still the knowledge that he has written something. Still The Judgement; still at least one blessed night that allowed him to follow that story across the hours.

And to have written nothing – or nothing of worth? Not to have had a sign, an intimation of that great writing that falls so bountifully on those writers whose biographies you like to read, and that lifts these lives out of oblivion?

I would like these hours at the desk, before the yard to be the husk of a great writing. Would like my life to be the dross of an anonymous book that would rise out of my life like a new island from the sea. There it is, sufficient to itself; absolute. There it is, the book that is the book, and I only part of its great unfolding, its relation to itself. I would be a limb of the book, that is all, and my life that space consecrated to its unfolding. A willing sacrifice – anything for the book; anything so that life could be lifted from the mediocrity of the day.

And how I would welcome my obscurity! How wonderful the clouding over of a life entirely redeemed by the composition of a book! How marvellous each obscure detail of the day, that is already aglow in the beneficient light of the book! Plato was wrong: it is not the immortality that is sought in the creation of the book, but the sweetness of obscurity. Not immortality – not the fame of a name that spreads from generation to generation, but the oblivion of a name, the St. Andrew’s Cross that is placed across it. Abolish me, book. Scrub out my name. Let every trace of me be obliterated as my whole life catches fire from the book.

Last night, unable to sleep, I broke open my emergency book, the book reserved for the plateau of insomnia. Last night, the last of my Bernhards broken open – last of the secret stash, over which there might as well have been a glass case and a warning saying: use only in case of emergency. I used it – I finished the book. In one sweep, all finished. In a few hours, and then the mediocre dawn, pale light, light rain: done. The last word: yes, and I could say yes to sleep; I fell asleep at last, and woke up too late.

What time was it? Too much of the day had gone. I thought: you’ll accomplish nothing today then. You’ll begin nothing, finish nothing off. Stranded, instead, mid-work. Stranded in the middle of that piece you would like to finish. Stranded in a mediocre writing, stranded before a writing in which you can sense, ceaselessly, the withdrawal of that great writing that would grant these voided hours some retrospective sense.

But there is no sense. A life wasted; mediocre life – life in lieu of what would lift it to life, and to writing. A life sacrificed to writing? That would be too grand. A life lived in the hope of writing? That would be a lie. Life lived in the hope of hope – perhaps that. Not even hope, that would be too much, but the hope for hope – for the chance, the possibility of writing. Hope for the hope that the great writing might be possible.

This morning, having taken the day off to write, I pass from one room to the other. One room – and then another, and there are not many rooms. A bedroom, a living room, a bathroom. From one to the other. The bedroom, where I have a laptop, to the living room, where I have a desktop, to the bathroom, rotten with damp. And there is the kitchen too, which is also rotten. The rotten kitchen, in which the electricity has failed.

A pipe leaking in the bathroom, and a leak in the kitchen, too. A rotten pipe in the bathroom, and a whole rotten wall in the kitchen, from which water seems to seep. Woodlice on the walls in the kitchen, dried there. Woodlice on the walls, slug trails on the worktop, and the mildewed ceiling sagging and cracking from damp. Everything, in short, is disgusting. The kitchen, which is barely a room, is especially disgusting. But then the bathroom vies for its abhorrence with the kitchen.

Last night, I broke open the last Bernhard. This is an emergency, I thought; reach for the Bernhard. Reach for the book you’ve been saving for emergencies. I open the Bernhard. The first sentence is the funniest, greatest first sentence I have ever read. The whole first sentence is a masterpiece, and the rest of the book is a masterpiece. How deft it is! How marvellously controlled! How marvellously it builds up to the climax: to the final word, ‘yes’!

It’s the equal of Concrete; it’s better than Old Masters. A different kind of book than Extinction or Correction, that’s true – and different still from Gathering Evidence, a book whose separate parts should be read in order of publication not the order they have been given in the edition in English. Different – smaller in compass, but great in its own way, perfectly rounded, a book that exists unto itself, absolute.

Happily there is Yes. Happily there was Yes, last night. A spectacularly funny book. A book it is impossible to read without a smile. A book that is marvellous funny from its first lines, which I have to stop myself from copying out here. A book that is not only great, but also funny – now that is a marvel. Funny and great – what a combination. And compelling – I didn’t mention that. It bears you along. It bore me happily along, from page to page. It exhibits narrative tension. One great sentence sweeps you into another, because of the great, sustaining narrative tension.

If I began to quote from it, I wouldn’t know where to stop. If I paused to copy out this or that line, I could not resist quoting another, and eventually the whole book. Perhaps that’s what I should have begun, last night when I couldn’t sleep. Perhaps I should have simply begun transcribing the whole book, line by line and page by page, until the final ‘yes’. Until the final, wonderfully placed, ‘yes’.

A heavy dose of caffeine: I will awaken you, writer. Five hours of work yesterday, but today? An empty path widens and becomes the desert. You will not cross, it says. Nothing is possible today, it says.

I set myself the long task of copying out. The whole chapter – copy it out, and divide it into small paragraphs so you can learn how it progresses, of its internal logic, its coherence. Very well then.

Hours pass; I have written a great deal. Not my words, but plenty of them. In a feeble way, I feel myself borne onwards by the rhythm of those words, by their pressure. But they only push forward the dross of my day, my terminal moraine.

Days of no work, days of Cava in the evenings; days of five hundred kinds of boredom. Would that my attention could be direction; would that I could discover a narrowness of focus. Because in truth, I am lost in the fog; in truth, everything claims my attention; I am unsettled, a ghost disturbed from his tomb.

And on these kind of days – quite rare – I look back through the categories of the blog, following corridors into former lives. Who was I, then, when I was alive? Who was I? Drifting – blessed condition. To drift, like the wandering speech of the analysand or the automatic writer. I would like to lose myself. No: to discover myself lost, having been lost for some time. Why do I imagine that speech, that automatic writing, like the voiceover to a life that is lived silently?

The truck came that I ordered and took away the wood that had been stacked for two years against the door of the outhouse. Was it two years ago we took apart the twin wardrobes that were built into the alcoves of the bedroom? That was the Great Summer of Work, when we passed the cows in the field going to the office in the morning, and passed them again in the evening as we came home.

One day lay down upon another; one day – another, like sheets of light. Now imagine I could mine down, stratum after stratum, to find the heart of that summer lying like a seam of diamonds. Sometimes I am aware of the thickness of life, of the days and months that press down upon one another. What traces are buried thus? What forgotten kingdom?

Perhaps my memory of that time is rather like those fossils in which the decomposed body disappears, to be filled in by another substance. I mean that what I remember is a plenitude rather than the openness of those many days, one after another, in the sun. That same summer is filled for me now as by a glittering mineral. It is born again as solid light, as an opaque object I can turn in my hands.

If I survived most of the instructors at my gym, this is not testament to my determination. In truth, I am the laziest of gym attendees; if I visit regularly, it is only to read on those cross trainers that allow me to wedge a paperback open. For a long time, I would write down the number of calories I expended over one hour on the inside cover of the books I read.

Thus, Gathering Evidence has 833 10/10, 851, 12/10; Extinction has 900 (but no date). But then long overdue, I changed my routine; I began to use the free weights as well as the resistance machines. I am still lazy, but today, I was pleased to put the largest weights on my barbell. Had I made progress? According to new research, I read in a gym magazine, aerobic exercise is much more effective when it follows severe anaerobic exertion.

So after warming up, I go straight to the weights, but now, on the cross trainer, I’m really too tired to read, and reading slows until books take much too long too finish. How many times did I carry Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting to gym? Long enough to forget the freshness of its beginning; long enough to tire of gratuitous intrigue. So many characters! So many scenes! And always that same authorial voice, too sure of itself, too steady; and the predictable sideswipes at popular culture.

But I remember starting the book a sunny afternoon a few weeks ago at St Margaret’s station in London; I continued to read on my journey back to the north along the East coast of England. As we passed the last of the hills of Yorkshire, I was already halfway through. But then my reading, confined to the gym, since I was busy at work, and my evenings were taken up with reading and writing things academic, stalled.

Finally, I finished the novel impatiently in my office; it was long overdue; now I could pick something new from the shelf. But what? My Muriel Spark novels had long since arrived, but I didn’t finish The Public Image. I went to the bookshop, wondering if Slow Man had come out in paperback. But then I remembered the book that I’d lost as soon as I’d finished it: Vertigo, Sebald’s Vertigo. Thankfully, they had a copy in one of the local bookshops; I took it to the gym, and after the weights, started reading it for a second time.

And what a marvel it remains! Happiness as I followed the vicissitudes of a single character, and the rise and fall of what seems a single continuum of mood; relief to be left along with the forward impulse of the narrative as it runs on into the dark; relief there are no authorial asides, and the text is not broken up, but seems to fall into itself, carry it with me. As I shower, it is as though Sebald’s voice continues inside me; I speak to myself of gym, of showering, of vanished instructors.

I have been given a voice, I think to myself, and the happiness of narration. MacIntyre would have it that life without narrative is chaos and noise, and it is true that if I am not in the company of a strong novel, the events of the day do not seem to settle in sequence. I want to be alone with a book, that’s what I say to myself, then, and am grateful for long train journeys, the voyage north or the voyage south, four hours as I am borne forward by what I read just as the train bears itself forward.

But what kind of narrative do I want to tell? Like Sebald’s narrator’s, Handke’s too are usually of a man apart, a wandering man. Is that what I want, then – to tell a story of being alone, or of coming to a wandering solitude, where neither word, wandering, solitude, can be thought apart from the other. But I am no wanderer. Only once in this city have I ever gone walking without a purpose in mind.

That was a few months ago, in the midst of turmoil and indecision. I discovered a route from here to there, a new secondhand bookshop, but I never revisited it, or retaken that walk. When I was young, it is true, I walked without purpose – across the square in front of the town hall in Manchester, across to the old warehouses behind Piccadilly Station, or to the wastelands still unregenerated along the ship canal.

But now I am older? No journey without purpose. No psychogeography, no drifting. A sense that there will soon be no chance to work, to write. Of urgency – or as if I had wasted most of my early life, as if I had lived in the wrong direction, and it was only now I had found a path. This is why I rise early; it is why I like to spend evenings after the pub reading, focusing upon what is to be written tomorrow.

Life lived in a single direction; the right one, and perhaps, in its way, a kind of wandering – but one, if this is possible, along only two dimensions. Life as a line, as the attempt to follow a line. Yes, that is the solitary wandering that can only be travelled alone. But then, too, there is always the pub, and company – my friends – about whom I do not write enough.

What is more wonderful than the evening drink with X. and Y. where X says, come and eat at my house, and we have an impromptu meal of whatever we can find in his fridge and the cupboard, or forage from the supermarket on the corner? Then we sit out in the little garden amidst the potted plants, and life is fine, the evening opens before us; it is summer; we are in the middle of our lives, and all is well, everything can be talked about, there will be no disagreement.

Remembering those times, I admire the lightness of The Girls of Slender Means: what a gift to be able to write like, so lightly! But even then, the day that follows such nights begins with the same demand: find again the unwavering line; follow it, attempt to follow it, as it breaks into the future. Or rather, receive it from the future, that line along which you travel; experience it as fate, as what is marked out only for you.

And then I think of the journeys of the protagonist’s seven friends in My Year in No Man’s Land – friends who seem only aspects of Handke himself, just as the characters of Mishima’s Kyoto’s House, dramatised in Schrader’s films, are aspects of the narrator. Seven friends – how to split yourself into seven pieces and let them wander on separate journeys?

But I am reading Vertigo, I must remember that. Vertigo will provide the orientation – and hasn’t it already given me this voice, the one in which I am writing now? But who is the ‘I’ that writes, and whose voice is this? To MacIntyre always the objection that there are so many stories that could be told, and so many narrators I might find myself to be.

But I know which narrator I want to be. Urgency, the single line to be followed: what distance is that I see myself crossing? Only that between the future and the present, as if I were bringing something back, not living forwards. As though I were protecting something I’d brought from there, the future.

I think of the ogre’s heart in fairytales, that is hidden far from the ogre’s living body. In a chest, at the bottom of a lake – and isn’t it possible to live from something of you that is buried in the future?

How many kilograms did I lift today? I barely lifted them. 5 repetitions, 6, and only 3 times over. That was nothing, but after, my left arm ached. I had an excuse: no more. Back to the cross trainer, back to Vertigo, relieved that with this narrative, my life lifts itself out of chaos and noise.

From one day to another, the same pursues itself. Capitalise it: the Same; writing as writing, language as language: how to remain on the threshold where anything might be said, where writing trusts you to go on with your work?

To secure your tomorrow, that’s what you seek. Where the next day follows from the last; where a kind of circle begins to trace itself and what is before you returns to yesterday, and the day before summons the next day before it as a kind of witness. The past and the future meet here, in the moment of writing. They witness each other; they pass, each in their own direction.

The look back is the look forward; now the days lie down, one after another, in perfect continuity. Summer is this: the continuity of days. Summer is the ‘as’ of writing as writing, language as language. It is the silence around which the whole sky of stars, writing, turns.

Eternal summer, that gathers to itself all potentials. How is it you are young again, with possibility as your element? We used to meet as children with our bikes under the ‘great pine’ every morning. That patch of wasteland in between the houses seemed to draw to itself all potential, all potency. What would happen today, in the greatest of days? We would cycle away, sustained, each day, by infinite possibility. And to write from day to day? It is the same; it is the same of the same, the axis that is the summer turning.

You’re never happier, says W., than when you’re planning something. A collaboration – a conference – yes, what is happier than having a plan, and of gaining thereby an orientation to those half-thoughts with gather inside me as iron fillings are shaped by the presence of a magnet: for a time those thoughts imitate form; for a time they point in a single direction.

It is as though those half-thoughts were streamlined, honed in a wind tunnel to the sleekest form that could then bear me to the future. Or it is as though it is from the future those half-thoughts come, welcoming me, reaching for my hand. Yes: I have a path to the future. Or it is the future that unrolls a path back to me, and says: come on: that is what my plan is.

An escape from the present, which turns my present into a threshold. I have a future; the future hasn’t forgotten me: that’s what it is to have a plan. In February, I spoke on Country Music; in March on New Wave music, and then on tragedy in Schelling and others, and then on philosophy and idiocy; in April on … I don’t remember. A paper for each month; I approach the future from a dozen directions.

And now, in July, I have to speak on – … but its content does not matter. How many days do I have left for my research? I ordered that book, and read that one; I looked up that article on the web, and Googled that topic. And then? And then?

A future without plans, what would that mean? To fall from all plans, all projects? ‘And then’: that’s what the future says. But what if there was no ‘and then’? Here, I write of little else, but there – in the world? I plan; I write, busily.

And then?: the other future, or the future furled within the future, like God speaking from the whirlwind. You will have no name. You will be no one in particular; every moment is a threshold. I will appoach the condition of Peter Handke’s protagonists: Andreas Loser in Across, the wanderers of Absence, the woman of The Left Handed Woman, who are blessedly lost from the course of their lives.

‘Only through walking do spaces open up and the spaces between them sing’; ‘rid of his name, yet certain that he is at last present‘; ‘the emptiness here no longer promises you anything’; ‘getting rid of our history, escaping into geography’; ‘… human clouds … we kept arriving …’

Blessed work, the effort to write the epic of the everyday, My Year in No Man’s Bay. How can a book be so boring and so necessary? I tell myself: do not keep your appointment with tomorrow. Miss the nexus of next morning’s writing. I tell myself: but miss it in writing, in another writing. Is it possible to turn a forgotten corner, to open a door miraculously unlocked, so that something of me stops, even if I go on?

I have time; I pause and look up in my work. No: time gives itself; it pauses and looks through my eyes. ‘Emptiness! The word was equivalent to the invocation of the Muse at the beginning of an epic.’ Yes, emptiness, which unlocks the door. ‘The present seemed so pure and uniquely luminous’. And then? And then?

To be lost in the middle of life, that’s it. Wasn’t that what X. said to me this evening, outside my office? He, too was lost. Very well, he should come out with us more often; what is the summer for but the pub, the sun? That’s how every evening must pass, and all the way to autumn.

But to be lost – or at least in a phase uncharted, that new, long period of crawling out of debt. I have a mobile phone contract, my first; next week, broadband, and the week after, a DVD player, a TV: this my reward for reaching my mid 30s (for clearing my debts). And I look back and say to myself, what have I done?

But I have an idea of prose that would bear everything that happened. Bear it – but be more than what is borne. More: and what could be borne would be borne along with everything, the whole world. Everything would speak; all would be spoken, in a prose, I imagine, that would intersperse great historical events with the most intimate occurrences.

But do not confuse it, this prose, with what is written here. It all goes wrong, I won’t labour the point, but it’s all botched – all this writing. But I’ve worn out that theme: writing botched and broken. Still, I tell myself that it is necessary to write because life isn’t yet itself. Because it hasn’t arrived, living. And what is lived repeats that non-arrival, it lives it, it is borne by it.

That is why the smallness of a life – mine – does not matter. I can’t write anymore about failure. W. thought I’d be melancholy after our return from Freiburg. No, not anymore, I told him. I’m too weak for that. Weakness, but in more than one sense.

A kind of indifference: the affairs of the day no longer bother me. What should I expect? It is as I would expect. And then, in the still nights at the flat now the students have moved out, a bland tiredness. The day has gone, and the evening in the pub, and now the night. Now what? Sleep; wake up again.

The earth turns into the light, and once again, morning. Gone that sense of urgency I once had. It will all end soon, I thought. You only have so much time. So I rose earlier and earlier, to get a headstart on the day. And now?

But still, an idea of prose. By what massive book could I let the smallness of a life be borne away? What epic could be written of this, my everyday? Mine – but it is not mine. Anyone’s; no one in particular’s. All lives are small; no one’s has begun. Life in lieu of itself: that too is life, and the life of life.

Nine o’clock, and it’s still light. The longest day of the year, and its vague and grey. Tilt your head back and look at the sky, my brother in law told me, it’s good for you. So that’s what I do, and there it is, the whole sky. The whole: you know it only by walking, and through an open space – the field, my field, where they keep cows over the summer, though it is so close to the city.

An idea of prose. No themes, no characters. A kind of wandering speech. Like the voiceover in Eloge de l’amour when the camera is still by the river. A still camera, speech. What are they speaking about? Oh I could find out; I could work out the plot. But better that they just speak, better that plot no longer carries them, better than they are not even characters, but just nodes of speech, senders, addressees, and then not even that, as what they say is not even said to one another, but to the whole night, the whole sky and the river.

Worse for them, perhaps, that they speak by that river, and in that city.  I’m fortunate to live nowhere in particular, in the high latitudes, where there is light on the horizon at midnight. And now it’s time to round off this post, to finish it. Think instead of that prose that could not end, laying itself in short paragraphs across a large page.

I think of the opening pages of The Decay of the Angel, in the collected Sea of Fertility. An absolute book. The book of the end, that’s what I think to myself. Mishima was already beyond death when he wrote it. He wrote to us from the other side of death; and how could he mark its completion by his extinction? But I wonder if that wasn’t his impatience: that he should have been condemned to live and condemned to write a prose that could never end.

Write. Write until nothing is said, or when what is said does not matter. Write until indifference blows through your words as through the fields. Write like a stone, or the river as it speaks back to the nameless speakers of Eloge de l’amour. What does it say, the river, the whole night, the whole sky?

There is a way that writing might come apart in writing. That by writing, what is held by writing would itself disappear. There is a way of lightening speech, the whole of speech, until it floats into the air like a fire-balloon.

‘Tell the story of the day.’ – ‘I can’t.’ – ‘Tell the story.’

Every night this week, The Drift, at least once. I’m listening to it now. I’ve just come in from work. I’ve opened a cheap bottle of Cava. Dull skies; rain. The plants are an island in the flooded yard. Silence. I haven’t spoken to anyone today. Someone is pacing upstairs. Soon, no doubt, the thud-thud-thud of the bass through the ceiling. There’s only of them up there now. He’s light on his feet, but he likes loud music. He has his vinyl, he says, in the room above the one I am in now. I’m ready for it, listening for it behind The Drift.

Where has the other one gone? The other whose parents’ own the upstairs flat? Has he finished his exams and left? But there is the matter of the leak from the gutter at the back of the flats. The leak, the flood, in a single sheet, running down the wall from the full gutter. I should have told him while I had time. The other one, the other neighbour, never answers the door. Neither the front door, nor the back door.

‘Tell the story of the day.’ A second glass of Cava. I’ve been reliving the death of a friend. Strange comfort. I would like to relive it again now. To bring it back to me. To play fort-da with the memory, like Freud’s grandson. Write about it, I tell myself. But I’m written out. There’s nothing to write – not about that. Describe your impressions, I tell myself. The view from the windows. The beautiful garden. The pond, the fountain. Write about that. And the hospice. The nurses, and the great calm. To die there would be to die like a child. To relax into death. To fall asleep as though I’d fallen in the snow. To fall all the way to death.

And at work? I won’t say anything about that. Or I’ll speak very elusively and reserve the other kind of speech for much later. Work: the office, mine, high ceilinged, with big windows that look out over the town. Bookshelves, CD towers: everything is there. And it is orderly. My email box is orderly and the office is orderly. I am prepared, braced. All day, busy. To ready paperwork. To ready documentation, retrieving it from filing cabinets, printing hard copies of old emails. Defensive. Defend yourself. These four walls will not be your enclosed space forever. Soon the wind will blow through here, the office. But that is to the good. No sedentarism. Do not stay put.

‘Tell the story of the day’. – ‘I’ve said nothing yet.’ – ‘Tell the story.’ – ‘There’s nothing to say.’ – ‘Say it, then, say that nothing.’ Say it: eight o’clock and it’s not dark. The yard. White light. The island of plants in the flooded concrete. Two wheelie bins. The long scar up the wall where the pipe was pulled out. Need to see to that. Need to fix it.

The Drift. – ‘Write about that, write about The Drift.’ – ‘But The Drift has set itself back into the day, the condition of the day. I can no more write of it than I could write of the day.’ – ‘Write of The Drift, write of the day.’ Foolishly, I’ve dreamt, these last couple of days, of the narrative I would assemble of those years. A narrative: the blog posts are a start. Narrate them, though, from another perspective. From a ‘you’ that addresses their protagonist. A ‘you’ that is spoken by a god, or by several gods. I had that idea in February. I’m coming back to that idea.

I read Spark’s Hothouse by the East River. It was like a dull blow to the head. Hit me without knowing where it was from. What was that? I’ve never read anything like that. What are the rules? Where are the rules? Quick, a context; I need to insert it into a context. I read a critical study – phew. Then another – phew. Now I know. I know what she’s up to. I’m less disturbed. But still – the blow. It was heavy, and dull. What kind of book was that? Who could write a book like that?

I drank Lucozade at lunch time. I thought: I’m too tired, I mustn’t be this tired. Up at six, just as I was up at six yesterday. Can’t sleep until late, but up at six. Working on an essay, so I have to be up at six. It works on me, and calls me me to be up early, when the day is already bright. Six: the day’s been around for a while; it is I who am the latecomer. The day says: where were you?; I sit at my worktable to work. But Lucozade: it is in me now, the caffeine, the sugar. Double tiredness tomorrow, and for what? I knew, today, I would have to be braced. Ready. On the defensive. Lucozade was necessary. I read the paper in the sun, and drank Lucozade, half a small bottle of it, but enough. Caffeine, sugar.

‘Tell the story of the day.’ – ‘I can’t.’ – ‘Tell the story.’ – ‘I can’t. I can’t raise myself to the day.’ – ‘All that caffeine and that sugar – and for what?’ – ‘I ask myself the same question. I ask myself the same.’

You are still dying and I am still living. Somehow, both seem impossible. To die – to live. How is it you are dead, and I am alive? I feel cheated. No: I feel I am the cheat. How is it that day comes after day? How is it day succeeds day? One day after another, I wake up, and think: is this it, another day? One day, another: sometimes, walking from here to there – from my office, say, to the library, I think of the books I should read on the apocalypse. I tell myself that that’s what it’s all about: the apocalypse. The day unlimits itself. The day unravels in the day, and only I know that. What separates me from that tramp, with his grimy face? What separates me from the binge drinkers who swap a bottle round in the sun?

‘Tell the story.’ – ‘I haven’t yet begun. I can’t bring myself to the beginning.’ – ‘Tell the story.’ – ‘There is no story. Or all stories are distractions on the way to the story.’ What else, what else? I saw a magpie on the wall of my yard. I had thought, nothing can live in my yard except slugs. And wasn’t there a slug in the washing up bowl this morning? Weren’t my bowls slug-touched, sticky, even though I washed them in the hottest water? I threw it out of the window, the drowned slug. I thought I’d found the hole through which they came into the flat; thought I’d blocked it up. But still they come. Still the silver trail across the bowls and the cutlery.

‘Tell it.’ – ‘Nothing to tell. Nothing tells itself.’ – ‘Tell.’ – ‘But I’m telling nothing. Only the most inconsequential, you can see that.’ This morning, a litre of Plymouth Gin arrives with the rest of my shopping. Gin – and a 2KG bag of ice. Plymouth Gin like a glyph, a ward: that will keep disaster away. Gin – and ice. That will be enough. We went around the Plymouth Gin factory, R.M. and I. We saw how it was made, tasted the botanicals, separately and then as they were mixed into the gin. We held the gin glasses in our hands to warm the gin, and to release its flavours. And now I have a bottle of Plymouth Gin here, in the far North. Perhaps it will watch over me. The Plymouth Gin is watching over me.

‘Tell.’ – ‘I can’t tell. I won’t tell.’ And now it hits me, as I spread the goat’s cheese I bought for my friends’ visit on ricecakes: I am a character in a novel who realises he’s in a novel. But I am not in a novel. And then it hits me again: I am a type, but – what type? Of what am I an example? I’d like to know. I’d like to know where this is all headed. Let’s go further: what if I am already dead, and she, my friend, is alive? Then I’m writing in purgatory. I’m writing my way out. To buy the price of a ticket out. But to where. A ticket – to where?

‘An unwieldy commitment to resolute, almost absurd darkness’. Blah-feme has seen into my soul, but I am not Shostakovich. Laughter: to produce nothing – no work, only comments where a work might have been. I’ve done nothing, I know that – done nothing and written nothing, except on what I could not do and could not write. Until what I’ve written is what I could not have written. Shame: I do not write, I unwrite. Shame: I subtract from the world; I do not add to it. Laughter: but by my very presence on its face is the world lighter than it was.

I insist on it, my own inadequacy. Inadequatio: untrue. I did not keep my appointment with the truth. And enjoyed it. Where am I? Who is making me do this? Should I be here? Am I the only one here? Why can’t I say what I wanted to say? I blame the day, old adversary. I blame you: the day, with whom I cannot come to terms. And the day says: you are inadequate. You are feeble, fallen from yourself. I will not gather you up, nor hold you in my arms. And that is what I want: not to be so held. To be told: you will not be held. And still the chance I might be held.

Actor, how is it I know you are not completely dead? When you have an eye open to see whether anyone is watching you playing dead!

Yesterday, in the office and then wandering out into the city, I really did feel like the doomed character in the Ice Storm, the one you know is going to die. No work done, the day too heavy – I’ve written about it too many times. I thought I should read Sebald’s Vertigo, thought that then I would feel at least accompanied.

I went to the library, and found a volume of Nabokov’s novels instead. That will do, I thought; but then there was a problem with my ticket and I left with nothing. I found a Muriel Spark novel to read in the gym, instead, but that was no good: where was the book-companion, where the book that would divide doom in itself, opening it to me as a surface over which I could pass?

In the end, I found nothing; later that night, visiting a friend, he showed a ten volume collection of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets: so many names with which I was familiar, but that I had never read altogether, like this. The feeling of doom had gone; I’d brought round The Drift to play to my friend – in particular, the track Clara. He was impressed. We listened to Xenakis and then he burned me a disc of Berio.

Cycling home, I was glad to have made it to the other shore of the day. My friend had given me a volume of Milosz: that was welcome. I stayed up late and read, listening to The Drift. That percussion! I thought, doom has divided itself – doom has given itself to me in another way: now it is aestheticised, it has become a work. I listened; yes, there was doom – the thud of fists punching meat -, there it was, outside of me. And who was I now, alone, after midnight?

For a long time, I couldn’t sleep. I had to plan, to think ahead. I thought, I will have to clear up the flat, to get everything in order. Things are getting away from me again; so that’s what I did, when I woke up, and now the flat is calm and still around me. I’m ready – but for what? I should be working, I know that. I should be writing, I know that. And instead?

The sewage is long gone from the yard. I moved the plants to the centre, where they form a kind of island. They look less sickly. There is still the scar along the wall, where the pipe was pulled out. The weather will get through there, I was told, and it is true; mould grows everywhere in the kitchen, and the slugs still get through.

Has the doom lifted? I phone R.M., in her new house in Clapham. We talk about the lecturers’ strike. She’s been reading the biography of Henry Green I left down there. What should she do, revise for another insurance exam, or write a paper? Write a paper, I said, and told her about all the trouble up here. She sympathises: doom is contagious. Her stomach did a flipflop when I told her, she said.

We’re doomed, W. always says, and he’s right. The last of a kind, the very last. Doomed whichever way you look at it. Gin on the train and the great, calm see. ‘The sea makes me happy’, says W., ‘get some more gin’. ‘How come it always happens to you?’, says W., ‘Why do you think you bring it out in people?’

Those were sunny days, visiting the South, the weekend before last. We listened to the Scott Walker boxset. ‘There’s a new album coming out soon’, I said. I’m listening to Clara again. Those drums!