Category: Journal

This is the last of the fine weather days, it said on the news this morning. Rain tomorrow, and the north wind. I won’t be able to have the windows open as I do now, and let the air move through the flat. The flat is not even dark, as it usually is – or rather, its darkness is like the shade that is welcome because it is part of a sunny day. I found out yesterday I would not have to draw a line under this part of my life; this was welcome, as would have been the opposite outcome.

Was it last Sunday that, bored in the office, seeing the football fans lined up in their seats in the stadium from the stairwell, I received an invitation to go out for drinks and then to eat with others, my friends? I thought: would I want to leave here? Should I want to – and for what? Further North, in another city, I would have had a different life. What would have happened there? And what would have happened here where I had left, that was no longer my ‘here’?

Eventful year! Who was it that said yesterday, I’m interested in the non-event? I thought, without saying it, so am I. And then, how to discover it again, the year of the non-event, the year that unlimits this and every year? Is it dark matter that will put the universe back to a single, smouldering point? Is it that secret force which will bring it back to its inception?

Forking paths: the event is joined to the non-event. What happens does not happen, and it is the non-event that steers everything back to the beginning. But what begins and what ever began that did not carry around it the nimbus of non-beginning?

None of that this morning, in this fine, clear weather. None of it: perhaps later this summer, bright day following day, there will be a time when it is that the summer lies down and that, as it does so, divides itself. Above the grass, in the summer haze, the event will slip out of phase with itself, or reveal, as if for the first time, what has never occurred.

Too many questions. I think of the boy in the firing range in Mirror who, charged by the commander to perform an about turn, turns a full 360 degrees, unlike all the other cadets. The instructor asks him why. ‘In Russian, "about" means a 360 degree turn’. He will be sent back to his parents, says the instructor, angry at his insolence. Another cadet’s voice: ‘he lost his parents in the siege of Leningrad’. And the boy says quietly, ‘What parents?’ And then, ‘What firing position. I don’t understand.’

‘I don’t understand’ – until the whole world is what is not understood.  But the world, now, is not the space in which it is possible to choose and act. ‘I don’t understand’: helplessness that gives the world as what it is not. Space of disengagement, time without possibility.

Noise upstairs, so I go into the other room to read. The Conversion; I’m already halfway through; Karl, once Jewish, is now an apostate. But the convert has been joined an old servant, who vanished at the time of his parents’ death. She, Gloria, is observant. The rituals mean something to her; Yom Kippur sees her in her white dress, and taking candles to the synagogue. In the evenings with Karl, she says she will have to go back to her home village, though she doesn’t want to. Why go?, asks Karl the convert. Because she is obliged to, Gloria says.

Obligation. Two memories of my own. The first is what my mum told me about my dad: when he was old, he’d go back to the old country, back to India. Oh yes, my mum thought – without her? And a second memory: the letter we were no doubt not meant to see: an older brother – the one who, when my dad was young, supported those younger than him through his government job, and for whom my dad would always have an enormous respect – wrote a letter to my dad not long before he married my mum.

If you marry this Danish girl, he wrote, you will betray your family, your homeland, your religion. And so it was thereafter, for at least twenty years, the names of my parents were excluded from those lists that appeared on the front of wedding invitations that would arrive to the UK from India. We were excluded: this was not a burden. Hadn’t we been received with great joy when we travelled to India in 1977 and 1981?

At any rate, my uncle’s letter continued, he would continue to support his younger brother, my dad, after he married. He was still one of the family – and wouldn’t he bring his bride to India to meet the family. When they went out there in 1971, they went to the oldest brother’s house first. This was apt, apparently – though dad wasn’t concerned, and he didn’t prepare my mum for the protools of traditional Indian life: didn’t she walk into the room with the icons with her sandals on, and then, bored, go out down the road with me (I was 18 months old) in search of excitement? And what, my mum thought, was that woman doing in a room all on her own, excluded from the others (the woman was menstruating)?

Of course, I remember nothing of that visit. Mum said the letter from my uncle made her and dad closer: they were two (and then three, and then four -) against the world. Against it! And didn’t my uncle, at my dad’s funeral, speak of him as a self-made man? Because that’s what he was, although he was never cut off from the family. Now, almost 40 years after that letter, my uncle is an old man, the head of the family; he is happy to see us, and we him in his flat in the block he has had built.

40 years! In truth, he was always happy to see us – was only concerned for his younger brother’s happiness. Cut off from his country, his religion – and from family: my uncle complained my dad was tardy in replying to the letters that arrived on blue air mail paper, with cramped handwriting from him and the other brothers. And there were letters from my dad’s beloved older sister too, written in Tamil, not English, until she died, too young, in 1981. The sisters died young; the brothers lived longer; there are three left now. Three – but in quite good health.

I remember – it must have been 1981 – the image of Ganesh in rice grains on the floor of one of the rooms of the flat. I remember the two horizontal lines in ash on my uncle’s forehead: Shiva, not Vishnu; it is the third eye that is figured thus. You remember the story: Parvathi placed her hands over Shiva’s eyes and the world went dark; then a third eye opened on Shiva’s forehead, and the world was light again. Yes, I remember – though that is only a purana, a story for the unsophisicated, and surely the third eye has a more profound significance.

Two horizontal lines; from the bathroom, the sound (I know now) of a throat being cleared. I looked querulous when my uncle emerged. Do you want to know what these marks are for?, he asked, referring to those lines. But it was that couging sound that interested me. Some evenings – was this 1981 or 1977? – my uncle would allow me to strike matches and to throw them lit from the balcony. We were five, maybe six floors up. Once I went out to play on my own – but the blocks all looked the same; I was lost, and some local boys had to bring me home.

But what was I thinking of? Appelfeld, yes: and tradition. What is life without holy days and holy books? Women provide culture, said my dad to me once. Men nature – he implied, and women culture. My mum is an atheist. Nothing worse for my grandfather than seeing the Pope on television. It would send him into a rage: all the money in the Vatican, what about the poor? He died a long time ago; I’ve only the dimmest memories of him (his flat, 1973. A book with a dog whose long ears were held stretched horizontally.) During the war in Denmark (he was Danish, as my mother is), he approved of the attempt to smuggle Jews over to Sweden. They’re so clever, he said, according to mum.

Tradition. We have a Danish Christmas – but what about Easter? And all the other days? They are not unmarked – metal eggs hang from yellow ribbons from the lamp. But a hometown? A religion? Ritual? We cross from place to place in the brave new world; my Indian cousins – from the South, praised by Bill Gates – are scattered all over the world. The Indian miracle is continuing; 50 years! my cousin in Delhi said about the post-partition policies. 50 years, we’ve waited! I was moved. We want to eliminate poverty by 2025, he said. We spoke of the car plants moving to Chennai, the Detroit (as it was) of the new India. Would the poor be employed there? Once we flew from Chennai to Delhi over the vast forest of rural India. Village upon village, I thought. Was is it true life went on there unchanged?

Candles, lit to relieve the greyness of winter – that’s Denmark. And rye bread – and crispbread, and pickled herrings, schnaps and lager. Denmark – but have ever cooked anything Danish? Or Indian? R.M. tells me she hasn’t eaten all day. Should she eat dinner?, she says. You don’t eat dinner, do you?, she says, and it’s true. There’s something compulsive about you, R.M. told me, and I said, but I had to work all day. I had that form to fill in, I said, it took twelve hours!

But I never have dinner. Home tonight and I drank wine and went online and then the music started, and I went into the other room to read. Sunday – the office. Not church – and when have I ever been to a temple? The bright day passes; I go to the gym. No one goes to the gym on Sunday, says R.M., and I remembered what the taxi driver said the other day about cycling along the river. But did I want to cycle by the river?

Where did they come from, the family in India? From a village, where life passed as it always passed? There are some who have an oral memory of the families of Krishnarajapuram, where we came from. Generation after generation, and back until – when? A saint. We are descended from a saint – that was my father’s word. Was he translating, rishi?

Questions like, do you think of yourself as British?, always mademy best friend growing up, half Egyptian half Dutch, and I, half Indian half Danish impatient. What did it matter? No nostalgia for roots. Our fathers came from the third world, our mothers from the first. We didn’t like the beggars, the dust, the haggling – and we didn’t speak our mothers’ language. We were British, then – British, and from the medicore suburbs, were light fell on everything with the same equanimity.

Religion appalled us. And false sentiment. And the posh. The wide present, instead. The present into which we would go out on our bikes, one housing estate exactly like the others. Would we, like our fathers, remember our old countries lovingly when we grew older? Not a chance. Our present was banal, our suburbs banal. No nostalgia – not for this place. Get away from it as soon as possible – and we did, he going south, and I north. As soon as we could – and relieved, both of us, that we escaped. And to wherever working class culture survived.

My cousin in Delhi has a volume of poetry in English in the backseat of his car. He reads when he is driven through the busy streets. His children will not have arranged marriages. His son is in America, studying. First liberal arts, then business – not business first, says my cousin, because it leaves the young tongue-tied. They need to be able to converse! And so his son studies Spanish and Philosophy and goes to concerts at Penn State. And his daughter may be going out there, too. The family is scattering. Let it scatter.

There is nothing mine in my flat that is old. Nothing that has any age that is mine. Days pass – weeks pass unmarked. No holy days here. Day turns upon day, one day upon another. In the evenings, out; in the mornings, early, before work, here – and the long day at work; I cross the afternoon there, it is happiness, there in the office, my books around me and sunlight through the windows. I tell myself I should draw a line under my life here, and begin elsewhere – that I am too settled. What it is to be comfortable! Better the old anxieties – better an unsettled life. What good would it be to spend thirty years here, all the way to retirement?

Tradition: the paganisms are banished; there are shopping malls in the old sacred spaces. Light falls everywhere; we are all the same. Sometimes, I tell myself I need a car, that I could go driving out in the countryside: out. That’s what R.M. would like to do, when she visits. Sacred time, separate time, carved off from work. But work is suffused all through my life; I live; I work; there are forms to fill in, even on Sundays.

Life – no alibi required. No story. I am in the midst of life; I am halfway – touch wood – through the course of my life. Healthy enough, young enough, to – what? But there’s no answer to ‘what’s it all for?’ In this new world, our colleagues are our friends, and the day turns around the office and the pub. Isn’t that enough?. Perhaps a car, and then I could drive out into the countryside. Enough. Lately, when I come home from work, I read. Enough?

I would like a house, not a flat. No noise. A house that stands in the countryside. Eventually – one day – a house detached. I will be 50 years old – 55, and I will have my house. Meanwhile, the light will fall evenly, with great equanimity, upon all. We’ve been torn up from the earth; we are all to be self-made men and women. Self-made, and in our 20s, we will try to find a job, and in our 30s, to consolidate our position at work – and in our 40s, will it then be time to live in a place nice enough to spend the evening, to cook, to live as others used to live, or will our lives be still suffused with work? Will it be that there is no difference, not yet, between life and work time?

No sacred. The days are undivided. One day is like another, and we live and breathe like others in the world. No obligation, not really – not to our hometowns, to our religion, to our country: that’s happiness. And to others? Are we obligated to others? But what if you change jobs and move, from one end of the country to the other. What if you both want careers? New life: pass through cities with which you have no connection. Pass until it is the whole world with which you will have no connection.

Now I remember Rilke’s Malte: will we weigh less when we die? Will our lives weigh less, we who are without obligation? Will life lie down on life, across the generations, like the shells of the sea-creatures that make coral? Light falls everywhere. Some of us thrive, others of us fall from the world, with no one to catch them. Am I thriving?

Is this it? Am I to wake up now? Nearly ten o’clock, and up for hours, I have not yet awoken. The flat seems unfamiliar to me, larger than it was before my trip South. Blank white sky outside, and cold. In the other room, on the other side of the bevelled glass, the light above the bed is on, and Austerlitz lies open upside down on the pillow.

I was reading, not long ago. I was turning the pages quickly, not long ago. I read, I was carried along by the movement of sentences, one after another, without paragraphs. I read: Austerlitz bore me, I was carried along by my reading, until -. Until what? I thought, I have a post to finish in the other room. The day said, finish the post, accomplish something. And I said, but I am reading of the labyrinth inside the building in Antwerp, of Austerlitz’s Welsh childhood, of the rooms kept locked upstairs and his love of houses with open windows.

I said, I barely slept; they are going to bed ever later upstairs, and I, who am too easily awoken, have to stay awake with them, the students who are on their holidays. How was I to sleep?, I asked. Should I sleep now? But I had been reading Austerlitz, turning the pages. I’d been reading quickly, and after all, there were very few words on the page, and very big gaps between lines, I’d been carried along by reading, on this, my week of Sebald, my ten days of Sebald. I’d been reading, and hoped the generosity of his book should carry over to my writing, to the furtherance of my post, which I have not up yet (this is not it).

I passed from room to room in my old dressing gown. From room to room, from reading to writing and the bevelled glass, installed to let light from one end of the flat to the other, in between. The students have not yet awoken: good. Hours left until I have to be in: good. But what was I to write? Of R.M. and I walking in Christchurch College gardens (is that what they were called), or reading Hello! in the late-opening cafe? Of my last night in Oxford, on my own, after everyone had left? Of the crumbs of Lavash bread all over the floor of my room? Of the alcoholics of the Cowley Road?

Reading Sebald the whole time (The Emigrants, and then Vertigo), it was that my experience was being narrated as I had it, that he (the narrator), set back within me, was speaking for me of my own experience. Or that what was mine was not mine. I thought (he thought): I should look more carefully at these buildings around me. I thought (he thought): I should engage in conversation with strangers and half-strangers. And didn’t a parking attendant address me as I sat yesterday morning outside Blackwells on Broad Street, waiting for it to open? And didn’t a taxi driver remind me that there was nothing we could do about the cold weather, the sleet and the rain? At least it’s bright, he said.

And now? Who is writing, him or me, one or the other? Who writes, he set back in me, or I as the one who remembers what it was to have lived Sebaldly, or at least like his narrator? Cycling home from the station, I took an unfamiliar route in honour of the author of Austerlitz. Uphill in his honour, because I thought: this city should become like the building in Antwerp where corridors lead nowhere and there are bricked in rooms without doors.

Obscure day. It is often muggy in the Thames Valley. Return home late at night, or go out to bid visitors goodbye, and the air is moist; the grass, like the tarmac, covered in a layer of moisture. I am here for – how long? – today? tomorrow? – working on this and that. The Rings of Saturn accompanies me and as I began to read this morning, having given up the letter I was trying to write, it is as though it had set back in me that backdrop against which memories can come into appearance.

Set it back: if I call it forgetting, this is in no way to be understood as the opposite of memory, but rather, a kind of patina, an encrustation which ages each memory, bringing it forward, already old, with the whole of the past. Reading, the day loses its hold on time and seems to fall indifferently into the past. Counter-day, how is I have always known you by what failed to happen?

Obscurity: Sebald’s East Anglia is my Berkshire, but neither is itself. Time’s arrow is lost in the sand; every day happens at once. How old am I? I lived in the same house when I was fifteen, and then again when I was thirty. How old am I now? Five more years have passed, but no time has passed.

In the South, outside London, to the West. The West: there where the houses are almost on top of one another, and when an old one is bought, it is knocked down, and three new ones appear, cheek by jowl. Houses on top of houses, almost like Chagall paintings. Only these are modern, Georgian style houses, side by side in vast estates.

I can see the boughs of the trees swaying in the wind through the double glazed doors. Silence: everything is quiet here. My fingers striking the soft keys of this laptop are already too loud. Yesterday, in a pub in London by the Thames, the river flooded and the water came up so high we had to stand on the tables. Today, we drove beside a tributary of the Thames which was likewise too swollen for its banks.

Evening. I watch Pickpocket; curious to be able to find a film like that, here. But it was easy enough; it was there in Blockbusters alongside other films. Everything can be found; there is nothing that can escape the great archiving, or that’s how it seems. Everything is here, and for all tastes; films, like the books in Waterstones, all weigh the same as one another.

The DVD extras are ineresting. Bresson seeks neutrality from the voices of his ‘models’ (not actors, remember). Neutrality – neither the one nor the other. And Inquietude was the original title of the film. Isn’t that another word for neutrality? For its movement, its wavering? The Book of Disquiet, The Book of Inquietude: how to translate the original title? No matter.

I think there must be many Bernardo Soaress in these suburbs. Many diarists, many writers. But they are all too scattered to know one another, I tell myself, stars who burn along for a while, and then burn out. Stars whose fuel is nothing but youth and ardency: what does it take for such a star to nova? What great deed? That is, perhaps, what Mishima sought: to transform the fuel of his life into a greater conflagration – and to set other stars, too, on fire.

Perhaps. But in the end, life in the suburbs consumes itself and there is nothing left. Isn’t it time, then, to sign up for a course, to retrain, to find yourself a career? No longer a star, who are you? Husk, how will you remember that part of your life when you were nothing but ardent?

Awake at 4.00 AM – again. 4.00 AM, halfway through the night, it snaps in two. Half way through, the night breaks and I wake up. What time is it? Fumble for the alarm clock. That time again: 4.00 AM, four hours since I went to sleep, four hours until I wake up. Shown, now, is the articulation of the night, sleep’s hinge, the centre around which it turns.

I wake up; fumble for alarm clock. 4.00 AM – again. What to do? I’m awake. Light on. Book out. Ill Seen Ill Said – that gain. Ill See Ill Said – the book which awaits me at night’s turning point. 4.00 – 5.00 AM: night’s plateau. The plateau of the pre-morning. Read. And then lie half awake until the real morning. Half awake, half sleeping. I was on the plateau, and now I’m descending to the valley.

Was it the last of the snow gathered behind fences in fields and in hollows in the ground that I saw from the train on my way back to the North? This has been a long cold snap, and no end in sight. I had promised a Spanish friend a fortnight ago that the worst of winter had passed – but it’s so cold!, she said in the pub tonight. But that’s March, R.M. had reminded me: in like a lion, out like a lamb. But I don’t remember a March that was this cold.

I’m very busy, with no time to write here. Piles of books to read, a lot to write; chapter 2 coming on well; chapter 3 to follow. The new book’s on … I won’t say yet. I hope to be back writing here in early April, and perhaps with new topics and fresh themes; until then, there’ll be little here. Unless there is another genre – a writing here whilst writing elsewhere. Guilty writing: what energy is expended here will not be repaid there, in the world. Why, then, is it necessary? Why is that other writing never enough?

On the train, on the way up, I thought again of the many memories I have put to rest here by writing of them, whether directly or obliquely. But they are not memories now, not any more, but rather spaces where memory once was; that I’ve forgotten is enough – that I’ve been given forgetting, that is enough: I do not know what it was I forgot, but I forget, and that was my desire in writing and it was what I was given by way of writing. But still I thought to myself, on the train, today, today, what is to happen today? And told myself when I had time I should find books on the apocalypse and write on that. Today – what happened today? Today – was it the last day? Write as if it’s the last day. As if every day were the last day.

When did the idea come to me to write what I pleased here, for a full year? I didn’t manage it; for six months, I think, there was writing, and after that? I had to cross, with writing into the other world, and remain there. No time for this – no time for the other writing, in which writing barely comes to itself. No time to mark the advent of writing in writing. What does it matter? But when I fail to discover that advent, it is also as though I miss an appointment with myself – or is it the other way around? Isn’t that there is appointment to be missed, so I can discover again the errancy of writing?

You will know my dream: a writing without topic, without substance – with neither theme of argument. Writing that issues from itself, only. Writing that is given from itself, with nothing to detain it. My secret: I am writing a book on music. The long promised book – on music, there in the other world. It comes together; the book assembles itself. Every morning, early, I write a little – then a break, and then, the next morning, I will have another idea, and so on. I told myself I would not write here. Only there, the other writing – only there, in the world.

John Fahey. Cold night. Home after a few days away. Meeting my friends in the pub. What’s to happen this week? Tomorrow – to taste the jamon P. has brought back from Spain. Then our paper on Wednesday afternoon – and then? And then? The last day: as though I were never able to make a plan that would carry me forward for more than a few hours. As though it were impossible to plan what I would be doing next week, or the week after that. What is to happen? Everything. When will it end? Today – it will finish today.

Yes, I am guilty – my paper is open in another window; I should work on that. Finish it. But then it’s as if everything had already finished. Posthumous life – why did I confuse this posthumous writing, once upon a time, with writing to a particular person? Why was it for her that I thought I was waiting, as if she could step towards me from the other side other side of the mirror? In truth, there was no one – no one to write for, no one to whom I could address letters. Who was it I was trying to reach? Myself – was it to bridge the distance, to join this world (is it a world?), with the other one, the real one (but is it real?)?

Today – but it is already too late, nearly midnight, and the day is nearly finished. Today – but can it begin, the other day, when we are joined, when mirror and world swim into one another?

No, this is not life, this is not living. Still early, still before eight o’clock, and you’ve drawn the quiet day around you like a shawl. Work time, but you are not working. You’re supposed to be working, but instead you’re blogging. And isn’t there a sense of triumph in this? Isn’t there a sense of struggle and triumph. As if you were welcoming the very waste of time that this is?

I am testing my strength against tiredness. Struggle: what is written here is written against tiredness. It sets itself against it, it requires it, as the cloudy paleness of the skin of Japanese women was once set against bilious green lipstick and blackened teeth. Tiredness pushed back, tiredness pushed against. The triumph of a writing which must achieve itself simply to be marked here. Triumph of writing against the old burden, against the weight of tiredness that should have kept me in my bed.

And the other writing – the new book on which I should be working? What of it, the other writing, that which would achieve and finish itself in a book? The real writing, not this phantom-writing – the writing that completes and finishes itself and closes itself into a book? It will be the third book, after two others. The third – after the other two, which were hardly books. The first, I’m told, is selling steadily, but the second is not selling as well. I would that the second – which is better – sold and not the first, but it is the other way around. No matter, there is the third book, in which I’ve placed my hopes. But have I placed them there?

Tiredness laughs: you’ll fail in the third book as you failed in the others. Tiredness, the old enemy, says: nothing will change, the third book will be like the second book, as the second book is like the first book. Tiredness, the oldest adversary, says: the only drama is the one I permit you. Tiredness: drama is your struggle to escape me and your falling back to me. Escape – every morning, early – and falling back – every morning, slightly less early. You have an hour, says tiredness, I’ll give you an hour each morning, and through the rest of the day you will wander like a dazed ox.

Tiredness is already clouding my thoughts. Vagueness is settling into me. But I must keep vigilance – I must watch out, even from this vagueness. There must be something of me that does not disappear into the fog. As in Flowers for Algernon, there is a time of strength, of intelligence – an hour in which anything might be written, but then there are the many hours when nothing is possible. One hour of strength, and then the long decline. And already it’s beginning, the decline. Eight fifteen, and already beginning, and what I’m writing here is written against it, that decline.

Is this life? Is this living? I have friends here, who I see every night. The pub, and last night the cinema: friends with whom to pass those hours of decline, those evening hours were stength deserts itself once and for all. And other friends, more distant ones? I can’t phone them – too tired. I can email them, that’s true, but I can’t phone them, I don’t want to phone them. Don’t want to talk as one person to another.

Better, the pub and a few people, all talking. Better the pub, and the general hubbub, where nothing needs to be said, but conversation passes between us like a beachball. Keep it up in the air, that’s what required. Nothing needs to be said; there is conversation, laughter, and the conversation is kept up in the air. No one to one talk. No explaining myself. No news to give. No effort to talk. No struggle. Nothing worse than the struggle on the phone to talk, to drag the words out. As though I were called to account. As though I had to confront the whole of my life and account for it.

No, I will not talk in that way, I will not be called to account. Email me, I tell them inside. Let them email, and then I can reply as it suits me to reply. No urgency; let a few days pass, and when in a part of the day when I am once again awake, I can write a few lines. Emails! Let the days pass, and reply. I keep the phone unplugged. Dialup, not broadband, so no one can ring when I’m online. Because these are the dazed hours, the wanderer’s hours, when every act is set against tiredness. These are hours where I’ve lost my way, and there are only a few books for company, a bottle of fizzy water, the desklamp.

And writing? – True, I keep the Post Introduction box open; true, there is a unmarked page opened in Word. Pages on which nothing is written. Pages which wait for me even when I go into the other room to lie down. Which wait as I pass into the other room to read a few pages of this, of that. Eight thirty. Should I go back to sleep? Should I go into the other room, where there are always a few books, four or five, which are likewise, I tell myself, written against tiredness? The other room, through the bevelled glass. The other room, through the pane of glass installed to let light from one end of the flat to another. Should I go there, where the curtains are not yet drawn and the day can cancel itself out? Should I lie down, and let the day scratch itself out?

Everything in the day points beyond itself; it is a means, and the end is not yet in sight. Urgency: rise, and get to work. Rise early – seven o’clock, – and get to the computer. There’s only so much time. It’s Saturday, and you mustn’t waste Saturdays. And then Sunday tomorrow. Two days for work! A weekend of work! From Saturday morning to Sunday night you will be the clean arrow that is shot through the hours.

Rise early. It’s snowed. No matter. Open up Typepad. Should I write something? Should I accompany the other work, the real work, with another writing? It should be forbidden, I tell myself. How much time did I waste yesterday, cutting down a post that had got out of hand? An hour – too long. I do not have an hour. But the desire, nevertheless, to make, and not in academic prose. Desire to make, to pause in this hour, to keep something of the day that will otherwise disappear as pure means. Keep the day, but how?

Write of the snow that seems to stick to the wall around the kitchen window. Write of the plant whose veins, you imagine, are frozen so that it hunches rather than spreads out – hunched plant, contracted around its pot, down whose leaves the snow would slid were it not so strangely sticky. Write of the blue sky, lighter this time than yesterday morning – is it the light reflected up from the snow. Write of the top of the truck that you see passing to and fro above the yard wall. Write of the open bin lids, of the little forest of potted firs. Write, and then keep time for yourself. Shelter the day that it does not become pure means. Hold it back, this time before my neighbours wake up.

I am writing chapter two of the new book. Chapter two! As though chapter one were already done! I finished a draft of the latter last weekend. It wrote itself across two weeks, in the morning before work. The second chapter is more unruly. Why hasn’t it come together? Why, this morning, has it not formed itself as by one stroke. But I have only intermittent energy. As I woke this morning, I thought: tired again. Just as I knew yesterday I was tired again.

I had only one day of clarity in the last fortnight. One day – Thursday. It was a marvellous day; I was reborn. I was too busy to write, it is true, but I knew that I could have written that day. Written here at the blog, pushing beyond the bottom of the page so many of my recent posts I so dislike, or written, in one gesture a five thousand word draft of the second chapter. Thursday!

But yesterday, the tiredness returned. An afternoon dazed. I was busy, and then I went to the library, still dazed. I forced myself to read a long article, but as I read, I thought, I’m too tired for this, the article’s too long. I thought, it’s too much for me; there are other articles to which it refers that are too much. What is sociolinguistics? What are codes? How is it that there is so much to read? Friday began to disappear. I thought, I’ll go home and work, but then: I’m too tired to work.

But then the phonecall came: pub, and then a film. So the pub, and then a black-and-white film in which men in darkened rooms smoked and talked all at once. I walked back over a snowy pavement. There was music thudding upstairs. Should I work? Should I write something now, I asked myself, though it was already late. But the thudding music. No: go to bed, I told myself. To bed on the sheet that was fresh this morning. To bed beneath two duvets for the cold. To bed and then up early, to work.

But as I woke this morning, I knew I was tired again. Double urgency, then: I should work straight after my morning coffee! Get to work, straightaway! You’ll have only one hour of working time today, no matter how hard you try, so work now! Begin now! White light behind the curtains. I opened them, and: an inch of snow. The forest of little firs. Snow! Who was I to work? Who was I to write, this morning?

And then the blog: all these awful posts. A sequence of awful posts, so tentative, so half formed! I knew I had to drive them down the page. I knew they had to go, and beyond the edge of the page. I had to write at the blog, and that first of all. Write here, if only to make my mark in this, the day. Write to say: I was here, it snowed this morning, and I’m going to write chapter two!

Have I kept the day? Is it kept? But soon I will have forgotten this post. Soon, it too will fall below the bottom of the page. Put it in a category then. Day by day, that’s the category. Different from Today, which marks impossible days, agonising days. Different from the Everyday, which is a name for dissolution, for days which undo themselves. Different from Stagnant Lives, which record defeat. The Day to Day: notes to say, I was there, and that simply. But was I here?

Yesterday, I saw Proust’s cake, madeline, sold in a bagel shop. I listened to someone speak of his grandmother and the apricot stone she planted. He’s brought the growing plant in because of the cold. What if it dries out? But he’ll return it to the garden after the frost has gone. I thought: I would like for my past to be as certain as my present. I thought, but I am losing it, the past, even as the present is as hard and bright as the blue sky.

Cold weather at the end of February, the same as last year. We were in the holiday camp last year in Camber Sands for the festival. Thin walls, a blanket each to sleep beneath. Too cold! Tequila and card games. Slint. And this year? I was ill for a few weeks, tired and vague, and then, yesterday morning, I knew I was better: the present was very sharp again; it had come into focus. I had been staggering about like a dazed ox, and now? The day was sharply in focus. Frost everywhere. The blue, hard sky; no clouds. What was I reading? Something about dub. I had thought to myself, that’s what Blanchot’s recits are – dub – where plot and character are stripped away and what is left is only a hollow echoing, drop outs and reverberation. I thought, that was my present, when I was ill. That was my non-present, the moment lost in its own echoing.

And now? Time does not lag behind itself; the present passes like the water that runs from the snout of a glacier. Clarity: last night, coming home, even the stars were bright, and I thought: I should know their names, these stars. But I saw the three stars of Orion’s belt low over the trees in the little park close to the flat. It’s only now the year’s beginning, I thought. It’s begun; every event will be clear and sharp; time will keep its appointment with itself; every day will be as bright and glittering as the tarmac that is streaked with frost.

I am at home as I am never at home at this hour: past noon, and still in the flat. Half past twelve, and still here, at the flat. When I lean back in my chair, I see the long cracks running beneath the surface of the paint on the ceiling. I think to myself: you should be in your office, writing. I think: you should be there, at the office, surrounded by books. But I am here, at home – is this home? – in the flat.

The light bulb from the ceiling, without lapshade. The brown exposed floorboards; brown louvre doors. What would it take to lighten the flat? How can light be brought here, to this flat, this pit, half-buried in concrete? How I can bring light to my life, to its hollowness? How to ignite an inner sun? But I know that there is nothing inside, or rather, that the space that has hollowed out itself can be rejoined to the blazing surface of the outside. Is there a way to turn the flat, likewise, inside out? A way to spread it across the surface upon which light is always falling?

One day we will have no secrets. One day we will be opened, each of us, and there will be no more secrets.

The first day of the new month. How did that happen? Too busy, though I noticed from my office the evenings were getting lighter. Too busy, though and if I have an hour free in this bright, clear morning, it has already been gathered from itself by the coming day. Then scarcely an hour free, but preparation time; no free hour, but the time to bring myself to the beginning, as God gathered himself before the creation.

But isn’t there a time when, as Bataille writes, ‘a god does not busy himself’? To be that god, or, like a god, the sacrifice whose stomach has been cut open and innards laid out glistening before the day. To have the secret of the future in my innards! To let others read the future there! But if, like one of Mishma’s runaway horses, I slashed open my belly to the sun, they would find nothing hidden inside me, nothing to read.

The floorboards rest on the solid earth, I tell myself; this is not true, but it is true for me now. They are solid, the floorboards; they rest – and upon the solid earth. I walk across them as though I walked on the earth. Yes, it is the earth below my feet, even though I know the centre of the flat is sagging, that a mine shaft was once open outside my front door, and this group of houses was once a coalmine.

Above me, though, the students – their flat. Their flat, not mine, a space above my ceiling. What are they doing up there? Sometimes, they are noisy, but tonight, so far, quiet enough. Above me, the students, in their airy flat, and me in my dark flat. Above, students, walking in the air and light and me in the pit of my flat, my writing table level with the floor of the yard, half-buried, half-subterranean, with barely any light let in here. That’s why there is a window between living room and bedroom – bevelled glass, four foot by five, through which light can come, though very little light comes.

I’ve seen several tenants come and go upstairs. Several of them – noisy and quiet, students and workers; once a family from overseas, I spoke to them. The children lined up to greet me. We shook hands, each of us; they did not speak English. Then, after them, the businessman who let his son live there in the evening. In he’d come, the son, who worked in a nightclub and play music. Three AM, four AM – music. No point knocking on the door, he never responded. I lay awake and redrafted the book on which I was working. Were it not for those nights, what would I have published? Sometimes, then, I’d escape to R.M.’s, catching the train to Edinburgh: it was too loud here, and especially when he had his friends around, the son.

That was two years ago. When is it that such memories become narratable? When is it possible to write of them, those memories, to recall them and set them down? Tonight I tell myself I am more solidly here than ever before; I walk on the stripped floorboards of the flat and know it is mine. How different it was when music came thumping down! How different when the flat seemed to shrink and compress and I was as though crushed between its walls! I used to go from this room to the other, on the other side of the glass. There, too, the music pounding.

And now? I rest on solid earth, but still the flat seems too large, too empty. How will I remember it? Perhaps for those happy evenings when I came home and wrote without forethought. For those evenings when writing was possible, and I wrote, taking up every evening the thread of what was written the night before. That, too, is in the past; the writing dried up; nothing asked to be written. The past: the flat has moved through many phases. For how many years have I lived here? But I’m not sure I’ve lived here. The floor is too wide, too large, even though I can cross to the other side in one stride. This room is uninhabited, although I am here in the room.

Have I given it a history, this flat, this envelope of my life? Has something happened here? When my friends come to eat, I place candles in a ring on the floor. We sit on cushions. When R.M. comes, she rests her bike in the hallway (mine is in the bedroom). And in the meantime?

As dub is to original, so writing to my life. Take it again, this time with space, this time with reverb and echo, this time with a tiredness so massive nothing can complete itself. Lie down. You’re ill – too tired. Later, write. Retake it: dub echoes, dub reverb, or take it over and again, wear it out. The worn out tape of There’s a Riot Going On, this time without vocals, without music, just tape hiss and tape worn out.

Dividing bedroom and living room, there is a window in my flat, a sheet of bevelled glass, quite big, to let in light. And that is written life, to look at it through that glass – too see, but also not to see, every event smeared and without detail. Vast, slow movement, backlit by indifferent white light: blurred life, life without contour, where no event is divided from any other, and nothing completes itself.

Events, now, without determinacy, bleeding into one another as the same not-happening. Eternal life, eternal non-event. How to write about that?

I have many projects, all of them idiotic. I keep busy, I think up projects, but all of them are idiotic, I know that. I am idiot, I am reconciled to that and my projects are idiotic, do you think I don’t know that? But still, it’s better to have projects than to do nothing at all, that’s for sure. Better projects than the absence of projects, the twiddling of thumbs, the passing of time. Better projects and not idleness.

Do something, that’s what I always tell myself, hence my projects. Do something, begin something, it’s better than sitting around doing nothing, that’s what I tell myself, and come up with my projects. Every morning, lying in bed, I think of my projects. I turn them over in my head – what shall I do today? what does today hold? In the morning, first thing, I think lovingly of my projects – I will do this – and then that. This, and then that: not one project, nor even two projects, but many projects. The projects of an idiot, it is true, but projects nonetheless.

They told me I was good for nothing, and they’re probably right, but even an idiot can have projects, I’ve proved that. An idiot’s projects – in the plural. If one goes wrong, there are others. If one project fails, there are others which may succeed. Of course I know they will all fail, one by one. I know it, I’m reconciled to it, I’ve lived long enough to know what I can do and what I can’t do. What I can do: nothing. What I can’t do: everything.

But still, projects – still there are projects, still I can keep myself busy and let the days turn. Still I can get on with my projects, I can get out of bed, having thought about them and then begin one project or another as the mood takes me. One project – another, I can drop one and start another, I can try to do two at once, one and another, but what’s important is that I’m active, important: my non-idleness, my preparedness to do something, to make something of myself. Of course I know I am making nothing of myself, that I’m wasting today as I waste every day, but there is always the illusion of progress, and I am happy with illusion.

It’s important to begin, I tell myself. Important, too, to finish, but first of all to begin, albeit with the hope of finishing, with the hope of completion bound up with it from the first, but there is the beginning first of all, the head of the waters, shining and splendid at the outset of the day.

Lost from writing of exhaustion, what is there left but exhaustion? I’ve recovered myself just enough to … what? Nothing to write, nothing to be written, and not for lack of urgency. When was urgency ever enough? There must be something to write about, and more than just the desire to write – that is not a theme; it is not theme enough.

Content: that’s what’s required. But what kind of content? From where is it to come? Nothing that is not given out of itself, that was the rule: writing was to draw itself from itself, like a conjurer’s scarf. And when nothing comes? Write about this or that book – write about an author, a philosopher. Address yourself to the affairs of the world. But that’s not what I want, not here. That is for the day – for the morning after dawn and the long afternoon. And in the evening after the pub? And in the early morning?

No content; nothing to say. Should I take a break? But what happens when you unmoor exhaustion from writing? At least let writing return to itself, if only to mark what cannot be written. Or should it be allowed to run into nothing – to disperse itself without marking itself, ink running into water?

How is it as soon as I committed firmly and resolutely to a direction for the posts on this blog, I was unable to write in that direction and any direction? Do I have to misdirect myself in order to write – have to write about anything but that in order for writing to be possible? Frustration: there was clarity, I knew what had to be written. I brought home a book to inspire me, and put it beside my bed. That book, I said to R.M. this weekend. But it was too obvious – the book became a monument of what I wanted to make. The cliff stood before me: no, I wasn’t to climb.

Why is it impossible to write in a single direction? Why impossible to dream of completing a work by way of writing, this writing? Nothing is to be completed; the blog outlives itself. It was set up for that – but it is long past that. Then what’s it for? What is it that should be completed here? I wanted to write a post called The Street, I wanted to write an epic post called How It Was, How It Is, How It Will Be, but I’ve written nothing.

Misdirection: make no plans. Do not print out what you’ve written. Rise and early, open the curtains and there is the yard. Only before the yard does writing find its necessary poverty. The yard: the wheelie bin with the number 98 painted on it in white. The kitchen wall which, when I pressed my fingers to it yesterday, wondering how the slugs still found their way into the flat, was completely soaked. Another wall to be damp proofed?

The yard: I will have to buy some concrete mix and fill in the scar where the pipe was ripped away from the wall. Then I will have to paint over it and paint over the wall, from which flakes of paint have fallen, and across which the algae is spreading. Now, I tell myself, I am writing, and of nothing in particular. Nothing in particular: that is my name for the yard. That’s what it is called. By misdirection will I write of nothing in particular and then find my way back to writing.

Morning again; the pre-dawn again; this time I’ve kept the curtains closed. The room is an island that belongs to no particular time. The window cannot see me and I am not witnessed by the night. The exception – what it is to have awoken earlier than anyone! What it is to awaken upstream of the day and know its unfolding as it separates itself from night! I know at this time I am close to the gods and to my ancestors; here, at the crossroads the spirits awaken, and am not I, too, a spirit?

There are ragas of the morning, afternoon and night. Why shouldn’t there be a writing, too, that belongs to a time – or rather to a time that seems to unjoin itself from time: the pre-dawn? Who are you, exception, that writes these sentences? The one who knows that any life lived away from writing is a double life; the one who waits for his return and is no more than this waiting. For the appointment will not be kept; the pre-dawn is not punctual. What returns does not cease to divide time from itself.

Exception, will you always miss what you seek? But writing is also divided from itself; the saying of writing and the said are not one. How then to hear the address of the exception that would bear what is written here? How does it reach you, this saying? When a cat seeks your attention, it reaches a paw to touch you. How soft this touch! Barely a touch! But you are reached; the cat’s paw has spoken. Dream of a writing that would touch by way of what is said. Dream of a saying-touch that would reach you by way of writing.

The castle K. sees from the wooden bridge is neither strange nor familiar, neither remote nor welcoming; it is at one with the houses of the village. So it is with saying, the address – nothing other than writing, but other than writing. And isn’t K., by standing on the bridge, elected? Isn’t it that the castle has chosen him to witness its neither … nor? So too with the writing that elects the exception.

The pre-dawn: space without place and time without possibility. The pre-dawn: name of the event in which writing divides itself. Exception: name of the writer and name of the reader; who are we, elective community? Who are we, set aside from others and from ourselves by the address?

It’s the caffeine, I tell myself. Too much caffeine – you were always sensitive to it, and now it’s the ruin of you. Patches of dry, itchy skin over your palm-heels – caffeine. Resurgence of eczema – caffeine. And reading back over the blog for the last few months last night when I couldn’t sleep (I can’t sleep anymore), I thought: this is terrible writing. It’s the caffeine.

I remembered the experiments where they subjected a spider to various drugs and photographed the web it made. First, the marajuana-spider – a lazy web, just a few glistening strands. Second, the alcohol-spider, no web at all, a few strands collapsed on themselves. Third, the caffeine-spider, a very intense web, but a mess of strands, a complete mess. So too with this writing, I thought at five AM this morning. It’s no good, I thought, as I weeded out the really terrible posts.

None of this is any good. A lot of activity, but for what? It’s like the web of the caffeine spider – a mess of webstrands, holding nothing, capturing nothing. What was I thinking? That I could publish anything I pleased? That my anything-at-all was worth publishing? But nothing I wrote was worth publishing, and it certainly wasn’t worth reading. Then it came, the dream: a cool, clear prose. Then it came: the dream of bell-like clarity, of limpid prose: the replete and glistening web.

But isn’t that its sleight of hand, that clarity? Is precision precise – is calmness another way to stand apart from the world and from the streaming of the world? Isn’t cool, precise prose the final temptation – the idea of a language that could say it all, in which everything could be said and could be said calmly: the many-stranded web on which the world would allow itself to be caught?

How I distrust it! How it is to be distrusted, the prose which makes nothing of itself, which makes no fuss! Clarity, precision: nothing worse. Measuredness, calmness: nothing worse. Better the web that laughs at itself, I thought. Better the web that knows it will capture nothing, I told myself. That laughs at itself, and is deliberately ragged. That laughs at itself and its own imposture. Better the drunken web and the caffeinated web! Better the web made on Cava and green tea! Better the revel-web that laughs at itself, at its own imposture, and that first of all!

Nothing worse that the calm and reflective voice, which is really the penitent voice, the craven-on-the-ground-before-God voice! Nothing worse than the sober voice, which is really the maudlin-drunken voice. Nothing worse than the voice that would lift itself above the others as if to deliver itself to a God’s-eye perspective, to the summit of the tower of Babel!

Below: the swarming of all the voices, the vulgar crowd. Above: the voice of God, the voice that sails close to God. What is worse than this voice, which considers everything and assesses everything and is untouched by everything? What is worse than it – this voice, which would lift itself from the babble of which it is part?

How to have done with it, the judgement-voice, the transcendent-voice, the surveying-everything-and-decreeing voice? How to plunge it, this voice, into the Babel of all voices? How to dissolve it in the Babel of voices disgusted with themselves and laughing at themselves?

How I revolt myself! How I disgust myself! – But without this revulsion, without this disgust, which is first of all a revulsion at God and a disgust with God – without this mobile horde of destruction which is first of all self-destruction? Without the daily confusion of tounges?

How rare to have a day, a whole day, to myself. But here it is, that day, after weeks of travelling back and forth from one place to another. I am here in the South; the room is light. We watch Fanny and Alexander, mum and I; I have borrowed her laptop.

A Danish family does not celebrate Christmas on Christmas Day, but on the day before. Yesterday, it was Christmas, and today? Other people’s Christmas. Books about India piled up on the floor. A new edition of Scrabble, which we played until the early hours last night. Jo Malone bags and a new diary and the copy of In the Shadow of No Towers I bought for my sister, and the set of Allen Keys I got from my brother-in-law and the bicycle lights I bought for him.

Why not write about our meals and conversations, the time at the pub – these events which make up the substance of life? Sometimes I imagine to myself these events are like the water that turns the waterwheel, flowing ceaselessly in order to turn it, time – that they do not occur, these events, within time but across it. Yes, that’s how I imagine it: we exist for the sake of time, for the turning of events; so we are drawn into the drama of life and death.

Then it is by passing events across time that moments are separated from their original co-happening. As though everything happened together, all at once – and all events are overlapped, even now. It is a question of perception – of finding the right angle, from which all can be seen. How old am I now? How many Christmases have there been? But they have all happened at once; they overlap. What day is this? What year?

Leave time to itself, and what would it become? Leave it to itself, time, and what would it become? Non-event, non-happening; the return of what does not occur and does not happen.

The Trent

Winter! All my friends behind the doors of their houses, no one coming out. Home instead of the pub, imagine that, home instead of the pub, who would have thought it would have come to that? The evening was for the pub, that’s how it was, that was how the evening was to proceed. Work, and then the pub for the evening and, likely, the whole night. Work and then pub, the first taste of beer, the first pint going down quickly and the second more slowly. Work, pub, the first pint quickly and the second less so and the third slower still, and after the third a pint of tap water to keep you hydrated.

Work, then pub. Work – everyone has to work – and then the pub. Work, pub, it’s very simple. First of all, work, and then the pub to follow. Around six-thirty: meet at The Trent House at seven. Yes, that’s how it should be, The Trent at seven. The Trent, with its free jukebox, then one pint, see if anyone wants a drink, buy a round of drinks and go back to the table, and then another, bought by someone else, delivered by someone else, drink that, back at the table.

Happiness of the pub! What is life without a pub? First one pint, then another. Conversation: how has the day gone? It was a day like any other, but there are conversations to be had about the day. How I like to listen to other’s stories about their days. I have few stories; I’m quieter. I wait until the innuendo starts, after the third pint. Then I am on home ground. Innuendo: yes, that’s happiness. Quick thought, but thought about nothing in particular and least of all philosophy. That’s the last thing I want to run up against, philosophy. Anything but philosophy. Innuendo, yes, philosophy no.

Three pints and all is well. The world turns around us, but we are at its centre. Three pints of Speckled Hen, and all is well, especially if the barrel is new and the beer is fresh. Three pints, and the world turns around us and we are at the centre. The world turns around us, others join us, but we are already at the centre of the world. Three pints, and I text the ones who are not here, at the pub, I text them: come, come now to the pub, we’re missing you and you’re missing this, the pub, for there is only the pub.

Three pints, a pint of water, and it’s time to text those who are not yet here. Perhaps we can pick them up on our journey to the other side of town to the other pubs. Perhaps we can arrange to meet on the way to the other pubs, in the Ouseburn Valley. For after three pints, it is time to take a journey, not a long journey, to the Ouseburn Valley and to the pubs of the Ouseburn Valley.

The Cumberland

What wondrous pubs are there in the Ouseburn Valley! What happiness there is to be found in the Ouseburn Valley! Past Morrisons, over the roundabout, past the Big Opticians and down the slope to The Cumberland Arms. What happiness to pass through the doors of The Cumberland Arms. My happiest hours are spent there, at The Cumberland Arms. No music except music played by folk musicians. No music except those played in the other bar by the folk musicians. An array of beers, new each time. A new array, new beers to try, each time.

Happiness of new beer! Happiness that there are new beers to try, each time! Spread before us, taps with logos of beers from different breweries. The breweries are old friends. A new beer from Wylams! It must be good. A new beer from Jarrow! It must be good. And it is good. And if it isn’t good, there are always other beers. If one beer isn’t good, you try the beers of your friends, which may well be good. The rule is: never order the same beers. Sip the beer of your friend. Say: mmm, that’s good. Then you can order that beer next time. And they can sip your beer and say, mmm that’s good, and then they can order that beer, next time. There’s always more beer to try. And there’s the cider, too. Prizewinning cider. Prizewinning beer. Always beers and cider, the full array, spread about before you.

Beers, ciders. But my friends are behind their doors tonight. My friends are behind their doors as I am behind my door with my Cava. I am watching a documentary on North Korea with my Cava. I listen to The Fall with my Cava. But it is not the same. There’s only a couple of glasses of Cava, and there are pubs out there, pubs in the winter, pubs in the darkness. For it is dark, and shouldn’t we be in a pub? It is dark, and we should be together in the pubs of the Ouseburn Valley.

Even the words, Ouseburn Valley, lift my soul. What marvellous words: the Ouseburn Valley. What a marvellous name: The Cumberland Arms and The Free Trade Inn. Nothing in life is better than The Cumberland Arms and The Free Trade. What could be better than The Free Trade, with its view of the Tyne. There is the Tyne, there’s town, and you are in the beer garden of The Free Trade. Tyne, town, and you are in The Free Trade, looking at Tyne and town. Looking along the river towards town. Along the river, the lights on the river, the bridges, and town. Along the river, lights on darkness, the bridges across the river, and then town.

The Free Trade

Beer at The Free Trade, in summer, there is nothing better. A sundowner at The Free Trade. And yes, the sun really goes down. The sun really goes down, beyond the Tyne, beyond town. And darkness falls. Darkness falls over the city. Darkness falls, and we are at The Free Trade. Darkness, and The Free Trade is ours, superlative beers, a marvellous view, and, if we want them, baps. Beers, a view, and baps, if we are hungry. Baps, if we are so inclined.

Where else do you go to watch the sun go down but at The Free Trade? There’s the Millenium Bridge, the Sage, where The Fall are playing on Wednesday, and the Tyne. Of course there’s also the pub called The Tyne, just a couple of hundred yards from The Free Trade. A couple of hundred yards down and across from The Free Trade, there’s The Tyne, the pub, that is, and not the river. But there is the Free Trade and then, not too far away, The Cumberland Arms. Cross from one to the other, it doesn’t matter in which direction, from The Free Trade to The Cumberland Arms. Go across, cross from one to another and you are blessed in that crossing. Go across, and the gods are looking down and demigods rain flowers on you. Go across, cross, and all is well in the universe, everything is passing and you are passing. Go across, and the universe, too is passing, everything is passage! You are on the way to The Free Trade from The Cumberland Arms! You are on the way from The Cumberland Arms to The Free Trade!

There is nothing great than this! You are suspended between one great pub and another. From one pub you pass, to another. One pub, then another, first that one, then that one. First The Cumberland Arms, then The Free Trade. Or the other way round, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that there is more than one great pub. True, there are also The Cluny and The Tyne, but these are not quite as fine. True, there are the other pubs, which are fine enough, but they are only waystations, and we are passing. What matters is passage, and we are passing from one pub to another.  Do you know such happiness? Do you know what the happiness is of passing from one pub to another?

We take newcomers to the city to the Ouseburn Valley. We take them there, it’s our gift. What more is there to give? We take our guests there. We take them to the pubs of the Ouseburn Valley. For it gets no better than the Ouseburn Valley. My Cava has run out, but I am thinking of the Ouseburn Valley. Two glasses of Cava and a handful of peanuts, and I am thinking of the Ouseburn Valley. It’s cold outside, it’s dark, my Cava’s run out, and I think only of the Ouseburn Valley.

On the Way

Walking between my flat and the office is always a trial; I am tested by the sentences which form themselves in me as I walk. Sometimes they are from books; sometimes they seem to have come together all by themselves, forming by their own initiative phrases I would never have been able to come up with by myself. Sentences, phrases, which I will have forgotten by the time I’ve reached my destination, for there is always something which makes me forget them, just as, in the morning, I forget the dream that a moment before seemed more real than the day into which I had awoken.

These phrases often take the form of absurd questions, a child’s questions. Where am I? But I know where I am; I am passing from one place to another; I am on the way – but then it is as though my walking had found an infinite space in which to wander, that I was crossing a desert greater than the Biblical one, and I will never find the other side. As though, then, a slackening had occurred, a stretching of time and of space, so that what was once passable has become impassable, so that to be on the way is to wander forever.

Where am I? Nowhere in particular – lost in time, lost in space and lost to yourself, that first of all: this is what I hear inside me. Who am I? But I know who I am; I am the one employed by the university; I am to cross the field and then to follow the road past the medical school; I am a worker; I am a son, a friend, a brother, a partner: a network of relationships hold me in place. But then it is as though those relationships slacken, that they give so much I cannot remember who I am. I pass, but this passage consumes me; what should take fifteen minutes now takes all eternity; I pass, but this passage requires I give up my identity until I become only a shapeless drifting without a past and without a present, and one whose future is simply that of being unable to begin, unable to pass, unable to find my way across the bridge of the moment.

Drifting, dispersal: to lose hold of space and time is not to float through time and space, detached body, but to disperse the body itself, to allow it to be torn apart as Orpheus was torn apart by the Maenads. But still to survive that dispersal, to remain aware in some way, as though dispersal were at once limitable and unlimitable, unlimiting itself even as it returns to itself; returning such that the unlimited is once again limited. And indeed that is what must happen for memory to happen; it is the condition of memory and recounting. I am writing here, after all, of what happened to me then; I have remembered; I have retrieved a memory from forgetting.

But in truth, the power to remember thus is not mine; it is not a power I possess. Then am I possessed like the child in the Exorcist? Or is it that I am dispossessed, that what is remembered comes unbidden, that arrives as though from itself, as if it were not a memory but a call, as though I were being asked a question, as though an answer were demanded of me. But what answer can I give? Perhaps it is given in my dispersal. Perhaps it is for dispersal that the questions call. I respond; I am dispersed, the questions come, Where am I? What time is it?

I Can Speak Now

Yes, what time? It is the 18th September. I’ve just written that. It is 11.20; I have just written that. Hungover, I am fit only for writing. But I am fitted to writing by my hangover, by my tiredness; they are what allow me to approach writing at the level of writing. As though my tiredness has delivered me into that trance in which everything can be said (the opening of Mirror, when the cured stutterer says, loudly and clearly, I can speak now). But I am not sure. I can write now: no, I cannot write that. Of what am I writing? Of barely anything at all. Barely anything; writing spins itself from itself, asking to be written.

How pretentious! How vague! I have always dreamed of a gossamer-writing without theme, without incident, without anecdote; I wanted to write with a tiny palette of words, with barely anything; to engage a writing in which nothing was at stake and which spoke only of itself, of the ‘there is’ of writing. Of the nudity of writing even as it sought to clothe itself in what was related, even though it were made entirely of details. This is why the occasional seizes writing, and why to write of nothing in particular is to write of everything. Is there a way of telling, of blogging, which would remain at the threshold of the occasional?

There is writing, there is blogging; so does the occasional ask itself to be marked in writing. This morning (it is 11.27; I am listening to Vespertine) wants to be remembered. But what is it that remembers itself here? The day recalls itself, its slackening; the day sags, the day forgets its self-relation and comes to rest here, in these words. Yes, in these words, by means of them, the day is resting, it lays down its head.

The Deserter

I always wanted to write with the word deserter. Of the one who left the world behind, who deserted the world. Recall Bob Hoskins’ character in 247; recall how he passes through the woods. Recall how he arrives and then disappears; how he loses himself, how he is lost in advance such that when he first appears it is as though he were the day coalesced! Bob Hoskins motivates the unemployed to open a boxing club. He has the gift of hope; he gives hope to the long-term unemployed. Gives them hope, but then hope is lost and he must lose himself again. He disappears. When he is found again, he is dying. That is how it should be. He is the day, and the day which knew itself in him dies with him, it dies in his death.

Peter Handke will sometimes allow hymns to telling and to the power of telling to break into the prose of his narratives. So too would I like to sing a hallelujah to what allows the day to write of itself here; so would I want to die from these pages as Bob Hoskins dies in 247; I do not need to be here; hope was given through me; the day spoke of itself, but now it is time for my desertion.

Where goes the one who writes here, writer born of the merciful strength of a hangover? Slowly the caffeine is being absorbed by my bloodstream and strength begins to fail me. It is the 18th September, 11.43: I write these words to mark the one I was when I wrote, to mark myself the day’s servant, the one who came forward like Hari in Solaris, the messenger who does not understand the message she is.

HARI: Am I a lot like her?

CHRIS: No, you used to be a lot like her, but now you – not she are the real Hari.

HARI: You know I’ve got a feeling that I’ve forgotten something … I can’t understand …

R.M. sensed it: the season changed two nights ago. We were in London; when I joined R.M. on Saturday it was hot and sultry, we took the umbrella when we went for dinner. It rained steadily, consistently, with a kind of patience. Flashes of lightning, thunder. Then the season changed; it was cooler, fresher.

Autumn, and a few weeks before I have to prepare to give papers again. I can write whatever I like. Pleasant to draw a breath here, to note the turning of seasons, the beginning of a new term, another one after so many. Am I looking forward to it?

Last night, friends return from hotter places. Tequila and enchiladas, beer and nachos in a south-facing garden. Where will I be by the end of the year? Still here in this city, or in another?

The turn of the seasons. Read Handke, whose books are always poised at the threshold. He is my companion at the threshold. Over the next few weeks, I promise myself to write on Josipovici’s short stories, on the origin of taste (inspired by Bergson), before I begin to write on music (an essay on Will Oldham) and film (Tarkovsky’s Mirror).

No more philosophy, I tell myself. Everything I write is to be completely contained in the object I write about. And the writing has to be as though dictated my that object, lending it an idiom.

No more philosophy, I tell myself, unless it returns to me as a kind of dream, unless the whole of philosophy concentrates itself into the absolute density of a dream, meaning everything and meaning nothing, returning too full of itself, overfull with significance, but somehow without itself, stripped, vacancy in place of presence. Philosophy as it passes like the wind in the field at the beginning of Mirror. The doctor has turned, he’s walking away, he turns back, and then the wind passes through the long grass of the field. The wind passing like benediction, that great speech which speaks in the bending of long grass, in a wave that passes through grass. So it would be with philosophy: let it speak as it touches things, as it passes through them. Let it be no more than that passing.

No more philosophy, I tell myself, unless it returns as the dream in which everything is present, and nothing: whose saturation leaves as it were a gap between philosophy and itself. That gap is the thing, which speaks in the gasp philosophy must leave and depends upon. Wisdom of the thing, thing-teacher as it speaks of itself and only of itself. No more philosophy, I tell myself, unless it returns as a kind of prayer in things, that silent meditation in which they seem to think of themselves, resting in themselves.

As we walked up the path to the church, a drunk, faced flushed, squatting in the sun and watching cricket practice called out to us. A succession of jokes. He was a happy idiot. ‘That’s beatitude’ said W., who had been talking about Spinoza. Idiot, idiom: I thought: I would like to be as drunk as that, dreaming myself into things. I would like to be that drunk, where the gap between philosophy and itself, the turning of one season into another, would be the hinge, the point of articulation wherein the future could be seen. The future: what philosophy lives from and kills. The future as it is born in the epoche in which it is not the philosopher who sees the world, but the world that sees him. Epoche: season, suspension, and I imagine to myself, threshold and gap. The epoche is the future, I tell myself as we walk in the sun, the future is with us in this turning of seasons.

That was last week, still summer. Now it is autumn. The heating’s on. I listen to The End of Amnesia by M. Ward. The plants almost cover the bins in the backyard. I pile my jumpers on my chest of draws. Seven jumpers, seven colours, bought in a shop in the tropics that has since closed down (Triminghams). Seven jumpers, which I recall to teach the difference between particulars and universals, but also to speak of what is singular and different from everything else. But how can I summon them thus, as examples for a philosophy class? No more philosophy, I tell myself. Cezanne describes his working method as a reflection on things seen, and mine should be a reflection on being seen, called, by all the things in the world. Called 7 times by 7 jumpers, I tell myself. Called 7 times over by 7 different-coloured jumpers.

What was it I was supposed to be doing? The paper – again? But I was watching The Simple Life, and now I’m listening to Laura Cantrell. And the caffeine isn’t lifting me, no doubt because of the strong cider I drank last night.

I can still taste cider. Laura Cantrell is singing and I congratulate myself for having found the heart of the summer this summer. In the cider I can still taste. I think to myself: that cider – the taste of that cider – is the chiasmus of the summer. Summer crosses itself there. On the one hand, the sun, the sky and what withdraws as the essence of summer in the same sun, the same sky, and on the other, a cloudy cider and what withdraws in that same cloudiness.

That withdrawal which presses forward as you taste it not like the memory of Proust’s madeline which brought more memories in turn, but as a kind of forgetting, one which is no longer the opposite of memory. A forgetting which is the propitiousness of what sets itself back as summer, in summer, from which issues a kind of steadiness, the allotment of a kind of fate which steers you through the days of August.

What is it that sets itself back thus? What withdraws? There are experiences whose sense seems to withdraw as you have them – a sense that leaves a trace, a floating half-forgetting that seems to point enigmatically into itself. The cloudiness of cider says:  I am not, I am nothing in particular but I am also what forgets itself in you. That nothing jostles with the nothingness of everything, I decide to myself, which hollows out all the world, all meanings. 

Every day the world is reborn, and what can you do except walk down to the river and along the river and up to the pubs where you can drink cider? The condition of the summer is close by. It hovers in a kind of forgetting, in the haze on the roads, in the cloudiness of cider. You are very close to the source, but to what are you close? To the hinge, the articulation of a season. To its secret, its promise. To what outplays your work and your ambition and wrecks your papers against itself, laughing at them.

How do you meet it, the essence of summer? How does it lay claim to you? In the golden pints of summer beers (Wylams), in the cloudy cider which calls you from the other side of town. In the cider that called forward the summer-witness you were chosen to be.

Discontent – but why? Of course, a mood just happens; to seek reasons for it is to make the error of the critic who would seek an objective correlate to Hamlet’s vacillation – or criticises the play for the lack of one. But a mood comes, this is its bounty, and though you cast about for its cause, trying to bring it back into the purview of that conception of the human being as the cause all that affects it, it belongs to what is outside and arrives only as fate. It comes.

Is it because the worm of resentment has crawled into my heart. Oh, I think so. A new, petty voice in me says, why haven’t I been promoted? Crush that voice and crush the worm of ambition. Is it because I had too much caffeine yesterday? No doubt that, too, only one hour of decent work this morning, writing, rewriting my vague papers.  One hour and then, resigned, I thought: I’d better go in even though my hacked computer is still not working, even though it was an hour before I could get my salad from the canteen (only twenty minutes now). Caffeine – but that, too is a rationalisation.

A mood arrives, better to ask, what can be made of it? How might it function? which is when I am relieved blogging exists. Mark it here, that mood. Mark it, and attest to what it brings. It is warm outside; late summer. A warm and soupy day, quite humid, waiting for storms. I would like the storms to come and experience outside me the correlate of what is within me, the worm in my breast, caffeine-tiredness. As though I lived only in the crossing point between fate and freedom, the inside and the outside. As though the chiasm between mood and world crossed at my heart, or that my heart was that crossing point.

But then I imagine myself as a plane with storm clouds above, and of a writing that would strike down from the clouds to that plane, discharging the tension, resolving the imbalance of negatively and positively charged ions (have I got that right?). Yes, that strike-writing that would like the swift mark of the calligrapher let speak the truth of my bad mood.

1.

What was the idea behind moving all the books from the flat to the office? A dislike of the collectors of literature, perhaps – of those for whom what matters is to fill their shelves with books so as to reassure themselves of the imposingness of culture. There is no culture here; the flat is bare. A few CDs, an old television, and no bookshelves. The only books are those I bring home and I like it this way. Perhaps I could put it like this: I am not distracted from literature by books just as no books of philosophy are present to distract me from philosophy. But this is pompous; in the end I deprive myself of what, through hard work, would make me a thinker and a reader.

Why am I still attracted by the pathos of the idea of the solitary thinker, the solitary writer who writes in the absence of books? An idea ridiculous because I produce nothing here at home: the files on the computer at which I type are old and redundant; current versions of the essays on which I am working are kept on the computer in the office. Very little is done here; if I am at home – and I am usually out every night – I play computer games and watch bad television.

If I rise early, as I usually do, to write here before I go to the office, it is to write nothing in particular, to write without project in a pure garrulousness, a prolixity that has no reason to exist other than to prove the voice I would like to test is still there, not inside me, but alongside me. That measured voice unlike the rushed and stuttering one with which I speak. But a voice which says very little – which only lets speak the ‘there is writing’ in which the content of what I say is less important than the fact that it was said.

I confess I like the idea of spinning a post from nothing, of taking the nothingness of the blank day outside, of another mediocre morning and hardening it into a form. In my dressing gown with a cup of coffee beside me, I want to press the quotidian into this blog just as a flower might be pressed into an album. To preserve here those moments between the tasks of the day.

And what are those tasks? I have many papers to write. The summer is for work, and there is a great deal of work. New modules have to be prepared. Reports have to be written, and a summer school to be taught. It is the beginning of August. Each day seems more obscure than the last. When I was young I thought: how is it there can be another day? How is it that the world continues? And thought: even if it continues, I will not, and every edition of each magazine I buy will be the last.

Curious to have outlived oneself, to live posthumously. Curious to feel I took a wrong turn, and missed the direction I was supposed to take. Each morning, without books, without DVDs and distractions there is the sense of having taken the wrong turn and I know if I have children, I will do my best to make them take the right one. And will they see in me the evidence of these empty hours spent between sleep and work, of a life at once solitary and crowded with the ghosts of the books I have read and the films I’ve seen?

For they are with me, here, these books and films, and I wonder if I love them only because of the wrong direction I have taken and that they took me on. I was ready for them, and they for me. And now they live again around me, like a halo. They live like a circle of ghosts.

2.

Conversations with W. turn on our reading of literature. It is as though we were snagged by those books which opened literature to us. Is this what disappoints us in the philosophy we try to write? Is this is why we are never quite philosophical enough?

Consolation: the oldest image of the philosopher is of one on the way. But on the way to something, and this is the point: to love wisdom is to stand on the path that would lead to wisdom, it is to have faith in the seeking because of what there is to be sought. Eros, in Plato’s Symposium, is not a sad figure but a hopeful one.

And when it is not a matter of hope, but only of wandering? When there is faith insufficient to hold oneself up in the name of philosophy? But perhaps there is a philosophising lived as wandering. An etiolated philosophy, perhaps – a blanched one, and one which will soon be despised as a relic of the last romanticism which saw philosophers in the last century turn to literature just as they claimed philosophy was coming to an end.

R.M. thought I was praising the Americans when I spoke of their pragmatism the other night. But, I said, that pragmatism is what I most fear. In Britain, there is the inertia of what is left of our miserable traditions. There is still some social democracy here, still something left of the welfare state that allows those interstices in which it is possible to drift and to live. But in America? I shudder. Work is everywhere. Doing is everything. It scares me.

Now I understand: what I think of as the wrong turn is an experience which belongs to those of us who still live close to Old Europe. Not, it is true, the Europe of culture, of literature, of philosophy – the old, magnificent unity which still survives, I think, in some countries across the channel – but the Europe of the NHS and unemployment benefits. The Europe in which it was possible to experience in the limbo of unemployment a sense of a global possibility.

How vaguely all the themes I have tied together resonate with one another! I know what I would like to say: that what comes down to us as literature, unbound as it is to the culture that sustains it, is that circle of ghosts experienced in that same between-time that is named by the everyday. There are no books in my flat, but this is appropriate; the hours I spend here are those lived out of time.

3.

Old Europe. The last unemployed wander along the last riverbanks. The last readers pick up secondhand copies of The Castle. There will be no time for literature, either because you work or you train for work and worktime is all time, or because you mobilise yourself alongside others to combat that world for whom work is all. No alibi can sustain reading. It is insufficiently political, insufficiently philosophical and the wickedness of the world calls for stronger arms.

I took the wrong direction; I live posthumously. How is it possible to say, I am dead? Those of us who walk across the tomb of old Europe know the answer. Elsewhere, capitalism perfects itself. Elsewhere, capitalism is driving away all the ghosts and we too will be exorcised in the coming pragmatism.

Extreme tiredness, a body which says no!, but somehow, on top, floating on top, usurper, a will to write, to fill the post box with typing. Who would ever read this? Who could ever take time to read this? Posts stolen from the time I saw to have spent in Yorkshire this weekend with R.M. Travel difficulties: R.M.’s reluctance to use the train have kept me here in my city in the office, sheltered from the glorious sun. But what tiredness! What sapping of strength!

As though my body belongs to the earth – as though, botched golem, the wrong words were written on my forehead. Frantic activity because my strength is draining. Light lunch to make sure there are no more demands on my poor, heavy body. It already weighs enough. What is left of me, here, writing, is like wave-froth on the deep body of the sea. Purely superficial, pure surface, spreading itself like a wave on the beach, sea-foam rounding forward.

The afternoon will be a single block of tiredness. There will no gym, just as there was no gym this week. Work, I tell myself, make hay, but I’ve written nothing. Nothing except what I write here which only marks the time I should have spent working. New stupid plan to fill the entire front page of the blog with posts written on a single day. Just for my own sake. Just to prove I was here and intended to work. Just to mark my persistence in time and to struggle against tiredness.

This raw book (Love’s Work), this book about love and about illness, is stripping me raw in turn. Unbearable to read an untranslated book, to be carried by an original syntax which has not been made to cross from one language to another. When I first read this book, it was 1997, a colleague said: she (Gillian Rose) was very indiscreet. It’s true, there are names, many of them, and reported incidents some of which will be embarassing or worse to those who will read them (or their friends, or their relatives). But what a book this is!

Scholasticus, said Sheridan, learnt to swim without entering water. So too the academic who writes at a distance from that of which she writes. Can I swim? I don’t think so. Unless what I am writing here is a swimming. But I don’t think it is; or if it is one, I remain in the shallows. How secure my life is, really! This is the afternoon of my life; I am no longer young, but I am not old. Years pass; slowly, I think, life improves, the horizon broadens, I hold on to a little more security; the world becomes stiller. Years pass, but what if serious illness broke the horizon of my broad contentedness? What if I were killed or maimed and half-killed in a bomb?

I like to write in morning. I don’t mind anymore if it is scholarly or non-scholarly; the proofs of my new book bore me; that work is done. And now? How old am I? impossibly old, it seems, though I am still enough to feel confident that I have decades of work before me. Always the feeling of leading a life snatched from others who would take time from me. Strange urgency that means I am always in rush, that I learn slapdashedly and approximinately, that I can call no field of knowledge mine. What do I know? What can I do? I don’t cook, but buy discounted sandwiches and salads from Boots. I live with no one, though I speak on the phone to R.M. And I don’t garden though when I open the curtains the blank back yard stares back at me.

Life lived undercover, paranoid. The post I always wanted to write would have been on that paranoia, mine, which means to write, for me, is always to do so urgently, at full speed, with no time for redrafts and revisions. Everything must be written now, for the disaster could have happened by the end of the day. Everything now, for there is no time and this office in which you write will be swept from you and your job will be swept from you and you will be just another wanderer in the street, half-dazed, wondering where it was to which his life had disappeared.

So I put a two pound coin in the palm of the beggar thinking: he is also who I am. I knew he would drink, but I thought that appropriate, as he had the whole of the day to deal with and not a day cut in sections of meetings and teaching and the evening at the pub as had I. A single evening is too long for me, and this morning – what is left of this morning – has already been stuffed with activities. Writing to avoid unmeasured time. Writing on a Saturday because it is not, officially a workday. Bliss that my office is open. Bliss that my office is here in town. I am here with my book and my satsumas, the blog window open. Typing on the wave of the book I am reading. Swimming, perhaps, in my own way.

You can’t work all the time, it took me several years to learn that. Spent most of my life trying to work all day and all night. Forcing my body, when tired, when it asked for rest, to work more by forcing coffee inside it. Until caffeine ends up draining you still further, and too much coffee drinking one day ruins the morning of the next. Now nothing, less than nothing can be done and the cycle continues. You incur a vast sleep debt which you will be unable to repay. Your body shuts down and you can barely do anything; you owe too much to work which is to say to time. Your tiredness is not the tiredness of rest but owed time, slave’s time, the time of the bad machine part.

It is absolute necessary to go out, to drink. Only through drinking can you unchain yourself from caffeine and from the intensity it engenders. And only through free time, in company, when your attention is allowed to lag and the whole world crowds in upon your senses and there is drinking and merriment is the next day refreshed and opened to you in the happiness of work.

That is a cause of binge drinking, as Theodore Zedlin pointed out on the radio (according to W.) and such drinking is a sign of health. For to work all day bound by caffeine to intensity is to change the structure of your brain. Intensity by day, tiredness by night. Until incipient manic depression reveals itself. One day you will try to forestall through drugs that are stronger than caffeine.

Avoid stimulants. Let them drain from your system. Let the caffeine pass through you and out of you. Then alone will you be uncaptured by work. Only then will work not steal the energy that is yours. Then you can give yourself to work, and work maximally but also tear yourself away from work. Now work becomes the yo-yo you control and you are not the spool that spins on the string of worktime.

Beneficient work! Happiness of a writing for which you were unprepared. A writing born of dreams and the unconsciousness. A writing of strange connections and leaps!

Unable to work this afternoon, I walked out into the world, looking for things to fill my attention. I thought as I walked: you dream in prose and so I was determined to dream in images, not prose. I thought: you need to bathe your eyes in art, and so I went to the library to look through picture books. I thought: you need your senses bombarded, so I arranged to see The War of the Worlds tonight with friends. And I thought: you need alcohol to pour through you, so I arranged a drink before the film and planned to drink after the film, not alone but in company.

In this way, I may find myself able tomorrow to write about God and Will Oldham. I know there’s some pretty, imagistic prose inside me waiting to be born. I know there’s something to be written about Will Oldham’s claim that evil must be shared in song and sung out loud. Sing of evil, share evil in song and it is outside and not inside, he says in an interview. But what of God, of Will Oldham’s God, God of one who does not what it means to believe in God? Ah to write with God and with evil, how marvellous! With them, you understand, and not aping the way in which these words have already given themselves to the rhetoric of politicians. God is little, I thought, and evil is little. Will Oldham knows that. Daydream of writing like a painter, dipping my brush in the colour of God and colour of evil and spreading their colours on my canvas.

The smooth paving stones of my city allow those in wheelchairs to glide through the city. There are school children and college youths in the streets and mothers with their pushchairs. I walk the long length of the mall, pleased because I know the way through its vast corridors. I think to myself: I would like to write of God and the mall, this mall. Then I wonder idly whether I should get a book out from the library on poetic metre. Will Oldham plays around with the grammar of his sentences not to fit words to the music but to unfit words from words and music from music. He is uneloquent, joyously so. The language of his songs obtrudes and brings the music to obtrude. You ask yourself: what was that about?, because words came together strangely, belonging neither to the ordinary language of the present or the flowery language of books of the past. Should I learn words about poetic metre to describe what Will Oldham does with words?

What is it that allows Will Oldham to give us a language which is out of time? And a music, too, which is irreducible to any particular form, any genre? A music as though unable to reach itself? A little music, to use that word which Will Oldham uses over again. A little music, a minor music, a music of corners and small animals. Will Oldham would not walk here, I thought to myself as I left the mall. He says he rarely goes out in public, but to filthy places, yes that was the phrase, though it should be taken lightly because Will Oldham always likes to surprise those who read his interviews by never answering the same question in the same way.

There are no filthy places here, I think to myself. Light is everywhere and the streets are exposed without secrets to the sky. Even the mall is full of light. There is nothing for God to judge, I think to myself, because no one can have any secrets. Where does Will Oldham find his filthy places? I wonder. Perhaps like his language they are outside time, I thought. Perhaps Will Oldham leaves time to find his filthy places, I thought. Perhaps they are those places where time lags and work is impossible, I thought. Perhaps the filth is the filth of worklessness – of that slackening which is not a break from work or the tiredness that follows from overwork.

I thought: that is time of God and of animals. It is the time of the one who is coming toward us. The time where Pushkin stood his claim. When the moon falls and the wounds are calling. I thought: Will Oldham sings about time, little time, forest time.

and a brand new baby child/ makes me trunky, makes me wild/ makes me trumpet of the swan/ a brand-new footprint-maker born.

I be ashtray, I be star/ I be monkey by Babar/ I be hippo calling far/ far into the forest.