Category: Journal

The days are so vast now. I’m lucky to have such vast days. What I’ve been thinking: how nice it is not to do any philosophy. Or, better, to try, badly, to do philosophy. Or to write badly about other people who do philosophy. Today I listened to Palace Brother’s Days in the Wake and wrote a long post to let the album percolate in my mind. I need to forget everything I’ve written and remember it in a different way. I need to dream about that album and about Will Oldham. Only in that way is writing about him possible. He will have to be reborn inside me. It is what he would want. It is what he asks for even as he asks and is no longer Will Oldham.

I reread parts of Handke’s Repetition as readied a little essay on it, which may be out soon. So the afternoon disappeared; and now, in the evening, I’ve searched for all the Will Oldham interviews I could find on the web, hoping that something will emerge from my unconscious over the next couple of days. It is necessary to forget and then remember. This summer I mean to forget all of philosophy.

Trap a wasp in a jar and in a day it will begin to look ragged. It stops buzzing and stands still, energyless and waiting. So do I feel today – ravaged by the Westerlies which bring hot and humid weather to this country. I feel sorry for W., who is that much more exposed to them on the south west coast of our island and remember how D.M. and I, back in Manchester, used to sit back in our armchairs and say to one another: nothing can be done today. But I am on the other coast now, and it usually much cooler and fresher here.

Conversation with W. He’s reading Rosensweig still, in German, each page taking him an hour. ‘I don’t know whether I don’t understand because it’s in German or because it’s really hard’, he says. Then the conversation takes the usual turn. ‘Your tanks dry‘ says W. to me, after asking me what I’m reading. W. is busy preparing his Spinoza course and thinking loftily about Michel Henry; I’m not reading a line, nothing at all. It’s all admin, admin spreading everywhere, piles of it and more to come.

In between, I’m writing a little essay on Bernhard, rereading bits and pieces by him, and … It’s at this point this post should lift off like an old Wright brothers aeroplane, but it’s not lifting. How tiresome to count on writing to mark something done in a long day like this one! W. is one of those people who thinks then writes. But I never have a thought in my head …

I know I’d like to write about Dizzee Rascal, who I saw last weekend (though I didn’t see him walk down the quayside with his posse; nor did I see Mark Eitzel strolling in his hat, though I’d heard him sing earlier, coming forward and backing away from the microphone, moving from the side to side the better to exploit his powerful voice.) Dizzee Rascal: lazily, without thinking, I would want to write about the way he intimates a bass line, keeping a place for where it should be without it being quite there. The same goes for melody which is fractured across the soundscape.

H. and I, watching him, were awed. He is so restained with the tempo, I think to myself. Until one of the last songs, which really pumps. Back to H.’s to listen to both albums again. ‘He’s like Rimbaud’ I said, amazed by his age and reading the liner notes on the album over and again. ‘It’s all there, complete, intact … How is it possible?’

Repetition sits on my office desk unread. I am still on chapter five on the book I have at home, Speak, Memory. I know I’d like to write a post which include my friend’s report of his new neighbour, a woman in a full burkha whose sons he teaches to play cricket. She’s attracted to him, he thinks and keeps tugging the burkha down over her eyebrows. ‘But her eyes …’ he said on the phone, ‘her eyes say everything’.

But that is back in Manchester. It’s already late and tonight I’ll treat myself to sleeping on the wooden floor of my living room. There is Speak, Memory waiting for me. These hours, just before sleep, are when reading becomes most pleasant as the rhythms of the book intermesh with those of the body preparing itself for sleep. To have come through a long day, as this one has been, is like having lived a whole life. The day’s wisdom, life’s wisdom, both are most present just before the end, in the peace of old age or of the hour before sleep, all desires dispersed evenly across the body.

‘He writes as though he lived in the nineteenth century’: I’ve heard this sentence not once but many times of this or that thinker or philosopher. But I have known them, the ones who live in another era, and at one time they were all around me.

Who were they? Monks, hermits, and those who choose to live on the fringes of academia, snatching a few part time hours here and there – although they are well into their fifties -, conversationalists, impassioned intellectuals, scholars of Sanskrit or Hebrew, speakers of a dozen modern European languages and a half-dozen classical ones – belong to another time. They are relics of a civilisation whose time has passed. Above all, they had time, hours to read and think and talk and when they came to our house, it was to spend a full and leisurely day in our company as I imagined people did in the 1940s or 50s.

A household of sadomasochists with an S-and-M dungeon built into their cellar (I saw it – fur lined cuffs and strange machines) would visit to discuss the Philokalia. One would always bring half-size bananas with him. When he visited on his own, after the big row which severed his household from ours, he would work back to back with me, for there were two computers at that time in the lounge. He was a DJ and liked to speak of those who danced in his club: the bears and cubs who, one day, were surprised to find that another friend of ours brought women to the club – women, who hadn’t been seen there in living memory.

That friend, whom we all thought was dying, was still alive to my delight when I saw him at the funeral last year. Why hadn’t he visited in the last years of the house?, I asked him. He had had a heart attack, he said, and needed a bypass operation. But he was bright and happy, and though he walked with sticks he was a healthier man than the one I knew, who had thought death was coming and used to plan his conversion to Orthodoxy and his funeral service. I have photographs of him in a leopard skin top with a monk’s arm around him – that same monk whom I heard from a young lad who stayed with us (the son of a Professor) had tried to abuse him.

That lad, as pleasant as his mother was eccentric, came to live with us after his elderly father died. He had been expelled from school for drinking at lunch time; later, telling me the story of the monk, he drank himself into a coma. I spent a panicked night at his bedside – I who had taken him to a party in sympathy where we drank punch as we would orange juice, cup after cup, while talking of monks and their ways. When I came home later that night, still drunk, I confronted the monk and he denied all charges. Who knows whether he was telling the truth?

Then there was the princess who always visited with a 6 foot crusader’s sword she used to ordain knights of the order of which she was a kind of royalty by dint of marriage. Her busband had died, and she was alone, this middle aged teacher from Yorkshire – an ordinary woman whom we always called the Princess. She delighted in that. There were other itinerant Royals around – princes and princesses of vanished Byzantine kingdoms. One, who had inherited a concrete block manufacturing plant in an African country, only to find it was an elobrate front for a drug smuggling operation, appointed me his imperial pimp. He was looking for a wife, he told me, and we would go out to Latin American clubs in search of candidates.

This immensely fat man, who would only wear tracksuits prepared for him by his staff, was eventually proved to be intersexed, which accounted, perhaps, for his massive and unpleasant misogyny. In search of a legitimate business, he thought of importing Roobush tea from South Africa to England. I told him he was too late, and that the tea was readily available from the shops, but he never believed me. Later, his cousin, co-inheritor of his estate, would try and murder him by cutting the brake cables of his car. But he survived, the visitor to the house and survives still, although his country is in near civil war and one day the doors of his compound will burst open to the revolutionaries.

There were often alcoholics and sometimes drug addicts living in a dry and a drug free house. When they were out, I would fetch beer from the off license and we drink a few guilty glasses of wheatbeer or kriek. Sometimes they would fall off the waggon and speak impassionedly of the great secret vouchsafed to them by drinking or by drugs. What was the secret? I would never know; they never got to it, for all its importance. One of the drunks, a burly rig-worker turned student, was, I was warned, wrestling with his sexuality. ‘Be careful, he’ll rape you’, said David. But I felt responsible for him and upon learning he’d gone back to drinking as I returned from holiday, I went to search for him in the bars, finding an appalling booze-soaked man picking fights until calmed by a pretty and patient girl. We asked him to leave. A few days passed. Every morning he would come down, red faced, booze-ridden, and go out for more drink. We feared violence (he was a tough man) but eventually he left. What became of him? He retrained as a teacher and I thought of him in his native Glasgow when I saw the film My Name is Joe.

One summer, a melancholy Texan came to join us in the house. Depressed, he took occupancy of one of the vast, deep armchairs in the lounge and watched American teen shows all day, a three-litre bottle of Coke by his side. He would eat only chicken, and we would make to make sure there was a whole one there for each evening meal. How we tired of him! The lounge became a dead zone, the life drained from it by his melancholy. We remembered how happy he seemed when he first came to England to study: what had happened? He was another ex-boozer, and though he stayed off the drink, was prone like other drinkers I knew, to great changes of mood.

For a long time, we hardly saw R., who lived in the self-contained flat in the attic. We made it a house rule never to knock on one another’s doors. There were phones in most rooms, each with a private line, and so we would phone one another. ‘Fancy a cup of tea?’ But R., severely melancholy, would only rise in the evening, working all night. Sometimes, he would go outside for a smoke and interrupt the burglars who would come to peer through our windows. I would hear hordes of burglars running through our garden, which they used as a run through.

Still, there were happier times with R. We formed, he and I, a secret society called the Friends of the Kitchen. We would meet so I could watch him smoke in the old stables in the garden. We’d look back at the house over the long grass we’d let grow so we could enjoy its flowering. R. knew an immense amount about flora and fauna. We’d sit outside, summer or winter, and sometimes venture out to our favourite cafes. Often we’d remember his arrival at the house, a bearded vegan hippy featured on a German documentary as a saver of turtles on a Greek island, and how he was transformed into a businessman who wore crushed red velvet trousers. For a while the pair of us became dandies, encouraged by my then girlfriend who like to make us up.

But all this belongs to the past. I was unemployed then; vast days opened before me. I had no money and so I took up residence, as did many others, in a house of retirees and the unemployed who lived in another century. Often, it was madness. But the years passed pleasantly until I left that city for this one, moving further north. When David died, we, his tenants and vistors, were scattered. He was the centre of that world and we orbited around him like the moons of Jupiter. We are scattered now and for all of us, I think, it seems like a long dream, those years we spent in another century, where talk was always of God and of services, where famous composers would ring daily for advice and David would compose vast fantasy novels no one would publish.

The 1^st June. I had promised myself that today I would begin to work again – to give evenings and weekends back to the effort to make a book, or at least a few essays. But what direction to take? There are, it is true, essays I’ve been asked to write, but I never wanted to make the mistake of scattering them into the wind. There must be a common theme, an underlying movement that would allow them to be grouped together one day, to come together into a book, or at least the draft of one.

I remember the notes I took a few weeks back in my reporter’s notebook. I said to W., who was there (it was a conference), ‘I’m onto something’; if I’ve never reread what I wrote then I think it is out of shame for the themes to which I am drawn. I would like, you see, to be drawn to other themes, to the pressing political questions of the day, or even to those philosophical ones in whose space they open. I feel trapped in the closed circle of my interests. Looking out of the window (it is before dawn, still dark) I can see myself and the lit box of this room just as, as Eco complained once, the novelist is trapped in his memory, his personal experience.

But what does Eco know? I am supposed to stop reading novels today, this 1st June, and return to philosophy. Ambitions for the summer: to become conversant with Bergson, and in particular Matter and Memory – not just to read it, but to know it through and through, to let it permeate my body so I can recall it without effort. This is always the test. Then there is Spinoza, whom W. is reading. And shouldn’t I read Benjamin, too? R.M. reminded me that I had said I would.

Then, the broader project of learning to write about music – to write, but to teach it, too. Next academic year, I tell myself, I will really make an effort. Students, when allowed, write on music and science fiction; v’ry well, I will learn to teach philosophy through both. Then, still more, the project of becoming completely conversant with Deleuze. But I remember how many books I have read over the last year which still require substantial notetaking lest they die completely to my memory. This is wearying.

No surprise, then, that novels are much more attractive. I’m tired of philosophy of reading and writing philosophy. Tired of the perpetual catch-up, the oceanic sense of knowing nothing and of being the avatar of a kind of thinking with which I am not keen to identify myself not because I disagree with it, but because it belongs to a time and a milieu when infinite nuance and subtlety were allowed and even indulged. Who am I to insist on this or that reading of X., distinguishing it from that proffered by Y.? Whence our ‘philosophy dogma’, W. and I, which means in my case the attempt to write as clearly and as simply as Flusser. But then, as I remind W., Flusser had a great deal to say.

How to find an idiom in which to write limpidly and profoundly? The second book, it is true, is an advance on the first, just as this blog is an advance on what I wrote at the previous one. Year upon year something is gained, if only a little. When I allowed myself to write prose passages no longer those of commentary in the first book, the effect was strained and pretentious. In the second, though I wearied of the book as I came near the end, it was less strained and less pretentious. All the same, neither book is a book, that must be remembered. Neither is even a beginning, but a kind of toiling before the beginning. Simply an attempt to write and to sustain a writing project from beginning to end. That was enough in those books, even as it means neither is a book.

Is it patience I lack? I think so. That and a too-great desire to write, to write anything, even this (how ridiculous!) Dawn. I couldn’t sleep, you see. Now my face vanishes from the window. What do I see? A white sky, daylight without depth. The world divided from me by the windowpane. It’s the 1^st June, I remind myself, and time to begin work again. But my attention slackens, falling from writing. I read a few pages from Speak, Memory in bed and then remember the first thirty pages of Handke’s Repetition, which I began to read yesterday. Which prose do I prefer? Which is closer to me even as it seems farther – close and distant at once? Which one carries speech forward in me?

I had wanted to read books about memory ever since, last summer, I reread Rose’s Love’s Work. As though it were possible, remembering, to fold out a life, to explicate it, opening beyond the closed circle of interiority. Yes, to open that closed space beyond the particularities of a personal life. What does this mean?, I ask myself lazily. Why this perpetual desire to evacuate the self? I will not be able to answer this question or even to ask it, really to ask it, except in a prose that could not be paraphrased: an absolute idiom, collapsed into itself as a star collapses into a black hole. Where each word counts, each sentence, but only as they become something like echo chambers, letting speak the weakness that any firm and decided speech would betray.

It becomes clearer to me that such a writing cannot be made from the abstractions to which I tend, but must be embedded in detail, in the concreteness of detail. It is Handke who seems to give me an indication of such prose, and not Nabokov. As I read Repetition, I remember Bresson’s A Man Escaped, a film I have not seen for twelve years. Watching it with great attention (I had heard the director’s name, but only came across this film by chance on the television I had in my bedroom that dreadful year) I wondered at its modesty. I thought: v’ry little happens, but it is as though ev’rything happens, a great deal. We know little about the prisoner, but that little is enough as, for a time (the interval of the film) he becomes the cipher for something – but for what? For the ingenuity of a human life. For its patience, its suffering, its resistance. Today I think to myself: the film was made of details and no lofty talk. The well off characters of Bergman films seem so indulgent by comparison, always searching for drama. And then: Bergman is a theatrical director, a man of the theatre. He should not have had the temerity to criticise Tarkovsky.

But these are idle and intemperate thoughts. As if, today, there could be a choice between this or that auteur director! Think of Handke instead, I tell myself. And think of that curious fact about Auster: he allows himself to write clichés, stock expressions, to get the writing going. And it does go, making itself out of details and weaving a plot from itself. That it goes at all is marvellous.

This morning (it is 5 o’clock) I remind myself the first entries on this blog were about the narrative voice. That was eighteen months ago. Writing the last book on this topic and others, I tell myself, it is as if I had experienced that voice for the first time. As I finish this inconsequential post which I will have forgotten by 7 o’ clock I remember those friends who died over the previous years and the way we, their friends, have been scattered by their deaths. There is nothing to bind us. There are memories, yes, but no longer that central, radiating point from which light and warmth travelled in all directions. Each of us, as former friends, has been cast into the darkness, travelling a long way from our orbits like those probes (Voyagers 1 and 2) which have disappeared from the solar system.

Speak, memory. Remember what happened again even as the earth turns into morning and it will be time to go to work. Remember but let this memory appear against the darkness of that great forgetting which sets each of us on a course of our own. Only a simple prose, stuffed with details, made of them, will do. Through such details reported in a simple prose, the shame of living a personal life, closed upon itself, will be redeemed and a book will explicate itself beneath the pallid sky.

Nabokov:

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it[….] Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the mute films of yore, and the portrait of my old French governess, whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books, is fading fast, now that it is engulfed in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own.

Happy forgetting that allows memories, personal memories to evaporate! How I would like to replace all my life with the streaming of words!

Morning again and I am listening to Mark Kozelek’s What’s Next to the Moon as custom dictates (it is a morning album just as The Complete Brass Monkey, to which I was listening before is an evening one). Yes, morning, but it was difficult to sleep and I wake tired, drained and with an ache in my stomach. But one thing makes me want to write (but my prose is already disappointing): last night, insomniac, I began Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and in a couple of hours had read nearly a hundred pages.

How I would like, now, the sails of my prose to fill with that wind which billows through his! I am two fifths of my way through his book and already I fear reaching the end; I am in suspense just as the narrative is suspended in the Russia before the Revolution (is the word this suspense: interregnum). I know terrible times are afoot for the Nabokov family and no doubt they deserve to lose their wealth but for a time, they are happily prosperous. Happy, yes – but Nabokov is narrating their tale from another time, from America, much later.

But I do not want to write about Nabokov now, let alone begin a new category called ‘Nabokov’. This is going to be a lengthy love affair, I think – there are many books to read – and I will need to see what happens to the books in my memory. What will happen to them? Don’t write on a book for sixth months – that’s the new rule, which I have already broken with respect to Leiris’s Manhood.

Piles or ricecakes, some solo, cylinders of Oat and Rice Cakes (it says on the label) some twinned (one cylinder bound to another with yellow tape) and discounted (only £1.25): they are plain Rice Cakes. In the other corner of the room, 29p fizzy water bottles from Tescos. A half drunk bottle of Marks and Spencer’s wine on the table beside me (£3.49) … This morning the lounge seems rather wretched as though a battle had been fought and this were the aftermath.

Why was it I wanted to write? Perhaps to mark a place for the post on Bernhard’s A Child I’ve written, which Typepad will not publish without peculiar paragraph breaks whenever I use the word ‘every’ or ‘Salzburg’ (I can’t erase them, even when I play with the html). But no – that’s not the reason for writing. I dreamt, but the content of what I dreamt does not matter so much as the prose with which they were bound up. Yes, strands of prose entwined themselves in whatever it was I dreamt about and I wanted to attest to them here. Alas, I’ve failed and what I’ve writtten today is only an attempt to mark a place where writing, real writing could have begun.

To keep place – this is already a reason for blogging. To press the ‘save’ button and publish these words onto the internet, subjecting them to that great detour which takes them out of my mediocre morning and into something like the world. I will forget them as soon as I write them, it is true, but it allows me to think: I could have begun today that book which would have allowed everything to have been said. Such is my version of Roubaud’s Project and these words a poor imitation of the book called Destruction.

In truth, this week, where I have written a great deal, is an in-between time (I would like to use the word interregnum, but I am not sure if it is the right one; there is no dictionary here and my dial up connection is too slow to search for an online dictionary and then for this word): there was work to be done (the book, now finished), and there will be more work to be done (a revision of the book, once it has been proofread, but more importantly, the papers which will have to delivered at the end of the long summer). I have a sense of urgency – now is a time without project, in which a smaller writing is allowed. Write a great deal, I say to myself, mark this interregnum in the passing of days just as, when a child, you would be asked to write a few words of your ‘news’ (this weekend, I …)

A new project will begin, no doubt. But I have a sense of a new apocalypse – a devastation of the world – after which the calm sentences I have set down here will seem as full of a lost security and well-being as the pre-Revolutionary interregnum Nabokov recounts.

I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch were my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the celing. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

I can smell the toast from next door; it is a pleasant smell. But this afternoon, I had four discounted wraps from boots, priced 75p each. That should have been enough; and I’ve just drank two glasses of wine, finishing off the bottle I opened last night. Why did I drink? To repeat last night’s magic. Last night – already it seems impossible. Why? Because it was possible to write anything, everything. Of course it couldn’t last; I knew I had to rise early this morning, to go to the office – there’s work to be done, a great deal of work. A report to write; examining to finish. Of course, when I got to the office, I couldn’t begin. Nothing could begin; I was stalled in the afternoon; I went to the gym and managed only 25 minutes. It was lamentable.

Lyotard: ‘And for each connection, a divine name, for each cry, intensity and multiplication brought about by experiences both expected and unexpected, a little god a little goddess, which has the appearance of being useless when one looks at it with globulous, sad, platonic eyes, which in fact is of no use, but which is a name for the passage of emotions’ (Libidinal Economy). Is there a god of boredom, of the everyday? Ah, but there is no intensity, but only its dispersal – there is nothing to be marked which is why I write posts like this. To mark – what? To stamp the everyday with the mark of time. To draw the dispersal of time back into the calendar.

There is no god, pagan or Christian, of the non-leap, of the fall from the tightrope. Recall Zarathustra: the tightrope walker falls because a buffoon leaps over him. Yes, the passage across the rope to the overman is not completed. The tightrope walker has a double, the one who leaps, who causes him to tumble. He falls and dies; Zarathustra drags his dead body with him. The gravediggers laugh at him. Eventually, having left the city, he leaves the body in a hollowed out tree. What of the buffoon? He will return as Zarathustra’s doubles – there are many of them, parodying his way of speaking, of prophesying. He returns from the mountain at the end of Book 2 (or is it Book 3?) when a child shows him in a mirror that his teachings are being distorted. He must return because a buffoon might leap over him.

Denton Welch, the short story writer who died marvelously young, leaving us with his drawings and his exquisite fictions (what writer has written more vividly of food – but I am thinking of toast again), writes in a tale in which, I know, he pictured himself as protagonist, a young woman trips over. What does she see? The whole sky, spread above her. Later she meets a young woodcutter. The other great moment of a fall comes in  Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, when the postman falls in the house of the protagonist. Oh the postman! He is a holy fool, familiar from Dostoevsky, but now reborn on one of the little islands, I think, which lie around Stockholm. A postma- fool, who falls – tumbles – on the wooden floor. And laughs in a way that suggests he knew he would fall. Yes, he knew, as he knows everything in Tarkovsky’s film.

A third fall. Bataille’s Blue of Noon. The narrator tumbles; it’s night, and -. Well, that’s enough. A great deal has happened. To fall, to become horizontal – it’s similar to the way in which Tarkovsky’s protagonists are allowed to become muddy. Mud does not concern them. They are far beyond notions of cleaniness and dirtiness by the time we have met them. Water pours from their ceilings; they are already Outside. To watch one of his films is to join them, yes – the evening parts, the television screen parts, the movie film is like an opening sea. Now you go between the shores, and all because a character has fallen, is caked in mud.

Patriot Games is on television. It is the opposite of everything I would like to think about. Harrison Ford is in bed, injured; there is his wife, his child. Outside, late, it is growing dark. I should draw the curtains on my unlovely garden. How is it I feel stranded in life, and not gathered up into a larger movement? Because a buffoon has leapt over me and I am falling. Which is a way of saying that I have fallen from writing, and writing lies impossibly far above me.

Nearly midnight. I’ve opened a bottle of wine from Marks and Spencers. How could I resist? There were three bottles lined up on the shelf; now there are two. I am thinking of cheese, but, knowing myself too well, I do not keep any food in the flat. Today I went to the gym, but couldn’t manage more than half an hour; I do not deserve a square meal.

Freedom! What it is, even on a Friday night, to write whatever I like! Where will the blind desire to write lead me? How many times the same situation and the same question? A question asked by writing, in writing. I know I’d like to write on the figure of the golem, following some reflections at Charlotte Street a while back, but my notes are in the office. I deliberately stripped my flat of books; there’s only a dozen or so here, kept so R.M. can see at one glance what I bought on my trip to America. They are in the other room, one I rarely use. It is there, open, barely filled, empty as though it were thinking for me, in my place. This room is where everything happens when I am alone. But what happens?

I wonder to myself: what if I were to attempt to uncover the latent structure of my world? What would I uncover? And my first response: rooms, a succession of rooms where writing was succesful or unsuccesful. But why is my memory as though snagged so it is always in a room I think of myself? If I had it to hand, I would reread Flusser’s beautiful essay on architecture, on a house which did not enclose a place but opened it, offered it to the air. I think of Rilke’s Open, too and even as I write the word Rilke, I feel both calmer and as though an animal were watching me.

In Monterey, we sat in the morning sun, my sister, her husband and I, and discussed what animals they were to get when they returned to London. A puppy? A kitten and a puppy? Or – best of all – a kitten, a puppy, a pony and a parrot? Drew said I could keep the parrot, and I thought to myself: I would rather not have an animal at all. To have the eyes of an animal on you is to be interpellated, called, such that writing is difficult. Yes, to write with an animal near is to do so as an ‘I’, as an intact and self-present ‘I’, sure of itself as one who is responsible for animals, who keeps them, tends to them, in that space where he is master.

A second glass of wine. Now I think to myself: you were a reader of speculative fiction, of science and fiction and science fact – what happened? You started this blog to broaden your field of interests, to write on what you had not written, but what did you find? A narrowing – there was an intensity of focus, it is true, but on themes which were already entrenched. Ballard writes his imagination were as though hardwired at age 15; he had survived a prisoner of war camp, of course, where he had witnessed the weaknesses of his parents. His father, he recalls, although physically affectionate, was one to whom Ballard felt less close after the war. He had seen too much weakness! The film-set world of old Shanghai fell apart rapidly.

‘All you can do is cling to your own obsessions – all of them, to the end. Be honest with them; identify them. Construct your own personal mythology out of them and follow that mythology; follow those obsessions like stepping stones in front of a sleepwalker’. That was Ballard. One of the great idiocies of Eco was to claim the novelist is trapped in her memories and her psyche. Why didn’t he understand how our world, for each of us, is full of a latent content which outstrips anything personal? My gratitude to Ballard is immense; I read him at an early age and immediately loved his work. I will not speak of it today, except to note that it attests to the infinite opening of the world to each of us, of a private pathology which breaks all our horizons. It is the key to blogging, do you understand that?

I listen to A Bed of Roses by Lal Waterson and Oliver Knight as I type. I am waiting for ‘The Last Days of Disco’ to start and turning through Ballard’s Quotes. ‘Inner Space: that’s the name to which Ballard linked his fictions in the 60s – as opposed, of course, to outer space. ‘My characters are almost all engaged in mythologising themselves and in then exploding that mythology to the furthest end, whatever the price’. To explode one’s mythology – but what does that mean?

Understand that The Kindness of Women was where I stopped reading Ballard. This book made me shudder. I saw him speak around that time and that ended forever my desire to meet authors. I asked him to sign my copy of one of his books, ‘TIME ZONE’ in capital letters, remembering what he wrote of deep time and archaeopsychic time – of private time systems and synthetic psychologies, of space time and the halfworlds which can be glimpsed in the paintings of the mad.

(I am thinking of the piece of sheep’s cheese I left in the fridge in the apartment in San Francisco. The Fall are performing ‘Blindness’ on Jools Holland. It’s as fine as ‘Sister Ray’. Mark E. Smith is wearing one glove. His wife is beautiful, with the beauty of R.M. whom, as I type, is attending a military ball in London.)

Half past midnight. Today, exercising in the gym, a collection of images occurred to me I did not want to lose: 1) the idea of a turn, or of taking a turn which would turn me over to what is normally missed, 2) the old cliche of the play of nearness and distance, that the near is the farthest etc. This image: a turn which would bring me close to what blazes in the present instant. As though, in that instant, the universe itself was fire.

‘Religions emerge too early in human evolution  – they set up symbols that people took literally, and they’re as dead as a line of totem poles. Religions should have come later, when the human race begins to near its end’. Ballard again. But I am thinking of what Holderlin knew: the sky is empty, the gods flown, and what remains is the time between the god’s absence and their return. Yes, their return, for there are old gods and there are young gods …

I woke just now after uneasy dreams, but I didn’t find myself transformed into a giant insect. Of Neighbours, which I haven’t watched for many years. I turned on the television and there was … Neighbours (Susan has cut her hair – she looks severe). Then R.M. rang and spoke to me of Darcey Bussell. The best CD to put on to ease you into the day is Mark Kozelek’s What’s Next to the Moon?; it’s playing now, but I am much too late for the day. Why so late? Because I woke at 3.00 AM and read Leiris’s Manhood for several hours. I thought to myself: I wonder if this is how Blanchot woke to read the books he had under review?

Lightness now the book is done. Confession: last night (this morning), before I read Leiris, I read my first book. Why? Sudden horror, after reading an online version of James Williams’s Lyotard and the Political that it (my book) was all ripped off Lyotard. What does it matter? But the second book is off with the publisher, and that is what is important. Lightness, as I say. Oh there’s plenty to do; I am busy, with piles of administration, reports to write and so on. But beyond that … I’ve ordered two bottles of Tequila. I have a new stack of books to read (the new biography of Kierkegaard arrived yesterday); the gym beckons.

Yesterday, walking in to work, I remembered my plan to write 50 short essays on Smog. I’d seen, by chance, 50 Short Films on Glenn Gould on my first few days in San Francisco, as I finished the book in front of the television. But how would I begin? I put this to R., one of my musical friends. ‘I don’t have any musical knowledge’, I told him, and said I would like at least to know the names of some chords, or what a vamp was (I was thinking of Reynolds’ book on the Smiths). He reassured me, and I dreamed again of an unpublished book called Bill Callahan and the Everyday, in the style of some of the posts here and here.

I had two strong dreams last night. I woke and jotted down some notes in my new Moleskine reporter’s notebook as I imagined Michel Leiris would have done. Firstly, remembering, no doubt, my sister’s comments on having few friends from her childhood who’d followed her through life, I dreamt of the friend who brought with him all of the past. The friend who was your past, such that when you came close to him it was your own past you approached, only now your past had become foreign to you, unfamiliar, the steady burning of a curtain of flame.

Secondly, a dream which was more like a dream of a dream, or a dream which could only be dreamt by one who was insomniac (a waking dream, a half-awake dream): I dreamt of the nakedness of time passing, all of time and feeling a dull fear at its passing. I was old, I thought, and by that I meant: aging is fearful because everything in the world remains the same and meanwhile time passes. Everything remains the same, but time is rushing inside me. And I thought: insomnia is what presses me up against the passing of all of time. But then: it was time pressing up against me. Time spoke. Time murmured through me.

The second dream was an indication of my philosophical intentions this summer: to grasp Deleuze’s general account of time, of being, in contradistinction to that of phenomenology. I told W. I understood it all in outline. ‘Explain then’, he said, mercilessly, ‘tell me about Spinoza’. He’s teaching a course on Spinoza, he told me, 12 weeks long. I had no such intention and I was never any good at explaining anything when put on the spot. But that is this summer’s project.

W. and I are planning our Dogma Philosophy papers for September.  Will it be a fiasco? Of course. What were the rules of Dogma again? I’ve forgotten. But Badiou has beaten us to it. The magnificent preface to the English version of Ethics … it’s like drinking a pure draft of water. Drinking from the highest spring, the head of all waters. Suspicion: that this is itself an effect. That’s it too late to drink from such a spring. Annoyance: why did Derrida never write on Being and Event? Why the book Archive Theory instead of a book on Badiou. But isn’t there an unspoken code among the French not to write a book on anyone else until they die? Lacoue-Labarthe’s haste in producing a book on Blanchot in the wake of his death …Besides, I have it from A. who has it from Paris, from X., that ‘Faith and Knowledge’ was addressed to Steigler, so presumably there would be a way of reading Paper Machine or some other book … Stop! This is the opposite of Dogma Philosophy (or is it Philosophy Dogma?).

Empty loquacity. How nice to write, as Moominpappa would say (a post on the use of the word, nice, as it is found in the translations of the Moomintroll books. Passages on the use of incidental detail in Jansson’s books, for example, ‘mermaids followed us. We fed them oatmeal’ as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world to encounter mermaids and that it is the most obvious thing in the world to feed them oatmeal). Today, what will happen today? I have to write a report, fairly lengthy. What else? Plenty of things. But a gentle light is falling everywhere, it is beneficient. All is favourable; I slept and now I’m awake. What’s Next to the Moon? is finished and now it’s time to go out into the world.

I am now in the state of Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, or, as I prefer to think of it, the narrator of Blanchot’s When the Time Comes. What time is it? When is it? Night or day? This year or last year? I dreamt on the train coming north that the book was unfinished, but it is finished and sent, though, going over the manuscript on the plane, I found more mistakes.

I arrived home at five, spread my bed clothes in front on the TV and let Richard and Judy play above my head. How did I fall asleep for the Simpsons? – but I did. I’ve piled up the books I bought on my trip beside my makeshift bed. The Borch-Jacobsen looks good; Corngold’s The Necessity of Form.

On the train, I reread Kafka’s ‘The Judgement’ and ‘The Stoker’ and then put the book, hearing within me sentences similar to those of Kafka spinning themselves from nothing. How nice it is a book can live in this way! Merleau-Ponty remarks on exactly this phenomenon: to read a novel is to imagine one could write it. Then you see what a novelist must have: the strength not just to begin but to venture at once into the middle of the narrative. How crowded with details Kafka’s narratives are! I thought to myself: he was a great observer of the world. The details are exquisite; everything is there. From where did that strength come? From what necessity?

Thinking about this, I remember Thomas M. Disch’s comments in his history of science fiction on Philip K. Dick. He was a guru, Disch notes, keen to arm wrestle his interlocutors into submission on the issue of the theophany he experienced in 1974. He craved attention, Disch notes, going from one 20 year old girl to another. Perhaps. But there are the books, too. The books written each one of them in a week or no more than a fortnight, which unfolded very rapidly from themselves. Each time a world was born; true, the worlds overlap, but what impresses is the necessity of each birth. His is not the prolix talent which creates first this world and then that, but that ranks the world he creates according to how close they would be to the real world.

That is the lesson of the novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in Dick’s The Man in the High Castle: it speaks the truth; it bears on what really happened. Thus Dick’s novel does not lay before us an alternate history but a false one. Dick is always looking for something, but what? The power to fabulate this world, to write of what is simple and close. The truest hero of Dick’s novel (but which novel does this come from? I’ve not read one for more than a decade?): the tyre-regroover, the one who works against entropy to stabilise and order.

The ‘real world’: how naive this sounds? Isn’t it by attempting to reach through the veil of fiction to the real world that Dick sought to leap from his books into the world, our world? He writes to escape writing; fiction is only a means, for him, of coming to the truth. Why, then, not put down the pen altogether? Why another tab of speed and the daily retreat to his writing shed? Dick writes a great deal; four novels a year and dozens of stories. He writes, but why does he write? To find himself on the shore that lies beyond writing. Meanwhile, there are the works in which dark-haired girls and tyre-regroovers multiply themselves …

‘What day is it?’ I asked R.M. on the phone. ‘It’s Wednesday’, she says, en route to the ballet. ‘I thought it was morning’, I tell her, and it’s true, I feel young as I always do in the morning. But I should be feeling old instead – doubly old, having missed a night’s sleep.

Now the summer is spreading out before me. No major projects, a paper here and there, that’s all. For the first time in sixth months, I will have time to write here, but on what will I write? It’s a little too late to write on cruelty, following Jodi’s example at I Cite. And there is the frustration that this blog is not private enough, not secret enough, but this is foolishness itself, for a blog must be public, writing must find its audience and to write is to let that of which one writes to be born anew.

What I’ve written here over the last months appals me. I am reminded of what Lacoue-Labarthe says somewhere about the originary role of acting. You begin with the mask; you are always an actor, especially and always when you write (but this is my extrapolation …) With whose voice do I write? Whose style is alive in mine? I would hope to find a style which is neutral, from which speaks the surprise that there is meaning, sense, that there is language. Yes, that’s what I would like to find, and it is against that which I measure the weakness of what I have written.

But is this, too, not a pose? The desire, like that of Dick to step from a fictional world into the real one? Staggering jet-lagged about the flat, I wonder whether I come close to the condition of the narrator in When the Time Comes (how ridiculous …): close to that point where fiction frays and what approaches is not real, if this would mean the world of ordinary things and ordinary people, but an immediacy which burns up everything but itself. As though all our experiences assembled themselves in that flaming, amidst it, and we live like salamanders close to a truth we cannot grasp.

Why isn’t the caffeine hitting? This is the last full day I have to work on the book. I can send an electronic copy to them on the 11th, the publishers told me. And don’t worry, they said, we’ll get a proper copy editor this time.

Tomorrow, to London and from there to San Francisco. I can proofread on the plane. ‘I’ve read my book 18 times’ says W., proudly. ‘I haven’t even put my chapters together into one file’, I tell him. ‘It’s going to be a fiasco’.

‘Why didn’t you give yourself enough time?’ says W. ‘We had the audit’, I tell him, ‘and the QAA. I wrote the paperwork.’ – ‘You’ve always got an excuse’, says W.

I’ve drank a Frescato, a cup of green tea and a third of a can of Irn-Bru. When will the caffeine hit?

I think to myself: your whole life will have been an excuse for not writing a good book. You’ll never write one, though you may write a lot of books. But what is it that is lacking? W. and I often pose this question to each other. ‘You still want to be a great writer’, W. claims. He has said this on many occasions. I tell him his love of failure still shows a nostalgia for success.

I remind him of what K. told me: his lecturers, active during May 1968, had turned to drink. They were drunk, all of them, all the time. I think of Debord and Duras. This morning it suddenly struck me what I disliked about some Bergman films: it was the sense that the dynamics of the couple were somehow important, worthy of drama. I think to myself: I can’t take these rich Scandinavian couples seriously. They’ve all the advantages. Their anguish is pure self-indulgence.

I listen to my box set of The Fall Peel Sessions. ‘The Fall are never self-indulgent’, I tell W. ‘Mark E. Smith is a genius’, he says. I tell him of the interview with his mum which appeared in a recent biography. ‘She said if he had gone to university he would have become an academic’. I’ve always found this horrifying.

What happens when intensity can find no focus, nothing to do? When it cannot aim itself at political activity, at the revolution, nor console itself in philosophical thinking that would prepare for the revolution? In a letter to Kojeve, Bataille writes of unemployed negativity. The man of unemployed negativity, he notes, can console himself in art or in religion. But Bataille is too honest for that. Debord too.

The difference between Bergman and Duras is enormous. She understands that loving is analogous to dying, the ‘to love’ to the ‘to write’. The Malady of Death breaks with the theatricality which still mars Bergman. Even films like The Silence remain within the space opened by Ibsen: a drama of selves, of individuals on a stage. Strindberg will sometimes point in another direction.

I saw King Lear with Corin Redgrave a few weeks back. It was as wonderful as Hecuba starring his sister was bad. The same in Shakespeare as The Fall: the drama becomes a drama which explodes the limits of the human being. I should substantiate this claim, but there’s no time. You’ll never find me using the word ‘subject’ or ‘subjectivity’. Bloom is wrong: Shakespeare invented the inhuman.

The new book is a fiasco. ‘The first book was terrible, but at least it was ambitious’, I tell W., ‘the new book isn’t even ambitious …’ Youth: the dream that one day you will write a book, a good book. Age: laughter which turns the whole world into the moor on which Lear was lost. It was only with age, with the sense of crushed dreams and laughter at those same dreams that I came to love Shostakovich. The 4th Symphony is already the work of a crushed man whose laughter has dissolved the world.

I first read Flusser on a beach in the tropics. When I reread The Philosophy of Design now, I remember the blazing sun (it was winter), the pink beach (ours; it was deserted), the green sea whose waves rose up like the glass side of an aquarium. Parrot fish could be seen as though in aspic. R.M. and I would drink Canada Dry ginger ale, going back and forth to the fridge in the condo.

I read parts of the book to R.M. who was unimpressed. She was reading Proust and had no time for philosophy, she said, on the island where she was born. Later, walking through Hyde Park we came to a gallery, the Serpentine, in whose bookshop R.M. claimed to see the new volume of Flusser before I did. She had no money but wanted the book; I bought it, pointing out she had no time for Flusser when we were in the tropics. But we were no longer in the tropics, she said.

Ever since, R.M. does not like to hear Flusser’s name, but I did not feel as mean buying the book she wanted and thought she had seen first as a few weeks later when, visiting me, she found a hardbound creamy notebook covered in butterflies. R.M. was poor once again, and I bought the book which she had seen first for myself. I stood in on the bookshelf in the office where we could both admire it. But then I thought: ‘this is wrong – R.M. saw it first’ and offered it to her. She gave it back: you didn’t do it from love, she said, and she was right.

A week later, I sent the butterfly covered notebook south to R.M. Use it in your insurance exams, I wrote in the dedication. Would it make up for the Flusser? Was it a gift of love? Remembering the winter’s day when, in Hyde Park, we sat on the deckchairs they put up by the lake (the same day I bought Flusser) I thought: all of this day was distilled into the butterfly notebook.

Alas, the package which contained the notebook never reached R.M. Was it stolen? Today, the same day as the package I sent to R.M. proved irretrievable, I received The Fall’s Complete Peel Sessions 1978-2004. Was this the butterfly notebook born again? But R.M. does not like The Fall, so I can’t send her this as a gift of love. The Flusser book is covered in annotations. So what can I send?

The clocks had gone forward without my noticing it. I rose at nine, not eight; I thought Popworld was on early. This is a work weekend: four whole days in which to write, following weeks of administration and bureaucracy (and similar weeks to come: the QAA, the audit …) But as with all work weekends, comes a time when you are too tired to work. I read James Lord’s splendid biography of Giacometti instead, which I found in London last weekend with R.M.

I should have gone out last night, I say to myself. That way, awakening, I would still be borne on the memories of the night before. Friends and company are essential to work, I know this now. That’s what Giacometti said to those who claimed his sculpture indicated his more general concern with solitude. Not at all, he said. Of course, he was our many nights with prostitutes. Then friends called at his studio.

What should I write today? A passage on the positive infinite in Hegel and the spurious infinite in Blanchot. A paraphrase of a small section of W.’s book. Finish off that little piece on Gillian Rose. All for the book, which has to be ready very soon. I still don’t have a complete first draft. If I was W., I would spend another year polishing the book, paring it down.

Yes, that’s what I would write, but I’m too tired. I am not in the office yet; the flat is warm but dark; I listen to Beck’s Sea Change, which is much better than I remembered. But my pot plants are shedding leaves, and the kitchen is messy. I haven’t rehung the pictures and mirror I took down when the new wallpaper went up.

New blogs appear. One reminds me of a conversation I have with friends on the phone about the fate of departments of philosophy. ‘So what of Warwick?’ The answer approximates to: ‘it has fallen’, which means the hordes have arrived and taken over. As though I were receiving battle reports like one of the doomed race of men in The Lord of the Rings (what of Rohan?).

I walked to the quayside yesterday, which I never do, and never alone. But I couldn’t write anymore; tired, I thought I’d risk a walk in the outdoors because I was content with what I had done; I was even moved by the introduction to the new book. But I remembered what Beckett said to Van Velde of a new picture of which the artist declared himself proud: ‘there’s no reason to be’.

Horror of philosophy: never a corner in which to hide and do your work. Always the biggest themes: truth, freedom, justice which demand to be spoken of. There’s no refuge. I always dream of escaping to another subject; I spend my time with musicians and with theorists of music and envy the determinacy of their subject matter. With philosophy there’s always too much at stake. And then there’s my miserable hackery: the desire to write, to write and all the while with nothing to say.

Still, the hordes are coming. Polite, well-meaning, they don’t even know they are hordes. They bring with them that facility in speaking, they speak, everything is easy, there’s a framework in which everything is to be done. What was the name of that famous horde member who said to the Chinese: there’s a way of doing philosophy which has sorted out all the basic problems? And then – wonderful irony – the Chinese took to Heidegger instead, or at least that is what I heard.

Caffeine is the greatest temptation when I work but it is also a great hindrance – yesterday’s espresso makes me feel tired today; halfway through my workday and I am already drained. How to resist going out to buy an Irn-Bru so that at least some of the afternoon is salvaged? But that would only make me tired this evening. Best to endure these hours instead, but doing what? My friends are also working, but it is a beautiful day …

A lovely vignette from a little book on Kafka. It is 1922, he is in love with Dora Diamant, a nineteen year old girl from a Hassidic background. Kafka himself has just turned forty, but they are in love and no longer does he seek to remain a distance from her as he did from Felice. ‘Felice had talked about furniture; Dora read him the royal verses of Isaiah’.

Kafka was a changed man; he broke with Prague, moved with Dora to Steglitz, a suburb of Berlin, into a small apartment where his prized solitude was not possible and never missed. Dora reports how he liked her to stay with him while he write and how, at times, sitting on the sofa she fell asleep when he worked very late.

I transcribe these lines a little sadly, knowing that the idea of creating a weblog to assemble such vignettes is of little use. I will have forgotten I wrote this before a week has ellapsed. I always wondered what it would be to come across pieces I had forgotten writing; this happens often now. When did I write, say, that little piece on Antelme? I have no idea, and even though I can read from the bottom of the post what date I wrote it on, I can remember nothing of the circumstances.

Sometimes, happily, I can incorporate such posts in the book I am writing. The prose of the book is enlivened thereby – a sudden change of pace, of formality, of tone makes the text more fresh, more unexpected; something happens in the text – a leap, an acceleration, a swerve…. Still, more important to me is the silence which surrounds each post: when was it written? On what kind of day? What was it that allowed those words and not others to coalescene? Or even for words to have been formed at all?

The last of these questions is important. Plenty of posts go unfinished. A strength is required to leap from paragraph to paragraph, or even from sentence to sentence. Sometimes words themselves do not come together; a fog descends, nothing can be thought. At others, usually after caffeine, great leaps occur, ideas, half-forgotten, call out to other ideas, a little  swarm is formed. Happiness: one paragraph gives birth to another and the whole post rises shakily into the air like the Wright brothers’ aeroplane (that’s something Steve wrote to me once of a post I deleted that same day (R.M. didn’t like it); does he remember? Have I remembered rightly?)

No caffeine for me. I will have to last until tomorrow morning’s coffee. Gradually, over the next hour or two, the withdrawal symptoms will cease from the half cup of green tea I always allow myself at noon, and it will possible to return to the book.

One-and-a-half hours before I meet friends for a drink and a film, I am stranded in the office without being able to write anything for the book. What to do instead? write about what you cannot write, so at least you have some relationship to what needs to be done, even if it is only at one remove. Vicarious writing, writing by proxy: this is what blogging permits, as letter-writing used to do.

Once upon a time, I would have used this interval to have written to a friend. Such a writing seems very far away now. Remember the joy of criss-crossing letters: one sent to X and another received from X and so on, each with the two to three day wait which detached what was written from what was experienced in the moment of writing. But this is already naive, as if writing did not always demand such a detachment: as if to write and to write a letter was already to have lost what was experienced and to have regained it in a new way, as words on the page.

Now, instead, words on a screen. But this is happiness: the sense something was done, that I will have made something from these vacant minutes.

It is six o’clock here in the office. I arrived hungover at ten this morning; I set to work with the aim of finishing a draft of the first chapter of the book, suffice to say this was not possible. Besides me, a pile of CDs. I listen to the odd numbered Beethoven symphonies. And besides me, too, two printed out drafts of lectures W. intends to give. ‘It is not because Pascal is unhappy that he writes, he is unhappy because he writes …’

What did I do today? Any answer I give betrays the feeling that nothing happened today, and that it happened such that this nothing became tangible, ever-present, there in the blank whiteness of the sky. What I do? Nothing happened and I remember the conversation W. and I have when we are in our cups: what does it mean to write as a philosopher? What does it mean for Heidegger to write, or for Blanchot? ‘For all that he wrote on boredom,’ one of us says, ‘Heidegger knew nothing of boredom’ – ‘By writing on boredom rather than with boredom,’ says the other, ‘he betrays it.’

Steve’s new essay on Auster’s Oracle Night sent me out on the street to look for the book in question, not to buy it, but just to look. I found it in one of the two Waterstones. I wanted to confirm what Steve reported of Auster: that he is unafraid to use cliches if only to release himself from that movement of writing which would have been halted if he had paused to rephrase them. That it is writer’s block that he would avoid by so writing. Then I remembered placing a star in the margin of Josipovici’s article ‘Kierkegaard and the Novel’. Here is a part of that passage:

[Johannes de Silentio] can make us feel vividly that he – and we – cannot really understand Abraham, but the implication remains that so long as he goes on writing about Abraham he himself will never be a Knight of Faith. This is Kierkegaard’s problem. He cannot remain simply ironical, like his beloved Socrates. Times have changed[….] he is committed to writing in order to make people see the lies they are telling themselves, but so long as he goes on writing he remains in the subjunctive mode and so cuts himself off from the life he most desires.

Life! Kierkegaard is like Kafka in wanting to leave writing behind. Should he stop writing?, Kierkegaard asks himself, should he take Holy Orders? Is this what God wants for him?

One could say that Kierkegaard’s personal tragedy lay in the fact that he was not enough of a writer to take pleasure in the writing process itself, but too much of one ever to be a Knight of Faith.

W. and I speak of a thinker we admire. ‘He is always absolutely serious’, says W., ‘it’s just as Blanchot said about Bataille: something serious is always at issue when he speaks’. I agree, remembering that W. always says the opposite of me. ‘You are my id’, W. says, ‘nothing is ever serious in our conversations’.

Does it change when we drink? I remember what Bataille reports of a drunken reading session with a friend. Drunk, they take it in turns to read aloud from a book. It is as though drinking changes the relation to the book. As though something becomes possible in the act of reading.

W. is an advocate of philosophy as friendship, as face to face contact, intimate groups of discussants, impassioned talk. I remind him of what he already knows: when Blanchot praises the seriousness of Bataille’s conversation, he is referring not to the content of what Bataille said, but to the seriousness of speech itself. What does this mean? That there is a way of communicating which interrupts the great circulation of words, which allows there to be felt a contentless declaration, a thundering silence, even a kind of call.

Blanchot had friends whom he never met. He sent short letters to them in a beautiful hand. Asked if he wanted to meet by a friend such as Edmund Jabes, he demurred. Derrida reports a dream where, speaking to Blanchot at the door of his flat, he tries to peer inside to see what is there.

Interruption. This post is growing rather long, so I will note simply that great writers, great thinkers have also sensed those interruptions which divide the facility of writing from itself. Mishima cursed the fact that a rain of words had never stopped falling within him. Bataille needed to break the smoothness of philosophical discourse. Hasn’t friendship, philosophical friendship something to do with this interruption?, I want to ask W. I am thinking of Bataille’s drunkenness, of Blanchot’s retreat, of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. I am thinking of another kind of boredom and of writing with boredom, rather than making of boredom one theme among others.

The last line of the Josipovici essay follows the last sentence I quote above:

But then that too could perhaps be seen as the best way of defining all those modern writers whom, like Kierkegaard, we may call ‘essential writers’ to distinguish them from the scribblers, even the highly talented scribblers, who will always be with us.

Talking to W., who is the great scourge of careerism, makes me ask myself: am I a careerist? I say to myself: when you first began to study as a postgraduate it was only as a ruse to allow you to —–. But what word should I write there? But there is no word – it was a question of a future, a stretch of time in which to be no one in particular. What did I want? To pass across philosophy as a stone is skimmed across water (the word passing is a lovely one; it reminds me of some lines in Char …) I think of Belle and Sebastian’s ‘A Summer Wasting’: a song about time that goes nowhere, the time of river banks and wandering. W. tells me how hard he studied: I never drank, I never smoked, I spent all the time in the library.

Comes a time when you have to begin to write what are called primary texts. When does it come? When through some strange leap you gain the courage to begin. But what kind of courage is this? From where does it get its strength, its conviction? Zizek says if it were not for Lacan, he would have remained a dabbler, writing on Derrida one day and Deleuze the next. He committed himself; he leapt. I’ve always told W. that it’s a matter of writing, writing – write enough, I tell him, and ideas will come, and then the leap can be made. But then I think to myself, you do not have the strength for such a leap, you’re too weak and all this writing disperses you in too many directions …

Zizek remarks that film was his first love; philosophy came after. I’ve often wondered whether those for whom philosophy was their first love are paralysed by that love; they cannot begin to write. Yes, I write, and soon I would like to begin a primary text (laughter as I write this). But this is, as I always tell W., born from an empty desire to make a book. A desire to make something pretty, dense and writerly. And to sing/speak of those few themes which make my blood rush. You have to become a name, W. reminds me, to write such a book. He means the book would have to sell.

‘What if I wrote a book on Smog, or on Will Oldham?’ I ask him. ‘You’d need to prove you could make money to the publishers.’ – ‘How many copies would I have to sell?’ – ‘I don’t know.’ – ‘Five thousand copies?’ – ‘Something like that. Do some research.’

Passing. The book I dream of, as I have written before, is called Common Presence. It will include essay/dreams on Tarkovsky, Shostakovich, each only five or six pages long … and what else? I have little idea of what its pages will contain. And I dream of another book, too, a kind of phantom autobiography. A book about a life with the name: a life …

Always the dream of passing, of moving without disturbing anything in the world. And I remember Deleuze and Guattari on becoming-infinitesimal, and the last lines of The Incredible Shrinking Man. And I say to myself: pass between the molecules. Write a book on the blank pages of the sky and the earth …

‘You’re a dominant personality’, said R.M. after looking at some old photographs of me as a child. She’s suspicious. I tell her of those high court judges who, tired of their roles, pay prostitutes to allow them to play the role of the insulted and the injured. I think to myself of myself: ‘and of course, for those same judges, it is a game, they’re paying, after all’. And then: ‘perhaps the appeal of disappearing and dispersal is also, for you, a game and what you dislike is only the extent of your presence, your heaviness for others as you have some say over their fates. What you dislike is that place you occupy and even as you write of a liberating weariness, of that falling where you tumble beneath your own work and the possibility of working, is still play, still play-acting. Only one in possession of himself would write thus. It is a kind of reversal of those literary toreadors, of Hemingway with his bullfighting or Mailer and his pugilism.’

Still, I wonder. Because what I also experience is a failure to talk, to write as someone in command of a subject-matter, as an expert. Tired, the other night, I read an old commentary by Wellek on Croce and others and thought to myself: Wellek is in command of his materials, Wellek writes, there is no doubt in his voice, Wellek does not fall from himself. And then: I prefer Bataille’s Inner Experience; I prefer Guilty – I trust a broken book whose author breaks himself and his authority. And then: but what if this, too, is enabled precisely by his strength? What if it is his strength which allows him to write of his weakness.

Weakness: a few days without work, lost from work. It is pleasant; I visit friends; I catch up with my administration. But I am slightly hysterical. Just now a conversation with W. ‘You wanted to escape this time last year as well’, W. observes. ‘But it’s crazy …’ – ‘So what are you planning this time?’ – ‘I don’t know’. – ‘Are you hysterical again?’ – ‘Yes.’ – ‘How does it manifest itself?’ – ‘A complete inability to believe in anything I do.’ I think to myself: it is usually enough to speak, to discourse on this or that thinker, on this or that topic, for the magic to work: to speak on authoritative thinkers is to seize for oneself some of this same authority. As though the activity of speaking believed in my place, and the voice with which I speak – a lecturer’s voice – believed for me.

Once I drew a moustache on a photograph of famous thinker X. (you supply the name). Tired of X.’s ability to talk, to talk on this and then that subject without doubt, without failure, without weariness marking itself in X.’s voice. Zizek and others write magnificently on the need for the strength of belief, for that magnificent sacrifice, that great repetition, the re-taking through which a future, a political future might become possible again. A revolutionary asceticism.

My favourite revolutionary? Yukio Mishima because he will allow doubt to infest his written voice in his novels and essays. As though he shattered his own resolve into characters who spoke each against the other, who prevented the possibility of action. And yet, in Mishima’s text, a great admiration for the one who acts. I will never forget the blow of reading the opening sentence of the second volume of The Sea of Fertility: ‘Honda was forty years old …’ In the first volume, he was twenty, but now – forty! What horror! Honda encounters, in that novel, the young revolutionary who will take his life in ritual seppuku after murdering an old industrialist. It is marvellously dramatised, this moment, in Schrader’s film Mishima.

Mishima admired Bataille. This, too, intrigues me. For all that the drama surrounding Mishima’s own act of seppuku, there is something admirable in his resolve for all that it is carried out in the midst of his own doubts, his own weariness. Of course, Mishima formed a private army with whom he went on training missions. It was madness, it’s laughable, a project of the extreme right. But he overcame his own lassitude, he hardened his body …

The dream of such action only comes to someone infested with weariness. As if, with a last strength, with the merciful surplus of such strength, it were possible to disappear into action. To become a living sun. This is madness, Mishima’s delirium of the extreme right. What interest me, however, is the way that weariness, that fall from work, from the possibility of working, itself becomes a source of hope, of freedom (I am thinking, with the these last two words, of I Cite‘s generous response). As though were we called to fight for a revolution, whatever that means, it would be with the peculiar weapons with which lassitude arms us.

Fie upon breakfast meetings, especially those without breakfast. Up too early, the rest of the morning was a haze. I went, straight after the meeting, for compensatory snacks. I filled my office table: falafels, salsa dip, pretzel sticks, prawn crackers, sandwiches.

In my lunch break, I make a trip to the library to find books on Kafka. And then, between the aisles, feel an immense tiredness. I want to lie down, to sleep. I sink down; I am close to the books. And then I spot a couple of books I never seen before whose spines were too faded to read their titles from a standing position. Two books, one with a marvellous essay by Martin Walser on The Castle and The Trial.

As I walk back to my office, I notice the wind has changed; it has become mild, the ice on the pavement has melted. R.M. is in the office; tomorrow, she has her viva. I tell her I’m so tired we will have to listen to our ‘going home music’ now. We have a strict rota: in the morning, The Killers and Secret Machines, in the afternoon, when R.M. gets panicky and lies down on what she calls ‘the floor of dread’, the Brahms violin sonatas. Then, in the evening, quite late on (9 or 10), it is time for a ‘going home song’: at the moment, the last track from the sixth Lilac Time album, which sounds as it were made for a carnival. It’s on again now.

Afternoon. Time to work. I still have a discounted salmon pate beside me and a few pretzels. I’ll save them for four o’ clock. As I work, I can still taste the meal R.M. and I ate last night at the Spanish restaurant. ‘What was the name of the black pudding dish?’ I ask her. And the peach spirit we drank after dessert? But she has left her receipt in her handbag at home. Then: ‘Do you know what we are, R.M.? Voluptuaries’.

I am quivering with excitement: Stanley Corngold’s new book on Kafka is here on my desk (I found it for half price online). Heavy, hard-backed, a brown dusk jacket with the picture of a flaming rolled up ball of paper printed beneath the title: Lambent Traces. Ah the pages are parchment coloured and the typeface is movingly clear (how unlike my own book, where there are too many words crammed onto the page)!

I begin to look through the notes and placing stars in their margins to mark books Corngold mentions that I might want to get hold of myself (David Shur’s The Way of Oblivion: how interesting!) Then I begin to read the preface: yes, everything’s right: Corngold seeks to defend Kafka as a writer against those for whom, he says, ‘his stories, like so many stomachs, can be pumped to disgorge contents that were merely ordinary’. Then a nice sentence: ‘My Kafa is an ecstatic’. And another: ‘This bliss, this feeling himself "at the boundary of the human", is connected to his writing …’

I set to work, making little pencil markings in the margins. But I fail; I’m tired, R.M. and I worked until late last night in the office; I’ve been busy all day. I’m not up to the task of the reading, and the pencil marks are the signs of a man losing hold of a book. Now the book is inert, beautiful, but away from me; I’ve failed it and I’ve failed reading. The afternoon is encroaching: through my office windows the vast sky, a whole grey cloud.

Dull panic (I don’t like empty time …) What should I do? I went to the gym yesterday which means I cannot go today. What shall I do? The manuscript needs work; chapter one, ‘A Merciful Surplus of Strength’ needs several large supplements, whole passages are to be excised and replaced, it’s a mess, sixteen thousand messy words.

But I have fallen below work and below everything. There is the only the pressure of the afternoon. Happily, R.M. is here and so are the jolly daffodils I bought this morning. And happily, too, I was able to mark this dead expanse of time here, to do combat against the infinite wearing away by passing through the detour of writing.

But what kind of writing? Only a post, after all – a post because I do not have the merciful strength, Kafka’s, to disappear into literature. Perhaps I only feel the ‘joy of the notebook’ (the joy of this blog) as Steve describes it (‘Moleskin Notebooks …’).

A friend told me once of the difficulty of verifying which ascetic or holy person did what, since the ascetic in question would spawn admirers who would go so far as to take his or her name, not merely repeating the ascetic’s actions, but exacerbating them, performing feats that were yet more exacting, yet more extreme. Some of the Christian saints and desert fathers are composite figures – but isn’t this intruiging! To exist as a style rather than a person. Or, better still, to become a style, a certain style (imagine writing: I am a Gilles Deleuze, I am a Marguerite Duras) …

I conceived the second book as an act of contrition for the first, disastrous book. A kind of overwriting, whose every word would erase a word for the former disaster and then leaving a whole book of blank pages. And when you find you’ve written two disasters? When you’ve filled two books with nonsense?

Youth: you have the future, you dream and the future is the space in which to dream. Age: the future is now, it is here, time to work, and you must earn your way by the sweat of your brow. So you work, with all the dreams of youth pushing you forward. You write, filling blank page after page; you write quickly and you think for this reason you write well.

And when you read the disaster? When you read back what you wrote at speed and, you thought, in inspiration? When you felt the future rushing by you and thought: I am alive in the future?

Tonight, I have a print out of a draft of the second book beside me. And I borrowed my first book from the library (I don’t have my own copy). The horror: this is my ‘oeuvre’. It isn’t even funny. Still, I laughed with W. about it on the phone. ‘I’ve never had a single idea’. ‘Nor have I’.

Steve of This Space (although he does not remember this and perhaps it wasn’t Steve at all) once wrote to me our first books should be written on biodegradable paper. Let the pages rot; tear them off and throw them into the breeze. Or feed them into the river. Let the water read them.

I gave R.M. a copy of Rilke’s Malte Lauridds Brigge for her birthday. She now works in the City, in London; I remembered when I too worked – although not in such an elevated position – and how I would read Rilke in my lunch hour.

Unpleasant memory. Another memory: my edition of Malte was given by a friend on my course in my first year as an undergraduate. A daughter of a well known artist, Beckett was her godfather; she knew him as ‘Sam’; he died that same year; it was Manchester, 1989. She put Malte in my hands; I had barely read anything (Fitzgerald and Joyce on the train home from work the year before; Lawrence …)

A few years later, I read Rilke again, and this time it was with an understanding of that great sense in his work of the immense patience one should have before death (it is similar in the last, wonderful poems of Lawrence …) I read Rilke in the sadness that such patience was impossible and that the world whose appearance he mourned was my world and that the invocation of a true relation to things, to the world, to death had disappeared. The wonderful Charlotte Street quotes a favourite passage of mine:

To our grandparents, a "house," a "well," a familiar steeple, even their own clothes, their cloak still meant infinitely more, were infinitely more intimate—almost everything a vessel in which they found something human already there, and added to its human store. Now there are intruding, from America, empty indifferent things, sham things, dummies of life . . . . A house, as the Americans understand it, an American apple or a winestock from over there, have nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which the hope and thoughtfulness of our forefathers had entered . . .

‘O Lord, grant to each his own death, the dying which truly evolves from this life in which he found love, meaning and distress’, writes Rilke, shocked by the suicide of a young man. Take your life, seize it for yourself and you join the anonymous dead of the big cities.

Recall Malte’s anguish at the murals which had been stolen from their original context. Murals, artworks moving to the exhibition space just as human beings have departed the places of their birth and made their way to the city. Just as Malte, this itinerant Danish poet, is a wanderer and an exile.

Malte is lost as the tapestries are lost, whence his anguish. But for what does he reserve his true horror? That death has become banal; it has become null, that is, mass-produced (why do I think of the wanderer Malte alongside the Russian poet of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia?) Now death is a product like any other; one size fits all; the exchange value of a life is measured in its end, which is the same for everyone who inhabits the big city.

Malte reflects:

It is evident that with accelerated production, each individual death is not so well executed, but that doesn’t matter much anyway. It’s the quantity that counts. Who still attaches any importance to a well-wrought death? No one. Even rich people, who can pay for luxury, have ceased to care about it; the desire to have one’s own death is becoming more and more rare. Shortly it will be as rare as a life of one’s own.

By contrast:

When I think back to my home (where there is nobody left now), it always seems to me that formerly it must have been otherwise. Formerly one knew — or maybe one guessed — that one had one’s death within one, as the fruit its core. Children had a little one, adults a big one. Women carried it in their womb, men in their breast. They truly had their death, and that awareness gave dignity, a quiet pride.

Yet there is hope, or at least a kind of hope: the artist, celebrating this authentic death, remembering things that have disappeared into the past, restores the dignity of death. Is death to be engendered by each of us? Or will our death come into the world as a stillborn child? ‘And grant us now (after all women’s pains) the serious motherhood of men’. To write, to die, for Rilke, is to mature like a fruit, to grow like a child; it is to be patient. Death must be formed; it forms itself in patience.

But what if death fails to give itself to us in this way? Rilke: ‘Be satisfied to believe that it is a friend, your profoundest friend, perhaps the only friend never to be alienated by our actions and waverings, never’. But what happens when this friendship becomes impossible?

There’s an autobiography in this, unreal, unwriteable pages as beautiful as Malte. A task I set myself many years ago: rewrite Malte replacing the Danish poet with a temp at a computer company (I was working at Hewlett-Packard). But I’d forgotten Pessoa had created something like this temp in his heteronym Bernardo Soares, clerk at a firm in Lisbon (I gave R.M. The Book of Disquiet, too …) I never wrote a line.

Was this a way to seek a death as authentic as the one for which Malte yearns? To discover an intimacy with things as I wrote the blazing pages of a great work? What foolishness! But I was never innocent enough to think this act of composition was possible. Even in 1989, I had already worked, I knew what had dissipated in the skies above the new industrial estates. It was, rather, to write an anti-Malte, to rid myself of anything left of the faith the Danish poet possessed …

Slightly ill, a low fever, as it should be, a little resistance, it helps work. Vague noise from next door, again as it should be, never get too comfortable, never rest. For a long time there was, almost every night, the noise of stomping and music and laughter all through the night. My neighbour lived on American time; he did American business; he entertained American clients; when he moved out, his son moved in who worked in nightclubs in town and came back with his friends and partied till dawn.

This was months ago; but I couldn’t write about it then. I knew what I wanted to say: those nights without sleep reminded me of what became of Husserl’s reduction first in Levinas (not Heidegger’s anxiety, but physical pain, insomnia, awareness that there was no escape). No escape. I said to myself: Sleep with earplugs. Spread the mat, the sheets, the duvet on the floor of the lounge, sleep there; the bedroom ceiling is too thin. And if that fails, the bathroom floor. Yet conscious – but is this the word? better: aware, with a kind of impersonal awareness, of the source of every possible noise. No longer was this a flat, but the burrow of Kafka’s story, and what I feared was the Outside …

Genet rented rooms near the station so that he felt he could make a quick getaway. I imagine, rather fancifully, that it is a kind insomnia which propels the great gust of his work. Insomnia? He experienced that unravelling which asked of him to be nothing at all, but then to be everything – to relinquish himself but then to find in his place the power, the non-power to allow his characters to pass through him very quickly. Until he was the site of an immense streaming. Why, then did he abandon first the novel and then the theatre? To lose himself again; to disappear.

Ah, more on Genet another day. Meanwhile, a few days off; I’m travelling …

Woolf: ‘I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past’.

Completion, incompletion. To write sentences trailing off in three little dots to open them in the direction of that future that will allow their meaning to become indefinite, to shimmer. So many of Bataille’s sentences end in this way as they reach for the reader who would pass them on. This is why, he said, he wrote in friendship for his unknown readers.

Friends: I learn from a biography that this is what Godard called the viewers of his films. Friendship …: why this word, today? It is a small word, a pathetic one. To want friends – and not an audience. Because the films gather each of us. A film like In Praise of Love breaks across each of us anew. Is reborn for each of us. Why, in the press kit to this film, did they supply a summary of the plot? I barely knew what it was about, it took several viewings, each one pleasurable. And why do I know? Because I read a summary somewhere on the internet, this was my impatience, my laziness.

How many times have I watched the opening scenes in Tarkovsky’s Mirror? The field. The man who crosses the field; the woman – the mother – who sits waiting on the fence. For what? For her husband? He is absent; meanwhile, her children slumber. Then – a change – the children are up, there’s a fire in a neighbouring barn. We watch it burn in the rain. We hear a poem, very beautiful. And then: the ringing of the phone. Then another scene, a man’s voice on the phone as the camera tracks round his flat. We see on the wall a poster of Andrei Rublev. We recognise the three angels of the icon and think: this is a story about Tarkovsky. Perhaps, perhaps. But he gives the film to us, Tarkovsky. It trails off in our direction like a sentence which ends not with a full stop but with ellipses …

Do you have complete emotions about the present, or do you have to wait to find them anew in conversation, in recollection, in writing? I never find completion, only a kind of infinite fall, a trailing into an open future. Somewhere, Tarkovsky writes of the day: what happened?, he asks. What emerged? Nothing … a few images stay with you; this was a day like any other; the days, similar, do not fall one upon the other like cards in a pack, but are superimposed, ghosts projected upon ghosts. A routine: I return home in the evening, as it grows dark; I watch the seven o’clock news, I eat; I make a phonecall. Days accrete, but nothing is complete, nothing completes itself. The future, what of the future? Days like these, neither happy nor unhappy. Days through which as through a window something can be seen. But what? Vagueness, formlessness …

None of these emotions can complete itself. By writing, nothing comes to completion. This is a writing which opens the sentence …

Looking for what? Friendship? But with what? The unknown, the future.

Relief after two days when too much was possible to experience the old incapacity, that inability to begin, vagueness, a day spent doing this and that without focus. When the future is not a distant horizon, but is never farther than this or that obstacle, when it is a matter of negotiation of what is here and now.

Incapacity: really, there is an immense amount to do, too much, it’s overwhelming. But if there were nothing to occupy you, only the expanse of time, an open future which asked continually: what will you do? you would experience much more acutely that vertiginous desire to realise a Great Work, to fill your days with the Great Project that would make the future less indeterminate, less frightening.

Today, there is only the dissipation of projects, minutae, a number of matters which require my attention. Do you remember that scene in Pather Panchali when the impoverished Brahmin tears up the pages of his studies when his daughter died? Dream: tearing all the pages up, throwing it all away, discovering something of much greater importance. And do you remember the scene in Alien Resurrection with the alien-human hybrid, up against the wall of the spaceship, its innards sucked out and dispersed into space? That is a figure for the horrible/joyful experience of the pure future, of the broken horizon, the object of fear and desire …

After a rare day of contentment and focus, when work was eminently possible and writing was easy, you slipped back into the usual fog. Tiredness, vagueness, wandering. No chance of finding a place to begin work. Only confinement to the office stops the infinite dispersal of attention. Even then, it is dispersed across the internet – message boards and celebrity gossip pages.

The struggle: to wrest a day of work from the fog. A day of work – one hour of writing takes five hours of surfing and wandering, of reading newspapers and grazing. Temptation to drink coffee – but you’ll pay tomorrow when you are more tired still, with dark rings under the eyes. Or to drink – but there are too many hours between now and bedtime to lose in the haze. Suspicion: the fog is a result of gluten. So cut out gluten. Or dairy products. Cut out those. Or of drinking the night before. Well, stop that, too. Or a lack of exercise. Well, go to the gym.

Still stranded before the tasks ahead, you make excuses: too much administration. Secretly, you find it liberating; it allows you to say to yourself after another unproductive day: I’ve done something. Filled out some forms. Filed a report. Prepare a document in officalese. Now you can really begin work. Alas, you’ve finished all the administration. What else is there for you to do. Write a post for the blog instead. Write about the impossibility of writing when there’s an essay to complete before the month is done and a review and then a book. Dream vaguely of another kind of writing. Then post about the impossibility of that, too.

Summer. Weeks when we had the office and the campus to ourselves. When we took up tennis, inspired by Sharapova. When we worked night and day. When we walked in the Lakes and North Yorkshire, and visited festivals and conferences. Weeks of discounted salads at Boots. Of snacks in the office. Of foccacia and guacamole. Of rice crackers and salsa. Of Ikea furniture and potted shrubs for the yard.

Soon R.M. leaves permanently for a life faraway, outside academia (though she hasn’t finished her dissertation quite yet) and for me the new academic year begins, the descent into winter and short days, the audit and the pass-the-beanbag learn-how-to-teach course. Summer is ending and it is as though a great epoch has come to a close. Or that everything which came to an end in my life ends once again as the door into summer closes behind me.

When I was twenty, I told R.M. as we crossed the field on the way back to my flat, I loved the intervals between work, time reading long novels or wandering streets, times of journeying (leaving and departing) – time to dream because my life had not found its course. And now? The channel has been cut and the river moves swiftly. There is no time, and time between is a haunted time, no longer open, drifting air, but a frightening expanse. The correspondences I used to keep by letter are ending, or have come to an end. Is there time? No time for that great giving of time to which reading and writing belong. There is only work-time, only today and tomorrow.

R.M. and I worked alongside one another all summer; she is spending a week tying her life up elsewhere (finishing her Ph.D.) and will be back soon (but then she will go again, and for much longer this time). Meanwhile, I am alone in the office as it comes to the end of the long summer teaching break. And alone, no longer bringing us splendid lunches to eat, no longer playing tennis after work and arriving back at the flat late (too late, it always seemed to me), my time is unstructured, I lose all grip on my projects, I’m overwhelmed by work …

Why am I entrusted with so much bureaucracy? It is unreal to me, or I am too unreal for bureaucracy…. But there’s task after task, all leading up to the quality audit. I’m hopelessly behind, as always. And there’s the project of the new book and a paper which has to be done by October 1st, and then a review article … everything written up to the wire, always half-realised, semi-botched, full of typos and poor grammar.

And the flat? Bare-walled, awaiting lining paper and wallpaper. Slugs die on the repellent at the back door … the shower needs an element and there are holes where the skirting board should be. Damp rises up from the darkness under the house. Ants find their way across the floors.

I read Bataille in the gym – what a contradiction! and feel, as usual, a nostalgia for a life I’ve never led. Bataille sleeps on Balthus’s floor during the war … Bataille reads aloud from Inner Experience in his lover’s flat. Bataille cycles in the fields during wartime. I attempted a kind of chronology of Bataille’s war five hundred posts ago.

How poor this writing compared to Guilty or On Nietzsche! I am one of those weak vessels who is smashed by the work of a great writer. I am so surprised such work exists I cannot muster my critical faculties. It all seems incredible to me that people still write in our world and regard it as important. I read an interview with Samuel Weber in which he speaks of French philosophers who will not let a day go past without going into the study. I still live from that great period when the translations of Bataille and Blanchot began to appear – Inner Experience, The Space of Literature …

Sometimes what I read and what I write seems to stream very far above me. As though what I read and wrote bore no relationship to my life as it is lived. At those times – and tonight is one of those times – a great power of unbelief seizes me. I reread my own book – painful experience! – I turn idly the pages of Bataille. It is always of Bataille that I think since he is the one who protests he is too weary for philosophy, or that philosophy makes him weary. He hasn’t the strength to develop a system of thought. He plunges, and he plunges as he writes, he plunges in a writing which falls away from him. And when you are only capable, like tonight, of writing of what you cannot write, of failing to let writing fall away, of clinging to writing, writing ‘I’, ‘I’, ‘I’ …

New neighbours: lads, more lads, loud music, a roaring car. Gone the quiet old lady. I’ll have to sleep in the lounge for the noise, with earplugs handy (I went and bought a fresh set today). Weariness of a weariness which will not let relinquish myself and plunge into reading and writing …

What you would like in the present sadness: a life lived, life already behind you, and you near the end of life. The future opens in the faces of your sons and daughters. What you would like, today: life to have happened already and you to have already known every grief and joy.

I dislike, in conversation, that demand to have an opinion, to express doubts, reservations, to assess, to weigh up: this invents the vile judge, measure of everything, the bore who finds the world wanting.

Deleuze was right: there is too much communication, too much opinion-making. My favourite thing about this country: polite talk, discussion of the weather, pleasantries: nor conventional formulae, but a lightness in which language is seized by an impersonal movement. No one appropriates it; there are no ‘order words’. No ‘ontological tumescence’ to use Levinas’s expression. I like to agree with others. I like living in a city where you often hear the sentence ‘I am a socialist’. I am a socialist: pleasant phrase, said with simplicity, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Unsurprising to find, when I go out for walks with a group, everyone avoids the one who pronounces on everything – true, I objected when he said ‘all these blacks, taking our jobs …’: what tedium. More than that, though, it was the desire to spread his opinions that bored us all. Someone said: don’t walk with him. So I drop back, walk with other people. Once again a conversation, joyous interchange, give and take of language where nothing is said – there is no specific content – but difference is affirmed by the very fact that each of us talks without taking a position.

Errant conversation, moving nowhere in particular – there are conventional formulae, yes, apparent blandishments – there is repetition but what is repeated is the difference that marks itself by the fact that what is said is said by another. You speak and then I speak. I speak then it’s your turn. But there is a sense of another speaking, that through both of us there is a great impersonal streaming of language. A happiness comparable to a certain writing. What do you discover? Joy of a speech which drifts without responsibility …

Bliss: no longer to make a case, to defend an argument or to contest one, but to allow there to open, like the psychoanalysist’s drifting attention, a movement of language and gesture in which the ‘I’ is no longer the castle which would have to defend itself. A dispersed movement, nomadic, across the plane without cities.

Fear of the afternoon when you fall below the level of work, of the capacity to work. And then what? Drifting time, the moments lead nowhere, seconds swell into hours, hours into days. You focus on nothing in particular, you notice nothing, no changes. Impersonal attention. The blank, white sky. You can’t say: I can do nothing – you can’t find the words, or any words. Pass an afternoon like this and it is as though you have lived forever. As though the afternoon had happened a million times over and is now worn down and exhausted. Frayed time, time worn down. Space drawn thin over the void.