Category: Unemployed

One afternoon, another. Any one was any other, they were all equally exchangable. And wasn’t that true of us, too? Weren’t we exchangable, infinitely exchangable, weighing nothing at all, swarming in the summer like midges? We were the same, each of us exactly the same. If one of us disappeared, another would come. We were replaceable, and this was our solace. We were anyone at all, and this was happiness.

How long ago was it now? Ten years and more than ten. But I wasn’t any younger then. I can’t say I lived through those times. I didn’t understand what happened. I didn’t know, how could I know? I was barely there. And you – were you there? What did we see in one another, then when we were no one at all? What was there to recognise? Only that, perhaps, only our looking like anyone else, like everyone else. I’ve never been so anonymous. Never fallen so far beneath my own name.

Later on, you sent me some letters. A few, not many. I lost them a long time ago. I must have thrown them away. I couldn’t keep them. Couldn’t bear that they lay face up in a drawer, the words staring upward. I neglected them, I remember that. They dwere lost among piles of newspapers. One had a coffee stain. A brown ring over the blue, faintly lined paper and the words. It didn’t seem to matter to me. It seemed in keeping with what you wrote.

I don’t think you said much. I mean, there wasn’t much to read. Hadn’t you told me everything already? Hadn’t you told me about your life in those long, interchangable afternoons? I remember the cafe, pots of tea. We took the sun. We spoke. You told me … what? About your life, the whole of your life. And I think I told you about mine.

How easy it was to sum up! It seemed to roll on far above me, my life. I wasn’t living it. Someone else was living it. Someone who lived in my place, far from me. And I was content, content to be lived rather than live. And you? How did I find you, in those near-identical afternoons? How among the cafe goers who looked exactly the same? Someone was living your life, too, you told me. Someone was living in your place; you’d given up. And that was your happiness, that giving up.

They came later, those letters. We’d broken up, hadn’t we? We didn’t see each other anymore. What happened? When was the break? I’d gone back to work, I think. I’d started to work again; I was rising. I was working my way back into my life. I wanted it again. Wanted to live and in my own name, equal to it. And you, what of you? You fell away from me. You fell – but was it only because I was rising? Or was it that you were disappearing into a deeper current, that you’d found a falling below our falling, a deeper nothingness, a deeper anonymity?

I couldn’t follow you there, I remember that. And I couldn’t stay with you there, in those afternoons, those interchangable afternoons, I remember that. What else could we do but break up? It was late summer, wasn’t it? Late summer passing into autumn. After a few weeks – one letter, then another. Then a few more.

Did I reply? Only to say little. Only to acknowledge your words, nothing more. To acknowledge them, as though only to repeat them back to you. To echo them, to amplify them, as though I were only a space for your words to resound. A few letters, handwritten, on blue, faintly lined paper. Envelopes addressed to me, with my name on the front, my address, and these letters, that seemed hardly concerned with me, that moved towards me only to move away.

They had nothing to do with me, I thought then. They were reaching towards what they could not reach, for I was not there where they wanted to find me. I had already left that place, that non-place. What did they say? Nothing, nothing at all. Nothing, nothingness, but by way of a few details, some pieces of news that concerned us and the people we knew.

To tell the same story, over again. To tell the same and the same of the same: in this way, telling wears itself away. It becomes valueless, issueless; it begins to lift itself from the story and say nothing. Or it is as though the story floats indifferently over itself, like a soul that has left its body. And now the story doesn’t matter; telling has outlived itself and what was told has expelled itself from the realm of narrative. A few incidents, nothing more. Some incidents, buried in writing, that remain amidst writing, that cannot be smoothed away.

Cycling through the new estates: why that image? I was unemployed, I remember that. I had an uncertain future, I remember that. I went out into the day, cycled, with no particular aim. Through the new estates, charting them, following them all the way to their edge. And then to what remained of the woodland – the brook whose banks had half dissolved; the muddy track along the field-edge. Bridleways and footpaths, that led down to the quarried river. And open lakes where the quarries once were: fenced off nature reserves. Over there, on the other side of barbed wire, wild life, kingfishers and herons. Near-still water that reflected back an indifferent sky.

No story here. Incidents without story, as though outside of themselves. Stranded events – a cyclist, the bland, wide day; the nothing-is-happening of the suburbs. Stranded life, life outside itself like the same near-still lakes spreading alongside the river. Life alongside life, ox-bow lakes and eddies, currents broken from the great flow of the city: how can narrative but break itself from the old models of continuity? How can a story but tell of what withers it as story, and places it alongside itself, an ox-bow lake, an eddy?

Through the new estates, cycling. Unemployed, off sick, one of the two. Absent from work, from life, cycling past new mothers with their prams. The omnipresence of the day, the afternoon. The vast cathedral of the sky. Later it would make me shiver. Later it would make me stay indoors. I came to fear the day, and unemployed time. Feared time without structure and journeys without aim. How old was I, then? Young enough still to retain a kind of optimism, a blindness in relation to the future. Still the hope that an estate might give unto something other than an estate, that leylines passed across the golfcourse, or that it was a barrow that rose behind the new houses. Still young – and still able to catch what happened in a story. Still young enough to believe it could be told.

Ill, unemployed – I was falling from the story; unemployed and ill, narrative lost sight of me. Whose eyes watched me? Who followed me? Writing eludes itself. The story does not move forward. The calm lakes of the nature reserve, dug out by quarrying. Birdsong; silence. But, too the greater roar of the afternoon. The sound of the day, reverberating in itself. No stories here. No narratives; one footstep does not lead to another; there’s no path along which to pass. I come to the railway bridge; I carry my bike over. Piss-smelling concrete. Graffiti. And the power station by the railway. Houses and gardens higher up, stretched along the railway. The bend of the track along which trains came roaring. Was I ill? Was I unemployed?

Tell the same story, tell it again. Tell the same non-story, the same of the same, as it places what is recounted out of the reach of the story. A cancelled day; a blank and eroded sky. Was I ill – unemployed? Unemployed and ill?

Cycling through the new estates. Cycling to find their interstices, the scrappy woodland along the railway, the rivers temporarily emerging from culverts, the private road through the plantation, the golf course green beneath rotating sprinklers. What was it that eluded me? For what was I looking? But this memory is now inseparable from recounting, and the search from what is sought by writing.

Writing eludes itself – is that it? Writing loses itself in order to become real, just as it is nothing without this reality. And it is this that tells itself in every tale, or untells them, wearing them out.

I cycled through the new estates, passed the old barrows and the glade of tree stumps left by forestry. I cycled beneath an indifferent sky. And the page, too is indifferent. The whiteness of the page burns indifferently in the sky above my cycling.

To be sentenced – punished. To be judged and punished, but for everything to remain the same. Curious dream. Why is it I imagine the white sky to be the judge, and the judgement? Because of its indifference. Because this is the judgement: You do not matter. That is the sentence: nothing you have done matters, not at all.

A recurrent memory: cycling around the new estates. Cycling through the gaps of countryside between the new estates, light falling indifferently upon all. And the feeling of being watched, and that I could not escape. That to be watched was to be judged, the judgement falling equally upon all. How light it was, the judgement! As light as air, the gentle pressure of air.

I carry my bike over the railway bridge. The white sky that sees nothing, but that sees. That sees from a source I cannot know, a perspective I cannot access. To be watched – seen – but in blindness. To be seen by the blindness of the sky, its indifference.

And when writing opened its eyes? The same perspective, the same non-seeing. And when the page burned up through my writing? The judgement, a trial and a sentence all at once. To say, you do not matter. To say, nothing you have done has ever mattered.

Drink on the old sofa. Drink the cans until you have no more. And let it die away in you, that drunkenness. And let it come back, the same numbed boredom, empty cans and sweet, stale beer spilled on the carpet.

What time is it? Eleven o’clock. What time, morning or night? Curtains closed against the day. Why is that brightness unbearable? Why is half-light the way to endure the turning of days?

The same, I live in the same. Without memory, it would be bearable. And with memory, that deepens the events of each day, that sinks them still further into themselves?

Sweet, stale beer. The sofa; afternoon TV. Curtains closed. Cat litter on the carpet. Stale gingerbread men from the discount Greggs.

Deep time, doubled time, days thickening as they are lived in series. My bare feet on the nylon carpet. The curtain beginning to fall from the rail: it’s happened before; it will happen again.

Time deepened, instants thickened: this has happened before; this will happen again. Distant pain. But who bore it? Who endured that pain? In truth, I was too tired to bear it. How to coincide with what was not my own? But then, in that house, in the half-light, what was my own?

Time thickened, instants turned outside themselves. Thickened – until each moment was lived in series. I will live it again. It will happen again – but to whom? To me?

Spilt beer, cat litter. The beer spilled. My bare feet on cat litter. Instants, now, that would not pass. They will come again; they will happen again. But for whom?

You were coming, weren’t you? You were arriving, weren’t you, coming as time thickened, avid for the thickening of time. You were coming, blurred one. You saw me.

(And I saw you in the film last night. A Scanner, Darkly. You were wearing a scramble suit. Scrambled, every person at once and no one at all, you were watching me.)

I saw you, watcher. I saw you watching me in me. I saw you, sufferer. I knew what you underwent for me. In the half-light, curtains closed, you were coming. Called by stale beer and cat litter, you were coming.

Scanner, thickening, I knew you by way of what would not leave itself behind. By the instants that returned and were thickened in their returning. Opened now like flowers, into the streaming of time.

You phone me, panicked. – ‘I can’t leave the house; I’m stuck here. I can’t leave the house!’ Okay, I’m coming round. Out of the door, over the bridge. Your house. ‘I can’t leave.’ The old, blind collie, eyes almost gone out. The Aga. The long dining room table.

They want you out, they’ve told you. They’re expecting you to leave. You’re already supposed to have left. But there’s a family celebration coming soon. Family coming from all over the country, and you’re not family, are you? A tenant, but not family, you know that. A tenant – you’ll have to leave, won’t you? But today you can’t even step out of the front door.

We’re in the house, the enormous house. So vast! A family house! A garden. The Aga. The old collie. The family are out. ‘I need to get to the bus stop’. – ‘Sure, let’s go.’ – ‘I can’t go, I can’t go anywhere.’ – ‘Come on, we’ll take it slowly. Let me open the door.’ Daylight streams in. – ‘I’m going to stay here, I think. I can’t go out today.’

You’ve been served notice. Served it in a friendly way, but they need the room, and you’ve got to go. But how can you move out when you can’t get out of the door? How when you are too sick to open the door and too sick for the open air? In streams the daylight.

‘They don’t want me here.’ – ‘They just want the space, that’s all.’ – ‘Where am I going to go?’ – ‘You’ll find somewhere. It’ll be okay.’ Drinking tea in the dining room. The long table – how many does it sit? The house around us – so vast.

‘Do you think either of us will have a place like this?’ – ‘No way.’ Not a chance, not for us. I look around – room for everyone. Everyone can come here, the whole family. The whole family, round the table. Everyone but us, round the table.

We’re out for a drink, a rare drink. I haven’t seen you since – when? I won’t see you again until – when? Out for a drink, then. Out in the bar for a drink. – ‘What have you been doing?’ – ‘Oh – you know. Smoking. Staying in. Not doing much. Just staying in. Smoking. I’m a bit tired of everything, really.’ – ‘What are you going to do?’ – ‘I don’t know. Might go back to college -‘.

Out for a drink. Afternoon, five o’clock, still light. Haven’t seen you for ages. ‘How are you?’ –  ‘I’ve been feeling so tired lately. I don’t know what it is. I think I’m ill.’ – ‘You look thin.’ – ‘I’m not eating – I’m off my food. Off everything, really. Maybe it’s the time of year. February, you know. So depressing.’

A drink, late afternoon to early evening. February, the last time I saw you, the first time I’d seen you for a long time, your torn jumper, your cigarettes. ‘Any plans?’ – ‘I don’t know – I can’t get it together. I’m so tired. And bored – you know. Just smoking, really. Every night. Too much, really -‘.

Out for a drink. Old friend, haven’t seen her for a long time. Still pretty. ‘How are you?’ – ‘Okay, okay – not been up to much. Haven’t been out for ages. Holed up for the winter. Hibernating.’

In the bar. ‘How are you?’ – ‘Just bored really. Not doing anything. Smoking – that’s about all.’

The bar, February afternoon. ‘What are you doing?’ – ‘Nothing really. Might get an allotment.’ – ‘Aren’t you going back to college, then?’ – ‘No, don’t fancy it. Sick of studying. But tired of everything really -. I want some time out.’

‘How’s it going?’ – ‘Alright, you know how it is. I hate winter. I’m hibernating.’

I am not a spokesman for anyone else, God knows, I would like just to be a spokesman for myself! To be that, just that: a spokesman for myself, that would already be enough. What did you expect when you asked me those questions? What did you want from me, with your questions? Did you think I could answer you? Did you think I could summon myself to the edge of myself and answer you? But I cannot speak for myself, that’s what I wanted to say. I cannot even speak for myself.

My tongue is too thick, it is too big for my mouth. And there’s my stammer, remember that. I can barely squeeze a word from mouth, and when I speak – whose word is it? When it is spoken, when words are spoken from my mouth, whose are they? For they are not mine. I cannot speak, I know that – and what I say is not speaking. I will not say a word. No words – not one, not two. I am not the spokesman of myself. I speak for no one, and not even myself.

You’d like to ask me questions, I know that. There are questions to extract from me, I know that, too. It’s your job, it’s nothing personal. You bear me no particular grudge. It’s not between you and I, two people, I know that. Is that why you’re so friendly? Is that why it’s all first names and shaking hands? Nothing personal – but still, the questions. Nothing personal, but there are questions to ask, and we might as well get it over with.

I am to be assessed. For how long have I been sick? I can’t remember. For how long have I been claiming them, the benefits? That, too, I can’t remember. If you force me, I will speak. I will say something, but in so doing, I’ve said nothing, and that’s what you have to understand. I cannot speak – understand that. I cannot say a word – can you understand that? Or when I speak, those words are not mine. There is speech, but look at my eyes – look at them, imploring. Eyes which say, ignore what is being said by that, the mouth. Which say: no one can speak for me, not even myself.

I am not my own spokesman, and I will not be my advocate. I am not in my own corner as counsel or advisor. Am I a member of my own prosecution? Not even that. Nor even a case for or against. Because I cannot speak – I cannot say a word for or against. Do you understand that, you who would ask questions of me? Do you understand, interrogator? I know I’m taking too much of your time. I know you have more of us to see, other clients – that’s what they call us now. I know you’ll be gauged according to your success for getting us back to work. No promotions for you, otherwise. And perhaps you’ll not be able to keep your job. Perhaps, one day, you’ll be in the position I occupy, I who cannot speak in my own name.

Deal with me then. Fill out the form. I will give you answers, any answers, but understand they are not my answers. Understand – I do not speak for myself. Everyone speaks, they are always speaking, there is speech everywhere, but I am the one who speaks without speaking. Unless everyone is like me, unless there are no speakers, and none of speak. Unless I am the only one who sees it; I am the one to whom it falls to experience it. I have no words. I speak – but they are not mine, those words. And I have no name, I who have fallen beneath all names.

My body says no. My body refuses. My body’s is the dark word of negation. And what does your body say? In what words does it speak? Does it struggle with you? Does it struggle against you and leap up against you so you know every word you speak is a lie? Does it ever turn upon you and say: ‘I will not’, except without those words, without the ‘I – will – not’?

How old am I? I have no age. Where am I? I am everywhere; my body is joined to the body of the world. Why do they want us to speak? Why is speech demanded of us? Why must accounts be rendered and these great structures impose themselves between us? I want to say to my questioner, you have a body like mine. I want to say, our bodies are joined, do you understand that? I will say, there are no words, and these are not words, only words that undo words. Only anti-words, which uncurl themselves in the ones in your sentences. Only the weight of words, their idiom, as every sentence falls in upon its own heaviness and draws the world into it.

No words, and no silence – not even that. No words, and not even the consolation of silence. Who am I, who speaks? The same no one who is writing now. The no one who, through the mercy of strength, is able for a few moments to write of what he cannot do. Who, strong for a moment, writes words that would undo themselves as they are written. Double negation: this post would be the white snow. This post would be a twig or a wall, obdurate and thing-like, contracting upon itself and taking with it the world, the whole of the world.

They’re going to dock our money, £10 for the first interview we miss and £20 for the second. We’ll be interviewed, each one of us, up against the wall. But why don’t they know – I can barely speak of myself? Why isn’t it clear to them: I am not even my own spokesman? Idiot – that’s the word. Barbarian – that’s the word.

But there are more like me, you should know that. There are others, too, like me – know that. Each of us bears all of the others, know that. Eliminate one and the others will come. Pass us through training, process us and send us back to the world, there are always others to be trained and processed. But that doesn’t bother you, does it? Questioner, interrogator, you know you are not a member of the S.S., but part of a vast, benevolent army. There is love in your eyes; you’re thinking of me – you’re sympathetic. And in my eyes, that give onto nothing in particular? What do you know by them – my eyes?

He needs a job, you tell yourself. He needs to get off the sick, and that first of all. He needs confidence, you say to yourself. He needs to return to the world. But what do you know of my needs? What do you know of the size and the shape of my desire? For it is without contour, my desire, and without shape. We are stretched from horizon to horizon, each of us. Our bodies are taut, and stretched across the horizon. We are each the size of the world. That’s what I want to say, though I can say nothing. That’s what I’d like to say, if I could speak in my name.

The Other Side of the Glass

Unemployed, fallen from work, from the chance of work, the day leads nowhere, the dole is the bridge across the days and the weeks; you are the object of crackdowns and tightening-ups, you receive home visits from the housing officer. Then your payments are delayed and you travel on the bus you cannot afford to town to wait in line, but what a line, to see the civil servants about your housing claim. You are on the other side of the glass, you can barely make yourself understood, you speak loudly to be heard and asked to be spoken to loudly so that you can hear, but the separating window prevented you from understanding and from being understood.

They know you, in the dole office. They know you, at the council. They know, and that’s why they separate themselves from you by a window. They know, they are prepared, they’ve taken measures, you are made to take a ticket from the machine and wait in the foyer, wait at the margins, wait in the corridors between rooms, wait in those spaces that are not quite rooms, wait in the chairs each set aside the other, wait and shift seats when others ahead of you are called, they are ready for you, they don’t want to be touched by you, they don’t want physical contact, or to breathe the same air as you.

Violence will not be tolerated. Attacks on staff will lead to prosecution. Yes, it’s understandable, some of us are violent, some too impatient, I’m frightened of them sitting beside me with WHITE written each letter across the knuckles of one hand and POWER on the knuckles of the other, I don’t want to sit near them with the tattoos that curl up from their teeshirts and around their necks, I wouldn’t want to be as close to them as I am, I wouldn’t trust them, I wouldn’t want to deal with them – listen to them talk, they can barely talk, they threaten and they growl, they brood and they resent, and you, civil servant, I know you want to be pleasant and patient and kind, you are sympathetic and empathetic, you want to help us, those who are called your clients, you want to help the job seekers find jobs and make the payments to those who want housing benefit, you want to run through the long forms they have fill out, you want to make sure everything is okay, even as you want, at the same time, to be separate from us, your clients, from those who are on the other side of the glass.

Ah, civil servant, for all your good will and attentiveness, for all your training and people management, you sense our stagnancy, you sense in us what has not begun, you sense what cannot begin, what is deficient or excessive, you know in us what you must not know. You know we are stagnant, and that our stagnancy threatens to run into the streaming of your life, the cool water of your life, its cool streaming. You know with what we might infect you, that our disgusting lives might run into yours, might pollute your days and your nights. You know our stagnancy is close to running into the clear stream of your life, you know if you came closer, you would say to your partner when you came home from work, it’s all too much, you would say it because you had come too close to us, not like Icarus with the sun, the opposite in fact, not like one who tried to rise, but one, rather, who was compelled to sink, who could do nothing but sink, who fell without wanting to fall, who was infested and invaded, befouled and besmirched, whose clear stream of life was flooded with our stagnant waters. Oh I know you, civil servant, I know and understand what is happening on the other side of the glass.

The Blind Sky

Simone Weil: God’s great crime against us is to have created us; it is the fact of our existence. And our existence is our great crime against him.

Unemployment’s great crime against us is to have made us; it is the fact of our existence. And our existence is our great crime against unemployment. Unemployed, we are beneath time, subjected to it. That is why routine is so important. Wake up at a set hour, never later than ten, if you wake at ten-thirty, disaster, but before ten and you are okay, better still if you wake before nine. But before ten is sufficient, there is the whole day ahead of you, but at ten you are not yet beneath time, you do not fear time, you take a stand at the head of the day. Before ten, and you have a chance to get something done, the day still holds promise, outside, faraway, the world is working, a great deal is happening, but for you, nothing has begun, you are square in the time before the beginning, ready for the day.

After ten, and around ten-thirty, you’ve lost the day, it’s already too far ahead of you. How can you catch up? The day will have to be endured rather than lived. You will get no purchase on the day; time does not offer you a foothold. You will suffer from time and you will not cease suffering from it. But before ten, you still have a chance, there’s still promise, the morning leads up to lunchtime, and lunchtime finishes with Neighbours, and then’s the afternoon, always too long, but in the evening, the workers come home, it’s time for the news. True, there is the afternoon, but if you get up early, the afternoon can be dealt with, there’s always a way of bracing yourself against it, always an activity you can invent for yourself.

Unemployed, I would cycle to town to do nothing but wander. Unemployed, town was the place where wandering was possible, where attention was absorbed sufficiently that you did not suffer from time, where there was enough variety, enough events to occupy you. True, they came from without, those events, they happened to you, you were not their origin, but at least something happened, which it does not in the suburbs. Town is for events; passing through town, inventing errands for yourself, you experienced the forward movement of time, time passing.

But eventually, before rush hour, you would have to go home. Eventually, it is time to cycle home and there is the risk of that terrible passivity which brings time towards you. Eventually, you find yourself not above but beneath time, in the eternity of the everyday, in the eternity beneath time as beneath the blank, white sky. You had no chance! Time was waiting for you, it knew you, the whole sky was its eye, looking for you.

But this all-seeing, all-knowing eye is a blind eye, its whiteness whiteness of the sky is the whiteness of blindness. It sees without seeing – it sees and you are seen by no one; no one sees you, no one is watching out for you, it is not even that you are alone, you are not even that, for what is witnessed is your disarray.

Now there is no boundary between you and the everyday. Seen is your dispersal, as though you had fallen like snow across the whole of the Thames Valley. The sky sees the whole Thames Valley and sees you spread across the Thames Valley, the whole Thames Valley that you are, the spreading-across that is all you are. Just as Prufrock was spread across the sky, so you are spread across the Thames Valley and the sky is spread above you. As you are spread across, so is the sky spread above you. And you look up to where you are seen, and the sky sees you, even as there is nothing to looks and no one to see. Even though what is seen is only your nothingness, your scattering. So does nothing see into nothing. So does unemployment see itself and see too much.

Who am I? Who was I? The one witnessed by unemployment, the one in whom unemployment saw itself. I was not made by unemployment in its image, but unmade in its image. I was undone in its image, the image of unemployment. Who was I? The one undone by unemployment in the image of its perpetual undoing. Who was I? Undone by unemployment, dispersed by unemployment, unemployment sought to know me as it knew itself. So did unemployment suffer from me as it saw itself in me. So did it suffer as it saw its truth. Unemployment tried to pass me, to void me from its body. I knew I was to be voided; unemployment suffered from my existence. It suffered as it knew its crime against me was to have created me; my existence was my great crime against unemployment.

Ten Thirty

It’s ten thirty, I’ve woke up too late, I stayed up too late, and now I’ve woken too late. Ten thirty, this is a bad start, the world’s already left me behind, time’s left me behind. Ten thirty and I live in the wake of time, and there’s no catching up. Should I rush? Should I go quickly downstairs and go out? Should I get the cycle out of the shed and ride into the day? But it is too late; I’ve missed my appointment with the day, I’ve missed my chance, the day and I are no longer on equal terms. The day knows this. The sky is white, but when I look up at the sky above the trees, I see that it is moving with great, imperturbable confidence. It has won, it knows it can only win, that eventually I slip and rise too late.

The day is a glistening surface without purchase. It is the smooth wall of a pyramid without surface. I cannot climb, I cannot ascend, there are no footholds. Should I read? Should I take down a book from the bookshelf and begin to read? But I will not be able to read a line. The sky is already in the page, waiting for me. The sky is already looking up at me from the page, I am seen, I am scorned, I am laughed at. The imperturbable day is already there in the white page.

What chance do I have? Always the effort to rise earlier than the day, to wake early enough to discover its ruses and its secrets. Always the dream to catch out the day, to observe the celestial takeover, to see night as it changes into the day (the day did not come first!). That’s why I used to stay up, past three, past four, to the dawn. I used to stay up until dawn and then sleep after dawn. Until I discovered that to rise late was to have no chance, that to rise at twelve, at twelve thirty, was to destroy all hope of resisting the day, that the day would win and could only win.

The Great Destroyer

Neighbours is the hinge of the day, its articulation. Neighbours, from 1.30 to 1.50 is the true noon; noon lies at its centre. To watch Neighbours is to know the morning has become the afternoon. Neighbours is the turning point, it is fate. The afternoon has come; it opens after Neighbours. True, there are other programmes to watch after Neighbours. But who wants to watch Columbo in the afternoon? It’s too old a programme, it comes from the past, and you should never watch old programmes in the day. It comes from the 70s, and you should only watch contemporary programmes in the day. It takes enough effort to remain contemporary without watching programmes from the past.

Neighbours is contemporary, and so is This Morning. Watch and you are up to date, you are up on current affairs, on the lives of the celebrities, on actors and actress doing the rounds, on authors doing the rounds, on pop stars and film stars doingthe rounds. With Neighbours, something is always happening, there’s always a cliffhanger. Always suspense, always events which lead to suspense, to the brink of the next programme. The new episode of Neighbours begins with the last moments of the previous episode; it orientates you. Aha, you say, that’s what happened. You never think of Neighbours when you are not watching Neighbours, but when it returns, when another episode begins, you are orientated, prepared, you remember what happened in the previous episode and in the last run of episodes.

Neighbours remembers itself in you. At the turning point of the day Neighbours sets itself back into your memory. Neighbours happens; Neighbours unfurls out of itself. Neighbours emanates from itself, and it is only emanation. Perpetual event, perpetual unfolding, Neighbours is always hungry for new events, for new sensation; it is unstable; it is instability itself; happiness must be destroyed, the ‘solid’ family at its heart must be torn apart. Time is merciless in Neighbours. Time, the thirst for events, is the great destroyer. But what is it that destroys? The same everyday that destroys me; the same non-event that seeks to hide itself in events; the turning over of the great non-event of the everyday.

It is the everyday that is the navel of Neighbours, its centreless centre. The need for the events in Neighbours is the need for the everyday to give form to itself. It is the everyday that holds itself as a kind of reserve in Neighbours, which holds itself behind every event that comes forward. But the everyday cannot happen; it calls for events, but cannot occur. The everyday is non-event, it is unemployment which seeks only itself as non-event. All the events of Neighbours turn around this same non-event, the event which cannot come to completion, the happening which cannot round itself off, but always returns to happen again.

The everyday is the navel of Neighbours; Neighbours is the navel of the everyday.

I promised myself to write on the way reading opened a path out of the hi tech industrial estate where I used to work. A path – no, that’s not the word. All paths that led out of Winnersh Triangle lead back there; there were only an infinite series of Winnersh Triangles all over the world, one after another, each more or less alike, each staffed by black and yellow and white employees, each traversed by great company cars that I have never been able to drive.

Yes, a great network of industrial estates and then, on the fringes, the great plains of misery where wandered the starving and disenfranchised, the unnetworked and disconnected. In truth, the plain was everywhere and the industrial estates, as well as the gated communities to which they were linked (and to the towns like Wokingham which were, in their entirety, gated communities) were spread only at intervals across it. How often, falling from a temporary job would I find myself back on the plain, not starving or thirsty, it is true, but at one with the hungry and the starving, in a great solidarity not of workers but of non-workers.

The unemployed! The sick! Those sent mad by work (and I will use that simple, undifferentiated word mad)! If you could not link hands with the others, if you were as yet unnetworked, depending on the slow, too-slow computers at your local library, and wandering through streets from which everyone you once knew had moved, if you were carried on the vague breezes that pass across the everyday it was not because you were the only unemployed person, the only wretchedly dependent one relying on everyone but himself. But where are the others and how might you recognise them? There are only the elderly and young mothers with toddlers or with prams. There’s no one your age, not here. Everyone has been assimilated except you. The light falls in steady benediction on everyone but you.

Now the plain opens at your feet. Every step you take opens a suture in the everyday. You are that scar, you the wretched one who does not work. The mothers with their prams hate you. The elderly, who’ve worked their whole lives, resent you. What are you doing on the streets, young and fit? What in you is broken? What’s wrong with you? The office workers pass around you at lunchtime. They have an hour to look for rolls or for toiletries. They move quickly, purposefully, thinking of their upcoming meetings or of networking opportunities. Some, you imagine, would like to work creatively. They would like to take a risk. They feel dissatisfied.

And what about you – what would you like to do? What? There must be some way, you think, of draining money from those around you. How can you tap the rich for their money? But when you talk to these young workers, they are pleasant, polite, there’s nothing to loathe. They talk of career pressure and taking time out; they’d like sabbaticals; they envy you with your free time and open afternoons. When you visit them, you find they have the same books as you: there’s Lacan, there’s Woolf, there’s Said, there’s Spivak.

These are humanities graduates, still shocked by the world, still reeling from the fall from university to the working world. How is it possible, they ask themselves? Then they stop asking and the corridor encloses them that they rush along with the other graduates. You imagine, rats, amiable rats, running everywhere, on top of one another, beneath one another. How busy everyone is! If it’s not work, it’s ‘home admin’ and if it’s not that, it’s the attempt to find a partner. Where is he? Where is she? Another rat, perhaps? Another rat who might turn her rat face to yours?

But you are not a rat. You’re not even a rat. Who are you? What are you? Scarcely assembled, scarcely held together, you haven’t a chance to become a rat. And the rats, looking for partners, will not look at you. Who are you, after all? You are unnetworked, unconnected. You are not one for whom the computer is that great portal through which you reach others in the world.

I want to be a rat, you say to yourself. But then you say: I despise all rats. In the library, you read books about apocalypse. The end is coming, you say to yourself. The end for all rats. But an image comes to you of a swarm of rats running across a blackened planet. Nothing will stop them, you think to yourself. Not even the apocalypse.

Black, hot skies and still the rats are running, crawling on top of one another. Winnersh Triangle has spread everywhere. Cars used to run on petrol, but now they run on hydrogen. Airships and not aeroplanes fill the black sky. The economy collapsed in 2014 but now it’s up and running again. It’s 2020, 2120, 2220 …

One day, I know it, the rats will transform their bodies into airborne locusts. They’ll live in the black clouds of the ravaged earth. The rest of us will be long dead. But the locusts will live from what little sunlight passes through the thick clouds. Then, further on, the great exodus: the locusts spread to interplanetary space. Then, even further into the future, they will spread themselves as dust between stars, buying and selling, exchanging light, still dreaming of what they might create, of their sabbaticals, of early retirement …

Then, with the heat death of the universe, they will upload themselves into another dimension and, discovering another universe, a host of universes, will disperse themselves across everything that exists and could possibly exist writing themselves into genetic code and into the heart of every atom. They’ll make sure that you, the aberration you are, never could have existed. They’ll find a way back through time and eradicate the possibility of your birth. You’ll have never existed and there never would have been an open afternoon or an open sky. Passing the wrong way through the office workers you think: and that is how it should be!

What is painful, infinitely is painful, is that capital will not admit you as one who would willingly be sacrificed. There is no place to offer yourself to the altar of capitalism. You want to say: I will give you all I am, all my life. You want to say: I want the knot of me untied. Or, better still, simply to disperse into the air. To disappear, every particle of you, into the air which drifts above the industrial estate. Then, seeing you, the sleek workers would see nothing and you wouldn’t trouble them by your presence. Yes, their sight would pass right through you as they look up through the sky to the empty interstellar spaces they will one day inhabit.

Meanwhile, in the present, on this day as on any other, you stay in to read the books you borrowed from the library. You lie on your belly in your room and read. Dust motes float in a shaft of light. The cat lies on the patch of carpet touched by that light. The air is warm and stagnant and the pine trees behind the houses across the road stretch into the sky. A way out of the Winnersh Triangle? There is no way out that does not lead back here. History has ended, or it never began.

Some days you can work, some not. Today is a day without work; I am at my desk, ready, but nothing comes. I ask myself: who is the ‘subject’ of this inability to work? Who is the one who waits to write? It is as though the day itself, the blank grey sky, had somehow turned itself inside out, rediscovering itself in my inability to write.

I would like to commemorate this unpropitious day which did not burst into flame, in which nothing in particular was possible, this millionth dead day of empty time-space that laughs gently at the idea of work. ‘It’s too late’, said the day, ‘nothing will happen’. – ‘But I’ve been here ready since the morning’. ‘But you’ve forgotten, haven’t you, what it was you were to work on?’ – ‘I’ve forgotten everything’.

My desk is crowded: Duras’s Practicalities, from which I’ve transcribed the line, ‘A man who drinks is interplanetary. He moves through interstellar space. It’s from there he looks down’, Bernhard’s Correction (I’m up to p. 200), a pile of CDs (The Low boxset, orchestral works by Strauss), chapters from W.’s book and from mine.

January 15th 2005: I wonder how I will remember this time? I know that today and all the days like it – so many – will be what I forget when I remember, even as such days make up the substance of my life. My secret history: life lived in the infinitive, a ‘to live’ without subject. What has happened today? Is it possible to write of an event that does not occur – that, as it were, reverberates through everything even as it leaves it intact?

When I come to myself I think: this is what the executives do not know – not those for whom time is scarce and a day will never stretch forever. Not the ones for whom all time is accounted for. Then I think: I belong to old Europe, to what crumbles like the buildings in one of Max Ernst’s paintings. Whatever happening, I think to myself, is not happening here. Nothing is happening, I think, and then, pretentiously: but that is a sign of the event. I’ve caught it out and here it is, happening without happening.

Nothing happens. To say this ‘nothing is happening’ is corrosive, that it is meaninglessness, even absurd is not to assimilate it to nihilism. It is nothing, diffuse nothing which has as though spread everywhere. What does it reveal? Now I think of a scene from a film I show sixth formers when they visit the university: a bag swirls up into the air. The voiceover: it was as if I saw God and he looked right back at me. And I think: only what I see is the blind gaze of the day, and the gaze with which I meet it has as though congealed somewhere in between the office and the sky.

Tonight George W. Bush will regain his presidency. At first I thought to write of something else, something completely different. But what I wrote in my stupid way became a lament for hope, for the end of hope.

My boss speaks of the chasm between the ‘generation of hope’ to which he says he belongs, and the ‘generation of shit’ to which he says I belong (and he means this not unkindly – he knows from what I have said what the absence of political hope must mean). Another friend, a man who died too young, used to tell me of the monks who taught him, of their brilliance and their inspiring example. I said: didn’t they try and grope you? weren’t they sadistic? remembering of my own encounters with mediocre, bullying teachers, with figures of authority from one could expect nothing but massive stupidity. This was unthinkable for him: they were his teachers, his guides, they demanded a great deal, but they gave a great deal to their pupils.

He told me stories of his enchanted childhood, of the full student grant, sufficient in those days to eat out every night, to develop a taste for fine wine and port, to assemble collections of the complete works of this or that author, to buy a gramophone and records, to entertain. He remembered the 60s when he grew his hair long and wore rings on each of his fingers. He spoke of seminars which lasted all afternoon and then all evening; he would take his students home and talk with them into the night and then, next morning, would take back to university. The 60s: you can’t imagine it, everything was possible, he said. It got silly, he said. He spoke of houses of friends where everyone would have sex according to a strict rota. You can’t imagine it, he said.

As he spoke, I thought to myself: you are secure in a town you never had to leave. You rose to prominence here, restauranters greet you with delight when you walked through their doors, taxi drivers vie for your custom, streams of visitors come to your door. You live on the outskirts of the city in what you call the earthly paradise. You are a man of hope, hope was always there for you. You always had a future because you had a past, a chance to begin.

And compared to you? We are the generation of shit; we are pallid, transparent; you can see through us. You can see our guts and our heart; we barely exist. Our past? Nothing happened. Our present? We are dispersed across the world. Our future? We will be dispersed across the sky. We are the ones without substance, one of the transparent creatures through whom shines the light of the long afternoon of the 1980s and 90s – those terrible decades in which political hope evaporated.

You remember (but it didn’t touch you): new housing estates spread everywhere. House prices rose; every home became a fortress closed against the world and the suburbs a wall closed against the poor (and you were never poor). Jobs were casualised; temporary workers serviced the great corporate machines. Incomes rose for a few; for the rest, they withered. The utilities were sold off. Workers closed their eyes in the workplace and opened them when they got home. A thin film formed over our eyes and our ears. You know this, but you were protected from it; it never touched you.

The 80s, the 90s, and now the 00s. You survived, entertaining everyone in your great house. You were alive, still alive, hope was alive in you. You could retire; you lived on the sidelines. And for the rest of us? We’ll spend a life on the dole and on the sick. We’ll live on the sick till the end of our lives. A life to lie sick from the new ennui, the great consensus, the crushing awareness that nothing is possible, that there is no foothold from which we could begin. Sick and alone, each of us, fallen to nothing. With only a dim hatred for those who had risen above us like scum. For the scum that had floated to the top and seethes there.

In my boss, in you, the world says: you came too late, you missed the party, now the final adjustment has been made and we’ll march in lockstep to the end. It says: you haven’t a chance. You are braced against the future because of you past. But this means, too, you cannot understand what will happen. You said you had never experienced boredom; I thought: you will understand nothing. You had the past, the richness of the past. Was that why I was drawn into the orbit of your house? Why, in the end I had to admit that all I wanted was security, continuity: a corner in which to curl up, a room with a table and a chair, some hours in which to read and write.

You gave me a room; I was grateful. I was indebted, but you never reminded me of my debts. We disagreed on everything, but we spoke for hours every day. And every night I ate with others at your table; I was in from the cold. You said grace and I closed my eyes. You took in those I thought were beyond hope; I warned you against them; you were right. The house was full, day and night.

In your attic room, I read, I wrote; it was dark, always dark; in a pool of light, I finished my dissertation; I began my first articles; I received my first rejection letters. Eventually, I left; I took a job, I moved further north; I went to another city and you, who phoned no one, who despised the phone, rang only once. And then you died, not long ago. You died a few days after I had tried, for the last time, to phone you.

Tonight, Kerry admitted defeat; George W. Bush has retaken the presidency. Tonight, I remembered the days we stuck Socialist Alliance stickers on the door and the window. That was 2001. When I left in 2002, the stickers were still there. And when I visited in 2003, they were there still. You hated Bush; you hated Blair. You spoke of other leaders, of different times. You spoke of the past, which gave you strength to endure the future. I thought: but they are politicians like the others, all the scum who have ruled us. You spoke from your hope; I answered from a resignation beneath resignation. I said: they are scum.

Roquentin, from Nausea:

I am bored, that’s all. From time to time I yawn so widely that tears roll down my cheek. It is a profound boredom, profound, the profound heart of existence, the very matter I am made of.

It’s true, I miss boredom, I’m no longer bored, I have too much to do, there’s always work and never the expanse between, that fog which billows up from the middle and obscures everything. Boredom: recall many years ago the madness of reading this and that preparing for an interview in the daytime. Sunlight through the window. Dust motes. It is the afternoon, the most frightening time, the time of dispersal. Pine trees over the houses opposite. The blue sky, too vast. Options: cycle to town. Catch the train from town to another town. Or stay here and drown in the afternoon. You are reading Kierkegaard; you take extensive notes.

Meanwhile, there is the day. You are – how old – twenty-three, twenty-four, already too old to endure the afternoon. You feel guilt: you’re not working. You’ve no money, and you’re not working. You know the great opportunity is close, that if you can get funding, everything will change. Everything depends on the interview. In the meantime, there is the day, the madness of the day. And there is a kind of boredom in which the day says to you: I am all there is. I am all there can be. That morning you had a dream. A cycle ride to Bracknell, only this is an unreal town, and nothing like Bracknell. You go to a library that is nothing like the library in Bracknell. Then you realise: this unreal town is the heart of all towns. It is every town and every suburb in the world. What does it matter where you are?

The dream fades and you wake up. Where were you? Where had you been. Days pass. You cycle to the woods. You know the lake is there … a break in the trees … promise of a vista. The lake. Stones to skim across the water. Somehow, you’ve been left behind. Boredom has caught you; you are enmeshed. As you imagine the weeds in the water would enmesh you.

The madness of the day: really you should disappear. Have the sense to disappear. Aberrant, out of time, you are up against the future, right up against it. Before, at the age of nineteen or twenty, there was all the time in the world – the future as the sky was then: distant, a blue screen upon which you could project many futures. But now: it is too close, unbearable close (that is what Bergman said once of the Mediterranean sky. I saw that sky once and had to agree).

The sky is too close and the future is right by you. The future says: what will you do? You have no words to reply. Because you understand the future’s question is the corrosion of your present. That it is coming apart, fraying. Like the celluloid that burns in Bergman’s Persona. What alibi do you have? What excuse can you give for your life? You have been pushed up against a white light. It is the day itself which interrogates you. The whole sky interrogates you. Only there is no answer to the day. The question turns. The question turns in the instant like a whirlwind. The question is boredom, a kind of acidic boredom which rots you from inside.

Yours is the condition of Gracchus, the man who could not die. The one who was dead-alive, alive in his death. You say to yourself: I am dead. Or: I have died. Or: everything is dead and only I am alive. Or: it is AD 51 and everything else that has happened is a lie.

Horror of unemployment: the day is too long, too vast; there will be another day, as long and as vast and on forever. Not having nothing to do, but the feeling that whatever you did could not fill the vastness which beats against you as if asking the question (is it a question?) who are you? No – not a question, but a kind of interrogation: again and again you are made to account for yourself even as you are reminded that in the vast expanse of days you are nothing. No wonder I always try and carve time up into specific projects and tasks, to forestall the moment when I am up against nothing in particular, undetermined time. I fear it … this is why I fear drifting, reading, writing, wandering. Yesterday, my office wasn’t open. I couldn’t escape my flat. I felt the same old horror … I thought books could distract me, but reading Bergman, Tarkovsky, Bresson, Blanchot only exacerbated the problem. Then I remembered what someone wrote about Mahler: he was a neurotic, the great existential questions that resound in his work are those of a neurotic. But then I also remembered the pages on anxiety from Heidegger, which disclose the other side of neurosis. But Heidegger provides no solution, because it was not death I dreaded, but time without project.