I am listening to Jandek and drinking Cava. So must you.
Blanchot and the Récit
Nothing Must be Illustrative
What lets itself be discovered by way of Blanchot’s fiction? The setting of his récits is mundane, the prose is calm – but the mundane is allowed to double itself, and the prose becomes thick and strange. Sometimes in his fiction an ordinary action will suddenly detach itself from linear continuity and turn upon itself, as if it had broken time into a separate eddy. Such breaks involve a sudden profusion of moods – affliction gives way to lightness, lightness to anguish, where each time it is the mood that seems to bear the protagonist instead of the other way around.
Sudden shifts in the relationship between characters occur, as though (Blanchot’s metaphor) the relative levels of water had been changed, as in a lock. And there are moments when the prose leaps into a strange abstraction: words like fascination, image, return, are used as a telegraphic shorthand, ordinary words that have been made to sound strangely, substituting for an experience which has no name, but that is like the double of any and all words, nonsense rumbling in sense.
‘It may be that all these words are a curtain behind which what happened will never stop happening’: the narrator of Death Sentence hints that what is important is not what is told, but something else, as if the events of the book come to stand in for another event, as though they sacrificed themselves to a greater demand. In a sense, the events of the narrative are not what matters at all – or rather, what matters does so by way of them.
In his biography of Kafka, Stach notes that his subject ‘demanded much more from his texts than formal unity; he sought a seamless linking of all motifs, images and concepts’; with ‘The Judgement’, Kafka’s stories ‘leave no narrative residues or blind alleys. Not one detail of Kafka’s descriptions, whether the colour of a piece of clothing, a gesture, or simply the time of day, is merely illustrative. Everything carries meaning, refers to something and recurs.’
With Blanchot, what recurs does so by way of the narrative details – ‘it is made of events, details, gestures’ and nothing else, and as such are ‘particularities, worthless moments, dust of words’; but then, too, surpassing these details, but being no more than these details as they are taken together, a kind of ’emptiness’ appears, a ‘lacunar immensity’ or ‘infinite distance’, such that the subject of the story is the lack of its story; ‘it tries to realise in it this lack that always infinitely surpasses it’.
What Cannot Be Told
The Blanchotian récit bears upon this lack, figuring its inadequacy to itself in its own recounting. Let us follow the opening lines of his récit, The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me to see how this works.
The récit begins: ‘I sought, this time to approach him’: as though it were only now the narrator wants to confront the one who allows him to write. Now is the time for the encounter. But how can it be brought about? Can it be forced? The next lines:
I mean I tried to make him understand that, although I was there, still I couldn’t go any farther, and that I, in turn, had exhausted my resources. The truth was that for a long time now I had felt I was at the end of my strength.
"But you’re not’, he pointed out.
At the end of my strength: to have run out of ability, or to have known the ability to be able the ability to be, fail you. But this is bad faith. To seek to approach him already betrays this inability; you are capable of something; you have a plan; clearly you haven’t yet exhausted your resources. And isn’t the fact that you’re writing these lines testament to precisely the surplus of your strength over your exhaustion? But who is the he, the ‘il‘ that answers back? With whom is the narrator conversing throughout this récit?
‘I would like to be.’ A manner of speaking which he avoidied taking seriously; at least, he didn’t take it with the seriousness that I wanted to be put into it. It probably seem to him to deserve more than a wish.
Whoever it is, he seems to have been granted a whole personality, an ability to think, to converse: what mystery! And the whole récit consists of their exchanges, and the long passages in which the narrator reflects on the situation in which he finds himself.
The other with whom the narrator converses is a personification of the condition of possibility of narrative. He is no one apart from the narrator, being only the one who endures in his place when he is claimed by the fascination with which writing is bound up, for Blanchot.
If he is its condition of possibility, he is also narrative’s condition of impossibility – he stands outside what can be narrated, set back from it, soliciting the movement of narration, but at the same time stepping out of its way, until the narrator, in this case, says firmly to himself, ‘I sought, this time to approach him.’ Him, il: in the case, the condition, the uncondition of narrative, that which gives and withholds the possibility of telling.
In the case of this récit, the ‘il’ is personified; the refusal of the event to give itself to narration is given a part in the narration. And yet it is made by the narrator, and by Blanchot, to appear in its refusal.
Writing in his diary, Kafka expresses surprise that writing is possible at all.
I have never understood how it is possible for almost anyone who writes to objectify his sufferings in the very midst of suffering them; thus I, for example, in the midst of my unhappiness – my head, say, still on fire with unhappiness – sit down and write to someone: I am unhappy. Yes, I can even go beyond that and with the various flourishes I might have talent for, all of which seem to have nothing to do with my unhappiness, ring simple, or contrapuntal or a whole orchestration of changes on my theme. And it is not a lie, and it does not still my pain, it is simply a merciful surplus of strength at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being and plainly exhausted all my strength. But then what kind of strength is it?
What, in the midst of unhappiness, allows one to write ‘I am unhappy’? A peculiar strength – a merciful one, in which I am permitted strength enough to report my unhappiness. But what does it mean to invoke mercy here? Does the capacity to write mean my unhappiness is any less complete? That I am less unhappy than I thought?
A surplus of strength: at least, now I can ring changes on my suffering, at least, using my talent, I can begin to write. But does it alter my basic situation? Does it offer therapy or cure? Writing allows me to take distance from my suffering – but it is the same distance which causes me to lose my suffering anew.
Then there is something left behind as soon as the narrative is begun. Suffering has lifted itself into an ideal suffering; as soon as one writes, or ‘I had exhausted my resources’, this belies exhaustion, but it is also, by inscribing the word ‘I couldn’t go any farther’ on the page shows how language lifts itself from the condition of its author. Something has been gained: the capacity, the ‘merciful strength’ to write. But something has been lost by that same writing – that mood, that attunement that allowed the possibility of writing.
Commenting on these lines from Kafka, Blanchot writes:
The more luck I have, that is to say, the more gifted I am in making my unhappiness felt by description, embellishments, and images, the more the bad luck this misfortune reports is respected. It is as if the possibility that my writing represents essentially exists to express its own impossibility – the impossibility of writing that constitutes my sadness. Not only can it not be put in parentheses, or accommodate it without destroying it or being destroyed by it, but it really is possible only because of its impossibility.
Strange that the task of writing loses what makes it possible and which drew a weary man to write, I have exhausted my strength. ‘But you haven’t’, says the fact of writing on the page. The narrator loses the particular concreteness of his exhaustion as he begins to write. He gains literature, which is also to say, the impossibility of ever returning to his suffering in writing. But what has he gained?
Ordinary speech has, at its heart, the ideal of a pure communication, which would transform ‘the heaviness of things’, in Blanchot’s words, to ‘the agility of signs’, the ‘materiality of things’ to ‘the movement of their signification’; they are nothing in themselves: abstract tokens to be used in exchange. The sentence in the story has another function: it does not seek to become the sign of an absent being, but to present that being to us in language. It is a question of allowing language to ‘revive a world of concrete things’. It is not, moreover, a question of revealing the concreteness of this or that thing, but a world of things.
‘In the novel, the act of reading is not changed, but the attitude of the one who reads it makes it different’, Blanchot writes. The value of words is no longer that of labels attached to particular meanings. Let’s say I hear the phrase ‘The head clerk himself called’; I am able to conjure up a world in which this sentence has meaning: I know the head clerk himself, the office in which he or she worked, and so on. The sentence is unobtrusive; I know what it means. When I read the sentence ‘The head clerk himself called’ in a literary work, the situation is different: it no longer belongs to a world with which I am familiar; the only access to the world of the story I am reading is through the words of that story.
Literary works characteristically strive for verisimilitude by elaborately constructing a world. In the case of Blanchot’s récits, however, we are left with something more stark: a sheen of words which present themselves as a vehicle of disclosure, of the opening of the world. A drama is happening at the surface of the text even before we are reassured by the creation of a fictional world.
What is the experience of reading this récit – if we do read it, rather than cast it aside in frustration? We no longer have any distance with respect to the text; the reader is no longer a spectator, since there is no secure place with respect to the narrative from which to grasp its unity, but is, so to speak, enfolded in the very unfolding of a narration. But nor do we feel the reassuring presence of an author who is in charge of the narrative.
This is the uncanny experience of reading Blanchot; there is no point of fixity to which one can anchor oneself. The récit opens as a void or hollow. The events the novel narrates stand out against a kind of nothingness. The reader is more distant from Blanchot’s narrative than she might be with respect to a more traditional novelist since she is unable to interpose a context for the events as they occur; they seem to come from nowhere. Yet in another sense, she is closer – too close, perhaps – because all she has are the words which attest, in Blanchot’s work, to the void against which those words appear.
No escape: the narrator cannot escape from his exhaustion; he writes, and that exhaustion is transformed. And when we read Blanchot’s récit, born from exhaustion and the ‘merciful strength’ which escapes exhaustion? Fascinated by the texts, close to them, far from them, there is no escape for us. Is this exhausting – a counterpart to the exhaustion of the narrator? Rather, one always reads, Blanchot says, in a kind of lightness, which is perhaps the analogue of that surplus of strength which allowed the writer to begin to write.
The Event Itself
The récit is not the relating of an event but this event itself, the approach of this event, the place where it is called on to unfold, an event still to come, by the magnetic power of which the narrative itself can hope to come true.
It may appear Blanchot’s narrator seeks to write about his encounter with ‘him’, but his récit refers to another and more fundamental encounter (or, with respect to our reading of the text, something closer to its surface): one that is the condition of possibility of any narration. The event the narrator would narrate is joined by another narration and another event – that of the interruption of his capacities as an author.
Then the récit bears upon its own possibility, even as it needs to give itself body in terms of a specific narrative, and is nothing apart from what is given to be read. It is as if the récit, as it names the event, pre-existed the narrative events that incarnate it; or that what happens in the narrative is only a way of allegorising or redoubling what has already occurred. Everything – plot, character development, the ‘interest’ of the narrative – would have been devoured by the black hole of the event. Or the event itself would stand over its characters, measuring out their destinies like Fate.
But the precedence of the event cannot be understood chronologically. When Blanchot allows himself in his critical work speak of the past, of recurrence, this is a way of figuring the way in which the récit leads itself back to the question of its own possibility, but also the impossibility of ever accounting for that event in the present of tasks, projects and intact subjects. Narrative incidents, then, must always be poor but necessary proxies for the event at issue. None of them are any greater significance than the others insofar as any of them is liable to fall into the lack the récit would narrate.
But if, in Blanchot’s récits, a fall is always imminent; when an incident is always ready to be substituted by the event, some narratives reveal this lability more directly. The step from Blanchot’s novels to the récits uncomplicates and focuses his fictional work – it becomes simpler, the story, such as it is, is presented more sparsely, which lets the lack for which it substitutes, or into which it continually threatens to plunge, that much more present.
Still, this is too simple a notion of the récit. See here for a continuation of these reflections.
The Weeping Flat
I need to know my enemy. To know it – the damp, to watch and study it; to press my hands to it as to a fevered brow. Only this brow – the walls of the kitchen – are cold and clammy. For the last few days, I have had a fan heater turned at various parts of the wall. The plaster dries out quickly; it changes colour from dark brown to broken and then almost all the way to a healthy pink.
But it is a sick pink that results, with trails of black and mould in little clusters like liver spots. A sense of victory – the wall, completely bare, since all the furniture and appliances in the kitchen have been scattered elsewhere in the flat, changes colour like the sky. A dawn is coming from the brown night. A dirty pink dawn.
And yet, and yet. Turn the heater off for the night and the next morning, when I open the kitchen door, I see specks of darkness invading the dirty pink walls. Specks of brown darkness that grow and link up. What sadness. And soon the brown is omnipresent again, and growing darker. And within 24 hours, a film of water covers the wall. A film, which when I wipe with kitchen roll carries with it dark particles of plaster. Mop the fevered brow. Mop it, and the water comes off brown, dark brown.
The damp punishes me. On the first night with the fan heater I felt exalted. Could the damp really be clearing? Was it as simply at pointing a beam of heat at the wall? The next morning I woke early in my bedroom, which, unlike the other rooms of the flat, I’ve kept clean and free of kitchen detritus. The washing machine, covered in mould, stands in the living room; the rusting oven in the bathroom. Cupboards whose backs are thick with green and black spores are scattered everywhere. But the bedroom – pristine, I thought, with creamy light green walls.
What peace! And yet, and yet, what did I smell? What was that smell – damp? had it reached me from the kitchen? And then I see it: punishment for my hubris; the restoration of the cosmic balance between light and darkness: all along the bottom of the bedroom wall, rising damp, black. All along the wall beneath the window, and curling the wallpaper up: damp, black mould.
And the damp’s already returning to the bathroom, I can smell it. Already returning, even after the damp course last year. Another damp expert ran his meter over the bathroom wall. ‘There’s something there.’ He and I go outside and look at the wall. We look, we look, until all we are is looking. How to read the walls? Does it need repointing? Best to do it. Best to get it done, to make sure. And then we look at the £500 of rendering I’ve just had done. It needs to be extended, he says. It’s not enough, he says. Look at the darkness of the brick, he says. Feel it. It’s wet, he says. Yes, it is wet. It’s weeping. The whole flat is weeping.
More rendering then. I book the rendering company to return. They’re coming at lunchtime today. And meanwhile, the damp and I. Meanwhile – and I think for the whole of my life – I and the damp, one to one. I press my hand on its brow. My hand on a patch of kitchen wall. My hand on the curled up blackened wall paper in the bedroom. My hand on the wall in the bathroom from which I know the damp will come. And my hand on my own chest, for I know where it’s coming from, all this damp.
Sunglasses
‘It’s too hot!’, I complain. W. reaches in his manbag for a wipe. ‘Rub the inside of your wrists and behind your ears’, he says, ‘it’ll cool you down.’ W.’s prepared for the heat, he said. He watched the weather forecasts. ‘Europe is either very hot,’ he says, ‘or very cold.’ He reaches in his man bag for suntan lotion, and applies it to his cheerful face.
W. is an enemy of sunglasses. ‘Take them off,’ he says, ‘you look like an idiot.’ But it’s sunny, I protest. ‘They block your pineal eye’, he says. ‘It needs sunlight.’ The pineal eye’s in the centre of your skull, W. explains, but it’s sensitive to light. Without light, you quickly become depressed. ‘That’s why you’re so morose’, says W. I’m morose, he says, whereas he, who doesn’t wear sunglasses, is joyful. ‘Joy is everything,’ says W., ‘I am essentially joyful.’
Planet of Damp
Like Jacob with his angel, I wrestle with my damp. The walls are bare now, a workman having spread the parts of my kitchen around the flat: the washine machine beside me here as I type, the oven in the bathroom, the cabinets in the hallway. The walls are bare, and absolute, and sweating – this is the word – damp.
For my part, I have a small heater which I aim at this part of the wall, and then that. Gradually, the plaster changes colour. From an angry dark brown, mottled with dark green and with black mold to a calmer, lighter pink: it seems a miracle; it seems I’m winning, but how can this be?
Periodically, I go out to the kitchen with some kitchen roll, and wipe down the great sweating surface. There’s always a layer of water – a sweat sheen. I marvel. Is the wall alive? Does it live in some strange way, like the planet Solaris, perhaps. That is the meaning of salt crystals which form on the wall. Is it conscious and groping towards me to communicate? Or is salt the way it expresses itself, or dreams? My flat is the satellite that turns around the damp, and I am the astronaut, fascinated only by its changing surface.
Whole religions have formed around less: around damp, and the source of damp. The kitchen could be a sacred grove, a spring. Only it seems a spring underground, a hidden place, a grotto to which our ancestors would descend. And what of the essay I’m trying to write? How can it compete against the great, bare walls?
Sometimes I want to press myself bodily against them, and to be absorbed. To disappear into the damp and to live a life there, on the other side of the wall. But I have my little heater, righteous weapon, and in patches the damp is changing colour, from angry brown to pink. Pray for me.
European Thoughts
‘What have I told you!,’ admonishes W. as we board a train in Frankfurt. ‘This is public space. Pub-lic. That means outside your head.’ He points to my head. ‘Private’. And then out to the world ‘public.’ W. is a great upholder of this division. Abolish the public/ private divide and you abolish civilisation, W. always says. He looks around him contentedly. ‘See how quiet it is in Europe. It’s civilised,’ he says, ‘not like you.’
We are drinking. The European countryside rushes by. It’s so green! So fresh! And the buildings are so old. ‘Europe!’, I sigh. – ‘It’s a mystery to you, isn’t it?’ Even the names of the stations are intimidating, I tell W. ‘Think of everything that has happened here! All that history.’ W. takes it all in his strife, he says. Europe makes him gentler, better. It improves him. It’s the public spaces, he says. They’re so quiet in Germany. So calm.
W. says he’s more European than me. ‘You’re British,’ he says. ‘A British ape.’ We drink. ‘I can hold my drink’, says W., ‘I drink like a European, see?’ His glass is two thirds full. Mine’s empty. – ‘Can I have some of yours?’ – ‘Fuck off.’ I take out my notepad. ‘I’m going to write down our European thoughts.’ W. says he hasn’t had any yet. I tell him we should keep a record of our journey.
Later, and W. is in a contemplative mood. ‘Are you thinking of your Canadian boyhood?’, I ask him. W. is thinking of his many European trips. Back and forth across Europe, W.’s travelled. Not like me. ‘You haven’t been anywhere. Anyone can tell.’ W. is an experienced traveller. Take drinking, for example. He can pace himself, he says. Morning to night, he drinks like a European. Steadily. That’s the secret. ‘You should watch the Poles’, he says, ‘they’re experts.’ Poles – experts, I write down in my notebook.
The Damp and I
I press my nose to the pink plaster in the bathroom. Is it damp that I smell? Is it coming back? My hand on the surface. No, it’s not wet. But there’s wetness, I know, on the other side of the wall. Waiting, darkly. I can smell it.
The damp can get no wetter in the kitchen. The plaster comes off on my fingers. Brown paste. And the smell, the terrible smell. What’s rotting? What’s behind the kitchen units? Something has died, back there beyond the wall. And down the plaster the trace of a vertical river. When did it stream? When did it dry up? A track of browner plaster on plaster. And everywhere the smell of rotting. What’s died, there behind the cabinets?
It’s all to come off Monday. And then the plaster’s to come off, and it will be the final encounter. The brick and I. Exposed brick and a man, and great drying machines. Because the machines are to come to dry the place out. Night and day, they’ll suck the damp from the air. And the plaster will have been stripped away. Nothing between the damp and I. Nothing but damp brick and I, in the stripped away kitchen.
There’ll be no washing machine and no fridge. No oven, and no cabinets. That will all be moved to the living room. In the kitchen, the wrecked floor and the wet bricks, breathing. The damp and I: a final reckoning. If it doesn’t dry, say the insurance people, then they’ll pull out.
It’s beyond them, say the drying company appointed by the Loss Adjuster. No one understands the damp. It’s Talumdic. The damp is the enigma at the heart of everything. It draws into it the light of all explanations, all hope. The damp says: I exist, and that is all. I am that I am: so the damp. I will outlast you and outlast everything, says the damp.
Outside, half an inch of rendering now covers the back of the kitchen. Today I placed my palm on its grey surface. Wet. But that’s to be expected, what with the rain. But it was still wet. Everything’s wet, on both sides of the wall. Apparently there’s a gap between two layers of brick. A gap – that’s where the source of the damp is, I know it. That’s where it is, dark, wet matter without shape. Matter without light, as there are in the dwarf galaxies stripped of gas.
And the damp’s still spreading. There’s still more of the wall to conquer. ‘It’ll be in your living room soon’, says the damp expert. I nod. Yes, it will be everywhere. The flat’ll be made of damp, and spores will fill every part of the air. And I will breathe the spores inside and mold will flower inside me. I’ll live half in water like a frog.
It is my own catastrophe, very close to me. A secret catastrophe, spreading from the gap between the layers of brick. I take people out there, to the kitchen, and run their hands along the wall. ‘Feel it’, I say, ‘it’s alive.’ They’re always impressed, and disgusted.
My Visitor, in particular, is disturbed by the damp, and by the dirt that falls from the kitchen. She stands at the threshold of the kitchen, appalled. ‘Don’t worry’, I tell her. ‘It’s inside the cabinets’, she says, in horror. ‘I know’, I whisper.
The washing powder has contracted into great wet lumps. The salt is a single wet block. The sugar, the same. And where tins stand for an hour they leave a rusty mark. And dirt from the ceiling crumbled over everything. And it’s so cold out there, so cold – so wet, the air full of spores. And salt covers the plaster like a beard. Salt in large flakes that you can rub away.
Leave kitchen roll standing for an hour and it’s soaked. Leave a dry dishcloth on a worksurface and it’s sodden. How wet is the air? Water condenses along the walls. And there are great green splodges where the mold is growing. You can’t rub them away. They go deep: great, green splodges like nebulas.
Once, the plaster was a dry pink. Once, for just a few days. Then the damp spread from one corner of the kitchen. We found the source: a leak. A waste pipe. It was fixed, but the damp began to spread outwards, strange sun, strange radiance. Until every part of the kitchen was a wet brown. A brown that became mottled with green, and purple. And then that was covered with salt that somehow grew from the wall. Salt in large flakes I sometimes wipe away with my hand. Was the salt a good omen? A bad one?
Sometimes, it has seemed the damp was drying. Sometimes, I have dared to think: it’s in retreat. But in truth, the damp was only gathering itself in darkness to come again. Gathering itself, breathing in, so it could exhale back out and farther this time. Gathering in so it can bloom out, strange star, so its rays might reach the living room, and there begin new work. There’s a whole cosmogony at work here. A universe born, expanding. Dark matter and darker matter intertwined. Impersonal life – it’s here, I know it beneath my fingers.
Just now, I went out there again, to verify. Is it really that bad? It is that bad. Is it really that wet? Yes, it is wet. Does dirt still fall from the ceiling? It falls, and constantly. And I take a breath. Am I really breathing in spores? I’m breathing in spores. And I touch the wall above the sink – is something really running off on my hands? I look at them. There’s something brown. Something wrong. There’s a new process beginning in there, I decide. Something else is beginning. A darker brown within brown. A spore within the spore, but with sentience. The king of spores, with a dark intelligence, growing between the walls.
I think the insurance company are going to pull out. I think the Loss Adjuster will shake her head and leave. I think the drying machines are going to fail, and I’ll be left on my own in the kitchen, in the dark. The electricity failed there for six months because of the damp. It was dark, only dark, and the oven didn’t work; nothing worked there. For a long time, dark, and with nothing working.
Then I got the electricians out. Light! ‘Your flat needs rewiring’, they said, ‘the whole lot.’ I ignored them. There was light, and that was enough. And the light is still working. It doesn’t flicker; it’s steady. Which means you can gaze upon the damp. You can gaze, fascinated at the damp and the plaster mottled with damp. It doesn’t hide, the damp. It isn’t shy. It is there, obvious. It announces itself calmly. It says, here I am, with quiet plainness. And there it is. A fact. Absolute damp. Damp beyond all damp meters. ‘Off the scale’, said the drying expert, who’ll bring the machines.
I’m going back out there again. I’m supposed to be working. I’m writing something. But the damp is calling me. The damp wants a witness to itself. And who am I but its bard? Make an idiom for me, says the damp. Let me spread in words, too, it says. Let me spread through your blog and through all blogs. The damp seeks a new medium. And it will spread, medium to medium until the pages of the universe are written with damp.
I have to go out there again. The damp is calling, and I am an arm of my damp, I know it now. One night it grew me. One night a spore unfolded itself to make a man, a golem of damp. And the damp wrote its name on my forehead and placed its charm on my tongue. I spoke; I wrote; I was the bard of damp. Write, says the damp. Let me spread there, too, on the page. I write. The blog is wet.
And is it coming back in the bathroom? Is it coming back there, from the brick and from the gap between the bricks? Is something beginning there, too, a kind of Singularity of damp, damp become self-aware? Because a new step is being taken here, I know it. Life has reached another level. Damp will speak. Damp has begun to dream, there between the walls. And what will it say when it comes to itself? What will the damp say when it wakes up?
I don’t know which one of us wrote these lines, the damp or I.
A Blurb
Too tired, can’t write, or unless it’s just to write that: too tired, and that I cannot write. But what does that register? What does it make clear? A kind of flashing of the sky in the sea, reflected. Flashing flashed at the sky: what does it matter, and to whom?
Sunlight on the backs of the houses, opposite. One o’clock. Home for lunch, and to write a blurb – two or three sentences, no more than that. But nothing comes to mind. The yard: no scar now where the pipe was ripped from the wall. Grey rendering instead, and spreading around the corner to cover the kitchen wall. And a strip of lighter concrete along the concrete floor of the yard where the burst pipe was dug up and replaced.
Came home to write a blurb, and thinking only of that. The book I’ve read three times in typescript. The book whose pages I’ve marked and annotated. I wrote the word, tone on the title page. Tone: a sign to myself. A word I want to explore. The typescript is full of such words, such signs. My trace. The passage I have left through its pages, like the voyager in Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth follows the signs of a previous explorer. What happened to him? Lost at the earth’s heart just as I am also lost at the heart of a book for which the blurb will not come. Lost in eighty pages on my bed in the other room.
Days pass unmarked. A new leak in the kitchen? The plaster seems to be melting from the walls. Rusty paste colour on my fingers. And the smell! Something is rotting, something dying there on the other side of the wall. Books: Duras’s Lol V. Stein, Henry Green’s Back, and now Loving again, after 15 years. A new office, straight out of Bela Tarr. A clean desk as I abandon my review for a while … what to write about now? Back to what I know, and hopefully back here, soon.
White Light
Ill at home for a fifth day, and a pale, seemingly sourceless light is everywhere. I recognise it; it has come to find me: white, indifferent light. White light like maggots writhing when you roll away the bin, alive in itself somehow. Trying to live in its own way, but such light lives only across kitchen work tops and empty baths. Such light, known to the ill, the unemployed is the great neutral medium of the everyday, interposing itself so that only it can be seen, passing like river fog across the clean surfaces of our houses.
Who has seen it? I saw it all the time once. A seeing that needs a great training, months of preparation. Until: there it is: the thickness of the everyday, the day as what neither begins nor ends, but flows across the work tops and the silver taps. I think to enter it fully would be to forget. But I’m not yet ready. Somewhere, I am sure, there are great sages of the everyday, great voyagers, who travel everywhere in the white light, unafraid. I imagine they are drinking. I imagine they drink constantly, night and day, but that that is how they hold themselves into the light.
You can never see it face on, I tell himself. Never directly. It must come towards you, like a shy animal. You have to be still enough, marooned enough, that it might drift towards you. And where your mouth was open, it will be filled with gossamer. And where your eyes were open, cotton wool wads. And your ears sealed by buds of light.
You should drink, I tell myself. Drink sweet, stale beer open in cans on your floor. Stale lager, cheap – an obscure brand from the German supermarket: others, you know it, in Old Europe are drinking this. Others, elsewhere, voyagers in white light are drinking the same cheap Aldi lager – in Hungary, say, or in Albania. They would understand you there. They’d understand it was Old Europe you were reaching, the same white light over rust belts and radioactive zones.
Or you should eat. The discount Greggs, selling stale goods from the region. 7 stale teacakes in a bag. 7 Gingerbread men, or 7 Lardy cakes. Lardy cakes open the way. Wrappers and crumbs on the sofa open it up. Lie down in the afternoon, full of sweet stale cakes and sweet stale beer. The day is passing, but your day is going nowhere. The day passes – but is it really passing? How to reach up and stir the sky with a stick to find out? The clouds have the thickness, you imagine of mashed potato.
And everywhere, white light and not a chance. White light, bland and shadowless – the great noon of life as it turns in itself. The great noon, nobody’s climax, when the day climbs to the plateau of the afternoon that you will cross with the aid of 4 cans of sweet beer and 7 stale cakes. Isn’t that what white light brings to me, and today? Isn’t that of what it reminds me?
Listen to Felt in the afternoon. Keep the TV turned on, with the volume down, and listen to this Felt album or that, it makes no difference. Felt in the afternoon: perfect. You are stranded – the day has stranded you, and so are Felt, who are with you. You and Felt. You and the TV on and Felt and half finished cans of sweet, stale beer and cake crumbs on the sofa. Is your life over? Did it ever begin?
Sometimes, in the day, you have had to keep the house clean. That was your duty: hoover the floor, and cream cleanse the sink after you’ve done the washing up. Scrub the silver hob back to silver. Let the silver taps shine silver again: do you remember what the son was charged to do in Hal Hartley’s Trust? Do you remember how he failed in his tasks, and how he was punished?
But they don’t understand, the workers, the able bodied. They don’t understand – how can they, who lack your perspective upon the day, who do not know the white light? What can they know, who drive from here to there, who work? Time has not given itself to them. Time has not opened itself as wide as the sky. Time does not allow them the vistas it has given you, as over a salt marsh: the whole, white sky.
7 stale Chelsea buns. 7 squashed eclairs, with yellow cream. In truth, they go the quickest, almost as soon as the shop is open. There’s always a queue, very long. A queue, and you’ll be lucky if there are gingerbread men left. Sometimes, you make do with white, stale baps, but they don’t fill you, and they’re not sweet. Or seven unsweet finger rolls. Or a single loaf of brown bread that is hard when you tap it. Toc toc.
It’s only on your own that the white light will reach you. On your own, but if that means alone enough to be no one, no one in particular. The day, like an office, has its functionaries. The alcoholics on the corner are as interchangable as bureaucrats. They have equivalent dreams, equivalent nightmares; they are all exactly the same, closer or farther to the heart of white light.
And you, who are you, alone, but with no secrets to share, with nothing to recount? White light flows through you. Light passes through your permeable body. When you cough you cough clouds of day. When you walk along the street, it is the day that walks, having hardened itself into a body, a life. Having lain itself into the course of your life like a glacier in its valley.
Like a Bela Tarr film, the narrative of your life is so attenuated, so given to stretches of nothingness, ghost landscapes, you can gather nothing together. What happened? You remember an atmosphere, a climate. It was always light. There was light everywhere. But that is a screen memory. Light does not happen, it is the way things happen. Light is what retreats from things, for the most part. It is the withdrawal of light that lets us see, and speak, and listen.
But sometimes it comes over you to blank things out. Now nothing happens, least of all your life. Nothing whatsoever: can you imagine that? It drifts through you, eventless. Drifts, and without knowing itself, seeks itself. Seeks, by forgetting it has sought and every other memory it might have had. There can be no plans. No anticipation. The absence of hope, and of all relation to the future.
Indifference, that’s what’s required. Perfect indifference to itself. A kind of sphere turning in its indifference. Can you imagine wanting nothing at all? Being lost from all orbits? Wandering out and out, lost comet? But there’s no need to imagine it, since you are part of it. I think it is you who I can scarcely imagine. You. But the light’s brought you back to me. Or it’s taking me back, all the way. Fifteen years … longer. Sweet beer on the sofa. Sweet stale beer, and crumbs from 7 sweet, stale cakes.
Evisceration
Ill and at home, but well enough again to read. Which book? I have a wall of books piled up. That one: Duras, Lol V. Stein. That one again, and not because it is familiar. To reread this one is to be gathered up again around its mystery, as though it replaced my own heart. But isn’t that the joy: to be gathered around what I cannot enclose, the outside inside, which means this new heart is as great and as wide as the night, and the space within is like the space without, as though I could take vast astronomical x-rays of quasars, planets’ rings and stray comets. As though that evisceration of which Mishima used to dream was already accomplished, and I could know my innards were always bleeding outwards to the stars.
Duras’s words are pieces of light, I tell myself, streaming above me. Absolute words, flashing like the light above the poles: how is it they have seemed to have detached themselves from anyone – from her narrator, and from Duras herself? How was she able to place word after word that it was another who spoke in her, that it was all of narration that gathered itself up to speak? As though it were the pressure of time, pressing itself forward in words that flash. Ah, but what does any of this mean?
The young Mishima felt words falling within him; he wrote. At sixteen, he was admitted into an elite literary club. His friend Kawabata – who eviscerated himself only a few months after Mishima (though he was Mishima’s senior, his advisor, and, unlike him, a Nobel laureate) – knew that such a writer only appeared every two hundred years.
No doubt – but Mishima also felt those falling words a sickness and sought to hone his body in the sun in recompense. No doubt he was right to fear those falling words, that made themselves, with him, into stories, essays, plays of all kinds, in but a single draft, knowing that as they were given to him, they were also turned away.
Opaque pebbles. Markers on what gameboard? He didn’t understand. They played him. They fell, indifferently, into the abyss they’d opened in his heart. No stalagmite in him could reach up to touch the source of their instreaming. For a long time, he bent his neck and words fell hard like rain across it. Then he raised his face, his eyes, and looked up through the words. High above, at the cave’s summit, the sun. And it was the sun that he would reach to him.
I think it was the dream of his death that allowed his words to flash. Death, that would join him to a sun above writing. A dream, for certain. There is no silence, only murmuring. Pythagoras was right: the universe is noisy. The planets turn in their gyres and a great roaring is heard. It is that we must stop hearing to hear. To speak with silence, and not words, if only to hear what will not be silenced.
What did Mishima hear as he died in the characters he let die by evisceration? The roaring of the sun, heard from within the sun. What did he see? Light, as it’s seen within the source of light. He knew what would come to befall him. It was the object of his erotic fantasies, and he staged his death over and again in his stories. He rehearsed for death – but death had already reached him. He wanted to silence the words, to make his body all surface without depth. There would be no dark, interior space within which words would fall, only brightness, as rain falls flashing in the sun.
But what does this mean? That it is my some kind of break that writing might be allowed to echo the ceaseless streaming of language. Some break, some block, as though there had to be a rack upon which the author is stretched. White sheets of agony – yes. But imagine an agony that is owned by no one and a rack upon which no one is stretched. Is it the body of the night that is pulled apart? Is it light that is torn into jagged flecks? Now I imagine it is all of language that turns there like a Chinese dragon. Turns, and is turned against us. Language seeks to attain itself. Molten language, words and sentences still, but running. Isn’t that what flashes in Mishima’s words and in those of Duras?
What are their characters? Wicker men and women to be sacrificed. What are their stories? Offerings to be burned. What unfolds in the time of their narratives? The setting fire of time; the sacrifice that must always happen again.
A Shit Stain
W. is ill and so am I. But W. will never believe I am as ill as he is. I haven’t moved from my sofa in three days; he hasn’t moved from his in a week. I’ve done little but watch DVDs; he hasn’t been able to muster the concentration necessary to watch a DVD. I’ve lost my appetite, but W has forgotten he ever had an appetite. And above all, I’m capable of writing, ‘I’ve lost my appetite’, whereas W. hasn’t touched a keyboard for a week. ‘Even your illnesses are affectations’, says W.
In his illness, W. has been thinking only of his failure. ‘What have you been thinking about?’, he asks me, ‘celebrity gossip?’ Night and day, W. has been pondering why he has accomplished so little. ‘What have you been pondering?’, he asks, ‘what you’re going to make me say on your stupid blog?’ W. has decided I have no real sense of failure. ‘Even your sense of failure is a sham’, he says.
If he were to watch a DVD in his illness, says W., it would undoubtedly be Satantango. ‘Seven and a half hours, all in one sitting.’ I tell him I watched In Her Shoes. ‘It was really good. I like romantic comedies.’ Next up, Hulk. ‘An old favourite.’
W., who is really ill, as opposed to what he calls my fake illness, has been ill continuously over the past few months. For brief periods, his symptoms withdraw, allowing him to go into the office. I, who caught my illness from W. in the first place have also been ill off and on, but it is only intermittent, says W. ‘You’re basically healthy. Robust in your idiocy.’
‘You don’t know what it means to be ill, night and day. Like Kafka. Like Blanchot.’ W.’s illness is grand, mine is petty. His draws him closer to the masters, mine only reveals how far from them I have ever been. ‘What amazes me,’ says W., ‘is how they could ever write a line.’ W., in his illness, can write nothing. He rises early each morning in the hope he might accomplish something, but every day he is confronted by his own inability. Even the small task of writing our abstract is beyond him.
Has he, in his illness, heard the rumbling of bare existence?, I ask W. He says he thinks he hears it night and day, or it might only be me talking about celebrity gossip. Am I his Eckermann, or his Boswell? I ask W. He says I’m his ape, and, remembering Benjamin on Max Brod, that I’m a question mark in the margin of his life. Well, more like an exclamation mark, says W., or a shit stain.
The Moor
I’ve been reading about Haddam, and Frank Bascombe’s small voyage away from it, and his small voyage back. 4.00 AM, and I’m up for paracetomol and cough relief: don’t I hear the line of narrative then, catching it by surprise as it threads inside me? In the bathroom, I hear calm male voices through the wall – strange, at this time of night: the voices of lovers? friends? – and I think I hear them as Frank Bascombe might, meeting them with prose, or drawing those voices up to the plateau of writing.
Now they will resound in another sense, and for others. Captured voices, details, giving themselves to that pressure to tell, to re-narrate the world that draws any of us up to the moors. By what impulse does any of us want to double the world, to join the streaming of writing to the details of everyday life? And it is on the everyday that Frank Bascombe is concentrated – details, details, a mad profusion.
Richard Ford writes biro on notebook. I can imagine that – and in my mind, he’s a cousin to another great notebook writer. And parts of Peter Handke’s No Man’s Bay are as dull as parts of Independence Day, but are also just as beautiful. Strange knot by which Ford loops the circular horizon of America – its possibilities, its promise, even beyond those of the battle Bascombe notes between Bush and Dukakis – within the small circumstances of a life, over a weekend. I imagine that if you unfolded Frank Bascombe’s tale in the right way, you would find all of America opening up, like one of those paper puppets you made as a child, with numbers written on its inner edges, opening and closing as it was puppeted by your fingers.
All of America; America – the whole country, but also the sense of America as project, as if it was a newly discovered country; innocent, eternally new America that opens itself from these pages mad with detail. On the back cover, a quote to say the book is a masterpiece. It isn’t one. A sport, a weird outgrowth: this is a book written up on the moors, written to celebrate solitariness, a voice detached from life and letting life echo in itself.
Frank Bascombe’s voice. But in its mad profusion, not even that. The man alone, says Aristotle, is like a god or a beast. Bascombe’s voice, it seems to me, attempts to pass itself off as a common voice, the voice of anyone with open eyes and descriptive powers. It has real beauty. It spoils us: few books flash with such sheets of prose; few books are so lushly precise.
But his voice is uncommon, alone – Bascombe is more alone than anyone. His measured, reasoning voice lets echo in its mad prolifigacy a narrative pressure that seems to draw something of writing back into itself. An inhuman voice; a voice that gives body to itself through detail so it can pass itself off like any other. And it is this voice, I imagine, that magnetises Bascombe, and draws him up onto the moors.
At four AM, Bascombe’s voice is more alive than I am, threading through the darkness. Where is it going? But the question is where it has been – everywhere, I tell myself – this voice that has exhausted everything. And isn’t this clear the more strongly it attempts to cling to the surface of the world? Details, details – and too many of them. Great, dull patches where nothing happens. Slownesses like long-necked dinosaurs chomping in the sun. What boredom! Who could inflict such a book upon themselves?
A masterpiece? A mutation. A kind of cancer wherein narrative, narrative pressure, splits into a million flashing shards, like the world seen from a dragonfly’s eye. But it is a necessary book, and I thank it for carrying me through these weeks. Alone with the book, I am as alone as Frank Bascombe, and more alone than him. It is his voice that threads forward in me at 4.00 AM in the morning. His voice as it seizes details and eats them up, his voice that never turns itself away from taking a bite of the world.
Who would I be, without this book? Lost, I think – but then I’m also lost with it; it’s lost me, I’m up on the moors knowing writing’s insistent pressure. Shouldn’t I throw details to writing like meat to hungry dogs? Shouldn’t I see my own life through a dragonfly’s eyes?
As I read, I think I know what it meant when Mishima said, words are streaming through me. They stream, and in an inexhaustible profusion. Ill and reading back over the last month’s writing, I must conclude that I too am mad in some basic way. Madness eats at me. Too many words. Words, streaming like the water from the burst pipe in my yard. And isn’t it to still that voice that I write here? Isn’t it to bring it to a halt by substituting a finished post for its eternal streaming?
The Day
Write at dawn, as day lifts itself from night. The day is coming: write that. The day has come: write that. So is its arrival lifted into eternity. The white page: there, alone, can writing arrive, for look, outside: soon evening will come; soon the day will fall from itself. Then the white page is the day, and more day than the day: the eternity of sense, the supernumerary day of black on white.
The flag of writing flaps in the wind of time. Time mocks it: ‘you say the day has come, but it has not come’, but writing mocks time: ‘the day completes itself on my page.’
Night comes. Time says: ‘isn’t night the ink of writing? Doesn’t the day live by the blood of night?’ Time pauses and goes on, ‘You have killed the day to make the day. Writing is also a tomb, and the words "the day has come" is the trail of blood running from the lips of a dead man.’
And writing laughs and says, ‘you know my secret. In truth, I can only write of the day in the ink of night; I bring the day only by way of deep oblivion. Somewhere else, another day is rising, a brighter sun. Somewhere else is rising the day to which all days are mere indices. How to write of the day itself, free from night? How to write in white ink on a white page, or in darkness upon darkness?
‘I know this is your dream, time, which is why you look for me.’
The Same
The same: the day comes to itself each morning. Comes to itself: the same day, the same each time. Why is it necessary to accompany it with writing? Why, if not to help the day complete itself, to complete it in a written act that sets its seal on its coming? The day comes to itself on the page. Or what is written marks its completion, redoubles it.
The day has arrived: that’s what writing says. But writing keeps its arrival; it does not need to come to itself anew. The day has come: write it now and it’s written forever. Why rewrite it, then? Why does it have to be rewritten? Now I wonder whether writing marks what the day does not have. Whether it is in writing, and writing alone that the day can come to itself.
Is that why it asks to be written, and each morning? Is that what it seeks, in the writing it asks for? Mark the day; mark the turning of the day. Mark what can never complete itself, once and for all, as the day’s coming. Set the seal on its coming; write: it has arrived; the day has come, even if, as you write, you know the day cannot come, or can only come to itself in writing.
February
The beginning of the month: nothing to write; begin again. But begin from what? Write about the yard. Write about the flat. Write about W. But only that the beginning will catch, and post give unto post continuously each morning, as day follows day. It is like the secret engine – time – that turns the finished day into a new one. The work of time: the page of the sky as it grows dark. And on the new page, it begins again, darkness becoming light. Why did our ancestors pray that the sun rise each morning? Not because they believed it would not, but because it rose.
Howard Hughes
W.’s been ill, he says. Again? Yes, again. He gets up, goes to work, and comes back to sleep, that’s all. ‘I don’t know how Kafka got anything done. It’s terrible being ill.’ I ask him whether his houseguest has gone. She has; and Sal’s still away, so his house is becoming like Howard Hughes’, he says. With bottles of urine everywhere? Exactly. Has he cut his hair and nails? No. ‘I’m like a wildman’, W. says.
Has he had any thoughts from his illness? None. Has his new book advanced any further? No. Has he written our joint abstract? No again. And what of your news?, he asks me. I tell him; it’s been a while; we haven’t spoken since Christmas. It’s all begun afresh for you, hasn’t it?, says W. What new plans do you have? Where will your idiocy lead you? Of what lines of flight are you dreaming?
I’m at my most idealistic at the start of the year, W. notes, whereas he’s at his most gloomy. Idiocy protects you, he says. He reminds me of my great follies in the past. ‘Do you remember your Hindu period? Your plans for a career in music? Your foray into business ethics?’ We both marvel at them. What’s it to be this year?, says W., go on, I need a laugh.
The new year! It’s always the same! New ideas! New follies! But W. is ill, and has no plans. Bottles of urine everywhere, hair and nails uncut, scrabbling through piles of unfinished writing, he staggers through the day.
My Flat
Yesterday, I swept the yard clean after the builders, and rearranged the potted plants by height – hebes and heathers, ferns and splindly shrubs – so they spread out pleasantly in the twelve feet of concrete between eye and wall. The long scar along the kitchen wall, which the damp expert said was ‘letting the weather in’ has been healed up; the thin skin of rendering, turning green from moisture, has been replaced by a thicker one, and finally, you can see a strip of darker, rougher concrete where the burst water pipe was dug up and replaced.
Inside, in the kitchen, the damp continues to spread, but calmly, changing softly the colour of the wall. Along its spreading edges, thick salt, which falls to pile at the base of the wall and along the worksurfaces. And grit still falls from one corner of the ceiling. And the wet walls are marked with mildew like liver spots on an elderly hand. Along the window sill, the plaster has turned a motled green.
The bathroom is dry now; the damp expert passed his machine over the wall: yes, it is certain, the damp course is working. And no leak, either, from the shower upstairs, though I look up still from my shower to where water used to run – where it even poured once, raining inside a room as in one of Tarkovsky’s films. But the wooden floor is still ruined in places by plaster dust. And the replaced floorboards are the wrong colour: yellow wood, instead of brown. On wood, fallen leaves from the palm. On the floor of the bath, long hairs – not mine – reddish brown on white plastic.
January
The end of a month, or nearly. Admit it: the blog is measured in months, or that each month is something like a life, beginning tentatively, exploring a new, wide territory, before rising prolifically to the plateau at the middle – the stretch of days that opens as to the wanderer in Peter Handke’s stories. But then, later on, the waste of days – diffuse anguish at the edge of the sea. Was it all for this? And what end has been reached, the soft green waves lapping at your feet?
The Cargo Crate
I came home this lunchtime to check on the workmen chipping off the rendering and pointing the brick on the kitchen wall, and it was as though I was present where I should not be – wasn’t it the flat’s time, in half darkness, curtains closed against the day? Wasn’t it a chance for absence to drowse like a lazy cat in the afternoon?
I lay down for a while and read Richard Ford, and felt a wave of prose gather itself forward in me and thought: is this my voice, or someone else’s? And then: never mind. But I had to go back to work, and forgot what was gathering itself in me to be written. Didn’t I mean to entertain the idea that you can write only when you don’t want to write – that writing begins when you relinquish it, or the desire to write, when it begins to gather itself in you, looking for itself, asking that you be absent so that it can roll forward in your place?
With whose voice do you write? By what act of ventriloquism? And I remember the image of one surfacing after a long time immersed. Surfacing, and breathing – another word for writing, or for what breathes itself to life here. And then I was to wander allusively through the several days when there was no writing: I was to write of my Visitor, presenting her only in silhouette – what an art! – or in the manner of a shadow that fell across my days. A shadow? But what is the opposite of a shadow, an image in the shape of light, and how to write of light passing through the shadow of my life?
And now the image that awakens in me is of Crusoe waking on the shore of an island. Who wakes? Who speaks? Sometimes the dream of beginning over again – a desire to lose my memory, like the protagonist of The Man With No Past, who sleeps in a cargo crate. A desire for that silence in which a voice might gather itself. The echoing walls in an empty flat. But then I know it is a voice that desires itself in me. To come to itself, but from no one’s throat; to sound, but with no voice in particular.
Is there a way of letting writing echo? Perhaps, as Red Thread(s) says of Albaich’s poetry, it must be made of space and sparseness: ‘the white of the page sings through; the words and phrases seem to float.’ But with prose? With lines and lines of prose? How to write what echoes as one speaks in a empty room, a cargo crate? Unless the blog is itself that room. The blog – my life – across which light passes like a shadow.
The Fish
Try harder!, my dad used to say to my sister when she complained she couldn’t sleep. As if you had to strain yourself and push in order to find sleep, when it is by surprise that you must come to it, or by surprise that it finds you, as when, walking through a wood, a clearing opens up, a secret vista – and I remember, now, a garden opened to our schoolbus that I would see again, years later, in Chagall’s The Poet Dreams.
Every time, it opened unexpectedly, and that is like sleep, which unexpectedly finds you, there around the corner you couldn’t turn by yourself. And then you understand that sleep was steering you to come to itself, that it was backed up behind you, and exerting a gentle pressure. Sleep calls you to itself, and what you want is only its wanting inside you. Sleep would like to join itself; sleep would like to lie down, turning inside you like a cat trying to find its spot.
That you wake up, like a diver surfacing – that awakening wants to waken in you, lightens you, and presses you upward to where the water’s bright – is the analogue of another kind of awakening. There is a state, says ancient Indian thought, of a deep sleep beyond sleep – and isn’t there an awakening beyond being awake? perhaps the two states are the same.
I can’t remember the Sanskrit term, but it is what is translated as the witness that is called from waking (or sleep): wake in awakening, sleep deeper: but it is the witness that seeks to find itself in you. To find itself, and to find you – for isn’t this, of the ancient Hindus, the truest self of all? Or perhaps it is only that it is joined to the self that sleeps or wakes that brings you to the edge of truth.
Joined – but as you fall deeper in sleep than sleep, or awake from your awakening, it also unjoins you from the normal course of your life. A relation in lieu of itself; a joining that is an unjoining: it is the witness that is the measure of you, looking for itself, seeking through your life and your dreams.
Borges has a story of the mirror people trapped by an emporer on the other side of the glass. But he says they are coming again, that the magical trap will lose its force. In the deepest mirrors of a certain province, says Borges, a fish can be seen. The same fish, I think, that Wolfe’s Severian sees in the mirroring pages in the House Absolute, gathering itself, obscure threat, to break the charm.
How can you reach the image in the deepest mirror? But it is coming to reach you, the witness, the one who would see with your eyes and dream with your dreams. Or it already roils in your dreams, turning there, hinting at itself, strange leviathan that withdraws as it comes forward, and whose scales are each larger than the whole world. And aren’t those scales what you see behind the sky, silvery blue within blue?
But it also turns in your own heart, and its turning is what allows you to find it everywhere, on the edge of your sight and the corners of your hearing. Isn’t it a version of the avatar of Vishnu that let itself be caught as a tiny fish, but then grew into its true, massive size – a fish as large as the universe – and announced itself the principle of all? Only this principle is not such, but is that withdrawal that undoes the structure by which knowledge might come to itself. Or is only undoing unleashed in that system, a fire in the forest?
The poet dreams: I remember that vista, and coming across it, always unexpectedly. A garden, and a wooden house, framed by pine trees, as though on the edge of a greater forest, a sample of immensity in our dull suburbs.
The Superficial
From where I sat, very close to the stage, I saw the shadows of her harp strings fall across her face. And, earlier, the lacquered wooden body of the support act’s guitar flash out as it caught the light. Wonderful to hear Emily with the whole orchestra there – that song, and the last one on the album, are the ones I really like. But Only Skin is too long for me – my concentration lapses – and I don’t like the strings on that one.
And what of the others? I think it’s just Emily is the one, a song for her sister – a song of remembering, almost remembrance, and aren’t you suppose to write pieces like that for one dead? Isn’t she, Joanna Newsom, too young for those kind of memories – too young to be caught back and fascinated by the past? But then I remember that children, too, live a distance from the past, and with a sense of loss.
Didn’t I, as a child, dream of a narration that would stop at nothing, that would double the whole day, but then, in its doubling, would make the day other than it was? For wouldn’t the narration be part of what had to be narrated? Mirror fell into mirror, and I remember my joy at this thought, back then at junior school. I was going to set down what Chocca said – so called because his skin was brown, but not unaffectionately. I thought, he’s the key, and I think what I sought was his unobtrusiveness, as if by noting down what he said, I would have seized also on the inconsequentiality of the whole, doubling it, and letting mirror reflect into mirror.
That’s how, I think, I learnt the superficial can have a kind of depth. But I also remember learning by watching a family friend the art of lightness in conversation, of wandering from topic to topic like a robin alighting and then moving quickly away to alight elsewhere. A flurry of wings – activity – and a little pause for stillness, and then another flurry, and so on. Light speech, lightened speech that froths around us like the bubbles in that Rolling Stone video.
And another memory, very dim, of the dinner party in Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald straining his prose to evoke what he could not show through reported speech alone. Marvellous conversation at the outset of the book, everything right with the world, everything dazzling, and then the long and slow decline: we know, his readers, how it will be. But that is because they did not know lightness: because they sought to be witty or topical – because they wanted conversation for themselves, wanted to seize and mark it, like dogs in their territory. True speech is inconsequential; real speech says nothing at all.
The Jet Stream
A square of concrete outside along the kitchen wall has been marked out in blue paint. They’ll dig there, says the man who came from the water company, though he said they were only doing it for me as a favour, since the burst pipe burst is on my land, and not in the lane, for which they’re responsible.
A favour, then, but it took them five months to come out to hear for themselves the underground river that seems to flow by my house. The workman put his ear to a long tube pressed to the concrete and listened: the pipe’s burst, he said, and then had me fill out some forms so the company could come out with a drill to see what’s what. But even then, if the pipe burst is too close to the flat, it’s my concern, not theirs; I’ll have to bring in my own plumber.
Very well, no bother, what matters is where we go from here, not what’s gone before. I say all this again to the woman from complaints who has been attached by the water company to my case. She’s extravagantly polite: ‘it was a pleasure speaking to you‘, and I think it might have been, if she is the kind of person who is happy when other people’s problems are to be solved, reminding me of my old friend in Manchester, head waitress at the cafe to which I went morning and early evening; and sometimes for the afternoon, ordering a whole pot of tea and reading this and that.
I arrived first, at eleven, when they opened, but soon there would come another man, quiet, who sat well away from me in another part of the space. Then, with his pen, he’d underline certain words in the paper – sometimes the waitresses and I would attempt to work out the pattern we supposed he was attempting to find. Was he slightly mad – ‘touched’, as they say?
That was back in the first blooming of cafe culture in this country since the 60s – hadn’t my dad reminisced about his cafe years, and the girl from English who wrote a poem about this young engineer from Madras, called ‘Anyone For Coffee’? The culture spread north to the regenerating cities, and bloomed along one street in our suburb. Bohemian life, or something like it.
I was unemployed then, or ill, or both, as others were; so many of us had been as though left behind by history and we watched in bemusement as our city was transformed around us. Did we belong in this new world? But the cafes were ours – at least at those odd ends of the day that could fall, in the cafe, to the ill and unemployed, at least before the prices rose and drove us away.
We went there, I think, to hold our day together; it was structure we lacked: a shape to time. The old squats had gone, and many of us had been displaced, ready for that long sleep that would carry us alone in our council flats through the mid nineties. For now, the cafe, and the last vestiges of society were ours.
Who spoke first? How were the lanyards extended from one table to another? I think it was when I brought our new tenant, a freshly reformed alcoholic for a morning coffee, and our happy banter again in which, he said later, I taught him by example never to talk about himself in the first person. And the cafe was no longer an archipelago of tables, each with friends talking separately, but a happy flotilla, a society.
We earned nicknames for ourselves – or, at least, they addressed by our first names, but added an initial ‘Mr’ – and they thought us a couple, the many lesbians who came there. And we became involved in their intrigues, confidantes from outside who knew nothing of the Scene.
For a time, I took tea with one friend in the garden of our house, and thought: my life is stable. But that social world was ephemeral, and began to fall apart right away. Didn’t some of us couple off? Didn’t vague enmities replace vague alliances? We were scattered again, and there were many cafes now in which to brace ourselves in the empty time of the ill and unemployed.
But how can I forget celebrating my birthday at the cafe, and going out that hot day to the Ees with one of the prettiest waitresses? Langour in the sun. She stretched white arms in the afternoon haze, the two of us in the long grass with a picnic. And as we went back again, as I thought: I should remember this. Another event to be pressed like a flower into an album.
And the time we went clubbing, and didn’t one of them, ‘the German’ we called her to each other, run her hands from the backs of my feet all the way up to my head. I was a person upon whom such moves were to be tried. Why not? Another moment, I thought; remember this – and hadn’t I learnt by then never to try to seize what was given, but to let such events fall away until everyone had forgotten them but me?
For their part, the waitresses were mostly graduates looking for work before they decided what was to be done with their lives and our joy was to share with them this brief intermission, when they hadn’t decided on their life’s course and were single, many of them, or at least in relationships they didn’t take quite seriously.
A glorious time, I thought, because their attention could be turned wholly towards you, but lightly – as they spoke, they were discovering what they said; when they joshed about it was with that lightness that comes of being released from the long chore of study, but not yet having taken on the yoke of real employment. And so they floated between our tables, all of them lovely and charming and light, sometimes sitting down with us at the end of their shifts, and sometimes ‘forgetting’ to charge us for the drinks we ordered.
They were always about to leave, and some did, but others stayed and became something like friends, since we were both stranded fortuitously together then before our lives had begun. Yes, it was our new tenant who started us talking – he was handsome and funny, and began to wear crushed velvet red trousers and a white shirt with cufflinks. We were Chorlton dandies in our stranded lives, dressing up because it was dull to dress down, and our days were very long with little to do but wander.
Somewhere far away, there was the completion of my studies, but for now, my life diffused itself across the whole of time, which I knew not as possibility, that project of the existentialists from which our tasks gain sense, but as dissipation – the flood that rose to strand me apart from myself and from anyone. A peculiar solitude, which you are hardly there to enjoy. A void into which moments fell and lost themselves. Who had charged me with pressing the essence of days?
My friend, of course, went back to drink, pissing himself as he lay half-clothed on the sofa. He left us, but there were rumours of him all about our suburb: a dandy gone to seed and separated from his companion. And the latest in an unlikely stream of girlfriends had me swept me up in madness.
She was ill, and I unemployed. Or was it the other way round? Either way, when it ended, it did so badly – I heard after from her friends the whole sad story I will not relate here. Didn’t we have, for a few brief days at the end, a semblance of a relationship? Hadn’t we made promises that didn’t seem hollow? But those promises, I think, did not so much stream in the wind that blew from our futures, as come apart in that present for which we were never quite a match.
We never sailed out under the proud flag of coupledom; we weren’t real enough, substantial enough: in what position were we to make promises? Isn’t it the pledge, for Nietzsche, that lets life become regulated? Isn’t it the contract and the promise that bind us to the time of tasks and projects?
I think I’ve always liked those who can barely keep appointments. Those who are not carried along in the stream of their life, but have found themselves becalmed in an ocean without winds or currents – ‘found themselves’, but barely even that, for it is no one in particular who has taken their place, and it is no one you meet when you meet them by chance in the street.
The question, what are you doing? finds no answer. What are you up to? likewise misses them. They speak, but perhaps they know they shouldn’t, that they do not belong to the city regenerating around us. They are of the old world, set adrift – the old welfare state, which let its ill and unemployed wander the streets. What’s become of them? Do they work? Have they been diagnosed as autistics or as depressives? Have they been prescribed a rescuing course of medicine?
Or have they fallen yet further, fallen from themselves and the what Deleuze might think as the interiority of time, as though they’d been cracked wide open, splayed to experience only time’s pure streaming? I imagine a kind of bliss might have claimed them. ‘Who are you?’ – ‘No one in particular.’ – ‘What do you do?’ – ‘Nothing.’ Suburban Bartlebys, then, with refusal in their faces and in the stubborn fragility of their bodies. Or Michael K.s, or the beatific adolescents of Korine’s Gummo.
Why, when I think of them, does Mark Kozelek’s voice come to me, and particular as it sounds live, detached from what he sings, but attached in that detachment: strange supplement that seems to void the songs from within, slow whirlwind that seizes up their words and lets them spin almost without meaning? ‘Almost’ because they are barely attached to the particularities of a life, because they express nothing lived in the first person.
And isn’t this is what is uncanny in the young Will Oldham, recording songs for the second Palace album in his kitchen, with the thunder rumbling in? And I think, too, of Cat Power’s bleached covers – songs strung out, songs washed of their colour, frayed like jeans no longer held together by their threads. Or rather, her voice gives unto no voice in particular, indifferent origin that sings without her, or with her as she is without herself, closed-eyed and singing into nothing.
And finally – the last of the holy trilogy, the presiding demigods of this blog – Bill Callahan, who records under his own name now, since even a parenthesised Smog cannot name what crumbles at the heart of his voice. Crumbles, for all the strength of his baritone, and gives itself to that streaming that he sings about on A River Ain’t Too Much To Love.
It is not his wisdom from which he sings, but from the knowledge of the simplicity of fate. A knowledge not his but that of the song that sings with him. Song, blank voiced, sings out with his voice, and though it seems continuous, and breathing, and real, it is none of those things, but the sound of a past fascinated with itself, the endless return, like fate, of the outside that hollows each of us out and opens us like a door.
These are simple experiences for me, and for which, I think, I’ve always wanted to find words. The most simple, the most obvious, and yet hidden for all that obviousness. A malady that no one suffers, or that no one suffers inside you. Inside, but there is no outside; the door is open, and through inner darkness you see a kind of landscape – a storm on the moon, ice without cease, stars driven like stigmata into the flesh of the night.
Formulations indebted, of course, to Blanchot, who is another of the demigods of the site – or is his work the soil from which it sprouts like a mushroom in the dark? Do our fascinations drive us toward our favourite authors, or are they born from that reading itself? Or are we drawn to them for what we share, strangely and at great distance, such that we choose for ourselves – or there is chosen for us – an affinity, something held in common?
To think with a thinker is more than to think about him. And it is to follow something like your fate, the destiny of a body, of a sensibility. Isn’t Nietzsche right to consider the digestive system as determining the shape and the body of thought? Strange that bodies might be joined by books. Or strange that books and songs are sloughed off like skin, drifting as you see dust motes float in a shaft of sunlight.
Stranger still that when the body sings, it is a voice that sings of the condition of singing – of a kind of power of speech that escapes your measure. As though song leaned back into Song, or singing into Singing: how to name a voice that supplements voice without belonging to it? of an initiative that began before the beginning? Of an origin that is only the interruption of origin, the present torn from itself?
But these formulations are as mysterious as any. Perhaps it can only be sung about or written. Sung, or written – or spoken, a voice that floats above images. And, each time, to let the voice – written, spoken – be caught by that Voice that speaks without words without being ineffable. A murmuring speech, an anonymous one, speech joined to all and to no one – isn’t this what is sought when writing, like speech, is thrown into the air like a kite? Another breeze. A wind above the wind, like that said to blow along the stratosphere. A kind of jet stream of song and of writing, moving in all directions in the upper atmosphere.
Perhaps I was never one of them, the ill and the unemployed. Or that my studies encased me in a bathysphere in which I could walk through our suburb with a line that fed me air from somewhere else. Was I only an anthropologist among the ill and the unemployed? Or was I like Kurtz, who had vanished among the tribes he was said to conquer? Neither, in the end; or both.
Others had faith for me. They said it would turn out well for me, but for them? They shrugged and looked at me with deep sea eyes. Sometimes I think all I am is the memory that keeps such looks, a living archive of chances not taken and barren paths. But then I know that this memorising is itself only a fold of the outside that writes of itself here, joining what cannot begin in the past and what will never happen in the future like the worn Ouroboros. Isn’t it to give a term to the interminable that writing begins? Isn’t it to give voice to the incessant?
The workmen are outside now, digging up the yard. I thought they’d bring a mechanical digger, but they are smashing the concrete with hammers. There’s no leak near the flat, they’ve discovered, and the underground river, if it flows, flows further out. But they’ll replace the pipe, they say, and have cut a long deep trench to reach the old one, summoning me out now and again to speak.
(See, on Gummo, Thomas Carl Wall’s essay Dolce Stil Novo: Harmony Korine’s Vernacular – Project Muse only)
One Man And His Damp
‘Damp’s easy to fix!’, said Blah-Feme, months ago, and with his usual confidence. ‘And it’s pretty cheap, considering’. I suspected he was wrong, but his judgement buoyed me: perhaps he’s right, I thought, and I’ve just been unlucky with all the workmen and damp companies who’ve come out over the years. But I’ve learnt since what I already knew: damp calls for a Talmudic inquiry; I will go from one wise man to another, from one to another, but none of them is really certain of the Law. There is no big Other when it comes to diagnosing the causes of damp, and subjective destitution comes when you touch a wall that is more soaking than ever.
There it is, the sinthome, naked and unashamed. There it is, strange pleasure, that, if it could gaze would look at me now from the soaked, grey plaster. And won’t it look at me again when the plaster is hacked off and the brick stands naked and seemingly without secret. Brick, wet brick, in its simplicity, its nudity, just as it stood last September, before the damp course and then the new plaster until it began again, the damp, beginning in the top righthand corner even as I held a party to celebrate the new kitchen I’d had installed, and then radiating out, strange, wet sun, to reach every part of the kitchen.
Now, three months later, its victory is total; mould is growing in patches, the damp is blackening, and a fine layer of downy salt covers the plaster. I stroke it and it flakes down: salt from the wall. Salt leached from the wall: isn’t it rather beautiful? Above me, the new joists and the wooden boards fastened over them. Dry as a bone now; nothing comes from there, the corner where the leak ran. How excited we were, the plumber and I, when we found it! Water poured down, we discovered, when the sink was emptied upstairs or the washing machine ran! It was from upstairs, and not from a copper pipe embedded in the wall! We were both joyous.
But a few weeks later when I called him again, he said it couldn’t be just the leak that was causing it. There was something worse, something deeper. And what was that rushing sound? What was that sound of an underground river? He turned the stopcock off and listened hard. It’s coming from there, he knocked the wall, from the other side of that. That’s your problem! Howay, Lars man. And shook his head. You’ll need to get someone out, he said. It’s urgent. And left shaking his head and swearing, and without taking money for either of his visits, except for the twenty pound note I pressed into his hand.
I called the water company first thing – and I would call them again, first thing, when the lines opened in the morning, for thirty days in a row. I tried pleading and wailing and sternness. I lost my will and then was filled with new hope and then bored of it all, by turns. Every day, every morning! Every single morning! I began to phone more sporadically, hope drooping even as I continued to hear, as the plumber heard, something like an underground river behind the wall, streaming all dryness away.
And in the meantime, all the dramas of work and life; in the time between everything continued to happen in its complicated way. There was a Symposium; our guests who flew in from other parts of the world heard all about the damp, and they even drove here in a taxi, dropping me off before they continued to the airport. Three Lacan-inspired theorists in a cab, driving away.
And still the damp. Always there, the damp. I’d breathe it, and imagine I breathed spores in the air. Mould in my lungs like asbestos. Spores growing in my heart. Mildew over my skin: the air was wet. Eventually, I learned I had to call the industry regulator. I called, and got straight through, one man, I imagined, in a little office; by the next day, a subcontractor of the water company phoned back: they’d dig up the lane behind my flat.
Very well, I said, having been promised this before. The next day they came, without knocking on the door, or announcing themselves. But they were far away in the lane, and the leak was close, by the wall. I called a workman in. Listen, I said. Do you hear it? He hears it. It’s where copper meets lead, he said. The lead comes off the mains in the lane and then meets copper, he said. They’re always leaking, he said. But he wasn’t allowed to dig up the yard he said. I’d need to sign a permission slip for that.
A dozen phonecalls and two weeks later – it’s December now, and chilly – a man calls at the door for me to sign a permission slip. And then two more weeks pass, and I hear nothing. It’s just before Christmas. The industry regulator is on the case, the complaints department knows me; the subcontractors who work for the water company are familiar with my name, but still nothing is done. Until finally, delaying my trip away for the holidays, they come out again to dig up the lane, the same hole, and give the same verdict. The leak’s closer to the flat, they say, and they’ll need a permission slip to dig there.
And I can hear the water rushing. Every night I hear it, rushing in the dark as though on an unknown and urgent journey. Every night, when I going into the bathroom, I hear it rushing beneath the floorboards. And hearing it by day, faintly, determinedly, seeking what ever it sought as it ran by the wall in the kitchen. I’ve signed the slip, I told the water company’s contractors. And gave up.
No more phonecalls for a time, I thought. There was the damp, and the water rushing, the one and the other. Let it rest. Until the new year, and a few days ago, a phonecall from the complaints division. A reassuring voice. ‘It’s in my hands now’. But I’ve heard that before. ‘We’ll do what we can, Mr —-; I will personally see to it’; ‘I understand your frustration; I’d be just as annoyed if I were in your position. Don’t worry, you’ll hear from us soon’; ‘It’s no good telling that to me. It’s the subcontractors you should be talking to’ – and then, from the subcontractors, ‘it’s the water company you should be speaking to. Have a word with them.’
For a time, they had me confused with someone else. ‘We’ve already dug up your yard.’ – ‘No you haven’t!’ She reads out an address. ‘That’s not my address.’ – ‘Are you a Mr Traviss?’ – ‘No, that’s not my name.’ – ‘Oh I’m sorry, we must have you confused with someone else.’ From that time on – late October – it’s as if we began again. There was someone confused with me all along. The contractors had already been out, they thought. They’d dug up the yard, they thought. Earlier still – a month after I first complained – they were similarly sure the contractors had been out. ‘We’ve records of it.’ – ‘I haven’t seen them.’
So when the phonecall comes in January, I know what to do. I log the time of the call, and the name of the caller. I tell her I expect to hear from her by noon the next day, or I would call her back (but there are no direct lines; the same queues, the same dumb music every time – the same half hour wasted, and explaining to someone new, someone else, the whole history of the problem, and that I was not Mr Traviss and never was). And I put the phone down with no expectation she would ring back.
But later that day, on a windy street, she calls my mobile and I hear her voice again. ‘I’m sending someone out.’ – ‘Great, when?’ – ‘Anytime next week. When suits you?’ – ‘Monday.’ – ‘We can’t come Monday.’ – ‘Tuesday, then. A.M.’ And we are agreed. Tuesday A.M.: tomorrow. Tomorrow!
In the last few weeks, the drying company’s been out and agreed to install dehumidifiers once the plaster comes off. The drying expert walked round the back of the house with me and pressed the wet, green-tinged rendering on the other side of the kitchen wall. Nine inches thick, he said, they built them solid in those days. I ask him if he thinks the brick’s corroded (water, the plumber told me, can eat brick from inside like acid). Could be, he said. Either way, can’t tell ’til the plaster’s off.
The next day, the Loss Adjuster and the contractors met in my kitchen. It’s got worse, they agreed. But decided in the end the insurance would pay, although I would have to get the external walls re-rendered, just to make sure. ‘I’ll get onto it,’ I told them. And I did, phoning the builders about the quote they’d give me months ago. They sent out a permission slip to sign, which I signed and posted back by return of post. And all this with no faith, with all hope withered away, but stalwart, adjusted, knowing the abandonment of hope did not preclude something happening. Down to the brick – what would they discover? All the way down – what would they find?
It’s been going on for years. I called six damp proofing companies out in turn, one after another. The water’s getting in behind the rendering, said one. You’ll have to strip it off, repoint the brick, and render it again. Above all, don’t replace the rendering, said another, you’ll need to leave the wall unrendered to let the water get out somewhere. It’s the hole in your wall, said another, referring to the long scar left where the lead pipe had to come out. It’s letting in the weather.
And still another discounted that and the other explanations. It’s your hopper, he said, showing me a thick patch of green at the top of the pipe through which it drained. Ah, I said, impressed at his observational powers. All of them agreed a damp course would help things. All of them agreed to provide one. We’ll tank it right up to the ceiling.
The year pressed on. Summer still, and dry, but I was worried at the damage the weather would cause through winter. But the damp proofers I chose were sure: don’t bother with the back wall yet. The wall needs to breathe. To breathe! But so did I! My lungs were full of spores! My lungs were caked with mildew!
Then the old kitchen went, and the new kitchen came, and I lived at Blah-Feme’s while the kitchen and the bathroom were done. I came back to check the work every morning, early, photographing it as it proceeded. All kinds of dramas: misdelivered goods, goods I had to replace from remote showrooms, the floor scratched and damaged, but it was done, the kitchen ready, and everyone came round for the party.
But the damp had appeared again. The damp, unvanquished, had appeared in the corner. And Blah-Feme said, it’s nothing, it’ll dry out. But by the next day, it had spread. And the day after, it had spread further, fanning out. And in a fortnight, the kitchen was soaked and the new, white cupboards were mildewed and the new plaster was covered in a film of water, and the air in the flat was damp again, and as damp as before. What madness!
That was September, when I called out the plumber. September after six months of damp proofers and diagnoses. September and it was the rushing river of water behind the wall that seemed most ominous. September and the water rushing like fate, a little personal Egdon Heath there behind the wall.
‘Either it’s getting better or it’s not’, said Blah-Feme firmly before he visited a fortnight ago, ‘which is it?’ I said I didn’t know, but a fine layer of salt had appeared, and it was nearly as charming as the small snails that used to fall from the hole in the ceiling. When he was round he looked at the white powder and pronounced it to be lime. ‘You’re very certain,’ I said. And he decided it was getting better. The smell’s gone, he said, and I thought he was right. Perhaps the kitchen was drying.
Back in November, I’d told Mladen Dolar, Jodi and K-Punk about the damp. Mladen asked me what I wrote about. ‘Damp, just damp.’ And they were driven off, three Lacan-inspired theorists in the taxi, leaving me at my door. I opened it, and there was a wave of damp, the old familiar smell. I wrote a post on damp, then another. Blah-Feme with Hero Harvest in Liverpool texted to say they loved the posts on damp. Even W. was moved. ‘My God,’ he said.
Back in the summer, down at W.’s, I told a prominent Levinasian scholar and her partner all about my flat. W. joined in. ‘It’s disgusting! The yard used to be filled with sewage! All the windows were jammed shut! And the kitchen! My God, the kitchen!’ They decided to visit me, the scholar and her partner, to see the kitchen at first hand.
That was in the days of the slugs, when nightly, through some nook or another, great slugs would find their way into the kitchen and then, slithering under the door, find their way into the lounge and leave translucent trails across the bare wood. My guests were impressed, watching me pick them up and hurl them over the back wall.
‘Can’t you cook them?’ I said I wished I could, dropping them into a stirfry, or steaming them like Dim Sum. Still other slugs were shrivelled along the side of the sink, where I had poured a thick line of blue slug pellets. My morning’s harvest! My guests took photos, impressed.
Back at his house, W. and I had explained my flat in Levinasian terms: the kitchen gave unto the il y a, we said, and in a Blanchotian one: the kitchen was an image of itself, we said. We went as far as Heidegger: my kitchen, we decided, suspended relationality. It was a kind of reduction. All this to explain the true horror of the kitchen to our phenomenologically-inclined guests.
‘Being is horror’, said W., ‘and horror’s his kitchen.’ We compared the idea of nausea in Levinas and Sartre, and cosmologies that saw order emerging from chaos. The tohu-bohu, said W., a scholar of Biblical Hebrew, that’s his flat. Absolute horror. He tells them they’ll understand once they’ve watched Satantango. Cosmic shit, says W., that’s what Bela Tarr called it an interview. Ontological shit, I say.
Sloane Disaster Stories
Do I have to note down the time and my circumstances as I begin to write? 7.30 AM, still early, another hour before I have to be in. ‘Complacencies of the pegnoir’ Stevens might say – laziness in a ragged dark green dressing gown instead; no ‘coffee and oranges on a morning chair’, but remnants of last night’s stir fry, complete with slices from a block of processed fish I bought from the Chinese supermarket, and small bright pieces of red chili to warm my throat at this cool hour.
Yesterday, I was awake – too awake – I thought: there’ll be a price for this. A good mood always has its cost; I suspect them; I want them to pass as quickly as possible, along with the delusions of ability and possibility they grant. Never walk out in a good mood: you will have to tolerate stupid fantasies unfurling in your head – half-dreams of achievement that are only the faintest double of the real thing. Fantasies like the images borne behind the fire in Plato’s Cave, and throwing shadows on the wall we take for our reality.
Never let a good mood soar you into heaven; clamp down on it, beat it, take yourself to the gym and punish your excess. Nothing worse than a mood untethered, that carries you into the sky of vague aspiration. Perhaps it was okay when you were young, walking along the road in a haze … the dreaminess of youth, of a life hardly begun, when you barely have to stand up for yourself: it is your youth that dreams, beautiful soul that it is, unconnected with having to earn a living and make your way in your foolishness into the foolishness of the world.
Of what did I dream back then? I won’t relate it here, but I think many of my friendships came from that dizzy kite-flying that came of good moods, being based on the credit of a life not yet lived, but still so far away as to be formless. A young man’s disease, and not, I think, young womens’; for the former, the latter only get in the way (and perhaps it is the same for men who love men, and women who love women): what is romance but a chance to poetise oneself from a relation whose term is blurred because hardly noticed?
She is barely anything but an empty space for projection: a sky in which vague, kite flying aspirations can dance in the breeze of fancy. Infatuation cannot deepen into love: what chance does it have when the former seeks only itself, and searching and losing what it is as it restlessly passes through infatuant? This is the Don Juanism of the beautiful soul, who lives only in what might be, in vague dreams of greatness that billows out the sails of his youth.
Leave those land-yachts to those who remain on the shores of life, and have not cast forth. I think the young are always rich in that – not time, but possibility: the sense of a life far forward and still indefinable, and still as great and wide as the sky. What will I be? And this questioning is luxuriance: a way of bathing in the light of distant planets, not yet the sighing of a life narrowed by those small choices that now make you run through a maze like a rat?
I suppose heirs and heiresses can sail their great-sailed yachts out to sea – possibility is, for a time, their milieu; to be young and rich is to have the infinite as your kingdom: isn’t anything for possible for one who do as they please, when their whole life is spread as wide as the horizon?
I used to be drawn to them, the rich, and passed through their lives when they pulled me up onto their deck. For a time, I could dream, like them, that anything was possible. But I was young, then. As soon as I made my way, we had cast each other aside, and forgotten our brief but happy alliance. Who was I, for them? I think I embodied arts and culture; I lent them books – I played them music. Of course, I was young, and barely knew anything, but it was my thirst that impressed them: here was someone really compelled to seek out that world they already knew, born, as they were, at a time when a certain cultural capital still seemed necessary to back up the real capital they possessed.
Still, the arts were dull to them, though they’d been to the best schools, and here was I, a curious fish, full of youthful ardency and fire, and I think they could project on me a different future for themselves, for it was true that though they lived like millionaires, they would have to impress their fathers and mothers of their seriousness.
To study the history of art and then waft through life was not really enough: sooner or later they would find themselves in a firm run by their family or a friend of their family. Seriousness, one day, awaited them; and for the women, a serious match: but they were not yet bent on finding their man, or at least they had time to pause and knock on my door in the student hall.
Didn’t I long for some unpleasantness to befall them – an accident, perhaps, or some great crisis? Didn’t X. know then to tell me Sloane Disaster Stories to calm me down (Y. paralysed after she drunkenly climbed on the roof of her house to throw herself off; Z.’s sliced up arms beneath her always long sleeved blouses? Not because I particularly wished them ill, but I wanted to know, for a while, that their kingdom was not the whole wide world.
I became a confidante; A. told me about B. and B. about A.; and a whole wheel of gossip began to turn around my room. I knew everything; I knew too much. One after another would surprise me reading, and I’d be pressed to hear a confession or a complaint. Once, one of their menfolk came down to be seduced, since to play Ute Lemper was enough then to signify homosexuality; he wasn’t sure of himself, not yet, though he whispered to me of the younger men he liked, and how his girlfriend was nothing to him, not really.
But I was no so daft to think I really belonged; my dreaminess let me range ahead into a future of arts and culture. I read Ted Morgan’s biography of William Burroughs and conceived for myself an itinerant’s life, setting travel before my mind’s eye and not answering my door when it was knocked. I pushed another future open for myself, and I think this is what drew them to me, the sons and daughters of the rich: wasn’t I in some sense a fellow aristocrat?
Of course my learning was not deep, although I talked a good game. I could barely write, though I thought I could. The heirs and heiresses wrote a Latinate prose: very sure and true, and I was left, as I still am, with a billowy lyricism that makes for a writing I can hardly bear to read, perhaps because it is the prose of one forever young – who cannot help but dream as he writes, and throw those dreams ahead of him.
What gives the desire to write?, asks Sinthome. The answer I want to give this early morning is that I would like youth and chance and possibility be reborn in me, not because I regret my life or mourn it – everything’s turned out very well, I can’t deny that – but because it is still a kind of maze in which only writing lets me look up.
Lyricism, luxuriance: I deeply regret it in myself: a blowy, undisciplined prose, and I always agree with those trolls who write to castigate me for pretension. And yet how can I help it when the early morning stretches arms in me of hope? When the rising sun – it is rising now – carries hope above me like a kite whose tail trails out in the breeze.
I distrust good moods; I do not like them. Better the end of day blankness that makes my tongue thick. Better the melancholy of the threshold, 5.00-6.00 PM, when the caffeine of my day departs my body and leaves it limp. Better quietness in the pub, and letting the eloquence of others displace my silence.
But I will say this: the lone kite of writing in the morning is not my vague and giddy transference. I project nothing of myself, I should say that: writing before content, and not the other way around, as Sinthome puts it. Writing first, before there’s anything to say (and didn’t I sit down this morning with Frank Bascombe’s voice as my topic?) and not to throw ahead a possibility from which I might live – a widening of life, a chance to become a beautiful soul once again -but to leave a furrow that said I was there and that writing broke the crust of my life and spilled over.
For a time I am only part-rat; or it is a chance to lie down in the maze and look up: the sky, imperturbably remote, does not spread wide a horizon into which I can rise. That’s why I never dream of making a book out of this occasional writing – why I will not let aspiration ride out ahead of me, and keep a firm grip on the halter of the donkey I fitfully ride.
And that’s why I never – bitter lesson – confuse the feeling of lightness in writing – the happiness of breaking through – with the merit of what is written: what is worse than reading my own prose after being carried along, say, by Frank Bascombe’s voice in The Sportswriter or Independence Day (which I’ve just begun)?
Let those rich in dreams do that. The young, and the young at heart – whose youth, I would also say, is not yet the youth of a writing that has broken from being merely their possibility. And that is why I think failure is necessary for writing – that it must begin in collapse, and that I do not believe the merits and accolades Saul Bellow lists on the flap of Humboldt’s Gift: mustn’t he have failed once? Mustn’t he have been crushed by failure?
This is what Kafka knew – and Bernhard – and Beckett. It’s what Duras knew, with her drinking, and perhaps even Henry Green, although he is always opaque for me. And it is what makes the other writers dull, or at least unnecessary – I won’t list their names here.
My own prose – what laughter! My own writing – laughter again! Nothing is justified in what I put down here. Nothing, made in the hobby shed at the end of the garden of my life. A question mark hovers above Brod in the margins of Kafka’s life, writes Benjamin, very beautifully. And a question mark hovers above this excuse for prose, this endless blowy lyricism. But I laugh at that, too, and this, I think, is why I am a man of joy: nothing is sought here except to make a mark. Nothing: except the laughter of writing that opens a small stream for itself, like lava breaking open a new flow.
The Hobby Shed
Does the blogosphere have an unconscious?, asks Blah-Feme, and wonders whether there is a performative contradiction in right-wing blogging: don’t the practices of citing, pointing, referencing and quoting overturn a simple, unilateral notion of agency? Don’t they enact a kind of refusal of the reduction and simplification of the social field?
But I suppose a libertarian right would say this is what various kinds of deregulation have allowed – trade moves more freely; supply and demand are always entering into new dances: there’s more to buy and more to sell, and the new world is a glittering ball room across which we all spin, enraptured.
But this same world depends upon the near invisible mediation of money, which to forget itself, and the measure it provides, as it translates itself so quickly into the acqusition of goods and services. Never, we tell ourselves, do we desire money for its own sake, but only for that to which it would provide access.
But money desires its own increase in our stead: doesn’t our economy depend on those who seek only a return on their investment, one which, now, outstrips what any of us could possibly pay? How many earths would be needed to pay back all debts? Our own earth is wagered, and our lives are pledged by capitalism all the way to death.
Meanwhile, money desires its increase and the whole world writhes like a Chinese dragon. Is it all we have in common: money, and the pledge unto death? Has the general equivalent cleared the ground in advance whereupon we might live in common? Bloggers depend upon another general equivalent: to write is likewise a mortgage; language needs death, if this is allowed to name the way words can function in the absence of their referent.
But isn’t there, too, a kind of writing that looks for what is lost (Lacan: for what precedes castration)? Looks for it, and only as it seeks to wager abstraction, to look for life in the midst of death in the singularity, the specificity of a voice? It matters, certainly, what is said, but there is also the ‘how’ of that saying, the voice that does not efface itself as it mediates what there is to be said.
A thickened voice, a voice congealed: there is a kind of equivalent, I think, that is no longer general. Voice alongside voice, one archipelago of posts alongside another – isn’t this a collective of movements to the singular, of the search for an idiom? An endless search, it is true, and a blog does not need to have one voice, but many.
‘Develop your own legitimate strangeness’: and this may mean the absence of a comment facility, or those long silences in which the idiom regathers itself in the darkness, ready to break forward again. But of course this is not enough. Let a million voices rise: but this, still, is nothing, when it is the same earth that is being wagered.
Then this kind of writing, blogging (mine, perhaps, despite Joseph’s generous remarks), can only be a hobby. The search for the singular, for the idiom sacrifices the philosophical task of shaping concepts like weapons. And it threatens the conventionally political task, too, of redressing injustices, of remembering the earth. Doesn’t the collective risk falling apart into voices narcissistically concerned with themselves – not, now, as they are measured by the ego, by the petty reporting of a life, but as they vanish into themselves, searching for the ‘itself’ that summons a certain kind of writing?
Writing looks into itself, fascinated. Writing flees into itself, all the way to its own voice: but this is not philosophy, nor politics, and if it seems political, this is a measure, perhaps, of how far our sense of this word has fallen. How to defend it, then, this kind of practice, if practice it is, and not its suspension? Is it more than a kind of new-agism, a private pleasure, a retreat from the buying and selling of the world? I think there is a great difference between a collective philosophical, political practice and a sphere of private bloggers.
Perhaps the end of blogging is nothing to fear. This new medium will appear old in turn. How strange the resurgence of writing in the text message, the writerly blogosphere and the way Google is programmed to search! But this is a phase and it is passing. No, the creative writing class will never disappear – and perhaps there are more of them now, and more ‘literary ambition’ than ever before. But isn’t life-writing a great distraction, a fleeing from the world into the hobby-shed?
Perhaps that is nothing of which any of us should be ashamed, especially if it pushes towards the proto-philosophical or the proto-political. The availability of theoretical blogs, and of those that attempt to think and enact a kind of politics is still impressive. But then, as Jodi says, the former depends on a slower kind of work, a different temporality.
Slight Return
Again? Yes, here again, in a post I should put in parentheses, for what is there to write now that I didn’t set down hours earlier? what, in this part of the day, evening moving towards night that is not the same as morning? The same LP – I Trawl The Megahertz, the same wind outside, the same bottle of Cava on my desk, though it is unstopped now, and empty (I only drank half – two fizzy glasses – last night).
The same -but to be here again, to write again, is necessary if I am to enjoy what Sinthome has called my Sainthood – and shouldn’t I ask, rereading his posts, whether he is not also a saint? – but then perhaps he knows that, with his punning Lacanian name. Sinthome, Saint homme: isn’t he also traversing the fantasy (supposing I myself am doing the same)? isn’t writing over again that small jouissance left in the wake of the big Other’s collapse?
Ruins all around us, but writing still, freshly beginning, and no nostalgia. Begin again, write again, and this surplus is what is left of the fantasy. A post in brackets, then, and nothing to say but everything: for to say it again is to say it anew. To say it, and worn all the way down to saying: that address, that first time which is the repeated act of faith that seems to stitch together my life.
An act – hardly an act, for it is never yet complete, or never complete enough, but there is enough jouissance here, for all that it stays unfinished. The interminable, the incessant: writing to no one in particular, for no one: a few lines in excess, a few lines unasked for, here as daylight fades to darkness.
And shouldn’t I close the curtains of the blog right now? Shouldn’t I shut off the light that lets those outside know what happens in here, in my life, between these walls? But it matters that what is written is public. Matters, then, that the act of publishing calls to a public, however phantasmal. That way I can turn from my life, or so I think. Or my whole life turns and takes aim in an act that simplifies it and pares it down.
To write at the your own edge: what would that mean? To write by leaning forward into the future: but what is that? One day passes, another. I marvel at the dried pink plaster in the bathroom, very smooth, and according to the meter of the man from the drying company, the damp course is holding. Dry, smooth walls: miraculous.
And I watch for the leak from the bathroom upstairs, and it seems that that, too, is fixed, and there is only the thinnest slither of water damage – only that trace of those great indoor showers through my ceiling. And the great plane of sanded wooden floors calmly spreads the way from room to room, even though it tilts down to the middle, both sides, to where I imagine the flat is collapsing (there was a mineshaft right outside the doorway once, I saw it on the mining survey; is that why a faint crack runs along the doorstep?).
And peace: my neighbours, very quiet, seem to be away. Peace: as wide and pleasing as the floor. Peace all around me, preparatory. Couldn’t something begin here? Couldn’t a step be taken? And I dream of that great breath I might take, to draw in all the world, and then to breathe it out again, and for the first time. Anew: but isn’t this what writing is: expiration, and not its opposite: an attempt to breathe the world alive again?
Eight thirty. At the threshold between evening and night. At the threshold, the watershed, there where two rivers might divide on either side of a ridge, or where two corries let their glaciers surge downwards, divided by an arrete.
How many times can you say it? How many times to find the words to say? But it is the words that come to the act, and not the other way around. Words that seem to belong to it, to fit – words that come, I think, because of the hour that it is, and because of the day. And because of me, too – I know that. Because the act gathers me to the edge of itself and asks, as its price, that I give it something of my life for it to consume.
And so must the curtains remain open: so this house does not hide itself from the passerby. To be published, even in this way, is necessary. To show – but to show what? You’ve worn away all welcome, I tell myself, and the pleasure is only your own.
But I am also on the outside, looking in (this wall of prose is blank to me, too). Words, streaming – whose? Whose life is being written? But it is no one’s life that matters, not now. Blackness behind your reflection in the window. Blackness: there, bottomless, you are no one at all.
Look back over the days, the weeks. Look through the categories. What have you traversed? What’s been broken through? But nothing’s been accomplished, not now, not once and for all. Again, and isn’t this the effort? To be here, and leaning into the future?
Again: whisper it: and behind your life, it is spread like a reflection on a night window, black and bottomless. The void that calls writing forward; the object cause it also is, divided in itself between the saying and the said.
Continental Drift
Morning, and I listen, entranced, to Paddy McAloon’s I Trawl the Megahertz for the first time. Narration over synthesised strings, loose – his own story, I think, or I would like to think, but not in his voice, and that is beautiful. A woman’s voice – whose? and why hers? – but it works, it’s glorious; it’s as Chris Marker films might be, though I’ve never seen one. Marker, to whose scripts I’ve linked and which I run through my head sometimes, wondering what the images might be like.
I’ve never had a DVD player, and my TV is too old for Freeview – no scart – so I’ve fallen away from films these past few years, though I used to watch two or three a day back in Manchester. How else to keep myself in my room, and working, or preparing to work, the non-flatscreen monitor on, keyboard ready, though I don’t think I really knew how to work, back then? How else: I watched films, and film after film, from the free library at the university.
But I stopped myself remembering them – stopped buying film magazines, or reading film websites: I wanted another kind of unconscious, and not to wake at night and know myself to be toting up pieces of information, facts running down in my head like the numbers in The Matrix. Neglect memory, don’t feed it – and besides, there’s something about film too forced, too all-at-once: better, for me, an open book, the surface of a page.
And didn’t I discover reading again, in the years of neglect, when my memory seemed to peel away from itself, as clouds unpeeled reveal the sky? Reading: and neglectfully, borrowing books from here and there, and not keeping them, and not remembering their authors, nor what they were about. Stir up memory and forgetting another way, I told myself. Stir it up, like a mixing stick in a cocktail. And let the white words set against the blackness of forgetting thread through my unconscious.
Unowned words – words from no particular source, loose phrases: stirred up, like silt from a river bed, turning – but for no particular purpose and pointing in no particular direction. But I Trawl the Megahertz is really lovely, rarely so – I’m playing it over, having listened close first of all, right up against the speakers, surprised and enthralled – concentrating – and then more distantly to the later tracks, there in the other room, where I finished Ford’s Sportswriter.
A woman’s voice – who is she? – acousmatically floating from her body – but who is she? – and behind whom, giving her lines, Paddy McAloon himself, who must live around here, somewhere. McAloon, whose songs we used to sing on the school bus, and whose band I went to see back in 1985, when we were really too young to be allowed in the venue.
It seems fitting my computer is slowing down, and you can see the cursor blinking slowly, and the words do not come onto the screen as I type them, but after a little pause. Fitting – as though the computer, too, had forgotten what it is, or its memory had been sent on some kind of detour. Perhaps it is also entranced by I Trawl the Megahertz, and isn’t there something to be written about singing computers – Grandaddy’s Jez, those back on Dazzleships?
Singing machines: how beautiful. Singing, sad machines: more beautiful still, and I think of the moving sculptures of Vermillion Sands. Her voice, not Paddy’s, though he gave her those lines, and perhaps in his home studio, not far from here. Her voice, floating, not his: how was it for him to hear her voice speaking his, her’s in the place of his, setting words afloat that he wrote, I imagine, in the midst of some illness, for there’s a crisis behind their untroubled surface? And now, in my imagination, I travel back to Robert Wyatt’s bedside, when he was dreaming up Rock Bottom.
Wow, things are really slowing up here. Window moves to window so slowly; the computer’s asleep – seduced – it’s dreaming, it’s carried along, swept, by I Trawl the Megahertz, and we are all asleep, all of us who read and write and listen.
Asleep – but awake, in life – awake, but with sleep all around us like a cape: what is this day going to give, I ask myself, when it has begun so dreamily? Saturday, and I let myself off work until later. Saturday, a blank, white sky, so unlike the usual high-up blue to which we’re used on this side of the country: don’t we always seem blessed, those of us who live here, when, on the weather forecast, cloud and rain curves round our region, but never reaches it?
Paddy McAloon isn’t far from here, I tell myself. Not far, and in his studio, with all his unreleased songs – whole albums. Everyone’s infuriated with him for not releasing more, he knows it. Does he mind? Has he been caught, like me, in a kind of falling? Has the glider slipped from its smooth streaming into a gentle movement down, but only down?
I’ve always warned myself: never store up stuff; never leave things unfinished – get it all out there, get it out, finished, however provisionally: do not be like McAloon and his tapes in his studio. And now? Nothing’s finished, and nothing’s being published. A long drifting, without hope, but without real suffering. A long numbness, a kind of anaesthetic against time and moving forward. Feel nothing. Or let feeling fall from thought, peeling itself away, until it lies, thought, in dreaming pools beneath the sky.
And now I think a kind of sickness has seized this computer, which is whole minutes behind what I type. Where is its speed? Where is speed lost? On what secret tasks is it bent, or has its energies, like mine, turned vastly on itself, moving inward, or is it outward, in a slow corriolis?
A white sky, and a wind-ravaged yard, the plants having fallen over in the night. The wind, I imagined, turned within its enclosed space like a whirlwind. Turning, and moving nowhere, not like the cartoon Tazz, who moves in a whirlwind, turning in himself as he moves hectically forward. The cursor beats slowly; words appear letter by slow letter, spelling out what I wrote tens of seconds ago.
The computer’s in a fugue, as am I, and how I have a name for my post: The Fugue or A Fugue: the definite or indefinite article? That was how Lynch presented Lost Highway, I remember: a fugue film, a film of fugues, where one becomes another and the end is the beginning. We waited five years for a new Lynch film, and that was it. ‘Bobbins’, said my friend, back in Manchester.
‘Bobbins’: ‘Song of the Siren’ thrown away, what a waste! Wasn’t it to have been used in Blue Velvet? But that would have deprived us of ‘The Mysteries of Love’, written in its stead. A fugue song. A song for a film about fugues. An a fugue post, itself a fugue, written on a dreaming computer by a man in the middle of life in whom a dream rises like the wave in Hokusai’s painting.
In the middle of life – how did that happen? How old am I now? – and the ocean reared up, all of it – all of the past in the present, as Deleuze sometimes says. All of it, and pressing forward, and pressing me forward, gathered as a wave gathers itself up to break.
A bland, white day; we haven’t escaped the weather, not this time. On the forecast, I saw wind was coming across Britain from the West. An American wind, or an Atlantic one, come from that eternally new country, or the eternally new sea that the welling ridge that runs down its middle like a seam is pushing both East and West.
The Atlantic is broadening, and the wider Pacific narrowing, but only a few feet a year it’s true, but one day the continents will have a new shape on the surface of the earth. I remember a simulation in a Time Life book of how our earth would look ten million years hence, or was it a hundred? Hadn’t the Americas been unjoined again? Hadn’t the Rift Valley broken another Madagascar like island from the body of Africa? Hadn’t the Himalayas been driven yet higher by India’s collision, a subcontinent adrift, with Asia’s long Southern edge?
And I remember the islands of Indonesia had thickened, too, and what had happened to our island, in the middle of everywhere, all maps, just as Greenwich Mean Time is the centre of time? But perhaps it will all be drowned soon, by the rising sea, or covered over by the ice sheets that will spread as far down as Nottingham, and obliterate my poor city on the northeast coast.
And now I can hear McAloon’s own silvery voice singing about a silver beard. He only sings a little on this album. ‘I’m lost – yes – I am lost’, sung slowly, over strings that rise silverly like his voice. I tell myself that he, too, was in a fugue, as he trawled the megahertz like a satellite dish that cups signals from the stars. Trawls them, and they trawl in him, unfurling like nebulas, coming apart, the universe in reverse, feeling its way within him back along the blocks and ridges of dark matter that have been mapped for the first time.
I scroll upwards to look at my post, but the computer is dreaming. Too slow – and it will take minutes to publish, and minutes to appear at the top of the blog, and how long when I read it there and pick up the typos, each of which drives a soft nail into my heart?
My day is widening like the Atlantic. And so is my life – widened, exposed, spread out like a pool reflecting nothing. In the middle of life, and no Virgil to guide me. Lead yourself by your own nose, like a horse. Go by going, as Cixous’ Lispector says, like a blind woman in the field. Turn into darkness like de Niro’s character at the end of The Last Tycoon: is it for reason of that film that I keep my rooms, at night, so dark? To disappear, to have disappeared, and only to be gathered mometarily by acts of attention, like the beam of a lighthouse searching in the dark?
Widening, a surface rawly exposed, and a wind passing across it: obscure pain. Indifferent pain, that of no one in particular. A stretched membrane of skin. The widening ocean, too large to contain itself. The vast creature that, on land, would be crushed by its own weight, ribs collapsing like a bombed cathedral.
Only ten A.M., but evening seems to lap against the shores of the day. Evening already, which means night at noon. But outside, the whiteness has passed. I see the forms of clouds going quickly above, and the blue sky that is usually our just desserts in this part of the country.
Vagueness
My teacher friend tells me that when it blows about out, the children are as if blown along the classrooms and corridors inside – blown about in their heads too, unable to settle, the wind still bearing them along. Tonight, the wind howls in the old chimney breast, where the back boiler is now. And I can hear it outside – no doubt it’s overturned some of the plants in the yard, including the one whose pot broke a few weeks back, and that stands, a cone of earth held together by roots.
In my vagueness I sometimes tell myself I should go down to B & Q for a new pot; nothing happens, though. And nothing ever does, not really, vagueness having turned my life into a glassy surface remote from whatever vague place I occupy. Yesterday a long post, botched. A long, sprawling post, replying to everyone. And today? Enough to get through the day. Enough to link moment to moment and live all at once, in a forwards direction.
Did it matter that I finally let myself hear Self Portrait – there’s a few artists whose LPs I ration myself, so there will always be new things to be discover as the decades pass?; Bob Dylan is one – The Fall are another, old constants, to whom I’ve been listening almost as long as I’ve been listening to music, but things to get by both of them, still. What kind of faith in time does that reveal? A faith that my life will spread out, decade after decade?
Lately I’ve felt farther from work that ever before. Vagueness keeps me from it; a kind of mist descends; it is not unpleasant, or not merely so. I thought to myself today: it’s 12 days old, but I’m already lost in this year. It’s as though I cannot break the surface, cannot breathe, or act. A single clean sentence, I tell myself. A single simple action – a gesture arising of itself, natural. But it doesn’t come; it doesn’t happen.
The same, and again. The same, with which I used to be content: remember when you were unemployed, and took the same walk over and again. Remember it, and X., always exasperated at me for taking that same walk, and wanting her to take it with me. Ah, what secret autobiography could be written of those who I disappoint. Didn’t she leave me in disgust? Or did I leave her? But I’m not capable of that.
I remember accepting a ride home from her from town, and just getting out, and never seeing her again. Stranded, jobless, what kind of prospect was I? I never complained, I said to her, I wasn’t that type. And I was looking for work back at Hewlett Packard, where I was before I went to study. She kissed me on the cheek when I said that, in pity. She pitied me, but what of herself, when a year and a half before she’d told me breathlessly of her great plans? At least I never had such plans, I thought to myself then. Never – I knew they couldn’t happen, and to me above all.
But I shouldn’t follow the winding course of autobiography any further. Discretion. Respect that. Ah but to follow it and to write of those who looked at me in disappointment, when I’d told them from the first how it was going to be. And I was right, always. And contentedly so. What a curse is ambition, and how happy I am without, living at the periphery, where we all should live! That reassurance at least in the midst of that vagueness that dissolves ambition.
Yesterday, an expert on drying came out to look at the kitchen. Hack away the plaster and expose the brick; put in the dryers for a fortnight, and then see. I agreed. And today, the loss adjuster agreed, and met in my kitchen with the manager of the workmen who were to carry out the job. How impersonal it became, my flat! The meeting place of strangers, the damp a problem others were to solve.
Mould forms on the wet walls. And there’s a layer of salt at the damp’s edges: I like it, and wonder what metamorphosis it signifies. Does it mean the plaster’s drying? The damp’s not in the air as it used to be. But the drying expert said my damp was off the meter – he’s only seen a few cases like it, he said, very friendly. We went into the yard, past the plants, and looked up at the wall.
He didn’t know what was causing it. It was a mystery to him as to everyone. But still the sound of rushing water. Still that sound, which perhaps only I can hear. Is that the source: a burst pipe, an underground river flooding through concrete and into the brick? What does it matter? Vagueness descends, and I forget everything but the struggle to join minute to minute.
Later, having spent a whole day adrift, wandering from here to there, unable to focus or to concentrate, I copied a chunk of posts from Larval Subjects to annotate: I gave myself that job. Saturate yourself with Lacan, I told myself; become damp with it – let it seep into your hidden places and then leach out of you, leaving a fine crust of salt on your skin. Hadn’t I made a plan to write a post on each of the types Fink analyses in his Clinical Introduction?
This is the Year of Psychoanalysis, I said to myself a few days ago, just as other years have meant other things. Didn’t I saturate myself, once, in Heidegger? And then the others? It came to end with Deleuze, something failed in me. That was three years ago, The Great Summer of Work, when everything began to fail, and I knew myself to have been cast adrift, becalmed in the great wideness of the vague. I tried to work; I remember it – everyday, across the field and back, eight to eight in the office, and wanting only to read, and write.
Weeks passed; months; a whole summer. But something had failed in me, and I was back again disappointing X. back in my years of unemployment. Work was a ritual to hold myself together. But it was only an empty form. I was open somewhere else just like the field. Somewhere else I was lying down and the clouds were passing, and a blank and sightless sky beyond.
Is vagueness the grounding mood to which I’m attuned? The ground of all my moods, the obscure centre about which they turn: I know it only when they seem to come apart, those other moods and there is only vagueness behind. I remember vague days in Manchester, David and I in facing arm chairs, rain outside. ‘Let’s give up!’ he said, of his attempt to work, and mine. What point was there? It was raining again, the weather was heavy again. And here, on the other coast, where it is nearly always fresh? How can vagueness survive here, when it should be blown away in those coastal winds that take the clouds very quickly across the sky?
The whole sky seemed to be moving tonight, as I walked home. The whole sky: and I could tilt back my head to see it, not being on my bike, wanting to walk and be reassured by the measure of walking. To walk and in my steps join moment to moment and succeed in entering the rhythm of time, observing its external form, if nothing else. Its form and not the strange matter of time torn apart, of moments that never achieve themselves.
Do we really desire to desire (Lacan)? I wonder if it assumes a too unitary point from which desire begins, or have I misunderstood: is it from desire that we are each of us born and that tacks ahead of us? Well, that great initial gust has left me now. Or at least it does not bear me along inside, as my friend tells me it bears her schoolchildren. The wind is there only to reveal the sky behind: my vagueness, absolute, and so simple it barely seems mine.
The rivers are flooding, I see on the news. Swollen rivers, overrunning their banks: isn’t this the afternoon lost to vagueness? White light on water. The clouds tearing across reflected on water. Nothing is hidden; it’s all there: mystery, and all at once. A mystery of the surface, of the sky’s lack of depth: I would say, quite certain, that I inherited my vagueness, and my dad had it too, and, like me, he sought at one point to let himself be claimed by it yet further – he cut down on tea and coffee; he faced the evening uncaffeinated, just as I do.
I strand myself in the afternoon, but with that steady knowledge that another day is rolling round, and morning will come again, that eternal freshness in which work might begin. I think it takes a kind of wisdom to bear it as it is, without caffeine or alcohol. A man who drinks is interplanetary, says Duras. And: an alcoholic is cosmic. I think that’s true – I think to drink is to stir up the sky, to shake it and watch its patterns. To see again the cosmic and the whole afternoon, vaster than the universe with the courage of drink. The whole sky like a nebula, torn apart.
What did Pascal say? ‘The silence of infinite spaces terrifies me’ – something like that. A quote Bernhard sets at the beginning of one of his books; and don’t I remember, very clearly, telling a friend as a child that each star in the sky was a sun like our own, and that each might have planets like our own, and that someone might be looking down at us, a gaze lost in their sky, just as ours was lost in ours?
The chance of this post came after everything, after the whole day passed and I could find no way to mark it. Perhaps writing is a way in which desire gives itself to itself, playing with what it might become like a seal balancing a beach ball. Eternal youth: is that writing? Is that what writing would mark as the morning opens? Just that, at the beginning of the day: a spreading page, a page spread out, and it is enough merely to have coincided with oneself for long enough to begin.
To begin – and just that: isn’t it enough in my years of vagueness? Isn’t it enough, at the outset, at the beginning of the day, to have recorded my presence? I was there to write. Here I am: nothing more. Addressed to whom? Calling whom? Not even myself, else why would the act have to repeated – lines of writing that precede any work I might do? An act and not an act, or one that is only an indication of what it might have been. A paragraph – several – that I forget as fast as they are written. A mystery to me, a damp surface by which workmen come and go.
But the vagueness will come again, like mist. It’s always on its way, the same and always the same, as sure as the writing that struggles against it. Faith: that it will not swallow everything. Faith: that the morning will roll around, and there will be writing again, just as there are always more LPs by Bob Dylan to hear.
Man Bags
‘You need a man bag’, says W., and shows me his. ‘You see? You can fit everything into it. Everything and anything.’ His bag sits on his hip, and hangs from a leather strap round his shoulders. He decides we should spend the day before the conference looking for a man bag for me. ‘You need to smarten up. Rucksacks won’t do. Man bags are the thing.’
‘What have you got in your man bag, then?’ I ask W. We’re on the train now, travelling North. ‘I’ll show you. A notebook.’ He places a large notebook on the desk. In the front, I write in black ink, and take notes from presentations.’ He shows me. – ‘Impressive.’ – ‘And in the back, I write in red ink, and develop my own thoughts.’ – ‘Doubly impressive.’ We both think back to our friend P. who taught us this trick. – ‘Of course P.’s intelligent. We’re not.’ I ask W. to see his notes. ‘What’s this drawing of a cock supposed to mean?’
Next, W. takes out his current reading. ‘Logique du sens. I don’t understand a word. Not – a – word. I don’t suppose you can help me, either.’ Next, he sets down a packet of moisturising wipes. ‘Very good for the skin. Calms you down. See, this is what going out with a woman teaches you.’ What else? ‘Nothing else. But I’ve got room for everything in my man bag.’ I tell W. his man bag is very continental. ‘Oh yes, I’ll bet Nancy has got one. And Agamben.’
The countryside is passing by. We’re in Scotland now. ‘Don’t you feel lighter? Isn’t the air fresher?’, says W. – ‘I feel freer somehow.’ – ‘So. What have you got in your rucksack? Go on, show me, I could do with a laugh.’ I take out a gossip magazine, and then another. I picked them up from our last train journey, without W. seeing. He gasps in horror. ‘My God, there’s no hope for you.’
Then some snacks. Nuts, first of all. ‘What kind of nuts are those? Can I have some?’ Then popcorn. ‘Popcorn? No wonder you’re getting fat.’ Then pretzels. ‘Where do you think you’re going? Up Everest?’ Then a book. ‘Load of shit. You read too much secondary stuff.’ Then my notebook. W. very pleased with this. ‘Let’s have a look.’ He flips through the pages. He’d taken it from me at another conference in order to write down his Hebrew question before he asked it. ‘See, that’s real Hebrew, that’, he says. ‘Ah, my Hebrew question! My finest hour!’ He’s quoted from the book of Genesis from memory, in Hebrew – we both remember that. ‘Ah! My genius!’
Then he tosses the notebook aside. ‘You should write from the front in black ink, and from the back in red ink,’ he says. ‘P. taught us that. Remember?’ – ‘He’s cleverer than us.’ Yes, W. concedes, he is. ‘So, what thoughts have you had? What would you write in red ink? Tell me. I need entertaining.’
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