The Sparkler

Of course, you can set to publish posts on past days, too, which I often do, making a secret archive only visible when I scroll back from month to month. But then I never do that, seeing them by chance only when, for example, through curiosity I look at the blog through a feed. It is the knowledge they are there, that the architecture of the blog conceals another, and there are fossil-posts intercalated among the others, which sometimes have only a secret meaning, and one that I, too, have forgotten.

To whom are these signs sent? To no one, and not even myself. But also to everyone, potentially, insofar as they are published. Can you alter the past? Perhaps to send posts backwards in time, or at least to withhold them from publication until a month is up, and they’ll no longer appear on the front page, is to open the past wider than it was: to prop a stick vertically in a crocodile’s mouth to hold it open.

Now the past will not shut tight; there will be a few secrets left; somewhere, in the darkness, there might be posts that bear no meaning in particular, meant for no one, not even me. Dropped idly into the past, or left to open there like night flowers that bloom away from everyone’s gaze.

Then, too, I wonder whether it is an architecture they open, or rather the fissures in what accretes here like the coral reef. Post lies down on post – but what of the cracks that pass through them all? What of the fissures that attest to the lines along which it is ruined, rather than the structure itself? A counter-architecture then: a way for what is built to be unbuilt, the unmaking of the made.

But what is this to say? That what is made here unmakes itself in secret? Or that there might be a way of erasing writing as it is written, so that only its edge remains, like the tip of a sparkler in darkness, and the circles made as you turn it in loops, that fade quickly from the night. Then it is the night itself that speaks – the darkness set back from the momentary figures drawn by writing.

The night as the past – is that it? Not the beginning, but what never begins in beginning – the same that returns and as the decay of what is written, its fate. I think that’s it: the secret law of writing, the blackness it vanishes against and that it lets speak in its exhaustion.

Fate: then it is the inexorable that writes. The past is that, and inextinguishable; I will not find its end. And, as I search – or as it searches for itself in writing, looks to return to itself in that loop that joins past to future – it is the future that opens, but now pushed beyond itself, beyond anything that might happen.

And I know it in the future, as in the past: the return of what comes by way of writing in order to return there, to itself, and in repetition. To say nothing other than itself, but, in so doing, letting the sparkler’s tip of writing speak, making loops against the darkness.

I believe in this intensely. I think I discovered it here, and by this writing – or at least discovered what I had written elsewhere, and in another key. But there (elsewhere) it was written about and here it is done, and wasn’t that the aim?

‘I have a project’: Jodi reminds me of the journal Kierkegaard has Quidam write, that is set in different strata of the past: one set of entries from one year ago, and another from a month: might one not conceive of a set of posts that might only be published years from now, and when everyone is dead?

In my fantasy, they outlive us all, and lie down like gems in the strata of dirt that will form over our cities. And then, too, in my fantasy, my life is only that tip of fire in the dark, looping even as writing’s hand holds the sparkler.

Somewhere else, I would like to rest like starlight reflected upon ice, flashing back up at the sky. Or like light on water, opening a million eyes into the night. Writing is also a kind of prayer – not for you, the writer, but for itself, its own survival. A Jew cannot destroy a piece of paper on which is written the name of God. And can you erase the prayer that might always be found in the world wide web?

Speak, and wait for those who descend like frogmen to probe the mysteries of the deep. Perhaps they will never come. But what does it matter? Writing is patient. I find that very beautiful. Patient, and waiting with indifference. Hidden too deeply for even wood s lot to find.

Am I guilty? not guilty? Quidam’s question. And of what does Bataille accuse himself when he names his notes Guilty? Amazed that anyone publishes except on the net. Haven’t I found myself defending blogging (not my own practice, but that of others) in the last few weeks?

Enough. Time to keep quiet for those who can’t see it. But how to publish beneath net and web? How to escape the net’s trawl and the web’s stickness, and to let fall, as into the deepest ocean, what is here written? I admit I will not change address and lose those who link to me as by strands of silk. We are together somehow, and falling. ‘Angel, angel, down we go together.’

Ah, but that is my fantasy as I yawn and let my back arch like a bow. Isn’t this writing as easy as the rise and fall of my chest by breathing? Ease: the word gives me an image of shoal of fish quickly passing. Follow them; follow writing – but how to let writing draw me to itself? How to find the current that makes it easy?

Push out your skiff into the river; drift. ‘Go by going’, as Lispector says. And then may a current seize you, even as it only tries to return to itself, and to what never began. But the origin is rising like a kraken, like Erebus at the bottom of the waters. I think it is the past that is rising, or the future, and what does not fail to come like fate.

Drop your posts into the past, then. Cast them from your hand into the water, and watch them glow as they fall, and then disappear. Faith: more is written than appears. Faith: that the most buried writing waits for readers, and the mouth of the blog will open one day like a crocodile’s, and you will see them glowing there.

‘I Have a Project’

One blog feels another appearing in its outstretched filaments – by the record of its stats and referrers, say, which record incoming links, or from trackbacks. A new blog: and it can be opened up, in another window: is it brand new, or only new to you who have found it, such that you cannot really call yourself a discoverer?

Happiness at the thought that alongside your corner of the blogosphere that there are other corners, whole forests of blogs and links. Happiness that you have stumbled into it as by turning the handle of a secret door, or is it that a door has opened into your own corner, and the blogs you keep around you?

Sometimes, you forget them almost as soon as you open them up. Read, scroll down, and then look through the archives: another life, another path of writing, now alongside yours. How often do they update? Is it a living blog, or a dead one? Dead ones can have their charm, and how sad when an old, dead blog disappears.

Where did they go, The Young Hegelian and No Cause For Concern? Many times I went back to wander through their corridors. But Invisible Adjunct is still there, one of the first blogs I read frequently. And will mine, too, disappear one day? No matter, when there are new blogs proliferating.

Perhaps it will crash down like a telegraph pole, carrying incoming links like cables down with it. But that, I think, is too violent an image. Now I see the links snapping like web filaments delicately breaking. Broken links wave like filaments in the air. Who notices they are broken? Who follows them? No one.

No one: and isn’t that beautiful? To disappear, drawing oneself from the corner: isn’t that what you want? In some way, I am the opposite of Sinthome, with what he tells us of his narcissism. I think by this blog I want to prepare a kind of sacrifice, but one no one will notice as it burns. 

To be anyone at all: what kind of fantasy is that? No self-analysis here, however it might appear. A kind of drifting, just that. Don’t wake me up, that’s what I’m telling you. I don’t want to wake up, not here; I am too awake in the world. And isn’t that it: that one who has to speak too much, and with too much reason sets speech loose here instead?

Speech set loose – but now without forethought, without preparation, unless a whole life lived was preparation, unless all the books I’ve read weren’t preparation enough. But for what? To fall asleep and write asleep, just that. To write asleep and as the voiceovers sound in Godard films; in In Praise of Love: ‘I have a project‘.

Scarcely a project, scarcely that. Unless the film follows the way a project wanders, lost from itself. A wandering speech, a speech lost but which, for that matter, does not want to wake up. Or, perhaps – and this is how it will end, though it will never end – I will wake into another life, not mine, just as though I were a god who lived my life as an avatar.

In my foolishness, I search for old posts I wrote that seem important to me. Disappointment follows – but doesn’t that mean I’ve made progress? To wander back through the archives is to see the prose lose its life: does that mean, then, that today’s prose is more alive? But even this prose, the freshest, I find repugnant, and sometimes I make great plans for weeding out most of what has been done.

But I am writing too much. Or rather, awakening is rising up through my writing, like a creature coming up for air. And now writing is drawn towards the surface where it must stop so that I, awakened, can take real breaths. Ah, but won’t I miss it almost as soon? Won’t I carry something of my sleep with me, dragging behind me like a robe?

Like a sleepy child, I love what I’ve lost. Can’t I close my eyes again? If only to know the one who falls in me before he rises. What’s his name? What kind of beast is he, who knows nothing but to fall? Sometimes I imagine that all blogs are falling together, but linked together, like skydivers holding hands.

But isn’t there a way in which we rise, too, each of us? Do not each of us, in their own way, come up for air? But then, too, we are each that child who rubs sleep from its eyes, wanting to go back to bed. And isn’t there something in us still falling, still asleep in waking?

Perhaps this image is too idyllic. Or I should add others, which I discovered only through my own wandering. That it is not from sleep we would awake but from the terror that inhabits sleep – a stirring presence like the Biblical Leviathan that, for a time, calls you from the heart of what you write. That there is an awakening within sleep, a kind of secret vigilance that keeps watch while you do not.

And isn’t it from this beast you flee in wanting to find your way back from the world, and that it is fear you can see in your own eyes, as if your pupils’ blackness was borrowed from his own? And then you’ll see more than you can see, and know your sight reveals itself in a kind of blindness, and that, at that moment, another writes where you cannot, but like an idiot, he can form no letters.

But this image is too grand, too dark, and I think once again of anonymity and neglect. Because there is something triumphally unimportant about writing: it does not matter; it matters to no one, I tell myself, and not even to itself. As if it was born only by neglecting itself and lived through this neglect. As though it wandered without memory and without sense.

How to follow it, then? How to fall, there, to its level? By not caring enough. By not wanting enough. By writing as one might casually brush away an insect. It does not matter: say that. I’ve failed: say that, for isn’t the abandonment of ambition its condition? Or rather, of ambition abandoning you, like Isaac Luria’s God, who created the world as he fled it, and for whom the universe is only the fabric torn open in his escape.

To be abandoned, then, but not to yourself. To a kind of distracted solitude, like a child doodling to pass the time. It doesn’t matter. An abandoned notebook; a graffiti tag no one needs to understand. Why write? To let writing abandon itself. Why? To let writing not matter: and isn’t this what remains of a project at this blog?

A project: but what throws itself forward? After what am I thrown? The attempt to abandon writing by giving it to itself. And then to offer my life, the substance of my life, as the pyre that must burn so it can come into flame. But that, again, is too much. To write of nothing at all, nothing in particular, making no claim. To write as I imagine anyone might write, as though I joined them, anyone, everyone, as they pass along the street like the commuters I used to see in London.

Let nothing distract you but distraction, I tell myself. Write like a god, or a child, I tell myself. There is nothing to begin, and nothing important to say; write like one who has no belief in anything, like the most ordinary person of all, drifting with the others in a crowd. But one so ordinary, I tell myself, he’s a cousin of Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith, but one who does not leap as he walks, but falls – who walks only by falling forward, stumbling, and who speaks in a stammer, like Moses.

You see, I am not eloquent; or what appears to be eloquence and writely style is only borrowed, and I’m not sure from where. If I read back, which I do rarely, I notice that I do not follow the rules of grammar: there are phrases of which I am unsure, but I set them down anyway.

Beyond Moses, who stammers, isn’t there one whose speech is borrowed, entirely borrowed, and isn’t he more admirable than that? Whose speech clothes nothing, no thought, and is itself a garment sewn together from others. And who is he, the imitator?

‘I have a project’. My speech is not my own; I find that a wonderful admission. What I write is not mine; that, too. To write as I roll over in my sleep. Or as in those rare nights where I forget what happened because I drank too much. Or when, in imagination, I meet one I know on the street who does not know me. ‘But I know you, don’t you remember?’ – ‘I’ve no idea who you are.’

The Most Negligible

Too often I write to say nothing at all, or only: I am here; or rather – I was here – and isn’t that the strangeness of reading diaries that have been transcribed as blogs, updating every day, though they were written a century ago: for does Barbellion really write alongside me? and Kafka? But they are here nonetheless, and very close, and each word in their diaries lets them say, each in their own way: I was here; once, like you, I wrote to mark the days in their unfolding – one day, another, and when I could not see the great wars you know are coming like storm clouds from the horizon.

‘Then came long years of restless wandering, culminating in the misery of the second world war …’ From Janouch’s introduction to his conversations with Kafka, where he says, even as ‘Kafka’s twilight kingdom of shadows became a perfectly ordinary day-to-day experience’, he gets out the notes he wrote back then, as a 22 year old, and decides to select and arrange them anew.

Appelfeld says we cannot understand what the death of millions might mean, when the death of one close to us is already overwhelming. I have found little about Janouch, but I feel I know him in some way through the conversations he records. From his presence that lets Kafka, even a fictional Kafka – Janouch’s invention – speak in the way he did.

This morning, just as any other, even as I imagine myself smoothing a page on which to begin to write. Smoothing it, this imaginary white surface, in order to make a mark as for the first time, just as I once saved to buy with my pocket money the pads such as you used to be able to find in W.H. Smiths. What happiness to begin writing on the first loose leaf page, to begin, to make a beginning, and with a fine-tipped pen!

I learned to write with a minute hand, and when I came to keep diaries, from the same stationery, but hard-bound now, and a day to an A4 page, it was with such a minute hand that I filled them. Perhaps it took time to know it mattered little what was said, and that what was written was never important enough but to be set down in anything but a sovereign neglect.

Neglect: is this why I think no one should speak about blogging? – or that one might do so only after writing a million words or so, coming up for a gulp of air having descended very deeply? But still the joy of reading blogs by those of whom we know the least, who turn themselves away from us except for what they chose to show, and how glorious that showing, fireworks against the darkness, when it is from the darkness of anonymity from which they write – and to let, as I read, the most negligible carry me into its arms.

I think I would like to read of nothing at all, just as I would like to write of it: to mark the passing of days, and the fact that each of us is alive, though our bodies are so delicate, and don’t I always worry, upon saying goodbye, that I will never see the one to whom I wave again?

… As The Blogger Said

I think I like most a writing whose source is obscure, a buried writing. Do not link to a blog where the photograph of its author looks at you face on: it is unbearable. The author should look away, or her image be replaced by one of someone else: might it then be possible to use an analogue of that old phrase, ‘… as the poet said’ when you quote another? ‘… As the blogger said’: but now to refer to any blogger, all bloggers, and we are all the same, falling through our lives together.

Perhaps you should always set your post to appear in the future, as is possible on Typepad. To let your words survive you, and survive everything (but a writing is not truly neglected when you have to pay a subscription for your account …)

Mandelstam: ‘I wake from the dead/ to say the sun is shining.’ But when did he write those lines? Was he was already a prisoner? The miracle: those words reached us. But also that the sun is shining, as I can write of this bright morning.

Runs

Sometimes there come runs of posts that seem to be important. Waking, I already hear sentences that seem borne from yesterday’s posting, as though it were the secret work of dreams to push forward what was thought the day before: that it is dreams which work, or perhaps that they have been made to do so, being transformed from a mess of impressions to an indication of what is to be written in the morning.

And a sense of the fragility of such runs – that the visitor from Porlock (was it Porlock?) might interrupt them; that some illness might come, rising as out of the water like a whale’s back; that I must make a trip to another part of the country and come back exhausted. And then the more general urgency – why do I feel this? – that there is not much time, and everything must be written now.

Foolish superstition: those who write much will die young. But mightn’t death be brought about by writing much – too much? Foolish thoughts, foolish superstition. And when there is no run? When the morning beaches you without thoughts, without phrases that call our promiscuously for the company of other phrases? No thought – nothing to be said, to be written, but only the desire to say, to mark my passage.

Because my sleep is never unbroken, and I awaken, usually, much too early, sometimes looking at the clock to find it was only two hours since I went to sleep, I regard it as an achievement to sleep late – to reach eight o’clock, say, or – but this never happens – nine. I always think that when I have no thoughts, when no run of posts bears me from morning to morning, I deserve to awaken later, beached guiltless and thoughtless on the shore. But this never happens, and without such a run, the hours before daylight are more hollow – for with what am I to fill them?

To live on one’s own is to know well the strangeness of the illnesses and fatigues of the body – but also those moments of strength, of possibility. How was it, for a time, that my evenings woke up because of writing? For a few weeks, tired, I’d gone to bed at eight and watched episodes of The Simpsons streamed on the laptop. And then – some posts that let the evening broaden and spread outwards: now the early darkness did not bother me, and behind the curtains, this room was a cave in which, sitting upwards at my desk, typing, I was moving and the room through time, through my past, which came alive again, and so to the future.

For a few evenings, it continued in this way, and I was eager to come home, rather than staying out to drink. Home – and to write, because for a few days at least, writing was possible and it gave me the possible; the evening was thrown like a spear into the future. And then, of course, it fell away as it must do, and I was left only with a sense of energy unbound. Not work, then, and the steadiness of work, but a scattering, and in all directions. What was there to do but to retreat to the other room, behind the bevelled glass and lie there as the hours passed unmarked, all the way up to sleep?

I decided instead to drive my evenings on by reading, and so ordered many books – some difficult, some easy because they were books I had before, and that I’d read before, and to read was to glide, as I was doing last night, when I finished two thirds of the first book of Gene Wolfe’s tetralogy. I made it all the way to midnight: fabulous achievement, burrowing through the night.

Possibility was mine; hadn’t I already braced myself for this new reading – my first in 15 years, I think – by reading speculative critical studies by Robert Borski and others? I don’t think I can resist a mystery, and the detective work that comes from working things out; braced by Borski I would read attentive for the clues that would guide me in understanding the mystery of the book (or would only lead me deeper into the mystery, as I know it is not bound up, say with the question of Severian’s ancestry, so much as what gives and withholds itself by way of Wolfe’s prose).

Always there is the writing – Wolfe’s supple, strong-limbed prose – and those asides which make the fiction come alive: those lovely pauses in the story that I think I like more than the story itself. But I made it all the way to midnight, and to the brink of this day, today – and wasn’t that what I wanted: to be carried by reading through evening to night?

Of course there is also my review to think about; I should be writing that – but sometimes it is sufficient just to get through days and nights as I imagine does an ordinary person: one who lives according to normal rhythms, who has strength and then rests in the evening when his strength is exhausted. Are there any such people? And besides, what do I know of exhaustion? Didn’t the weights have to be lifted from me when the other day I loaded too much by chance upon the barbell?

In the gym, I allow myself to read Saul Bellow as I train, but I’ve lost the plot of Humboldt’s Gift so infrequently have I gone lately. I think it will be necessary to turn a new page in my life, to begin again, in some new way. And that requires travelling back to the head of the day, to the place where resolutions might be made, or renewed.

But what resolutions have I? It is enough, today, just to write. Enough that in the hours before dawn (but dawn comes very late; it is winter) that I can make my mark, or rather make it again, having forgotten what was written yesterday, or remembering only that a mark was made and must be made anew. Isn’t that enough? To open up an evening, or a morning, to live, or only to mark that moment where a sense of living opens up? But why is it necessary? Why writing, and why here?

It is morning now, and bright. Perhaps the coming of light in winter cannot be called dawn – or at least that dawn should be something unshared, with the sense that only a few of us are awake at this time, very few. Morning, then, just that, and the busyness of the day. Am I braced for it now, and ready for the office? But I would rather the day was forgotten and I knew only the latest in a run of posts, not for what it said, but for the urgency of its saying, that seemed to let fate direct me as soon as I awoke, and gave a single orientation to my dreams, which otherwise tend to linger where I would rather they did not.

The Mark

To mark a date, a time – to have been capable of marking it with a little writing, if only to scratch a mark on the walls of time – why is that enough, at least for me? why is it necessary, so that to fail to scratch means, like a prisoner kept unaware of the date, that I forget in some sense what day it is? What day?

Not that I cannot tell it’s Wednesday, or early December, but that the day without writing fails to open for me. As though, by writing early in the morning – and didn’t I, this morning, wake at half past one? – I’ve a headstart on what occurs such that it might happen not to others, but to me.

I will have a stake in this day, that’s what writing announces. It will be partially mine; the hours will part for me like the Red Sea to the Israelites – they will let me have passage, and so join the passing of this day to the passing of others, and so on, through my life, letting it be mine, and letting me live. And better still, for me, the knowledge that I will have forgotten this, what I have written, by the time the day is over: that I am like one who loses his memory overnight, so that each day he must find himself again.

A liberation, because it breaks me from the dominion of the past by a neglectful forgetting, and lets the future open to me as it is not measured by the past. Is it this eternal youthfulness I want, a wheel propelling itself, like Zarathustra’s child?

I think this is how I want day joined to day, each morning: this that will be the hinge of my days, or the point around which they turn: that happy forgetting that means writing must come again to mark the day, to say: here I am, even when, by the next morning, I have forgotten yesterday’s mark, and must mark it again, and that that is the condition of memory, and passage.

Here I am: then it is not the succession of days I would mark, but the rebirth of the day. The mark must be marked again. Here I am: but where am I, when I’ve forgotten by evening that there was a mark at all?

Idioms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On The Plateau

Comes a time in your life when you stand as out on a plateau, at some elevation, and with the sky spread about you and the wind buffeting you: there you are, exposed, seeing all around you, but also being seen, for isn’t the sky also an eye turned upon you? a blind eye, though, one that sees without seeing, and it is as though you see yourself with that eye, yourself, and also the whole of your life, what it has been and will be. Isn’t it that you are as though already dead? You’ve died, but died in life to life, but that has made you the god who can look at all with perfect equanimity: what will happen must happen, but you have seen all and know its law.

I am always on the lookout for such plateau moments in the books I read. Handke’s later work (I’ve no interest in anything before The Left Handed Woman) is almost all plateau, or struggles to let its narrator wander along the roof of the world. On A Dark Night I Left My Silent House: you left it after a blow to the head. You’d forgotten everything, and then where did you find yourself? On the roof of the world, on the plateau, wandering: how could it be otherwise? Yes, Handke’s books deliver us there, to where the plateau spreads and the sky swirls around you and you know your life as though you watched all from a still point in the swirling clouds.

And this marvellous scene from Debord:

I have even stayed in an inaccessible house surrounded by woods, far from any village, in an extremely barren, exhausted mountainous region…. The house seemed to open directly onto the Milky Way. At night, the stars, so close, would shine brilliantly one moment, and the next be extinguished by the passing mist. And so too our conversations and revels, our meetings and tenacious passions.

And then, a little further on:

I saw lightning strike near me outside: you could not even see where it had struck; the whole landscape was equally illuminated for one startling instant. Nothing in art has ever given me this impression of an irrevocable brilliance, except for the prose Lautreamont employed in the programmatic exposition he called Poesies. But nothing else: neither Mallarme’s blank page, nor Malevich’s white square on a white background …

Comes a time when, on the plateau, beneath the flashing stars you know absolute books from all the others, which separate themselves and lift themselves into the sky. On the plateau: in your youth, you might do anything; possibility was your milieu; your future was open. Then, later on, the time of accomplishment; you worked, you gave yourself body: what kind of person had you become? And then, later still, the time of falling, when you knew your work was nothing, and you had become nothing; when all excuses fell away.

Lear lost on the Moor. The desert which opens around Hamlet. The sacred space that is separation, the time of the nudity of the crime. Footage of the man who survived the suicide leap in which his son was killed. He is a murderer but also a survivor; he is drenched with guilt. But he is also a sacred man, a man apart. The blinded Oedipus wanders led by his niece, looking only for a place to die. What else is there to do on the plateau but wander?

But I should say Debord was not lost – or that if he was, he lost himself, happily stranded in obscurity as the world gradually caught up with his ideas. But then, too, on the plateau, those ideas do not matter, or what matters is only the great source to which they’re joined: to revolution and the regathering of revolution that is more than any one of us.

Then Debord’s voice, sovereign, is also triumphal: it spreads itself as the stars are spread above the wind. It sees all and knows all, even Debord’s own passing. And mustn’t he die so that revolution can be lifted back towards itself, as light to the source of light? There are many ways of being sacred, but to all of them belongs that solitude which knows the end is close.

Panegyric

With sovereign neglect, knowing the time for action is already passed – or that it must be given to others to act, to follow his example, Debord, the old revolutionary sets the following quotation at the beginning of his book:

Why ask me of my lineage? Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees. Those of autumn the wind sheds upon the ground, but when the season of spring returns the forest buds forth with fresh vines. Even so is it with the generations of humankind, the new spring up as the old are passing away.

That from the Iliad, book VI. And above it, from a dictionary:

Panegyric expresses more than eulogy. Eulogy no doubt includes praise of the person, but it does not exclude a certain criticism, a certain blame. Panegyric entails neither blame nor criticism.

So Panegyric, the book. With what sovereign neglect is it written! How close to death, pressed up against it! A serene book – a neglectful one, sovereignly seizing upon this or that detail to let speak the whole. Why that detail, that episode? Why write of that? But with it the whole shines forward. As though the book were riding forward and we readers looked out ahead over the open sea. Open: a book that looks back as it looks forward. From volume 2, part 2, this unattributed quotation:

All revolutions run into history, yet history is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers of revolution come, thither they return again.

But I should say, reading both volumes, that there are barely even episodes, barely details – only a general telling, a great swelling of the narrative voice, even if what is told is done so briefly, swiftly, as in an ancient epic.

Among the small number of things that I have liked and known how to do well, what I have assuredly known how to do best is drink. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk a lot more. I have written much less than most people who write, but I have drunk much more than most people who drink.

I would like to quote the whole of this famous chapter, but it will suffice to note here that it was perhaps drinking that carried Debord forward, that held him out ahead of the others, over the open sea. The drinker becomes interplanetary, writes Duras somewhere. Drink until neglect claims you, and you are a God. Drink until you sovereignly stand ahead of your time, at its prow. Doesn’t Debord say elsewhere that his ideas did not have to catch up with time, but that time had to catch up with them? In Panegyric, he is ahead of us still. Ahead – but also at the head of all waters, there where revolution gathers itself, regathers itself.

The Waves of the Yangtze

Debord’s scripts. In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consummur Igni: We Turn In The Night Consumed By Fire. I like these texts that are made after a life lived, that are retrospective, looking back, even as they know, with great serenity, that there is only looking back. The future has come; it is already here, and it is one without Debord:

Here was the abode of the ancient king of Wu. Grass now grows peacefully on its ruins. There, the vast palace of the Tsin, once so splendid and so dreaded. All this is gone forever – events, people, everything constantly slips away, like the ceaseless waves of the Yangtze that vanish into the sea.

And so he writes from the perspective of one at the end, or from after the end. Has he died? How else has he managed to write from a time in which he has disappeared and his memory been forgotten? How beautiful to write from that time! How beautiful to write when you’ve already vanished, a wave in the sea.

What is writing? The guardian of history…. What is man? A slave of death, a passing traveller, a guest on earth….

Beautiful, beautiful. But still, something hard, adamantine, in Debord remembers (and this is his own voice):

Considering the overpowering forces of habit and the law, which continually pressured us to disperse, none of us could be sure we would still be there at the end of the week. Yet everything we would ever love was there. Time burned more intensely than elsewhere, and would soon run out.

And I want to remember one last paragraph, the thought of which, remembered from my first reading of these scripts, but when was that?:

The sensation of the passing of time has always been vivid for me, and I have been attracted by it just as others are allured by dizzying heights or by water. In this sense I have loved my era, which has seen the end of all existing security and the dissolution of everything that was socially ordained. These are pleasures that the practice of the greatest art would not have given me.

Passing time: I imagine Debord writes after his death, surviving in some way, still alive, and knowing now only the purity of time’s passing. ‘… passing through all those years as if with a knife in my hand’ – but now, there is no knife. He writes; writing neglects itself in his writing. Lies down and looks upward, to say: it’s all done, finished; the page has already turned.

Chance

Pinget writes of the pain of being between novels: how to find a voice? He thrashes about – first this voice, then that, but where is the one that will impose itself upon him like a destiny? When will it come, the voice-seed of a new novel, that will lead him forward by itself through sentences and paragraps, and through page after page?

But when you have no novel, and have no intention of writing one? When you’ve fallen from all projects, all schemes of writing, and there is just the trying out of voices, first one and then another, but absent the voice that will give you your destiny as a writer? Only chance, and a swerving each time, and without pattern. No progress, no moving forward, but only the melee of voices, as they inhabit you, as they turn you from yourself and show that what you are is only this turning?

The Last Days of Damp

‘These are truly the last days …’ W. is making me listen to Godspeed’s Dead Flag Blues again. ‘Shut up and listen.’ I play this to the students, he says. And he makes them watch Bela Tarr.

The last days! What are we going to do? ‘We’ll be the first to go, says W., we’re weak. Gin?’ Yes to gin, no to the apocalypse. What time is it? Already late, though you can never be sure in the shuttered living room.

I rang W. today to tell him the damp is receding. True, the air is still full of water and little spores of mildew – no doubt of that, but the plaster is lightening, there at the edges where it was most soaked. And the walls run with water no longer. All the same, I’m anxious: am I not in some deep and intimate way linked with my damp? Does it render safely external some perfidious inward state? Now I’ll have to confront the true horror, I was going to tell W. on the phone (he wasn’t about …)

In truth, I depend on my damp, I was going to tell him. It defines me. When I come in the evenings, it’s there, just as it is in the mornings, when I depart. The damp: soaked through the plaster, brown, and in places, greeny-blue. Damp saturating brick and plaster, and devouring the former from within like acid, the plumber said, and the brown and the greeny-blue spreading like a vast bruise. What sin had I committed? What had gone wrong?

What, if there’s no damp, I would have said to W., will I write about here? What will there be to write about, if there’s no damp? The apocalypse, perhaps – there’s always that, but it’s too vast, and too diffuse. The damp is close, the apocalypse everywhere, far and near – but far, even when it comes near. It’s causes are complex; the cause of damp, simple. I want a simple correlate to my inner state, a simple call to externalise in writing what is wrong within.

Do you think I’m rotting inside?, I would have said to W. Have I been cursed? If so, the damp and I are mirrors of one another. I, too, am bruised – but inwardly, and justly. Bruised inside, and because of some great sin, some wrongness, that nevertheless lies at the seat of my identity. It all went wrong somewhere, I tell myself. I took a wrong path. And then the damp began; damp sprang up all around me; all surfaces became wet, and brown, and greeny-blue, just as there was something dreadfully wrong inside me.

My God, your stomach, says W., who is always amazed by its delicacy, its constant ferment. You’re always ill! And it’s true. Pain – from an inward bruise. I’ve been beaten there – and rightly so. I deserved to be beaten, and inside, where no one will see. And I even liked to be beaten thus – it was a kind of relief, an answer, to a general feeling of guilt. Somewhere, at some time, I’ve committed a terrible wrong, I was going to tell W.

But still, the damp is retreating; the plaster is less soaked; the walls no longer run with water, though the new cabinets are still full of mildew and the whole flat smells of wet and rotting. Yes, the oldest smell, the most familiar one: the great rotting of everything, the great saturation. Away for a few days, my return confirmed it: home, for me, will always be the smell of damp, and that first of all. Open the door – yes, the old smell, breathe it in, along with the spores of mildew, ah yes.

I think I will always associate damp with Lacanian psychoanalysis. For it is only at this point, when the damp has returned most forcefully, after the damp proofing, after the visit by the Loss Adjuster (who hasn’t called back), that I’ve begun to get some idea of psychoanalysis. Piles of Zizek beside the bed, which I go through one book after another. Three Finks. A few Lacans. A handy psychoanalytical dictionary – all this will help me with my review, I know that. But it is all changing my relationship to my damp, I know that, too.

Can W. save me? I want to get him to speak about the apocalypse. ‘It’s all over’ – that’s what I want to hear. ‘These are truly the last days’: I want to hear that. Because I fear the damp’s retreat just as I fear its return. Perhaps it is that the damp is returning to itself to regather its strength: withdrawing only to bloom once again across my walls and ceiling, only more magnificently this time, with a new palette of colours. What colours this time? What richnesses? Yes, the damp is regathering itself to return, with more force, with more splendour, and with new and splendid spores to send out into the air.

‘It’s Lacan!’ I wanted to tell W. ‘It’s Zizek! They’re changing me!’ I wanted to tell him. And it’s true: I’m not used to their world. It’s buffeting me. Somewhere in the walls, the plumber told me, a pipe has burst and it’s rotting the bricks from inside. And now my stomach aches and I feel nauseous. Rotting from inside! For all my reading, I can’t keep Lacan and Zizek in my head, I would have told W. I’m not sure where it’s going. Somewhere – I know that, but where it is I’m not sure, that’s what I would have said. I think it’s hollowing something out in me, and that’s why my stomach hurts, I wanted to tell him.

Crumbled brick and wood on my work surfaces: the ceiling continues to cave in; the hole is still wide open. What’s up there? Something terrible. Something dark. A slice between the flats, open. I hear the voices of the tenants upstairs echoing there, ghostly, so I can’t make out what is said. Yes, there is something terrible there, the source of all damp, between the flats.

I’m surprised their washing machine hasn’t come through, said the Loss Adjuster, who’s yet to call back. What’s going on? What negotations? Perhaps she’s arranging for the builders to come and tear everything out. Start again! Get down to the brick! There’s to be drying equipment. And perhaps the kitchen units are to be replaced.

She warned me I wouldn’t be able to cook. I said: I don’t mind!, and meant it. For months, I said, there was no electricity in the kitchen. Nothing worked; I couldn’t cook, even if I wanted to. For months! Because of the damp! Because the electricity was affected by the damp! In the end, I had to get the kitchen rewired. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said the electrician. – ‘Not even in an old house?’ – ‘Never,’ he said.

Lacan and Zizek are behind this somehow, I decide. They’ve brought it on; they’ve exacerbated it. My stomach is in ferment. Vague nausea. And a vague, encompassing feeling of guilt. It’s my fault – but what have I done? But then without my guilt – what am I? What will I have to write about? Are these really the last days of damp?

Peace

‘The elm tree planted by Eleanor Bold, the judge’s daughter, fell last night’, I am quoting from memory, tenderly, from the opening of Gene Wolfe’s Peace. The other night, when I suddenly awoke, I thought again of Alden Dennis Weer, whose ghost was uprooted when the elm tree fell, and remembered how he says that everyone is dead, and I tried to calculate the age of such a tree and wondered whether it took a hundred years or two hundred for it to reach maturity.

Either way, the ghost Alden is alone, and wandering in a house similar to the one he had built when, in life, he became rich. Each room holds a memory. Each door he pushes open opens into another part of his life. But I have written before of the opening of doors, and that time remembering the tetralogy called The Book of the New Sun, which I have ordered again, half in fear, wondering whether it will be for me as it was then, when, 15 years ago, I finished it for a second time.

I ordered the other series too – the Long Sun and also the Short, although I admit the former bored me, and I only want to read it to find Severian again, who, I’m told lives and breathes in the books of the latter (but with Wolfe, it is never simple, and one might be there who is not there: who will Severian be, when I find him again? And who will I be that finds him?).

Let me return to those lines again, at the beginning of Peace, which I still remember. The Buntings axe, ‘this planet of America turning’, the golden faces that bend down like angels to look through his windows (how many times have I stolen that image?), and the rorschach Dr Black shows him, and from which the story begins to open.

It is Severian I want to meet again, and the ghost in the orange juice factory, and the impostor who steals the body of V.R.T. – yes, those might be the pleasures of reading (but will I like the books? will I still like them?), but there is also the joy of remembering again those characters, those ghosts and clones and severed twins as I know them now, from 15 years distance, and as through a veil. As I know them and I think they know me, looking towards me for their life and death.

Is it peace they want? death? Is it that I should close the door on the room through which they walk? But then I ask them, too, for peace, and to close the door they opened in me. I think we live each others deaths and die each others lives, as Heraclitus said of the mortals and the gods. Only they are not gods, and nor am I; and I think we see each other only as forms through bevelled glass, as I thought the other day I saw an intruder in the hallway. I know they see themselves in my sight, and that they ask for something with their seeing. I know I see, too with theirs, and that their fictional world is also mine.

The other night, very late or very early, I seemed to approach myself in the mirrored door of my bathroom cabinet, that was open to reflect me as I came along the hall. I thought: this is like reading. I thought, it is like watching Mirror again, when the young mother rubs the cloudy glass and sees a face much older than hers. I saw my face, my body coming towards itself as I came closer. But whose face was this? whose body? And if I reached out, how could I be sure my fingers would not reach through into another world?

Why wander again in the rooms opened by reading, by seeing? Why come again to what I can bring close to me again by reading again? The book reads itself in me, its pages turning in my heart. Tired, too tired, and isn’t there a hope that this weariness is propitious, and will let me travel by way of the unfolding of sentences to that threshold where I will remember more than I know? Ah, those sentences, these written sentences – how difficult I used to find that their rhythm must be filled with words! How difficult to find what there was to say so that saying, telling could also speak!

Neglect – is that the word? A kind of sovereign carelessness, where you turn away from what you might want to say. Something akin, perhaps, to automatic writing – to that automatism that lets you speak of what cannot be said. And by a neglectful wandering where the golden faced god wanders with you, there where speaking can begin only with tiredness, and weariness opens a way.

Does he accompany you, or you, him? Are you, too, a ghost, a god? Peace – I think that’s what is wanted by Alden Dennis Weer seeks. Does he find it in the room that opens into the orange juice factory, and he hears his voice come through the intercom? ‘Den, darling, are you awake in there?’ But his aunt, who looked after him as a child, when his parents went away, is long dead and he – the ghost – is already old.

But perhaps they are always old, ghosts. Perhaps they are born from a kind of regret, and distance. Rereading, I read again what I found first at 20, at 21, and the gap of 15 years is also part of reading, as another gap was, no doubt, when I started to read. Or perhaps it is that to read is always to know your past trails behind you like a comet’s tail. To know by what is told that it is also your past that tells itself as you read, and that reading is also a voyage back as well as out, away, from what you know. Or is it that it gives you the past as strangeness, as the eternally strange that returns to turn aside the present?

‘Who am I?’, you ask into reading, and reading answers only, ‘who?’ And then as you read you are always too old to coincide with yourself. Isn’t this what gives itself again in rereading, in coming again to the books you read then, when you were young? You are too old now; I think you always were. You read, and it is the strangeness of your life that rears up, all of it, and each time anew. ‘Den darling, are you awake in there?’ and as I read, I murmur: yes, I am awake.

A god reads with you, a ghost with a golden face. What is it that seeks to return to itself as you turn the pages? ‘Itself’ – but that return is the whole of your life, a mazing to death, as Freud says. Is it peace you want – death? Is that what the ghost wants, or the god? You are always too old to read, I want to say that. And you are never young enough to read for the first time. Reading, rereading, life looks to maze to death through you. Life, awoken, looks for death. But death’s curse is that it has to pass through life to die. It needs your living, your reading, and your sight to touch the pages. ‘I am dead’ – say that. ‘I am alive’ – say that.

Puerility

1. One of us is dragging the other down, W. and I decide, but which one? Is it him or me? Of course I think it’s me, and so does he. But I think he likes being dragged down. A friend of his, who had held out great hopes for him noted that since he’s been hanging out with me, his work’s really gone downhill. I like to think that’s my gift to you, I tell W., laughing.

Of course, W. had great hopes in me, once, which were part of his larger hopes of building a larger intellectual community. W. often speaks movingly of those hopes and how they were dashed, and how I played a large role in dashing them. Do you remember, he says, when I gave you that opportunity of speaking for a whole afternoon to some of the most interesting and intelligent people in philosophy? He pauses for dramatic effect. I know what’s coming. You ruined it, didn’t you? You completely spoilt it!

That was the last of those meetings, W. observed, that used to held over two days with only three speakers speaking. And you were one of them, says W. I invited you. And then what? ‘Disaster’, I say cheerfully, remembering it all. ‘But I was ill.’ W. communal dreams fell apart, just as his great hopes for me, and for all of us fell apart.

There’s still our collaboration, of course, W. admits, but that is slowly taking us downhill. We’ve worn out everyone’s patience, says W. Everyone’s tired of us. W. is also alarmed by my new surly turn. When asked a question after one of our talks, I speak for as short a time as possible, churlishly and without concession. W., meanwhile, is ceremoniously polite, and has to overcompensate for my surliness. I tell him I find this very funny. I like it when you flail about, I tell him.

For his part, he likes to turn to me when I am least awake and ask me, before an audience, a deliberate and pointed question. He’s always amazed by my recuperative powers. I can always think of something to say, and quickly. You manage to sound intelligent, says W., how do you do it? I tell him it’s shamelessness pure and simple. And I can think on my feet, I tell him. I’ll say that for myself, I tell him, I can think on my feet. Or I used to be able to. I think that’s going, too.

I remind W. that we’ve rejected a prestigious invitation to speak or two. Even to promote our own work, and in London. Yes, we turned it down, that opportunity, and that was a great moment. ‘Our greatest moment’, says W. But then we remember with great solemnity how we’ve encouraged those truly intelligent minds amongst us to carry on with their work. We pause and say their names like magic talismans.

By a strange turn, I end up inspecting W.’s teaching. He draws diagrams for the students, two stick men. What was he explaining? Hegel and religion, I think. This is Lars, he says, and draws a tiny cock on one of the stickmen, and this is me, he says, and draws a huge cock on the other. Why do you think we’re so puerile?, he asks me later. We’ve always cursed our sense of humour. We’re not witty, we know that. It lets us down. We disappoint people ceaselessly.

2. I know nothing irritates W. more than sociobiology, so I always make a special effort to read up on the latest sociobiology before I see him. What have you been reading?, he asks. I run down the list of titles I’ve committed to memory. Why Men Lie and Women Cry, I tell him. It’s good, you should read it. I learnt all kinds of things. I tell him what I’ve learnt at great length until he holds his hands over his ears and rocks back and forth.

Stuck in a German airport for six hours, I know this is a special opportunity to get on W.’s nerves. Six hours!, I say with relish. Oh my God, says W. I’m concerned about Lindsay Lohan, I tell W. – ‘Who’s Lindsay Lohan?’ – ‘She’s getting so thin. Like Nicole Ritchie.’ – ‘Who’s Nicole Ritchie?’ W. tries to hide behind a newspaper. ‘W. – I’m concerned about Mischa Barton.’ He doesn’t say anything. ‘W., W., Mischa Barton! I’m concerned about her!’ He puts down the paper and looks at me over his glasses. – ‘Shut – the fuck – up.’

Six hours! We don’t have much money between us. How are we going to spend our time? ‘You go that way and I’ll go that way’, says W., pointing in opposite directions. But of course it’s his fault we’re stranded here. ‘So, what shall we talk about?’, I ask W. ‘What have we left undiscussed? What have we learnt from our trip? What have you learnt about yourself? How has your thought advanced? Are you dreaming of your magnum opus? When do you think you’ll write it? Have you abandoned all hope that you’ll write it, or do you still think you’ll write it? Do you think you have a magnum opus in you? Go on, I’ll bet you do.’

W. seems panicky. I’ll have to calm him down. ‘Remember the ‘Realitatpunkt‘, I tell him. In ungrammatical German, it directs us towards what is firm and certain in our world – our hatred of X. Remember that hatred, and rebuild the world back up from that. ‘Focus’, I tell W., who is flailing.

Alternatively, in these moments, I sing to W., knowing he can never help but sing along with me. Like a disturbed child, rocking back and forth, he needs order and regularity to restore his mental health. So I sing, ‘hey, little W., hey little W., thank you for not letting go of me, when I let go of you.’ It’s our version of ‘No More Bad News’ by Bonnie Prince Billy.

Sometimes I sing our version of ‘A Hit’ by Smog. ‘You’re not going to think anything so why even bother – with it. You’ll never be – Franz Kafka. You’ll only ever be a Jean-Luc – Nancy …’ W. can never help joining in, and this restores continuity to his thoughts. ‘You were stuck for a while, weren’t you?’

For my part, I lapse into stammering, and can’t get a word out for several minutes. W. is convinced I’ve had a series of minor strokes. ‘Your decline – it’s alarming.’ But he thinks stammering is another of my many affectations. W. is convinced I have dozens. Why do you sit with your hands beneath your thighs?, he asks me, outraged. And why do you keep touching your chest? It’s rude. No one likes it. Don’t you think you should give it up?

3. We’re too puerile to be true European intellectuals, we’ve decided. W. lived in Strasbourg for a while, it was beautiful, but he couldn’t stand it. ‘I’m too puerile’. But, visiting Strasbourg this year, we walked along the river without a puerile thought in our heads. The city had silenced us. We drank wine from tumblers, quietly. W. spoke French softly. We were happily quiet.

‘I think we’re cured,’ I tell W. ‘I think we should live here.’ It’s true – we are quieter, softer people, real intellectuals. But later, when we get hopelessly lost in Strasbourg puerility returns. When we find the station, we sit in an antechamber and do hysterical impressions of people we’ve met. ‘What’s wrong with us – this is terrible – my God!’

Then, on another trip, as we are borne through Poland on an old style communist train (as we imagine), being brought beer after beer by a steward, we know we’ll never belong to the continent whizzing by us. ‘They’re different from us.’ What went wrong in our country? What happened to us? Who can we blame? W. becomes hysterical. I sing to him. He calms down.

In Freiburg, the Americans seem very earnest to us. ‘We’re not like them, either.’ We like them, they wear caps and are very serious. ‘Serious young men and women’, says W. as we drink our morning beers in the sun. They’re all going on a daytrip, in their caps, all fresh and innocent, we imagine. ‘They’ve never seen anything like it,’ we decide, ‘all this old stuff.’

Passing through the German countryside on the train, we notice station names from Kafka’s Diaries and other books. Europe! Everything has happened here! All the great men and women have criss-crossed the continent! Of course they belonged here, as we do not. W., who was to be my guide, knowing this part of Europe quite well, is as lost as I am. ‘We don’t belong here. They’re better than us’, looking round frantically at the other passengers. ‘They’re so calm and quiet.’ – ‘Europeans, not like us.’

I sing him a snatch of another song. W. likes to say that before a course of action, he asks himself what Kafka would do. – ‘What do you think he would make of us, sitting here?’, I ask him. – ‘We’re the two assistants in The Castle.’ – ‘Or Blumfeld’s bouncing balls.’ – ‘He had two assistants as well, didn’t he?’ – ‘Idiots always come in pairs’, I tell W.

Mushrooms

W. remembers when I was up-and-coming, he tells me. He remembers the questions I used to ask, and how they would resound beneath the room’s vaulted ceiling. You seemed so intelligent then, he said. I spread my arms. I shrug. Of course, of course. But when any of us read your work …, he says, without finishing the sentence.

I know, I tell him. There’s no excuse. But then, I point out, I think it encouraged you to write, didn’t it? And W. admits it’s true. He started to write encouraged by my writing. Until then, he said, he spent 7 years on each paper. How long do you spend?, he says, five minutes?

It was different for your generation, I point out (W. is slightly older than me). Of course, I’m not even part of a generation, I tell him. At least for your lot, there was a chance of a job. At least everyone who wanted a job, got one. But for us? W. finds it funny when I become self-righteous. But that’s got nothing to do with it, he says. You have to work, he says.

You don’t work, do you?, he says. – ‘I do.’ ‘What on? What are you writing?’ – ‘A review. A long one.’ – ‘Oh yes? And what are you reading?’ – ‘Lacan and Zizek’, I tell him. – ‘Oh yes, what Lacan?’ – ‘Well, it’s more Zizek.’ – ‘What do you know about Lacan?’, he says. – ‘Very little. But I’m only reading it as a background.’ – ‘Oh it’s background reading.’ – ‘You have to follow up all the references when you’re reviewing’, I tell him. ‘It’s a long review – 9,000 words’, I tell him, ‘and then, after that, I’m reviewing your book’.

‘Of course it’s different for people in your class’, I tell W. (W. is from a slightly higher social class than me). ‘Oh yes? How?’ – ‘You still have expectations. You don’t know how bad it is.’ I look at my fingernails. ‘I’ll bet you were a prefect, weren’t you? There’s something of the prefect about you’, I tell him, without knowing what a prefect is. ‘You haven’t been crushed‘, I tell him. ‘It should be part of your education – to be crushed.’ W. finds this very funny. – ‘You’re being self-righteous again.’

I go out and buy pork scratchings and a four pack of Stella from the shop. ‘I was never really up-and-coming’, I tell him. ‘Shameless – that’s what I was. And desperate.’

‘Do you know I’ve got mushrooms growing in my flat?’, I ask W. – ‘I think you should harvest them.’ W.’s house, which is very large, was fitted out by interior decorators and only cost him £50,000. ‘They completely rebuilt the foundations,’ he says, ‘layer by layer.’ There is no possibility of damp, he says. And it’s true: there’s no damp there, nothing at all. ‘The air is so dry’, I say, as soon as I get in. ‘I know. It’s great, isn’t it?’, he says.

‘So were you ever up-and-coming?’, I ask W. He was, he remembers. That was a golden time. Everyone looked up to him. What went wrong? Booze – and fags. But wasn’t there another golden age, a few years later when he became single? ‘Oh yes’, says W. ‘I only taught one hour a week. Every morning, I got up and read and took notes until I went to bed. I had a desk and a bed in my room, and my books, and nothing else. I didn’t go out, I didn’t drink, I just read, and took notes, day after day.’ We’re both moved, sipping our Stellas and eating pork scratchings.

I remember a short interview I conducted with W. a few months ago. ‘What do you consider your greatest weakness?’ – ‘Never to have come to terms with my lack of ability.’ – ‘What’s your greatest disappointment?’ – ‘To know what greatness is, and know I will never, never achieve it.’ – ‘What’s your worst trait?’ – ‘Fear and anxiety cloud all my judgements and relationships.’ – ‘What is your greatest academic gift?’ – ‘I don’t have any. My whole career has been a crushing failure. I only carry on out of debilitating fear.’

The King of Damp

W. speaks mournfully about my intellectual decline. Of course it’s not my decline he laments, but that of his own judgement, and his own phantasmic hopes: how was it that he placed his hopes in me? why does he need to place them in anyone at all? I tell him at once I only appeared intelligent, but in fact it was a sham.

I’m very sensitive to caffeine, I tell him, and when I drink a cup of coffee, it’s true I really can appear intelligent. But it’s only an appearance. I make no great claims to intelligence, I tell him, in fact, quite the contrary: I’ve always been very open: I don’t think I’m particularly intelligent.

At times I worked quite hard, I tell him, but those times are gone. There was a time – many years ago – when it was necessary to cultivate the appearance of intelligence, but I knew, then and now, that it was a sham. A necessary sham, mind you, but still a sham. I have no nostalgia for my own intelligence, I tell W., unlike you. That’s your weakness, I tell W., and he always agrees, the idea that because there are two of us, because we work together, something might result. W. agrees, mournfully.

Yes, I was never intelligent, he knows that now. It was all caffeine, he admits, and now I drink far less coffee, it’s become clear, he says: I was never intelligent, or no more than ordinarily intelligent. I used to read a few things, I tell him, but that time has passed. Yes, for a time, but only a short time, I liked to read, and even read a great deal. But it’s over – I don’t make time, not anymore.

I used to make time, but I used to have time. Even when I have time nowadays I don’t make time. There are other things to do, I tell him. And it’s true I rather like these other things, because they give me an alibi. I can say, I can’t think because I’m busy, whereas in truth, I can’t think because I don’t read, and I don’t make time to read.

My sense of shame is underdeveloped, I tell W. I feel insufficiently shameful. We are, I tell W., supposedly experts in a particular intellectual field. There are things we should know, I tell him, and I should feel shameful for not knowing them. But I have my alibis and excuses I tell him. There’s always a story to tell, always an excuse, I tell W.

It’s because there’s no intellectual culture over here, I tell him, that’s one of my excuses. It’s because of global capitalism, that’s another, I tell him. There’s a whole range of excuses, and what it comes down to is that they are all excuses, I tell him. I’m losing interest in everything but my own ineptness, I tell him. I’m interested only in my inability, I tell him. It fascinates me, I admit that. It’s all around me like a cloud. Like damp, I tell him, the damp that follows me around like a dog.

I think it’s my own stupidity that follows me, I tell him. My own incompetence. Of which, wrongly, I am not ashamed, I tell him. I think that’s what I lack, and what you envy, I tell W. Isn’t that what you always tell me: that I’m your id, that my very presence around you makes you lose all sense of decorum?

You find my very presence permissive, I tell W. When I first met you, I tell W., you sat at the high table, talking with the others very seriously. But latterly, we sit at the low table, talking rubbish. At the low table, the disastrous table, I tell him. And away from the others, and in the pub, I tell him.

It’s an ongoing disaster, I tell him, that is permitted by my shamelessness. It’s as if shamelessness has leapt across to you, I tell him, and my range of excuses. So we can talk happily of global capitalism and a lack of intellectual culture and of general decay, I tell him, when what we are really speaking of is our own incompetence.

In truth, I tell him, it fascinates us, and is the only thing that fascinates us. It is like a mirror for all our interests. The source of our interest lies in the way it is reflected in our incompetence. It’s from that it all begins, that is its source: our incompetence. Of which we are far from ashamed, I tell him. Or at least I am not ashamed, not really, and you, increasingly, are unashamed.

I think that’s what my company permits you, I tell him. I think it’s my great gift to you. My incompetence has become our incompetence, I tell him. We’re hypnotised by it, I tell him. We speak of nothing else and think of nothing else. It’s like the damp in my flat, I tell him, which hypnotises me. It’s like my six foot by six foot by six foot kitchen which is completely saturated with damp, I tell him. A little cube of damp, and where the brick is so wet it’s eroding, I tell him.

The brick is being eaten from the inside out as by acid, I tell him. And it fascinates me, I tell him, because it’s the perfect figure for my own stupidity, which follows me like a dog. In truth, we are the kings of damp, I tell him, you and me. Me, because, after all, I am literally and metaphorically surrounded by damp, and you because you are metaphorically surrounded by damp.

Damp is cosmological, I tell him, remembering Bela Tarr. Cosmological and ontological. Everything is damp, and there is only damp descending everywhere and over everything. The pages of the books will stick together, and a thin film of damp will form over our lips. And the great names of the European intelligentsia will be smeared in damp, their books rotting.

Down to the Brick

It’s what will happen if you lay plaster on wet brick, says the loss adjuster, looking at the discoloured walls of the kitchen, deep brown and rich green. Who installed your kitchen? I tell her. She shakes her head. And what about your damp proofing? It was their fault she says. I’m amazed they put plaster on top of wet brick. It’s very porous, she says of the new plaster. That’s why the damp spread so quickly.

Your bathroom’s ok, she says, but we’ll have to dry out your wall. Everything’ll have to come out. We might have to replace the cupboards, too. And you’ll have to empty them. And we’ll need the washing machine out. Looking up at the ceiling she said, I’m surprised the washing machine from upstairs hasn’t come right through. The joists are completely rotten.

I am reassured, even if the loss adjuster was nothing like the one in Atom Egoyan’s film. When she leaves I lie in the other room on the bed in the morning sun, reading Henry Green, and thinking, all is well. Earlier this morning, I had to listen to Donny Hathaway’s eponymous album to steady my nerves. And then My Name Is … by Albert Ayler. And I reread a little more of Concluding.

But now I reward myself in relief a tidbit or two from Surviving. I read a little of what his son, the editor, wrote about his father. The old anecdote about the glass of water Henry Green’s colleagues remembered at his elbow in long meetings at work being full of gin in fact. And his visit to America, where he is feted as a writer, the doorman, at the end of the week bidding him goodbye by his pseudonym and not his real name. And his meeting his hero, Celine.

By these facts my world repairs myself. Thank goodness for Green and my hardback Surviving. I reread the essay on C. M. Doughty and underline some passages for future reflection. ‘A man’s style is like the clothes he wears, an expression of his personality’, I underline. ‘But what a man is, also makes the way he writes, as the choice of a shirt goes to make up his appearance which is, essentially, a side of his character.’

And then I remember how W. likes to criticise my old velvet jacket. ‘Who wears velvet jackets?’, he says. ‘You have to look at the kids, at what the kids are wearing.’ For his part, W. likes to dress up in a suit. ‘Your trousers are very scruffy’, says W., look at them.’ And he’s right – they flap objectionably unironed around my legs. ‘Where did you get them? Primark?’

And then the phrase a friend of mine uses: ‘brown style’. ‘That’s what you were trying for in your book, wasn’t it?’, he said. Brown style – like Henry James, he said. And it’s true I was looking for something, for some kind of style, but in the end whatever style I have is scruffy and borrowed and bought at some cheap shop.

If I print anything out from the blog, which I do rarely, the first impression I have is light horror. An ape’s style, I think. But I expect little more, which is why the horror is light. And sometimes I even think that what is written here is worse than the books. I think: what a waste of time!, and curse blogging for the great detour that it is. And feel guilty that I should be thinking more, and writing more, or at the very least reading more, and pressing my reading through tougher books.

As it is, though, my reading is tough enough. Rise early, pages of Voicing the Popular open, and now to decipher that passage or that, having hunted down the books referred to and gone through those, and then, in a document in Word I add notes to my notes, wondering how I am to pull it all together.

And thank goodness for Sinthome who writes about Lacan and Zizek so lucidly, so I can fill out my very scanty knowledge of psychoanalysis that I need to read Richard Middleton’s book. Why don’t I stick always to what I know?, I ask myself as I read, and take notes. And of course I barely know what I’m supposed to know; I’m bad enough at that, and it is a cause of shame that I’ve published anything at all, what impertinence!

My god, what we’re doing to philosophy!, I always say to W. But then shouldn’t you at least once a year break into some new area? So many books. Middleton leads to Mowitt, who of course depends on Lacan, and Zizek. Dolar’s book, of course, in the pile by my bed. And what of Laclau on populism, and the book with Mouffe?

How much did these books cost me, all piled up? And why am I reading Green instead, if I’m reading at all? It’s at these times, I wish I had a realise excuse for not forcing my reading on, or writing. Write a paper, I tell myself. Submit something. W. wants me to begin another book, if only to listen to me moan. Then I’ve got to read Adorno on popular music, and then Taussig on mimesis, and shouldn’t I at least glimpse at Latour, since Middleton mentions him, and I really need to take some notes from Attali.

And then I think with my stupidity: how will another age look back on this one, and who will read what. And then I curse my stupidity and my thoughts drift to the damp, just as the spores of mildew drift, I imagine, into one’s throat and then into the lungs. To read Middleton, you have to you know your Zizek, or at least the first few books. And then of course Lacan, and Freud. And don’t I want to make some critical remarks or another on his take on this or that thinker?

I suppose the pleasure I take in Green is that I am not supposed to be reading him – or that I read on borrowed time. Here is Surviving beside me on my desk: don’t read it, I tell myself. Don’t open it. And you can write on damp if only to share your joy with the world that it has but one source after all, and that if it spread, it’s only because the plaster was new and porous in its newness. And that the brown and blue-green stained plaster will be hacked off again to the brick, and the bricks dried out with machines, and then the whole kitchen reassembled.

A room that is only six feet by six feet by six feet has caused a lot of trouble, I think to myself. A room – a cube that is as though tacked onto my flat, which is really one half of a divided house, which is why its rooms are so strangely sized. Built in 1895, above a mineshaft, I tell our guests as they drop me home on the way to their hotel.

This was once a coalfield, I tell them, looking about. But it was closed in the mid 1800s, and then they built houses for the workers in a factory brought it from the Borders to work here, I tell them. Hence the name: Ancrum Street – Ancrum is a town in the Borders, I tell them.

But all this is very well, I tell them, but the damp’s the problem, nothing else. And in all the ground floor flats, I tell them, up and down the street. Yes, that’s our real drama, I tell them. It’s our only concern: the damp. I’ve had mushrooms growing in my flat, I tell them. And for a time the slugs were omnipresent. And ants – though I think there’s too much damp for them now, and it’s winter. But there’s still these little snails, which fall through the hole above the sink. I don’t mind when I find them in a mug, I tell them. They’re decorative, like small stones.

But now, of course, the hole will be closed, and the kitchen stripped out and the plaster chipped off and they’ll begin again from the brick. They’ll bring in drying machines and dry the place out, and that’ll be it: down to the brick, all karmic debts repaid and perhaps damp will follow me about like a dog no longer.

Slugs and Ants

Your damp’s world famous, Jodi tells me as she smokes and we stand outside the Playhouse. Squalor, she says, remembering the title of a post. At first she thought I’d look Norwegian, she says. But then she read Squalor and pictured me as living in squalor, drinking heavily.

I did go through a drinking phase, I tell her, and I do live in squalor. It’s quite disgusting, I tell her, and no joke. It’s no way to live: what W. said was right, and besides it will make me ill. Jodi says she liked to read out the posts on my yard to her partner and he would laugh. Ah yes, the yard, I say, I remember.

The shape of the flat is always changing, I tell her, and slowly it is disappearing into the mine shaft I know lies beneath it, on the right. It’s slowly tilting in that direction, I tell her, and the windows and doors are being pulled out of shape. For a long time, I couldn’t open the windows – the frames were distorted, and looked soon to make the glass break from the pressure. So I had the frames replaced with frames that tilt. The whole flat tilts, the windows, and now the door, which I also had to have replaced. But another disaster when the windows could open: the smell: the terrible smell.

The yard was filled with sewage. The plants, which had looked ill for a long time, were dying. The yard was rotting. Everything was disgusting, and my stomach turned when in hot summers the window had to be opened for air. Of course it was fixed eventually, I told her. But not before they had to tear the pipes from the wall, leaving a great scar, and through which slugs could find their way in, and ants.

Slugs and ants, I told her, are the bane of my existence. I wake up in the morning, and there used to be slugs in the mugs and in the sink. And ants – I didn’t mind them – crawling all over the walls. I think the damp keeps the ants away now, I told her, and the slugs left when I blocked up the holes in the walls. Which leaves just the snails, a new arrival, I tell her, and I don’t mind them, with their translucent shells. I wonder what kind of snails they are, I speculate as we stand in the cold air, outside the Playhouse.

Yes, it’s all true about the squalor, I tell her. I think I was cursed at some point and by someone. Not a terrible curse, you understand, but rather a flummoxing one. To be cursed with damp and a tilting flat, and, more generally, intellectual inability. It was all true, I say, everything I write, and I’m not a tall Norwegian, far from it.

The fame of my damp precedes me, that I learn over the weekend. It fascinates; people want to hear more; it’s much more interesting than I am. Or rather, if I am interesting, it is only because of the damp, of which I speak very freely: I have no choice, and in fact it’s a relief, for I actually think of little but damp, day and night.

Yes, I admit I am obsessed by damp, and I speak of very little but damp, and damp is constantly on my mind; that and the more general decay: the general tilting of the flat, its movement rightwards. If you look at my sideboards, I say, pointing to Blah-Feme’s sideboards, at whose house we are having dinner, you’d see they are very far above the floorboards, which are sinking, along the joists beneath them. Sinking, and leaving a great gap between themselves and the sideboard, like the stretch of gum you can see when some people smile.

It’s no good, I tell everyone at dinner, and of course I’ll never be able to sell it. The flat is a disaster, but it is my disaster, my shipwreck, and in the end, it’s no so bad, there’s far worse, I tell everyone. And I think in some way it’s the correlate of my life and that I deserve it, I tell them all. I think it’s fitting, or even karmic, and that damp is my burden but it is mine and if it follows me from flat to flat like a dog then so be it.

Slugs and ants will always be close to me, I tell them. And snails, I accept that. And the mushrooms that used to grow in the corners of the kitchen. And mildew, of course, mildew everywhere, spreading, its spores drifting through the air. Perhaps I’ll become tubecular, I tell them, and that will be the making of a true European intellectual.

But in truth, when I cough – and I do have a hacking cough that won’t leave me – it drives the few thoughts I have from my head. W., who is also ill, is likewise disappointed with his cough. He’s just ill, he says, and it doesn’t help with his thinking. Of course W.’s Sal will never repeat her visit to my flat, she’s adamant. It’s disgusting, she said. I don’t know how you can live like that. But don’t you think it’s improved?, I ask W. on his last visit. ‘My God! Is that what you think?’

‘Do you think I’m becoming a damp bore?’ I ask him. ‘I think you should only write about damp. It’s hilarious.’

Damp Follows You Like a Dog

I caught W.’s illness a few weeks ago, and we are both still ill, commiserating on the phone. What have you been up to? Chapter two of his introductory book, he says, in which he’s ruining Heidegger. What a traversty! Didn’t I warn him about such a project? But he’d promised a friend he’d write it, he says. ‘It’s all about friendship.’

In the evenings, ill, W. watches bad TV. But he’s still up in the early hours to write. ‘Well, I call it writing, but …’ And what have I been up to? The flat, I tell him, is worse than ever. The kitchen was damp proofed and the old units replaced, and everything in there is white and new, but the damp has come back again, and worse than ever, filling the new cupboards with mildew.

The walls, newly plastered, are wet through, and there is water on their surface, not merely condensed there, but gently streaming. And small snails fall through the hole in the ceiling. Sometimes I find them in my mug, and I don’t mind them, not like the slugs, that still leave great trails around the house, which you can see in their winding profusion only when you shine the light just so.

‘It’s a disaster,’ I tell him. ‘You’ll have to sue’, he says. Last night, I called the plumber round again, and he said he’d never seen anything like it. ‘A total disaster. The brick’ll crumble.’ And if it crumbles? The flat upstairs will come down on top of mine. But then my flat is slowly tilting into a mineshaft, into which they might both disappear.

It’s like being on a ship, I told our guests over the weekend, Mladen Dolar, Jodi and Mark, when it tilts one way as it rides the waves. But it never rights itself, I tell them. It’s always leaning to starboard. I’m waiting in this morning for the loss adjuster. There was a leak, once upon a time, from the waste pipe upstairs. The joists are wet through and crumbling and there is doubt they can hold up the ceiling.

But that was that, and at least the problem was diagnosed by the swearing plumber. But then, horribly, last week, the damp in the ceiling seemed to grow, spreading itself out brownly above me. And this was a new ceiling, too, because of the damp. But there’s no stopping it – the damp is spreading, and it spreads down the walls, which, though damp proofed are all wet to the touch.

At night, I can smell the wet air from my bedroom. And what’s that smell in the bathroom, also newly replastered and damp-proofed? Is it damp that’s returning there, too? My hand on the plaster. Still dry. But the smell! Something is wrong, very wrong. All this I tell W., who sometimes laughs and sometimes says, ‘my God’. I remind him of what he said last time, or what I made him say remembering and writing it down here: ‘damp follows you like a dog.’

In any case, I’m fit for nothing anymore, I tell him, except rocking back and forth as the mildew spores float around me and the slugs leave trails on my wooden floors. I read Henry Green and listen to Donny Hathaway, or sometimes Albert Ayler I tell him. And over and over again.

Then there’s the leak below the house, I tell W. You can hear the water streaming. The plumber says maybe it’s spraying up into the walls, and maybe that’s the cause of the damp. But how to persuade the water company to come out? ‘Tell them you threatening to sue’, says W.

Meanwhile, I throw out my pots and pans which are rusting in the kitchen. Nothing is salvagable. The tins in my cuboards rust into the plastic. The washing power box has liquified. The walls, once a new, replastered sand, have turned deep brown, and in places, green. All along the window ledge: deep green. What horror! And through the hole in the ceiling small snails sometimes fall, but I don’t mind that.

I’ve had a dozen experts on damp come and go, each with their own explanation. The swearing plumber and I rejoiced when we found the leak. It was that all along. But it wasn’t that. There was something worse, something horrible. Something that always returns to its place, dripping. Something dripping water down its maw like the alien from the films. And that follows me from place to place, everywhere, rotting the walls of my flat.

It’s like acid, said the plumber last night, it’s eating the brick away. You have to do something about it. You can hear it, he says, turning off the stopcock, and going upstairs to turn off their stopcock.Well, can’t you? And he’s right. A great streaming, a rushing. Water somewhere close and rushing, spraying up into the wall and rotting it from within.

But one of the men from the water company says on the phone, that the water would flow down and not up. These old lead pipes, he says, burst and let water into the ground. That’s what happening, he says. And what will the loss adjuster say today? What will be her verdict? Will the insurance pay up?

The plumber pities me so much I have to press money on him. He doesn’t want to take it. He’s never seen anything like it, he says, standing, looking up at the ceiling. He seems hypnotised. He won’t leave, but just stands, looking. And even when he’s out of the front door, he’s still shaking his head. ‘It’s terrible, man.’ And so I go inside to read Henry Green, I tell W. And listen to Donny Hathaway, and sometimes Albert Ayler.

Cats and a Man

In a thunderstorm, remembering, no doubt, how thunder and lightning scared him as a child, my dad would make the rounds up and down the landing to see if everyone was alright. Our cat was always afraid, I remember that – she was a fearful thing, a stray who, when we took her in, was shy and scared and hid from us children under the sofa. But that didn’t stop her clawing at our toes as they poked out from the bedclothes in the morning. She was playing a game with them, and was a kitten again when the house was quiet and unthreatening. And she too, a kitten, a cat fell under the umbrella of my dad’s concern when thunderstorms rumbled over the house.

I think later on we were all impressed by what we took to be her dignity: she was ill, but she wouldn’t show her illness. Ill, and when she let herself be lifted up in her last illness, dignity was all that held her body to itself. A cat’s death is not, in the end, very significant. Or it is so just as everything matters, and in these small events is also everything.

I remember her, feet tucked into her body, sitting in the afternoon light that used to come through an upstairs window. Content, and her coat, which looked black, also showed brown patches in the light, and her pupils were slits when she opened her eyes and you could see the traces of the flush of blood that must have once filled the iris of an eye. Perhaps she’d caught the claw of a rival there, for she fiercely defended her territory, watching out from under the car and then slinking forward in her viciousness.

The world of cats overlays ours, or ours theirs; our house was also her house, or what was hers was also ours. Where do they think we go in our cars?, I wonder. And from where do they think we return, as they wait outside to be let in? But their time on earth is shorter than ours, and there have been two cats who have lived and died as I grew, and a third cat now, back there at the house, who survived the death of my father and now must be alone in the long daytime.

When did we discover her favourite game of following lights across the walls and the furniture? When did it become part of the ritual of the day for my dad to tilt a mirror into the morning light as it came into the kitchen and let light dance across the cupboards and the floor? No one could believe that you can train a cat, said dad to us, as it was our secret that our cats (with the exception of the last, but this could be just obstinacy) knew the meaning of the word ‘upstairs.’

‘Upstairs’: that’s what you said as you switched the light off in the lounge and they were to let themselves docilely from the room. Just as dad would say to us children, calmly, I think it’s time you went to bed, and we would go upstairs as he had said. Isn’t this the power of a father, who can say things more gently than a mother, who needs only insinuate where she enforces?

I think we were obedient. I remember lying, more than once, and my dad’s anger at those lies. Didn’t he have an unshakable faith in reason, in rationality? That he would only have to explain in order to persuade, because children too were each gifted with the light of reason? So his calm words, but then he could become angry, too, and all of a sudden. Anger – sudden flares – and the whole house would change.

Of course these changes are part of the weather of family life; it is life offstage, where only a newspaper, the old, big broadsheets, can, held up around you like a fortress, give you peace from everyone else; where a cone of noise and light from the television might open to enfold you and your family; where a trip out in the car can bring you together in a common adventure.

But we would never know quite where he wanted to go; he liked to surprise, and to surprise himself – where was he driving? He had no plans. This was his impulsiveness – to turn up somewhere without plans, looking in vain in Slough for the Diwali celebrations, arriving at Bognor Regis, but without swimming trunks or costumes – he liked to drive, and the world to open to him from the car. Just as he liked it to open on television, watching nature documentaries, and, when we were children, making voices to the let the animals speak. Yes, the natural world should reach him on his terms; there should be a pane of glass between him and what was real, a kind of distance – otherwise where would be the enjoyment?

But he liked, too, the element of risk in driving, and would go too fast down country lanes, a look of excitement in his eyes: were we safe? was he? At those times I wasn’t sure with whom to side – was he right as a man, as a male, to insist on risk? was this part of the life of a man, as we might break out together from the world of women? – or was it the recklessness of machismo, from a vanishing world of what men used to be?

In family life, where little is private, and a small house cannot hold apart four separate worlds, you cannot help but learn of the others’ weaknesses and strangeness: it is all there to see, and when a parent commands – this has always struck me – you also hear the voice in which they command themselves. Spend time with one parent alone for a while and you will understand the integrity of a life, the way it is held together, autonomous and separate from yours, the way a self is bound to itself by the secret demands it whispers to itself. And perhaps, then, you can learn of something like their parents, for perhaps that voice in which they speak is the voice of parents and elders – the older ones who always stand around us.

Five thousand miles from home, we rarely saw my dad with older relatives; he was a man in charge – but then, I remember a visit from an older brother, and now my father was a boy, anxious that everything appear right, and that this brother feel comfortable on his visit to our house. And so, it seems, the brother did – a just man, a calm one, though fast speaking, interrogative, assembling facts and impressions for himself, and in this he was just as my dad, although his younger brother only spoke of his conclusions when asked. And indeed because he felt no great need to talk, and because the rest of us liked to speak, dad was not always asked – but how curious to know that another there perceives what you have seen and heard, and knows it from a perspective that is not your own.

He was quiet, for the most part; he used up his words for the day quickly. And he preferred serious talk – he liked the talk that swirled around serious topics – to discuss this or that intellectual topic, or to laugh at the follies of our new world as he always laughed, knowing that everything was going to pot. Serious talk – but also, and I think this is how it must be for fathers, the happiness of hearing the family in the other room, talking together, even though he might rather be away from them, at a slight distance, with his computer, for example, or reading the paper, or with the television on in the other room, but knowing they are there, the background to his life, as he is the background to theirs.

This was his role in the great continuity of family life. A quiet role, perhaps. But there to listen, to offer quiet judgement: a kind of rock, as a father must be. From him must judgement come. From him the balanced opinion, the other side, and that amidst the swirl of family life. And didn’t that give his quietness a kind of life? There was another person in the room of whom one must take account. A quietness that commanded, because of his seriousness, because of his sense that children should never speak ill of adults – and because of that judiciousness that would never let him hear another condemned in speech.

My mum and her friends would sometimes talk in the kitchen, or in the dining room. But sometimes it was in the living room they spoke, and my dad would read the paper, listening, and carried along by the conversation, even if he did not join in. He would form a judgement, that he would speak only when asked. And there would be our first cat on his lap, or our second on the quilt mum was assembling, and sometimes the third, though she preferred to sit up on the warm amplifier instead to watch us all, only coming over at nine o’clock for the ritual giving of Iams and then to lie soppily on the sofa to be stroked, the white fur of her throat and belly open to us to touch.

He liked our cats, despite himself; they fell under his protection. Was he to judge them, too? He spoke to them as he spoke to us as children, with snatches of Danish, which we never understood, sometimes imitating them phonetically, amusing him. Yes, cats were a kind of child, but they were also other, the alien in the house, another perspective, drawing into their liquid eyes what happens around them and living it in their terms, and sometimes asking to be spoken to, as they bask in the attention of everyone in the room.

Of course a cat can understand that a baby is young and needs to be protected, and even cats can indulge the young letting them be more boisterous and loud, and holding back their claws. But a cat, I think, can sense sickness, and I remember how they avoided my dad after his operations. What could they smell? Did they know of their own mortality through his? Only later did they come to him again (two cats from different times – we never kept more than one. Dad wouldn’t allow us to get two kittens, as we always wanted. A pair of kittens – who could resist? – but he resisted.)

To be sick – to endure the long downward curve of your life, as the earth turns into darkness from light – what was it to live with evening always before you, the fading of light, and then night? ‘I’ve had my three score years and ten’ he said, turning 70. But many years of sickness, many years of not being able to walk long distances, and the cold which prevented him from walking at all.

I think it was in his country, or at least in his family, that death was not something of which to speak. I think he said once to me – I was a teenager, but still the oldest son – that he wanted his ashes to be scattered in the Ganges. A curious comment to hear from a nonbeliever: but there it was: the Ganges that the puranas say flows from Shiva’s matted locks, he catching the goddess-river as she fell from heaven. The river-cousin of that other which dried up, stranding the earliest of civilisations in old India, whom archeologists seem to want to date farther and farther back.

The desire to have been first, the earliest, before Greece, before Europe – it marked by dad as it has done many Indians. And the sense of Hinduism as the broadest and most tolerant of religions – as a monotheism, and that first of all which welcomed other faiths, which included everyone and never proselytised. A monotheism, a religion, but also a way of life, a great culture, that bore in its streaming – like the Ganges itself, or the other, more ancient river, saints and metaphysicians, lives of whom we would learn in the comics he would bring for us back from India.

But he did not like to speak of death. When my mum’s close friend died, too young, and of a drawn out illness, he confided to mum that he didn’t have the words to speak. What was there to say? He had known death; his last sister, his beloved Sita, died in 1981. There were other sisters, and a young brother who had died years before. But death was marked and mourned in a different way over there, in the old country. And perhaps here it is rituals that must grieve for us, and that is what is given by religion. Didn’t he warn the husband of that close friend that he must not give up his faith? ‘I don’t why I told him that. I don’t believe in any of it’, he said, but there is a belief before belief, a living of the great trials of life through ritual and where the rite is more eloquent than we can be.

Cats, of course, are creatures of ritual. They live by rites, of their own devising, just as children demand that parts of the day be repeated. Rites – that harden from habits, from expectations. It is nine o’clock now (the same time, winter or summer), and time for Iams. It is ten o’clock and time to lie belly up on the sofa, luxuriant. And now it is twelve and time to hear ‘upstairs’ and to go out into the darkness – but it is true, our latest cat always affects not to hear this call, and protests at the injustice of being shooed out of the room. And their rites become ours, and the day is organised by how it is lived by a cat.

Another life, another view of the world – they watch us from somewhere else, from a world more distant than any human one. But they are our cousins nevertheless; they are like us, and our worlds can intersect, the world of cats upon the world of humans, and the other way round. They need us in some ways, and in others, we need them.

I cannot speak of my dad’s last years as though they were different from the ones which went before. There was no long descent into old age; his face was unlined, his hair no greyer than mine; he was slim – perhaps too slim, moderating his intake, carefully, scientifically measuring what he was to eat, wanting to avoid the insulin upon which he would one day become dependent as a diabetic; his legs were thin sticks, but he looked young – ten years younger than his age. Hadn’t we admired him as children, calling him our film star dad? That was our rite. It believed for us, and we believed, as children need to as much as cats.

And there is a last rite to perform, with my dad’s youngest brother standing in for me, the oldest son. One year after the death (but according to the Hindu lunar calendar, nor out solar one), a ritual to let karmic debts be paid back, on behalf of the dead one, who otherwise would be condemned to a ghost’s life on earth. Debts to ancestors, first of all – to one’s elders, to one’s parents, and, I think, to one’s teachers; and then debts to the saints and the temples; and finally, to God, to the one God from whom all comes.

And note the order – God comes last, but no doubt he comes first, too, as he gives ancestors and saints, and as perhaps he gives everything and knows everything, even the smallest event – the death of a cat, its life, and what we thought as children, being driven along on a family trip. Or perhaps there is no God and only the sense behind all of the importance of those events only we know who have known family life.

Small events, significant-insignificant, that let the corners of the world be brought to light. They live in our shadows, cats, but we live in theirs. In India, they are scrawny and barely fed; children are warned against them as they are warned against rats. But then people, too are scrawny and barely fed, and that is worse – poverty on all sides, and that is the shadow that overwhelms all.

The sense of that shadow reached us all in our house. Poverty, injustice, colonialisms and racisms, and the sense that the life of the rich rides upon the life of the poor. But another sense – that the Sarasvati river of legend flows still, in the Ganges, in India and all Indians, that other civilisation, that other source of civilisation, with our ancestors, with temples and saints – and weren’t we, our family, descended from a saint? – and then the God in whom none of us believed, placeholder for that belief before belief that is family life and from which we live, for all that we take its great continuity for granted.

Perhaps we know it only when it is broken, as it comes apart. Perhaps it is clear only then, when my mum’s close friend no longer visits, when there is no one sitting at the computer when I go home to visit; when the chair in the lounge is not occupied by him, and the television is not showing the Ashes or the football, or even the wrestling, which he used to watch, Big Daddy crushing Giant Haystacks.

I think men like to imagine they can lift themselves from family life, or that it is what is to be taken for granted before real life begins. Only later, much later do they remember that life, and want to return to it. I think it is invisible to them, the milieu they think belongs to women and children: the space of the home is only what gives unto the life of the world, and it is out there they must prove themselves, knowing their strength by what they defeat.

I think it is only when they are old and have room for weakness that they want to return. Old, and weakly knowing they are borne back ceaselessly into the continuity that is what they are made of and always were, and all debts must first be paid to that. Of what are we made? With what must we begin, and end? Perhaps to die is also to return.

Appropriate, then, that he died on a visit to India one year ago tomorrow, and the night before his medical treatment was to begin. Died at a stroke there where he was home, and having been sent off from here – I’ve seen pictures, he looked glad, young, smiling with a child’s smile – very ill, but with the hope of that treatment. And perhaps the hope that gives itself on the return to what you knew then, when you were young – knew without knowing it, believed without believing in it: family life.

And meanwhile, over here, there is a cat that looks to have a mirror tilted in the morning when the sun comes into the kitchen. A cat for whom, one might think, anyone will do, for whom one is just like another. But I know she has mourned and her ritual is a part of mourning. Doesn’t a cat, too, believe? Hers, I think, is a religion of lights, and who knows what those lights are for her as they move across the floor and cupboards. And who are we that play with her, she who is the part of the weave of continuity? Perhaps it is that she weaves us back, that is she is a living part of what our life was made, back then when we lived together. 

A River Ain’t Too Much To Love

‘I am quoting from memory’: Blanchot says this in his essay on Levinas, the tenderest of gestures, though doesn’t it also allow what is quoted to go amiss? How tenderly I got you wrong. How tenderly I forgot, though I was trying to remember. But what kind of tenderness does not look for accuracy?

I think there may be a writing that neglects, and is given over to the vagaries of memory. As though it were like the large glass of Duchamp’s artwork that would slow light down as it passed. To slow light, to slow sense, or the exchange of sense: I only half remember what you said. Remember it like light at the end of a summer’s day: fading, almost twilit, just before the bats come out. What did you say then? What did you want me to hear, or were you only talking to yourself?

You were ill and I took you to the old country to recover. It was winter, very cold, but I still pressed you for anecdotes: I wanted to know something of your private memories. And what did you say? Should I remember here?

Another memory instead, but still one of yours: the end of a summer’s day and you and a friend beneath a tree, the one with flashcards and the other guessing the shapes on those flashcards without seeing. ‘We were so tired. I think that’s why we were receptive.’ Wearily receptive, as the light failed, guessing the shapes right. But I am quoting from memory – when did you tell me that? twenty years ago – more? and when was that summer of which you spoke? – and no doubt I’ve got it wrong. I think you have to be tired, very tired, to write with the right amount of neglect, to let distance enter time and slow it.

Curious that memories like that can hollow out a space in you – that they ask to be kept, and that something of you is kept with them. But how to keep fidelity with a memory? How to remember, except by way of that forgetting that, like the Japanese aesthetic category of sabi lends the charm of a patina of age to that which is recalled?

As though it were a slightly damaged antique, or book pages that are sun-yellowed, or old yellowed photographs from the 70s, smaller than they are now, and with colours softer than they are now – that fading lets a distance speak; now it is time that is those pictures’ element. They bear the trace of the memories they would carry, but don’t they carry a trace of the neglect that they know will meet them? Who are those people? Who were they? Photographs remaining when all are dead and gone, when no one is alive.

We drove out to see you in your student halls, and walked out along one river that was a tributary to another. I have photos from that time – there, with the college behind us, and in the college cloisters themselves, and then with you standing on the semi-circle of bridge near to the houses where the boats are kept. And it was not long ago I stood on that same bridge, and a picture of me was taken there. That day, we quoted from Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy, laughingly, and of course inaccurately: what can such a poem mean to us now? what can poetry mean? No doubt it was the setting of the poem I recalled, for speaker, and choir and orchestra, and not the poem itself.

‘Now I will give my grief it’s hour’; ‘The festal light from Christchurch Hall’: poetry sings of what it was and is not now, or perhaps that was the way those old lines sounded as they were marked by my forgetting. Aged by our lives. Listened to, that setting, half a life ago and now as we spoke half-remembered lines with a patina that carried it beyond that half a life and spoke of the lovely fading of poetry, of the neglect that must meet it if it is to be alive.

And then you fell ill, and our families arranged that I took you to the old country, staying with my uncle in his cottage, a room each upstairs. How many photos did you take, film after film? The dog with snow in a little pyramid on his nose. The dog inside, lying on the underheated floor. The dog running out into the water. And then a picture of the ice on the water, like a crust, nearly breaking where the waves lapped up, but still all one, a single sheet.

I remember pressing you for anecdotes, remembering those stories recounted of the Greek philosophers by Diogenes Laertius in which the thought of a thinker was to reveal itself by an appropriate incident from their life. As though the whole of their thought were there, as the general shape of a tree is found in the angle between twig and branch. You told me something; but I will not tell of what you said. Two stories, I think, one of life and one of death.

And when I think of you, and of our lives and deaths, isn’t it with those stories first in mind: first of all, those anecdotes in which something came alive of which I did not know before. Your life, beyond mine, and different from it. I felt a pleasant neglect, I felt pushed back a little and this was happiness: to have been present when memories returned, and with great force. Yes, to have been there, then as they came to break the surface.

It is early now – or very late – and I cannot sleep. I wake up and come into this room, with the aim of picking up this thread, bearing with me my reading for the day: on the Stoics, on the notion of harmony, a little of Henry Green’s Nothing, and still the Jean Genet I remember from the other day: The Declared Enemy. And a more distant sense of mourning in advance, for when I saw that Robert Altman was dead, I thought of old Ingmar Bergman, and how that morning when you took a photograph of the frozen sea, we were told it was once possible to walk across the ice the five miles to Sweden.

It is on the other side of Sweden he lives still, Bergman, on his island, alone. Writing still – and he is the old man of Ullman’s Faithless, who assists when it comes to remembering the past. Not a narrator, but a kind of god who watches over narration, and blesses it. A god of neglect, and who comes to you by way of distance, bringing it.

How old he is, Bergman! And how late it is, as I take up writing this post again. As late as the night which seems never to end in Fanny and Alexander, and wouldn’t I like to speak as they were able to speak, the old woman and her friend the old Jew. Neglect carried their words, and she, in particular, let what she said be borne on that current which arrives from the past. Spoke, and let her speech be carried by that divine neglect that broke its words upon its surface, like funerary flowers carried apart on a river.

And now I remember, how nearly one year ago, the ashes of my father were carried into the Bay of Bengal and lowered there, in the city that used to be called Madras. Were their flowers? No place for a grave, but this is welcome. The sea to which all rivers are tributaries: that great river that runs through our lives, scattering what we say and what we remember.

Divine neglect: isn’t it of that, too I should remember, recalling little stories in which his memory comes alive? It is very late; it’s early. No dawn – not for a few hours. I hear the rushing of water from the kitchen – somewhere a pipe has broken. Somewhere it is leaking still, for all that the water company came out yesterday. I hear the heating coming on and then turning off again, and the crack of the water bottle from which I drank snapping back into shape.

I took a decongestant and a paracetamol: should I go to bed? But something is awake in me and I tell myself it is the god of neglect. But there is no god, only a river – the same one, I imagine that runs through the album by Smog, whose name is again free of parentheses.

And didn’t we (a different ‘we’, this time) watch Bill Callahan and Joanna Newsom performing ‘Rock Bottom Riser’ on Youtube, she sitting playing piano and he standing singing into a mic and say to each other, they’re really in love? We thought them both very handsome. We saw love when he turned to look at her, and love in her looking at him. We liked her dress, and his uprightness. We liked the piano that accompanied the song. A River Ain’t Too Much to Love: but what does that mean?

I am awake now, as only writing can awaken me. Who writes? The river seeks to find itself – to return flowing to flowing, breaking apart the funerary flowers, and carrying the ashes of the dead. To return to itself: as though writing wanted only to complete a circuit, to come back to itself by writing of a life, and of the ancedotes that speak of that life, the part of the whole. To return: as though writing had a nostalgia for what is lost to memory, for the distance that divides us from old photos and old memories.

Nostalgia – but not, now, of a lost place, of the homeland of memory, but of the river that runs through all places, returning, always returning, as the flower petals scatter. ‘I will give my grief it’s hour’. Grief – and joy – and death – and life. I am quoting from memory. No: memory is quoting me. No: memory quotes itself by way of neglect. How weary were you, that day, when you guessed the shapes, and thoughts seemed to pass from one weary head to another?

Escaper

I have a fierce, stupid love for Jean Genet; it’s always been there, even as I’ve given his books away, or bought them again. But is it Genet I love, I ask myself, reading Sinthome’s post – is it really Genet who interests me? Or his work, his life, a kind of rorschach – blots of ink that give themselves to be interpreted in various ways?

Or perhaps it is more than a matter of interpetation, and I find myself wanting, without having the book to hand, to ask myself what fascinates about the superhero Rorschach in Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Of course he is not quite a superhero – fierce and strong, yes, but he has no real powers.

Once, we get to see his ruddy, ordinary face. Only once, perhaps (I haven’t read the book for many years) – and it is indignant, even embarrassing. We prefer the smooth surface, the mask with changing blots of ink, and the detective’s jacket. He is a man alone, only uncertainly allied to the other superheroes (but are they heroes? – only one of them, perhaps, and what was his name, his skin coloured blue like a Hindu divinity?), and I admit I’ve always like to read of such solitary men, alone just as Jean Genet was alone, never keeping a permanent address and carrying with him only a nightcase with five books – poetry by Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Villon … and a couple of changes of clothes. Genet who says there is only truth when he is alone, and is writing: only then – and not in the interviews where he is half a person, or too much of one.

Solitude – and then to become – who? But now remember that Genet stopped writing when there appeared Sartre’s huge book that read his work and life together: Genet was now anointed: he was a saint. But who had canonised him thus? The philosopher who drew out the juice of his work: Sartre the master-writer, Sartre the canoniser – how was he, Genet, to write now?

Compare, decades later, a book written on him by another philosopher, whose multicolumned form recalls Genet’s own essay on Rembrandt: was Genet allowed to live in Derrida’s vast, risky text with its priestholes? Ah but Genet had forgotten writing by that time (1974); he was moving round the world, allying himself with the Black Panthers and then the Palestinians; it would be another decade before he drew together the manuscript of The Prisoner of Love, whose author has, it is clear, attained insubstantiality, letting himself be drawn into a form – as birds into a flock, as fish into a shoal – only as he is called by a cause greater than him.

But the young Genet, confronted by Saint Genet was a different person. He stopped writing. He was written out, he suggests, because he’d escaped prison, once and for all. Hadn’t he been facing a life sentence? Wasn’t it Cocteau and others who made a case for him as the great writer of a generation? But Genet wasn’t fooled. He repudiated Cocteau, too. He turned away from Sartre.

Later, he would declare Giacometti the most admirable man he’d met, and Greece his favourite country; I forget why. Genet was always escaping, and escaping himself. The books lay behind him. Blocked 5 years, he did not mourn. He lay back and let there come to him those idea-germs from which his work would be born again. He travelled, with his night case. He reread Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, and Villon, although he knew every line. He fell in love a hundred times.

Yes, this is the Genet of my delirium, a little like my delirious Godard – the one whose work sets me, too, to dreaming. And is it of myself I dream? Or rather, the one I might have been, who, in my dream, was latent in the 20 year old who first read Genet, Saint Genet; who first saw Godard. And shouldn’t I mention Mishima, too, the patron saint of 20 year olds?

Solitude. Fold open the bureau in your university room, I tell myself. Read those books again. But what do you read, would-be escaper? What do you promise yourself, you whose later travels would end in farce? You’d never go anywhere, would you, or you’d already travelled with Genet as far as you would go?

In Greece, having run out of books, you bought with your remaining money a ticket to leave today, thus ending your bid to escape into another life. Is it Genet I love? His voice? Or the idea that it is possible to speak thus, that the Law might part and you might be given the right to speech?

You – solitary, you – alone. ‘Alone as Franz Kafka’: didn’t Kafka write that? But isn’t it also to solicit the Law that you would write, to seduce its attention even as you are told off – what bliss! – even as it seems forbidden to write as you would allow yourself to write.

As alone as Jean Genet, telling truth. Alone, but not with the writer of those first 5 novels. Genet after Saint Genet; Genet after Sartre – not writing, but, I imagine, whispering into his lovers’ ears. Genet moving, travelling with his night bag: escaper who, with The Thief’s Journal let his name tremble with the name of those blue, wild flowers that flower along the border and, in my dream, all borders.

He crossed then in literature, in the pages of a book, but now, in my dream, he crosses for real, as he trains Abdullah to walk the tight-rope, as he passes through that country where I chose to live and from which I returned after less than a week, the sun being too bright, the sky too darkly blue.

Jean Genet, Bowie’s Jean Genie, I am folding open my bureau table fifteen years ago and today, and there is the black and white framed picture by Ernst I cut out from a book. Escaper, it was called. Did I escape? Did you? In Morocco I see you turning in your bed. You will not write today. Nor tomorrow. Because you have Abdullah to train. Abdullah for whom you hold a training tightrope five inches above the ground.

I wanted to escape, and reading and writing. Leave them behind; be translated into another life. In Greece, by the busstop I finished A Boy’s Own Story. Eight hours passed; the bus was late, so late, and then wound up through the bay: what beauty! In the town where we stopped, an old woman filled my cupped hands with pomegranate seeds. It was Sunday; strangers were to be fed. Then, later, the bus came down on the other side of the mountains, to another bay. Where to sail next? Anywhere, everywhere but what was I to read? A volume of Mandelstam, and that was all. And after that? Life, apparently. Real living – but what was that?

In his essay on Giacometti, Genet remembers sitting opposite a dirty old man in a train compartment. He wants to read, to avoid conversation. The man is ugly and mean. And then? ‘His gaze crossed mine … I suddenly knew the painful feeling that any man was exactly ‘worth’ any other man. ‘Anyone at all’, I told myself, ‘can be loved beyond his ugliness, his stupidity, his meanness.’ And then, ‘Giacometti’s gaze saw that a long time ago, and he restores it to us.’

To see thus, to be seen thus. In that town, in that bay, I drank ouzo with another traveller, a civil servant who came to the islands once a year, for the whole summer. We drank together, my spirits lifted. Where would we go? But suddenly I wanted to be alone. Just then, I wanted solitude, and I left him behind somewhere on the ferry. We came to our destination the next morning. I thought: but this is not where I want to be, either. To travel, I had thought, was to be worn down like a stone in a river. No more edges, no distinctness, and we would all be alike, us travellers.

In an Athens garden, I read from Mandelstam. It was over, I knew that, as I travelled 6 hours early to the airport to wait for my flight. No escape, no adventure; I was too much myself, or only lost what I was when reading. To be a stone on a river floor, a stone among stones, worth no more than anyone else: how to be worn down by escape? How to live like anyone else, and everyone else? Wasn’t that the question I asked into Genet as I read, and to Godard as I watched? Wasn’t it the question Mishima drew from me (it was the opposite of being stung. The sting – that I did not know was there – was drawn out by my reading)?

I went home; I studied, I read nothing but philosophy for 10 years. 10 years blocked. 2 times 5 years without another kind of reading. Perhaps I had written a kind of Saint Genet. Perhaps I had cursed my reading, my writing. I was no longer alone; others whispered in my ear. Was this life, was I now alive? How was it there seemed no escape, without those texts that moved like ink-blots? Write then, draw the mask over your head. Read and let others be masked. How to give everything away and travel, too, but without leaving your room?

Derrida writes in Glas of the dredgers he can see at work along the Seine and of what is lost by them as they scoop. For my part, from my window, there is my yard, and the scars along the wall, and new plants in new pots. Back in my student hall there was a cat like a remnant, who lived for a time with us for no particular reason. One night I drew her into my room and she transformed that space as she wandered, tail up, sniffing, curious.

What is there around me that is not being renovated, completely transformed? What falls? The leak which rotted the joists between my flat and the flat above; the second leak beneath the kitchen floor which makes the wall still wet. Then the mildew that grows in the new cupboards, and the stains left by rusting metal tins.

Remnants, fragments, that should be remembered as they fall, like the rustbelts that are still found in our New Europe. The cat disappeared, taken home by one of the cleaners. The water company is coming out to look at the leak, the builders to mend the soaked-through ceiling. What remains?

I am on the side of the remnant, I tell myself; I see myself from there, on the other side of the glass. The long scars along the wall; the cat; the rotting joists, the gaze of Giacometti’s statues: each time, a remnant of the past, and as what remains as the past. What returns? what is being sought here? and what will you find, reader for whom this cannot be interesting, and which interests you only because of that?

The Law

As my friends know and tell me, I have a relationship to authority that is one of masochism: don’t I love it, the sense of having done something wrong, whatever it is, without knowing it, and then being corrected – told off – and brought back into the fold?

A child’s book – Charmed Life – whose character, the passive Cat (like so many of Diana Wynne Jones’ protagonists) sets himself on fire by striking a match from the book in which his lives are kept (he doesn’t know it yet – and like, again, those others of Jones’s protagonist – but he has great gifts, in his case nine lives and a powerful capacity for magic); sets himself on fire and then in comes the Enchanter, the owner of the castle where the orphaned Cat has found himself and lifts him into the bath – sweet smell of burning – and then rolls him in a carpet to be put out.

Ah, delicious memory – to be bathed thus, to be rolled thus, and after, like Cat to bathe in the attention of one who has hardly seemed to see him – and then to be recognised eventually as another Enchanter – as an heir to the castle and to a government position in this alternate world where magic is everywhere and technology far behind that of our world!

I remember the ghostly flames with which Cat seemed to burn and then understanding – was it then or later – that the nickname, Cat (his real name, Eric) was because, as an Enchanter, he had nine lives, and those left to him placed in that matchbook a match from which he had unfortunately struck.

Yes, to have sinned – though it was not your fault, and then punished, and then attended to, having sweetly burned, given sweet tea in bed: to be weak and tired from a temporary, involuntary transgression that let for the first time, the sense of the Law spring up around you – there are limits, prohibitions, against which you were brought – what reassurance to know the presence of the Law, even in its inscrutability. The Enchanter, the law’s agent, the one who knows, attending to – you: who have you become?

I am reminded, also, of another book, long given away, so I can’t check it – Denton Welch‘s A Voice Through A Cloud, the last of his three novels, unfinished at the time of his very early death, and recounting, in a manner that is more or less true, the story of his accident – a car ran into his bike – complications from which would stop him completing this novel.

Denton half falls in love with his doctor, that’s what I remember. And doesn’t he test the limits of his doctor’s care – doesn’t he transgress a little to enjoy all the more being brought back within the hospital Law? Poor dying Denton, who describes – he is a consummate food evoker – placing peppermints on his chest and watching them rise and fall with his breathing, and isn’t there a very beautiful passage about a cat – I used to know it by heart, but it is twelve years ago at least when I last read it – beautiful because the cat plays its games in his memory, from a time before the accident that is killing him.

Didn’t I have the fantasy as a child of being very ill, confined in some way – when was it I read of iron lungs? in the Guiness Book of Records 1977? – but then I also remember seeing in some programme or another a little girl falling ill and then being confined, but what old black and white film was that? and then some television series about an ill child and helicopter-carried doctors: all that, the medical world, the promise of being ill and then made better, the technical apparatus enticed me then because it seemed another embodiment of that wrong you would commit without knowing it was wrong, but that also elected you to the position of one who would deserve special attention.

Why that love of swooning (Barthelme’s book on King Arthur’s court has all the knights swooning), of illness? – and perhaps the same love now of a kind of falling – or is it the falling that engenders love (recalling the gaze of the boss in Sinthome’s reading of The Secretary)? – of that sweet tiredness that give me the excuse of writing only what asks me to dream along with it, carrying me once again to the limits of the law – this time to what cannot be said, and consoling me by allowing these words I write to come back to me on the blog, pretty and distant and mine.

But then I also admit I enjoy being told off for what I write here and isn’t that another way of being gathered up and loved by the law, like the Little Match Girl in the illustrated book of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales I had as a child, who is met by her grandmother in heaven? Gathered up – just as a little girl when I was young, might when she cried in class be sat on the lap of a teacher and cuddled?

Because to be told off is at least not to be neglected. Ambiguous desire, because I am in love, too with that word, ‘neglect’, and isn’t it also that I want that another part of me writes, that part half-writing with me now, in relation to whom I am the master, I am the punisher although I feel tender towards him who loses himself in that wandering that sets him too far from the work I have to accomplish in the world?

How will that review get written, I ask him as I shake him – but don’t I love him, too?; isn’t he the one for whom I feel all tenderness and who goes out from that always wounded place I remember as belonging to my childhood?

It is a child that writes, or half-writes distractedly alongside me. Distracted because his gaze is caught by the field and the trees on the other side of the field, and that space beyond the school that is owned by he knows not whom the path through which he will not discover until when one day on a school walk he sees his own school, his classroom small and far away.

I remember it still, that view. I dream of it. What does it see in me? What gaze did it send towards me? – and by what gaze am I still watched? I indulge him, this child who almost writes. Sometimes I promise myself to use the words cuddle and pretty – a child’s words. And the word toy, for which, as a child I already felt a great tenderness.

Didn’t I know that to the heart of childhood, to those smallest of children who play side by side without mixing and in whom, Deleuze said, one only sees the play of a life, there belonged only those toys? I was perpetually too old for the toys with which I wanted to play. And easy to tears I when told off I also loved those tears and to cry. Marvellous humiliation, and in front of the whole class.

It became annoying only when to be told off was not enough and the teacher had another child take me to the most junior class in the infants and made me sit with the smallest children. What a baby! But didn’t I know I was approaching the heart of what was already lost? – that it was childhood that was drawing me towards it, and that I was living what could not return for the too-old child I was?

That was the perfection of tears, as they gathered me then to the edge of what I was losing. And the perfection of the view that saw me from the field on the brow of the hill beyond the school that always let my tears dry up.

Seeing a friend of mine enthuse his poor son to take karate lessons and then when he cried in front of the other boys and their fathers (it was all fathers) not to take him from the hall of crash mats somewhere private, I thought: he is breeding a masochist.

No surprise years later when the boy denounced his father, and, as I hear, was taken away from his custody. Unfair – cruel – and I think unjust though I know little of the particularities of the case – and the boy is with his mother now, suffused by her tenderness, exalted by her mercy.

Poor Denton, poor Cat and that poor lad, then, though what is he becoming now? Remember what happened when Francis Bacon’s father had him whipped by stableboys? – wasn’t it lads like stableboys who Bacon would henceforward seek out to whip him to his father’s shock? And what is that line by Prince from Come where he sings, don’t abuse children or they’ll turn out like me?’

What strangenesses can be hatched in the minds of the young. Happily or unhappily, conventional relationships are enough for me – I am rather passive, I let things happen, but they eventually harden into an ordinary heterosexualism, into relationships in which nothing is unusual – but then I wander what writing has unleashed, or rather that fallen writing written here. Whose law am I breaking? Whose punishment do I seek?

To be sick, to be made better: a child’s game. A game I might have played with my soft toys as a child, making my voice higher than it was, and seeking by way of those ‘transitional objects’ (Winnicott) passage upstream to what had already shut me from the heart of childhood.

Time was already carrying me along, and those toys were binbagged and put into the lost where they wait still, keeping place for what has no place – indices of what retreats as childhood in childhood. I think I never made the transition, and something of me is as though snagged back there.

Is it the same for all of us? From what do we love, or cuddle? Who is it that looks for the pretty? Didn’t I love pretty girls as a child? And pretty things? And pretty writing? I think these are dull times, and consensual reality is such that you can play with nothing, and relationships are part of the great clampdown.

Wasn’t there a short period in my life when other lives were lived as possible? Ah, that was back in Manchester. And don’t I like now my zipped up fleece and being just like anyone else? Like anyone else – but excessively so, and this ‘too much’ becomes a metonym, I’m sure, for something else.

How strangely desire leads us. I am learning more from the notes I take from Sinthome’s instructive posts on psychoanalysis, which I paste into Word and annotate.

Vaguely and stupidly I dream of a time, a place where fantasies might be lived in body and soul. Like the vanguardist, I would want what is found by way of writing to be discovered in all parts of life. To live what is written. To complete what is begun here, and in the sphere of life.

But don’t I also love the Law that keeps the spheres separate? Don’t I love those arbiters who tell me that I’ve sinned and why, that I might correct my ways. I am a penitent. But then, like an attention-seeking cat, I begin again.

One night, at the end of my first year at university I remember lighting tissues and throwing them out of my first floor window. It was my tribute to the festivities around me. I think I was very bored. And you came over and said, ‘you want attention’ like a father to a son. And didn’t you tell me what to do to overcome my boredom? Didn’t you make all kinds of practical suggestions?

I was pleased to be acknowledged, and happy to be so addressed, and with such care. But I also knew I was turned away from you and from myself, that someone in me had turned his head and dreamed inside me.

Boredom – was that the word? I think I was close to where the Law sent great shafts of light into the sky. At its edge. I think I thought, I am alone. I wrote something in a journal about the head of all waters – a phrase that when I use it I always fear will bring me bad luck.

Do you see – I’ve cursed myself now, and this will be a bad post, I will have confided too much and at too great a length and should lead it home now, like a horse by its nose. Home: you have been out, and now it’s time to come home; the Law opens to enclose you. The Law welcomes you back.

Byzantium

There’s no doubt I’ve always felt an attraction to those who feel part, whether by an accident of birth or by some later process, of official culture – of that world of books, of music, of painting, and of travel, being able to compare this European capital with that – even if, at the same time, I always felt it was I who belonged to the new world, the new flattening out, that great work of destroying what has been.

Wasn’t I one of the cultural levellers? I loved the old world – old Europe – but didn’t I hate it too: didn’t I enjoy the great destruction and falling away even as I affected to despise it? Perhaps this was simply an imaginary revenge.

For the years I lived with the monks, all revenge was imaginary: wasn’t I always polite and pleasant, even when it was as though they had lain in wait for me when I came downstairs in the morning and they pressed me to tell them what it was I thought I was doing? What was I writing? what was my project? and did I really think it was philosophy? Did I – really – think – it – was – philosophy, the words dragged out like that in incredulity?

For my part, I tried to say very little, and I knew never to leave a book downstairs for the monks in their jolly joshing to tear apart. And never to leave a chapter draft or a paper draft – never to leave anything behind, doubly difficult when the only working printer in the house was the one downstairs.

The landlord of the house, himself not a monk, had said, quoting Dr Johnson, only a fool writes for anything but money, and so he set to writing vast fantasy novels linked in a multi-volume saga. I was made to read the first one – nine hundred pages – and told him what I thought: it was bad, the imaginary world existed only in the head of its author, but for the reader, thin gruel.

Its author was impressed enough that I became his editor, and he made great readjustments, writing quickly – as always, one draft was enough – he wrote his well known book on a well known philosopher in 5 days; he wrote academic papers, when he was still asked to write them, in a single morning; when he broadcasted on the radio, he needed no notes, but only a single take, his voice on Thought For The Day being much higher than it was in ordinary life.

One draft – I saw him write another 900 page book in three weeks, this one a lot better, and it was decided that as well as an editor I should also be an agent, and we sent a section of the manuscript hopefully to publishers. A series of radio plays had been more succesful, however – nothing of my landlord’s was published, but the plays – a whole series of them, the manuscripts of which disappeared with his death – were heard and loved.

Hadn’t he received fanmail? Hate mail, too, and sometimes on a daily basis, until he invited the one who hated him out to lunch, and off they went and came back friends. That was his generosity and his bravery. I’d said: he’ll stab you, and he, then let him, but they came back friends after a long lunch, and there was no more hate mail.

He was a big man, my landlord, but bigger still was the millionaire priest from whom, it was said, every two years a whole side was carved away like a kebab. He drove a people carrier before that was common, and brought with him one of his girlfriends: a frail sixteen year old he’d picked up when he taught at a rough school, a match to the other frail sixteen year old he kept in his great house, which his wealth had allowed him to fill with exquisite antiques: but wasn’t he too large to sit at any of the splindly chairs?

In his backyard, he kept a pack of dobermans, for he lived in a rough area. One day a girlfriend told the police about the gun he also kept for fear of attack and he was jailed; later, he said he settled happily in prison, this vast man, who wheezed when he had to mount a single step, speaking calmly and with great simplicity with those around him, for that was his charm, his grace.

Like my landlord, he had arched feet and could move quietly and swiftly, and like him, again, he was a man of presence and charisma: a certain man, who stood foursquare on the earth, knowing his entitlement. Once my landlord took his friend out for a lunch of dim sum, and he had ordered, the millionnaire, everything on the menu, and drank a great deal and then pissed in our front garden because he couldn’t hold it in. And he did this with grace, with certainty, though that seems impossible in memory.

He was, it is true, only a half-cultured man; the seventeenth century was alive for him, and the eighteenth, but not those that are closer to us. But then he lived in a house where no piece of furniture, no fitting, was older than 1800: that was how he spent the immense wealth he had.

For our part, there was a Jacobean chest in the hall of our house, and around the walls in the room with the oak parquet there were valuable plates mixed in with unvaluable ones: a ruse to stop thieves and coveters of whom there were many in our house, which took in alcoholics and drug addicts who had given up their vice.

In the garden, the sculpture of a saint, but without a head, and the stables, where another tenant and I would go out to sit and look back across at the house asking how we’d ended up living there and how long it was to go on. I would watch him smoke and we would talk about his business, which he ran from the basement of the house, when he was sober and even when he was not, taking apart and reassembling computers – it was always mess – though he always set aside a computer so that I could come down and play games there and keep him entertained.

He liked to chatter and so did I, and he credited me, in his years struggling to be sober, with allowing him to talk about himself in third person and thus see himself from another perspective and not be so serious. The former eco-warrior, star of a Dutch documentary that showed him saving turtles from German tourists in Greece, who would lie their towels on top of the nests from which the turtle young would hatch, had become a lover of meat and fine clothes.

We were Chorlton dandies and known in the cafes for always going round together, chattering in that way we had which kept them amused for it was testament to closeness of being months and years together. In the evening, he would surf for porn and pin pictures on his purple walls, and I would find old country songs on Napster for us to sing along to – a whole New Year’s Eve passed that way, with the monks downstairs baffled by our loud, sober singing.

For their part, the monks were great gossips and planners and bon vivants: one rule was that if a guest had travelled, then the rules of the fast were broken, and all could eat whatever they liked. Only the Copts refused to be indulged thus – we’d shelled prawns for a big lunch, and it fell to me, in the end, to eat what the Copts would not: a whole mound of shellfish, squid and crab and prawns.

I used to offer to wait on the guests, so I could observe them without participating: wasn’t it fun to be on the fringes of this, more ancient world, where, as I suppose with the masons, one with a lowly in the job in the world could still hold high office in the church and command deference from all?

There was even a supposed princess, a primary school teacher who’d inherited the title from her late husband, who went round with a crusader’s sword in the back of her car, sometimes going out to Spain where it was still believed she the legitimate heir to one of the kingdoms of the Byzantine empire. Why Spain? – I’ve no idea, but there was an order she had knighted with her heavy crusaders’ sword and whenever she was in the house, we all called her princess and addressed her with solemnity.

In the top flat, there stayed for a while the prince of another such kingdom, who gave me some title so I could be part of his virtual court. For a long time, he drove a taxi, and had great plans for an import/export business, but then he came into a compound in Zambia where his uncle had a business. His cousin, who was also remembered in his will, tried to murder my co-tenant, cutting his brake cables. And then the great fraud was revealed: it was not a legitimate business that had been inherited, but something much more shady.

The former tenant returned to find a wife to take out there for the long attempt to run an honest business. He is out there still, I think, but without a wife, lost in his compound with his Zulu servants. One of us even went out to see him once and came back shaking his head. ‘What a terrible place …’ Money was being smuggled back in tubes of toothpaste, I knew that. Horrible stories of murder out there – the life of a black Zambian being worth of course infinite less than a white one. And the settlers with their dodgy, exploitative businesses stranded in their compounds and afraid of revolution.

Colourful times, life full of incident, guests and tenants coming and going: I met all kinds of people there, and heard all kinds of stories, which I knew no one would believe if I told them. The house belonged to another century; the Byzantine kingdom hadn’t ended; no philosopher was liked after Thomas Aquinas, except for a scattering of twentieth century analytics – one monk was taught by Grice. These were scholar-monks, men of knowledge and modesty, sight translating from old Greek, Syriac readers, self-taught Sanskrit scholars, lovers of Old English – it was they who seemed to lie in wait for me those mornings.

Who was I that had appeared among them? I would make excuses to got and fetch them sandwiches and pies from the bakery, chosing for myself videos to return for a pound by six o’clock to keep in my room writing. How many films did I see? Two or three a day, and for years, and sometimes running into the apocalypticist in the video aisles who would tell me of the New World Order that was to begin in the year 2000 and of his failed acting career and his unjust expulsion from one of the universities.

Films – to keep me in my room, working, for that was to be the horizon of my life. To work – and night, and day, it was all of what I could afford to think. Keep your eyes down, I told myself. Focus. And drank too many coffees that sent my mood up very high and then plunging down – a mad life I lived in the hope it would be temporary, for weren’t there among the frequent visitors the terrifying ghosts of the academic world, the man who burned his Ph.D. in a fit of madness and was now in a drawn out legal dispute with the university, the formidable scholar whom no one would trust to teach so wayward was she, but who lived in poverty, and from whose husband my landlord would buy paintings in the knowledge it would keep that poor couple afloat – and others, many others, who had crashing and burning in various ways, but whose life still turned around the chance of a job or at least some part time teaching or a settled courtcase?

Many years passed, and I outlasted all the other tenants. Year after year, I was like Hans Castorp in the sanatorium, at the centre of all incidents. I remember that house so well; I wander it now, in memory and it seems realer than the flat in which I live, just as that life, so frustrating then seems richer than mine now.

Castorp left the magic mountain, I think, to die as a soldier in the war where we see him last, and I left to continue my wrecker’s work on old Europe, loving and despising that to which I can’t belong.

Peacocks

In a small town such as the one where I grew up, there are unless you are especially gifted, few opportunities to be engaged by learning, by culture, all that – what a marvellous sight for us, and rare, to see a whole bookshelf full of books, with titles familiar and unfamiliar, where one book would lead you on to another, one after another, until strand is joined to strand in a great luminous web.

Wondrous diwali – wonderful those feasts of light that burned in those houses where full bookshelves were found, or low rows of albums – of jazz and classical music, for we were able to negotiate the worlds of popular music by ourselves. Culture there and all at once – spines turned outward to your look, album sleeves pulloutable and inspectable: lucky those who lived in the worlds of books, or music, and who knew their way in that foreign country.

Curious to visit houses were they were taken for granted, those worlds, and were nothing special to remark upon: yes, there are books, albums, all this …Visiting relatives in the old country, I remember a friend of theirs inviting me to his flat as they had never been invited, to inspect the great rows of books, of albums, and to let me look through them.

Ravel’s songs, I remember them. Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc; Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis. And a book about Greenland – photographs of wintry expanse, and samples of Greenlandish writing – long words, very long, and not, to the eye, like Danish. And wasn’t I taken by a percussionist to watch the orchestra rehearse at Tivoli? He showed me the branches he used to perform one symphony or another by Nielsen.

And I think it must have been that summer when, walking around Humlebaek I listened to Sibelius on my personal stereo – taped from an album given to me by another friend whose flats were lined with books, with albums …

Culture, that world, books and music and ideas – conversations that were linear, and were not scattered in all directions. Witty conversations, too. And moments when, all of a sudden, attention would turn to you and you were to shine, as though you were the repository of all hope.

For they were older than me and felt themselves to belong to a vanishing world? Wasn’t I to continue what their sons and daughter would not? And so I became an heir of sorts, and there was shone on me the whole light of their attention. Now I could let them speak of the great decline they felt was taking place around them. Weren’t their books and records shored against a world which I did not quite occupy?

Much later, an old friend of mine from those times (from those circles) found herself living in the big house of a professor, a teacher and their family. She was a guest there, and for some months (a year? how long?). And she told me, in her room, sitting on the round-backed whicker chair that she felt she’d cheated her way into another world.

Wasn’t she happy there? She was – the new daughter in a house where there were only sons. A daughter – they redecorated a room for her, and I was allowed to stay, now and again, a favoured guest for they thought, the parents, that I was part of a world to which they should convey their houseguest.

For how long was she there? I remember conversations around the great table in the dining room, where each would have a turn to speak, and each, in that turn, would have to shine somehow. I was glad to have read some popular accounts of physics, for that was one topic at the table that night – and wasn’t I congratulated for drawing the father, who never said much, into animated conversation (a beachball tossed between us)?

I think it was on that visit, or was it the next one, that I was deemed a suitable son-in-law for the new daughter, and weren’t we sad, my friend and I that that could never be! The evening – either that night or another – tore itself apart. It was not our world, or the price of its admittance was too high.

She, for her part, was not attracted to men: didn’t they know that? They knew, but perhaps they hoped for something else. Hope for her, for the life to which I was to convey her. It was a benign hope, a loving hope, but that evening was torn down the middle, she leaving the table suddenly to go up to her room, and I, who had noticed that (where else was the centre of my attention? Nowhere else, not ever) spoke on, to deny there was a tear.

Not long after, she left, but not before, one afternoon, we watched Mirror together, she wrapped in her duvet, and then after, took me round the garden of that vast house, with its iron gates, its lawn. The mother, we remembered later, wanted her sons to be creative – everyone must create, that was the imperative. This was beautiful, but they were rich, or so they seemed to us – rich and their lives had begun to flower in the 60s, when there were jobs for those with degrees, and large houses to be bought by them for little.

And who were we, who hardly belonged to that world, and had to make our own way in dimmer times? I think I dreamt of finding conversation as I would read of it in books – light, airy, where each, confidently, let what they said lift into the air – where everyone kept the conversation buoyant, bouncing it wittily between them like a beachball.

And in the meantime? There were at least books in which such conversation bounced. And didn’t I come to prefer zipping my fleece up to the top and going around like anyone else, speaking to say little, giving nothing in particular away and only falling back occasionally into the world that seemed to announce itself then, when I was young and full of hope?

It is true I resist them now, what friends of that time are still alive because they cannot be like anyone else, their great peacock tails fanned out: culture: their entitlement: it is marvellous, but these are different times, and who can speak of creativity now? You need a big house for that, and iron gates to keep the world away.

Meantime – and there is only the meantime, the time between – there is the sober business of living amidst the great collapse, knowing the world went mad some years ago. Isn’t it enough to find a few hours of the day to set against that madness, and friends to laugh at it with?

Reading Bourdieu much later I realised that what we found then in books, in music was a mark of distinction – a cultural capital was necessary to make of our retreat from a world we disliked a kind of jewelled cave. All the jewels of culture should be stowed there, shining. We knew we were in retreat, but it was a marvellous one. Books around you – albums –

Nowadays my flat is bare, or nearly so, and I got rid of those thousands of collected jewels. Happiness, but this is perhaps because I did find my way eventually into a world where such jewels are alive between us, that it is even ordinary to speak, if not of what was once regarded as canonical, then of the world they were once deemed to occupy.

A vanished world, an empty cupboard – I like this revenge we have taken on our youth and our youthful dreams; I like our new politicised realism. That world is torn, and wasn’t it always thus? We’re outside the iron gates, and in the world. Now and again, a peacock’s feather will remind you of those who seemed once to belong to a vanishing world – of the heirs we were, that we might have been.

Somewhere, I know hundreds and hundreds of books will be left to me. Hardbacked collected works – literature, in English, from all ages, stacked in a flat whose walls are shelves, and where in the lounge, there is even a smaller set of shelves, until there are only two seats on which to sit, right at the centre, but only if you lift the books from them first.

When I visit I turn the pages of the new books he has found. It is marvellous, always marvellous. But the arms of the clock in that same room have not moved for many years. Once, there were held mock concerts there, LP recordings of old 78s, so you could hear Sibelius conducting Sibelius, and mock programme notes and even an interval, with drinks – Aqua libra on a metal tray.

You were to listen in silence. I was a school leaver, lost in the world. Here, in a teacher’s flat was still something to learn, great bookshelves reaching into the sky, box sets of operas lined up alphabetically, new books piled all around. Wasn’t it there I was read The Man With The Blue Guitar – read, and the whole thing: that was welcome. And Sunday Morning! And The Emperor of Ice Cream!

There was an edition of Steven’s letters to look through. A few hardbacked Ivy Compton Burnetts. The old world, the marvellous world as in a spread wide peacock’s tail. Curious, years later to stay on a farm were the peacocks were pests, coming begging for breakfast, with their tiny heads and massive, scaly feet. Not suited for the world, not really.

And was I? Were we, because there were always a few of us gathered at this house or that, back then in our small town. Wanting – what? To share in a life that was moving away – did we sense it? Or perhaps, as I sometimes feel, it has moved nowhere, and it was that the likes of us were to be excluded.

We were admitted for a time – a golden summer – and then, I think, the door was closed. Or was it, for a whole period, the 60s, the 70s, the door was open wider than it would be again, and they, too, our hosts, found their way into the enchanted kingdom?

I will say for myself that I never felt entitled to that kingdom, not really – and that I do not today. I was not permitted that identification; I was never given body and soul as I imagine, or hosts were. Or perhaps this, too, is a phantasm, that I speak as one committed as they never were and never had to be, they for whom culture and art was the aether in which they moved as if through clouds of perfume.

Did they need to make the slightest effort? Were they not always natural heirs to a kingdom that will be forever theirs? But now there bubbles up in me a kind of dull resentment: why isn’t it mine what was theirs? And isn’t it my resentful kind who will inherit the kingdom, smashing their way through the museums and shouting in the concert halls?

But resentment is just a petty dependency on what one affects to despise. Perhaps the peacocks still stalk about untouched; perhaps there are less of them now, and growing fewer, and soon there will only be one, dragging its tail, disconsolate.

Finishing Henry Green’s Pack My Bag, I know I should never like to write of that uncertain time when the gates seemed to open and full bookshelves made me full of hope. One never likes to have been naive. With whose dreams was I burning? Whose lit torch was I?

Perhaps Bourdieu would say it was to separate myself from others that I went through those gates – to render myself distinct, gathering feathers for my own peacock’s tail. And no doubt for others I was a peacock as those hosts had been for me, and still am, although I vow to give books to those who want them rather than let them stand tall on bookshelves, rearing up as the whole of Culture rears in them, a thousand horses.

Nowadays we all wear zipped up fleeces, and our books lie in careless piles, and none of us are experts, and none of us is young. How I have loved to read Green and Woolf and Lawrence! How it was that those books seemed, by their very existence, to fan out a miracle! Wasn’t that always my excuse for my unwillingness to judge: that it was enough that there were books and that there were writers: that this already was enough?

Years ago, I lent you Mirror and you lost it, my treasured tape, and then forgot I even lent it. Then, years later, but still years ago, you gave me a bought copy and not one taped from the TV one enchanted Valentine’s Day when we wanted to feel that you liked men. We met on a deserted campus – do you remember? No: I am the one who was given to remember, I am the archivist in whose memory there are still peacocks and a house with iron gates and your redecorated room with a high round-backed whicker chair.

Arts and Culture

I am always weak enough that the style in the novel I’m reading seems to unfold itself in my own, or perhaps it is that I have no style, and am only the nobody who is always swept along by a gust that is not his own.

Ill in bed for the last few days, it’s Pack My Bag that I read, and my thoughts turn weakly to the times I passed through the social world which Henry Green remembers. ‘I passed’, but that suggests agency too great – wasn’t it rather that I was always being taken up by one group or another, and that, by a kind of elevation, because I was blank enough that others could project on me desires of their own and recognise me thus, I was caught into the whirl of a social set?

I remember being pinned down by my arms on a bed in a country house by a girl with a double barrelled first name and a double barrelled second name – only for a moment, and part of another drama – that of making her boyfriend jealous, whose family also owned a country house like the one in which I found myself.

The girl had felt slighted, so she had come upstairs to find me, and what was I doing there? She was too young to have asked herself that; I was simply there, and to be drawn into her drama. Of course her boyfriend – was he her boyfriend? – noticed nothing, and had long since retreated with his friend to play snooker.

The house was all full of terrible knick-knacks, and in the snooker room, books had been bought by the yard to fill the shelves. The girl (another one) who had invited me there – and I had no idea that her house was different to any other, and was amazed to be told, as the taxi driver took us up the hill, that what appeared a small village of old houses was in fact part of the one estate, hers, or her family’s, my host – did so from a sense that I would add something to the drama.

Did I disappoint her? I remember, the first night, entering one of the largest rooms I have ever been in, with thirty foot ceilings and great high glass doors and great curtains pulled across them, there to find some men – boys – in dinner jackets, cooking for us. I was taken up to my room, and was to change. I had only a jacket I bought at a jumble sale, with a rip in the back.

Down I came, and it was dinner. We all drank a great deal, our hostess became ill, and slowly the intrigues began to unfold. Three men and two women – girls, all of us younger than 20. So this really was a weekend in a country house! And these really were a ‘set’! But of course they were not; our hostess’ family were new money, and had bought the estate all at once, and filled it with knick-knacks and books bought by the yard.

The real aristocrat amongst us said nothing of this, it was rather one of the girls, very snobbish since she hardly belonged to this world, who laughed at the unkempt maze in the gardens and at the ragged lawns. She was unimpressed. But the aristocrat, for whom her remarks were intended, was involved with the other girl. It seemed a complicated affair. Of course they were both very young.

Sometimes, later on, he would visit me in my room in the halls at university, and I would play him CDs as he looked through my books. I always thought he should be given things, he who gave so much to everyone else – true, he could afford it, but I always felt he was ashamed of his forced generosity, and wished someone could reciprocate in turn, and in their own way.

But this never lasted long; one girl or another would always come to find him, and if he always invited me on trips in his old car, which he used to drive the length of England to visit one old friend or another, it was the girls who always charmed their way in, taking all he bought them and demanding more. He disappeared back into his own circles, in the end, leaving his girlfriend behind (but she was never really his girlfriend).

On another occasion, found one day photocopying, I was taken up by another girl, who thought to involve me in her group – jaded, urbane Londoners with boyfriends much older than themselves, and who already tired of what they felt life had to offer them. Every night, for a time, I would be visited and they would speak of those minute social manoeuvers – perceived slights and insults they had borne or dealt to others around us.

Social climbers again – but this time measuring themselves by the cool, by a kind of reserve. They’d seen everything! They’d travelled everywhere! And where had I been, compared to them? And what was my connection to this or that London set? In the end, happily enough, I was dropped; they stopped visiting me: I was going out with someone they thought beneath me; I was snubbed in nightclubs, and this made me laugh.

I had been caught in an intrigue; I had disappointed them – or was it that I had moved from a diffuse set of possibilities – who was I? who was I to go out with? – that they might allow to be realised in various ways, to a person attracted to that kind of girl (the wrong kind)?

But that romance soon ended, and I was on my own again, to be picked up by the Young Conservatives, with whom I watched the General Election in 1992, laughing on my own when Chris Patten lost his seat. I was told the Young Conservatives thought me someone worth getting to know.

To be worth knowing – why not? – I was bored and romanceless, so I let them come round and smoke cigars in my room. How passive I have always been! Still, it was interesting to find out later what became of them all – one retired by 30, the other working in an off license, and to be caught up in speculation as to why one person succeeded and another did not.

For my part, of course, I had no hope of succeeding; I was a disaster, and I so depressed my poor university friends that I told them I was going abroad to teach for a year, when really I returned to the country after less than a week, having failed to find work and even the desire to find anything at all. Back – and to unemployment – but at least free for a few years from my friends who, in those years of recession, were doing much better, I thought, than me.

But wasn’t I, always, for them, some kind of absence, an open space of possibilities, occupying a position into which they could imagine occupying themselves? I was usually treated as one of their kind, whatever kind they might be.

Much later, returning to study, there was another period of being taken up, another crowd who desired that I was one of them and that I desire as they did. Once, ill, they came round to tend me like nurses; I was grateful for that.

I was figured as an older brother, I think – they were undergraduates, and I a postgraduate, and deemed wiser and older for that reason. And didn’t I belong to the world of the Arts? of Culture? That was my passport to their world, after I was 20 and had read a little, and to all the sets. Art and Culture, which still had a value in their world.

But of course, I fell away from that last set, too, when for a few months I was ill with some vague, unspecified malady. Days in bed – weeks lolling in the summer sun – and gradually a return to the world no longer populated by them, the posh and the would-be posh, to whose world I would not have to return for another ten years.

Arts and Culture: I began to read, before turning 20, under the influence of another, bohemian set who, I think, gave me the push to read by seeming so well informed themselves. Didn’t one know Samuel Beckett (‘Sam’ as she called him; he died at this time)? Hadn’t another lived a few weeks in the backrooms of Shakespeare & Co.?

That was a time marvellous until I they told me how young they felt they were, how their tastes would change, and that our tastes now were not to be trusted. They were too young and I was too young, I think they decided, and though we were all to live together in a big house, I pulled out, thinking I wouldn’t care for that moment, of which I already saw signs, in which they would pull away from Arts and Culture into another life.

Wasn’t it then I met one of their brothers, and knew? Wasn’t it then I saw that Arts and Culture was around them as they were raised, that they breathed in the dust of old civilisation with such ease because they hadn’t pushed their way into them like explorers unhappy with this world, but as they’d been taken there by their parents, university dons and artists? Taken there as to the tropical houses at Kew Gardens to be acclimatised and to know their way around, but only as they’d been shown in advance, only as it was their birthright.

When one of them left a note on my door in the halls to which I’d moved instead of living with them, I ripped it down, no doubt resentfully, and I think I regret doing that still, and that we all fell out of contact. But I thought I had to find my own way into the hothouse. Hadn’t one of them, the most generous, the one I remember the most tenderly, said she would rather I read whatever I pleased, that I follow my own course? And so I did, stumblingly, and over many years.

I think it was my 20th birthday I passed with her in the park. She’d remembered it, and bought me a gift – I can’t remember what it was, though a few months earlier, she’d got me the Notebooks of Malte Lauridds Brigge in an edition I still have. I even wrote to her once, when I found her name online, one lonely night a few years ago. What happened to her? But what happened to me, by the same token, or to any of us, who are growing older as part of a generation for whom things seem less sure than previously, though no doubt this is what every generation thinks?

The Young Conservatives used to buy books from me, which I sold to buy more books. I lived on pancakes, which I supplemented with what I found in fridges in other parts of the hall. I put brown paper all over my walls and wrote formulae on them to help me in my exams. I threw my mattress out and slept on the hard surface beneath.

I read Ted Morgan’s biography of William Burroughs with the curtains drawn against the sun, and dreamt of escape. When I heard my name called outside and a knock at the door, I didn’t answer. The bureau was open, and I took notes from Musil and from Proust as I read. I bought a creamy-covered copy of Finnegan’s Wake, and read it alongside a book that promised to be its key.

I think it was then I found a translation of Ungaretti’s poems – and Quasimodo’s. And I’m sure it was then that Stirrings Still came out, soon after Beckett’s death. ‘What Is The Word?’: the last poem, printed in very large type in one Sunday supplement or another.

Arts and Culture: weren’t those my heydays, with the university library open before me? But all I remember are the brown-papered walls and the hard bed and a kind of mania as the examinations approached. And when we left university, I knew some of us would fall from those circles of which we were part; it was a recession; what chance was there?

Didn’t I meet other ghosts at jobfairs, queuing to find out about PGCEs? Ghosts – former students – the more ghostly for that they appeared, now, without context. Some of us were adrift, and wasn’t it unbearable to see one’s own drifting in another, as in a mirror?

Meanwhile, others were busy becoming doctors and lawyers and accountants; other had disappeared into the City, until there were only a few of us left, blown hither and yon by what training courses were available to us or were not, by job applications and failed interviews.

A different life, a fallen one, and now the privileged were very far above us, and moving further away like the stars that, astronomers say, are moving away from us at half the speed of light. To have fallen, and have found oneself at the bottom – now books became truer company, and I read them as I thought the rich could not.

That is, I reread instead of read, and went over again books in the Quartet Encounters series – Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet amongst them – and then over again the volumes in the handsome Princeton collected Kierkegaard – and then again over Rilke, and Ungaretti and Mandelstam and Tsvetayeva. No doubt fantastical, distorted readings.

Bernhard was being translated then, and Henry Green republished, in too expensive-to-buy Harvill editions. Arts and Culture – but now on the side of the poor, not the rich. And wasn’t I making my own path? Difficult, then, before the internet. Difficult, great lulls, then frantic activity, say, for example, buying up all of Mishima after seeing the film that I caught by chance on Channel 4.

But now again I was no one at all. Back in my parent’s house in the back bedroom that looked over the fence to the large houses opposite. Back and my dad retired very early and unemployment all around me, that great wave of recession that finally caught the middle classes, I was absent to my friends who thought I was away.

I had returned almost as soon as I’d gone, having met the Mediterranean sun for the first time and thought it too hot. Gone, and returned, secretly, even as my friends thought I had gone elsewhere to weather the recession.

Sometimes, later, we saw each other again. To whom did I lend Troyat’s Tolstoy? I remember; I suppose she has it still. How many years has it been? I know she works for Glaxo, and drives up and down the motorway. Perhaps she’s married now, and has found her way into the Chelsea set as she wanted. But I think she is unmarried and on the edges still as she was then.

Whatever happened to that big biography, and to the copy of The Thief’s Journal I made her buy, and was surprised – infinitely surprised – that she read it at once, and even liked the same passage as me, when he sees the little genet flowers as he crosses the border from one country to another? And didn’t she remember, too, the line, ‘I wandered through that region of myself I called Spain?’

I remember repeating that line to another friend, in whose house I convalesced as I crossed the border separating a life on the fringes of sets and groups, and another life, in which I think I still live now. How many people I’ve known! Through how many sets I’ve passed!: two exclamations as I wonder at how very long life is.

Of course there are no flowers with my name, but it does seem I cross a hill similar to the one Genet describes, only this time there is no end to the crossing, which passes across a plateau joined to the borders of every country. Where will end? When will I descend to the valleys, or is this life, up here on the plateau, where life always seems never to have begun?

Runts

W. is growing his hair. ‘It’s what the kids are doing’. The kids are looking very gentle, we agree. -‘It’s the age of Aquarius.’ – ‘So why aren’t you growing yours? Go on, grow it!’ This as we mount the Hoe from the town side. ‘The sea makes me happy,’ says W., ‘does it make you happy?’

It does. The whole panorama, from Mount Batten to Mount Edgcombe, the far off break with the lighthouse at one an end, and, because it’s a very clear day, the very far lighthouse, that can be seen standing blue against the horizon. And then the various islands, large and small. And the whole sweep of water, very blue under the very blue sky: here we are again!

We go down to drink something in a cafe. We talk about the End. How’s it going to come? W. defers to me on this topic. ‘The North Atlantic Drift stopped for a few days in 2005’, I tell him. ‘We’re doomed’, says W. – ‘But the economic catastrophe will come before the ecological one.’ – ‘We’re fucked!’

Recently, W.’s been ill. ‘I’ve never been so ill’, he says, ‘I had a temperature of 105.’ But he didn’t have an ideas, W. says. Not like Kafka, or Blanchot. He was just ill, and wailed, night and day. Later, when I catch W.’s illness, I, too, wail. I demand he bring me Lempsip to where I am reclined on his cough. ‘You’re not a stoic, are you?’, says W. Neither of us are stoics. We’re whiners. ‘There’s no strength in us. We’re the runts of the litter.’

As we walk home, lads shout at us from a passing car. ‘It’s my hair’, says W., ‘you have to get used to it, if you grow your hair. Great, isn’t it?’ I tell him he looks like his father from the 70s, which I saw in his photo album. W. agrees. ‘Don’t you think something has gone wrong with our lives? That we’ve gone off course?’ – ‘Definitely’, says W.

The Tulip Garden

We are in the tulip garden at Mount Edgcombe, where W. comes sometimes to read Kafka. ‘Where are the tulips?’ – ‘It’s the wrong season, you idiot.’ Autumn crisp and blue all around us. To get there, you have to go past the Orangery and then past the geyser – then of course there is the boat which crosses from the pier that leads out from the street with the naval barracks.

We like sitting on the low wooden boatseats and looking towards the redeveloped Naval Dockyards where we went to see if we could look at a flat and we wanted to be taken to be a wealthy couple. But they saw through us right away, and no one would show us around. That was a few months ago – summer – and we were feeling especially inane.

Now it is autumn when there are no tulips, and I photograph W. sitting on the bench where he comes to read Kafka in the gardens of the old country house. The last Duke of Edgcombe, W. tells me, married a barmaid from the pub, and had to sell up the whole estate, so the city bought it. It’s a miracle, we agree, as we walk out along the shore to where the path rises up to pass through the woods.

It was here the Dukes and their guests would charge their carriages in the darkness, imagining they were in some Gothic romance. There’s even a faux-ruined folly built on the hill, very unconvincing in the autumn sun. We know nothing about trees or nature, but W. suspects I might be a woodsman, because I am confident among the brambles and fallen trees.

A landslide took the woods with it; some trees still stand, growing at a slant, though most are fallen. The path has been diverted, but W. prefers the old route. It’s slow going – very overgrown – and, where the cliff has completely collapsed, you have to scramble across scree. All the while, we manage to keep up our chatter, like birds. Is there anything we’ve not said?

Life!

A weekend with W., and we do our best to fill our days with inane chatter. Increasingly absurd questions probing every aspect of life: ‘Do you think you’re a nurturer?’; ‘Have you got leadership potential?’; ‘What, do you think, was your biggest mistake?’; ‘At what point did you know you were a failure?’, and even better, we had someone before whom we could parade our ridiculous, half-formed ideas on every topic.

Whole days pass in chatter, even when I catch W.’s flu and have to lie in his sofa in the upstairs lounge. W. comes and sits at the sofa’s end and we watch TV and comment on that. He had been as ill as he had ever been, said W., like Kafka or Blanchot, but he hadn’t thought of anything, he was just ill, and looked after by Sal, who, fortuitously was down for the week. And now he has to look after me.

Does he have paracetamol? Yes he does, he says, but of course he has everything but. I make him make me Lemsip to make up. He brings it up to me in a mug. You’re not ill, says W., you’re just tired. The first night, we’d been out to dinner and then to a nightclub and danced, and after that back to the house to dance some more. We worked out some formation moves.

The next day, Sunday, the traditional walk to Cawsands through Mount Edgcombe, in order, as is also tradition, to forget that the pubs stop serving food at 2.00, which is always about the time we arrive. We have foregone our honey beers in order to eat, but why deny ourselves those earned pints, especially since – another tradition – we had crossed the ravine in W.’s adventure route along to where the cliff had collapsed?

Yes, the usual fiasco, but no one lost or nearly lost as happened last time, with poor R. almost slipping all the way into the sea. In Cawsands we ate pasties instead, and ice cream for afters – and I bought fudge for after that. Then back on the busride that takes you past Whitsands where the holiday chalets cling to the cliff, with the sea on the left side of us and the city opening out on the right.

The next day, Monday, while I was ill, we had a moment of inspiration, and drafted a collaborative project on the back on a newspaper. We knew we had to be quick: soon the tide of inanity would rush forward and claim everything, but for a time, and impressively seriously, we wrote down our ideas and the other thoughts they made us have and then sat back happily. That night, we were made frikadellar and a substitute for rotkohl, and peeled boiled potatoes, Danish style.

What is to become of us? W. always trusts my predictions. I lay down the law. ‘It will happen this way …’ Meanwhile, W. is thinking about chapter two of his new book. He was ill – iller than he’d ever been before, and unable to begin. I tell him I’m reading Lacan and Zizek and all that and he sighs: he’d read all of Lacan, everything he could get hold of, in that period around his peak, more than ten years ago, but he hadn’t understood what he read.

It’s all gone now, he says, as though I’d never read it. W. is amazed at his decline. He works only a couple of hours a day, getting up before dawn, reading, writing, before going to work. I used to work night and day, he tells me. All I had in my room was a desk and a bed. When did the decline begin?

There were several stages, says W. As an undergraduate, he worked very hard and showed great promise. He commanded respect from his peers and much was expected of him. But then came his postgraduate years, the slow fall. He started smoking and drinking heavily to pass the hours. There was little tuition.

True, things picked up again later, when he got his first proper job. For five years, in a room, working. What zeal! He didn’t have a TV; and since he was on a 0.5, barely an hour a week teaching. He learnt Hebrew. He took lengthy notes on everything he read. He had no desire to publish, and if he did, would work for as much as 7 years on a paper. That was before I met you, he said.

7 years! But he likes what he wrote, back then. It seems okay to him. A lot of what he did then he’s forgotten, but he has the notes. His earlier notes, from the time when he wanted to be a writer, he gave away or destroyed. He kept diaries too, like Kafka, but those, too, have disappeared.

At what point did he want to become a philosopher, rather than a writer? He doesn’t know. But isn’t it true you can always hold out, in philosophy, for a late blooming – a Kant-like coming into your powers, years after you would have been put out to retirement in other fields? But he also says it was Kafka who made him both stop writing: how could his own work compare?

For all his work – and he worked very hard – he could not; so he stopped, and gave everything away, or made sure it was destroyed. Still, he muses unhappily, neither of us will get very far as philosophers. You have to know maths to be good at it. He’s stalled at differential calculus, W. says. In fact, he’s stalled at Euclid. He only really feels happy with Pythagoras, and he’s not even sure about that.

He doesn’t know much about surds. Parmenides, says W., he discovered those. No maths, says W., means no philosophy. We talk of our friends who have a background in maths. They might achieve something, says W., but not us.

We repeat the old formula: we’re intelligent enough to know what genius is, but we’re not geniuses! That’s our tragedy: to know we’ll never amount to anything. Still, we did come up with some ideas at the weekend, and we’re pleased with that. In some peculiar way, we’re advancing. By picking ideas from here and adding a few of our own, we getting somewhere. Perhaps.

I’m to transform our notes into an abstract, W. directs. Very well then. Now W. presses me about my own decline. But you never really had a peak, he says. And you don’t really do anything, do you? I’m in my office much more than he is in his, I point out. Yes, that’s true, says W. And besides, I’m reading Lacan and Zizek, and writing reviews. Yes, yes, says W., but what about work – real work!

On Tuesday, I see my second book has arrived by post from the publishers to be reviewed. W. will have to send it out. He sits down and opens it, reading the first lines. Yes – he’s found it – a mistake in the first paragraph. A really dumb mistake: I’d changed ‘ego’ to ‘the "I"’ but still gave the translation, le moi. What idiocy.

You’re depressed now, aren’t you?, says W. Of course W.’s book has mistakes not only in the first paragraph, but in the blurb. We both find this very funny. In the blurb! And after all that proofreading! After reading it again and again and again! I think you should do a third book, says W., that would be funny. Meanwhile, W. is busy writing his introduction. I’m destroying Heidegger, he says.

W.’s decline is getting worse. He doesn’t work at night any more, but watches trash TV. And now, like me, he’s bought Civilisation 3. What appalls me, he says, is I play Civilisation 3 with more seriousness than I work. I tell him I’ve given up. The computer cheats at higher levels. There’s no point playing. So what do you do instead?, says W., oh yes, Lacan and Zizek, I forgot.

For his part, W. is teaching Leibniz next year. He only has so long to understand the maths. He taught Spinoza last year, and this year Leibniz. Meanwhile, he’s going to read Hermann Cohen. What am I going to read? I tell him I’m rereading Henry Green at the moment. Caught. It’s so lovely. And then – Party Going. And then Back, which I’ve never read. What do you like about it?, says W. – It’s so pretty. That’s one of his failings, he explains to our friend who cooked for us, he likes pretty things.

He, meanwhile, is still reading Kraznohorkai. Bela Tarr’s new film has run into problems, W. tells me. His producer’s left. We should send him some money, we decide. Ah, Bela Tarr!  In the cocktail bar, we drink Martinis and then – something new – so called English caiperenas, with Plymouth Gin instead of cachasa.

More gin! We’d had a few glasses that afternoon (Saturday), in the red front room with the shutters, sitting as usual around the table, with pork scratchings from the corner shop. But we’re seasoned drinkers. Then to the restaurant, then the nightclub, and then home for more dancing. ‘Toxic’, that daft instrumental off Yoshimi, something by Kenicke (W.’s choices), and I choose Prince – ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’.

Musical movement’s very important, I tell W. The next day, I instruct him about the limbic system. In mammals, unlike reptiles, physical contact is important. W. defers to me in several areas: on health and nutrition in general, and on the decline of academia. On the latter, I’m particularly good, he says, I’m always right.

‘Life!’, I exclaim, as I often do. – ‘What’s wrong with you?’, says W. – ‘Nothing’s wrong, quite the contrary.’ Life: how did we end up here, and living these kinds of lives, and doing these kinds of things? And whatever’s going to become of us?