Inquietude

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today

A coffee, then a tea. Write something, I tell myself. Hadn’t I thought of something to write when I went to bed last night? Hadn’t I had an idea, or at least the beginning of one? But I’d been reading The Rings of Saturn, and was carried along by Sebald’s prose. Was it my idea? His? I opened the book again this morning, but it was no help. What should I write?

I thought again of Mirror, and the historical footage that comprises part of the narrative. What footage would I show, were I making a similar film?, I asked myself. And the passage where the boy reads from Pushkin’s letter to the ghost in another room, whose coffee cup leaves a ring on the polished wooden table which fades even after the ghost has disappeared – from what would I have the boy in my film read?

Sebald’s narrator, like Tarkovsky’s, does not disappear behind historical events. Their recounting is also his way of appearing. Have I been long enough away from Manchester to allow a narrative of the regeneration of that city to allow me to appear? Long enough away – five years. And in five years time, where will I be? Unemployed again? What story will I tell then? Perhaps another phase, a whole five year bloc, is rounding itself off. I’ve always been surprised that time moves forward, that there are events which complete themselves in the world. Or that surprise is the one which reveals itself only as I write – as I struggle to bring an act of writing to completion.

I am in the South. Radio 2 plays in the other room. Dido, Coldplay: these songs obliterate memory. Bridge Over Troubled Water: the theft of memory. Then to write against Radio 2, against the DJ whose afternoon show we used to hear on the schoolbus. Obliteration: how to remember otherwise? How to receive the counter-memories that would turn those afternoons inside out?

Is it a kind of revenge I want?, I ask myself. A kind of apocalypse – a retrospective apocalypse that will have revealed that things were never as they seemed? As though those relationships which bound me to what I took to be ordinary and familiar were refracted through the great strangeness of the world? Then write of that strangeness – from it, as though it was by way of an infinite detour that the world has always come to itself. Come to itself? No – failed to so come, missing its appointment. That is what should be remembered: the failure of the coherency of the world, the self-coincidence it was never able to achieve.

That is what I hear in a word as simple as today. Strange word that I find myself saying to myself now and again. As a ward? As a litany? As what turns the day from itself. As the self-division of the day, its unbinding. The world is not itself; the day will not finish happening. How to think of the past, the whole past, as a day that has never dawned, yet that is dawning?

Event, non-event: when will it happen, the incompletion of the day? When will it succeed, this failure to come to itself? When will it arrive in its non-arrival? When will you come, you who cannot come? The Messiah will not come until the last day, the very last – but how is it that what is last is also what has always happened, and that the word, today, is also the sound of great bells that seem to ring from the depths of time?

The Third Time

I open a book I bought R.M. I read the second section, not the first, the second one, where the narrator begins to write of himself in the third person. Almost immediately, the desire to write something. No internet connection at the flat, so coat on, out the door, along the street – but I’ve forgotten my phone. Back again, open the door, close the door, back out on the street, back to the internet cafe.

How many times have I been here today? This is the third time. The first, early on, was to check my email. The second time, slightly later, was to write about what I’d found on my walk (but I wrote nothing about walking). And this, the third time? This morning, through the streets. This afternoon, through the streets. Then, at last, to the flat, where I got out the red hardback, opened it to the first page, and then to the second section, where the narrator moves from the ‘I’ to the ‘he’.

I close the book, and put my coat on to go out. It’s clouding over. The flat is cool. Out and then back for the phone, then out again. The feeling of urgency is subsiding. What would I have written, had I got to the cafe in time? What did I want to write? I wanted only that writing keep its appointment with the desire to write, to mark that desire. But why? Sometimes I tell myself that what I write here is in ascesis. Purge yourself. Pare yourself down. But to find what? And in the name of – what?

Peter Handke wanders out with a pencil and a notepad. For a long time, he relied on a typewriter: he thought he had to be inside to write. But a notepad’s no good for me. A pencil’s no good. I could have stayed in the flat and written. I have a stub of a pencil and my reporter’s notebook: why didn’t I stay in to write? Why didn’t I write there, in the cool flat?

Out. It was necessary to travel – to walk. I needed to walk, just as I walked this morning and this afternoon. Earlier, I was remembering the last of the stories Gene Wolfe tells or retells in Peace. Tells or retells: this phrase came to me as I walked. I thought: that’s important, remember that. The last story: I’ve told it before. When I think to myself, the last story in Peace, I do not need to retell it to myself. I know it too well. But, strangely, that knowing is also a kind of forgetting. As though it is the book itself that keeps the story for me – and not, now the real book, with its yellow pages, my second copy, I think, or my third, in the office back up North. The book in my memory – the book that is sealed in my memory.

Do I need to tell the story? It’s a sentimental story. Remembering it – or remembering the way it is archived within me, that it is sealed in itself like the holy of holies, that it is as though forgotten as well as remembered and to remember it is also to bring forgetting to the edge of memory – I also remember the friend to whom I lent the first copy of the book. She knew what it meant, the story – but what did it mean? I thought of her as I read it, and then I lent it to her, and she told me she thought of me, and of us. But what does it matter? That was many years ago.

Later, I remembered the book of Tarkovsky’s polaroids I received last week. In the last pages, black and white pictures of his mother sitting on a fence looking out and his father in an army uniform. Then a picture of the well. How well I know these photographs, though I have not seen them before. I remember them through Mirror; it is as though I remember them with Tarkovsky through Mirror. Peace and Mirror: both, I think, are stories of dead men. Or both are stories of men sentenced to die. And wasn’t the patient in bed in Mirror played by Tarkovsky himself? And wasn’t the bird perched on his hand a premonition of that bird which would visit him every day when he was dying of cancer in Paris?

On the street, as I made my way to the cafe for the third time, a phonecall from my sister. I thought it was – them (I can’t say who, not yet); I thought: they’re calling me, at last, and will they give me news? I’ve rehearsed it again and again: we’re sorry, or, I’m really sorry, that’s how I think it will begin. And what will I say? My sister had phoned to ask whether I’d heard yet. I said I’d heard nothing, and speculated with her as to what might be going on.

Just now, I thought: what if they ring me as I write this post? What then? Will I lose the thread? Once, when I lived in Manchester, burglars broke in the house as I was typing a letter to a friend. Was I writing of Peace? Of Mirror? And was it because I was in the middle of something that I barricaded myself in my room and saved the day by my shouting. I was thinking of my letter: I was thinking, I want to finish. I want at least that, I who asked for little from the day, who requires very little.

Peace, Mirror: nothing to conclude, here; nothing to round off. The post does not complete itself. I am not writing to her, anyway – the friend who read Peace and to whom I was writing that day more than ten years ago. To whom, then? As a way of keeping memory for myself? Of recording, as in a diary, the events of my life? I remember I once had that ambition: to write, to record. Only later did I realise I remembered nothing by writing; that it was by writing I was freed from memory, or, better, freed memory from itself.

Strange this past year releasing memories into forgetting, setting the past free, givingit back to itself. Back to itself: yes, that’s what I’ve done: the past has been given back to itself, and I’ve received the past anew, not, now, as it happened, nor even as it might have happened (this has nothing to do with possibility, with the measure of the possible). The past: what is given in the same way as speech is given to the stutterer who is cured right at the opening of Mirror. Do you remember what he said, straight to camera? Do you remember what the boy (the son) hears him say in a steady, determined voice: I can speak now. Yes: I can speak now.

But I cannot speak. Or rather, I speak along the edge of forgetting. If I want writing and the desire to write to coincide it is, I think, to let the other speak, the ‘he’. I want him to speak – or, better, to become him, the narrator who can refers to himself as ‘he’. He: like Coeztee’s narrator who works in Bracknell. He: to move from the first person to the third: wasn’t that what Kafka celebrated as the great movement of literature?

I am in the cafe for the third time. I feel alert, awake, but I don’t know why. The caffeine died down in my bloodstream hours ago. R.M. will be back at the flat in an hour. Why now? The clouds have parted; sun on the pavement. I am in the cafe, here again, for the third time. The cafe: where, last year, I remember writing of Handke’s Across. And hadn’t I promised myself, some time ago, to write a post with the title, Across Time?

In truth, the questions I ask myself in these paragraphs, the questions that are asked here, are Handkean questions. They come from Handke; I found them first in the longest of his books, the ones he wrote outside, pencil on notepad. Across – that was earlier, wasn’t it? Strange book that is all climax. Strange book that is like the endless coda to a novel, rather than a novel. And wasn’t it in here, in this cafe, that I found Across had a code, that there were a few more pages of that novel to read. Unexpected gift!

I’ve heard nothing as I’ve been typing. But today is the second day after -. Shouldn’t I have heard by now? Won’t it be tonight? To have heard – what will change, after that? What will have been changed? In the meantime – waiting. Across time, waiting. Or is it that waiting attenuates time in time, that it seems to pull each event apart without breaking it. Nothing is happening – there is waiting. Nothing happens, but time voids itself of time; time lives outside of itself.

Today, I thought again of those long afternoons, years ago, when my future was more uncertain that it is now. I remember them, those afternoons, in which to write was to hold up a great sail into the air. How was I to catch a wind? I was becalmed then, and perhaps it is the same now. What is to happen? Suspense: wasn’t that her word, for those times we met when there was no wind. There was never any wind, she said. Suspense: through the field, and over the railway bridge to that last patch of countryside. From that same bridge, now, you can see the new Tescos, which presses up against the fields. Yes, that’s what I’d see, if I went there.

Five o’clock. Is it time to stop? Should I stop writing? Or should I continue until I hear, should I write all the way until I hear? Enough. Without rounding it off, without making sure every motif has been taken up and transformed, I’m going to pay and go back down the street.

Bad Cava

A few days away, and I’ve already forgotten how to blog. Forgotten, that is, what it might have been to mark anything other than the act of writing. An act? Long Tuesday, half the day waiting, just like yesterday. I even came back here, to the flat, in the daytime which I never do. Here: for the afternoon, which never happens. But I needed something to distract me; I cleared up, washed the floor in the bathroom, polished the floor in the living room. Waiting – and still waiting tonight, receiving the message: a couple more days. A couple more? But I’m in London tomorrow. I thought it would be decided tonight. I’m not going to say what, though. Still secret.

About 5PM, to the pub for a pint. Time slowed down. Cigarette smoke around me. Much better. I unwrapped my CDs and read the booklets. Grey skies outside. Hoped to reach my hands out and part them to see the blue sky again. All my friends away, so I was on my own. On my own, but London tomorrow. 8PM, back at the flat, listening to American Music Club and waiting. Everything cleared up here, everything ready. Wait, says the tidiness. Wait, says the whole flat. I’ve opened a bottle of bad Tescos Cava. In honour of what? Celebrating what? Distract yourself, I tell myself. London tomorrow, I tell myself.

London: R.M. lives there. We were in Yorkshire over the weekend, near Stokesley. Walked up and down the hills. Ate fresh farm eggs and just-killed turkey. Slept in a room with a staircase to a room above it: two rooms, our bedroom and an attic. Outside the drafty window, the brown hills. I told R.M. as we walked that it suited her complexion, that brown. This was once Abbey land, she tells me. This valley was Catholic, she tells me. There’s a Shetland pony called Twix where we were staying. They’re easily spoilt, Shetland ponies, said R.M. on the phone today. Better surfing the net for Shetland pony information than working, she tells me. Why am I never on the blog anymore?, she asks me. Why haven’t I got my own category?

R.M.’s waiting with me. Everyone’s waiting. Champagne on ice in other parts of the country. But I have my bad Tescos Cava, with which I am waiting. Bad Cava: everyone’s away, and I’m here on my own. The flat smells of the fabric conditioner in the drying clothes. Two Regimes of Madness face down on my bed. Mercury, which I didn’t buy, but exchanged, is turning out well. But the Cava is bad – harsh and acidic. Bad Cava. You won’t get to tomorrow, says the room. No more past and no more future, says the room. The present’s broken, it says. The broken present: is that what it is? Broken, the order of days? Broken: the succession of one day after another?

Day by day. It used to be that time moved forward; the days were similar, it is true, but there was a forward momentum. I would have said: I have the whole of Easter, and then the whole of Summer. Time for work, time for writing. And didn’t I promise myself a whole year of writing whatever I pleased, here at the blog? Isn’t that what I promised myself, crossing the Byker roundabout? But there was the new book, the third book. Another book – as if I hadn’t done enough damage! A third book – as if the first and the second weren’t bad enough! And somehow or another, that third book led me to the present impasse.

R.M. phones. She’s in the office working for her exams. Her friend, the taxidermist Q.C. has written to her of his pathological loathing for velvet. Why then, he wonders, does he stroke the feathers of the stuffed bird in his office? He’s not sure. This amuses R.M.; she phones to share it with me. I tell her I’m writing about her, at last. And about Twix. And Yorkshire. She begins to read. ‘Bad Cava’. ‘Is that the stuff you get me?’, she asks. No, that’s from the Co-op. Co-op Cava is a step up from Tesco’s Cava; Marks and Spencers’ Cava, which comes in two grades, is a step up from the Co-op. Anyway, she’s glad I’m relaxing. There’s nothing else to do, I said. I wish I never began that third book!, I tell her.

But R.M.’s encouraging. She sends supportive emails. Everything’s going well, she says. It’ll all come good, she says. And phones me to share the Q.C.’s turns of phrase.

Assemblage

The Fall before they became The Fall; Warsaw before Joy Division, the Devoto-fronted Buzzcocks: why is it I’m interested in those transitional moments before a band is able to harden itself into the style for which they would become famous? Because they are part of a collective ferment, the trembling of a whole city? Manchester 1976, 1977. Manchester of the first and second Sex Pistols gigs, reviewed at the time as receiving an ecstatic welcome.

Why? The crowd were ‘sussed’, said a contemporary reviewer, yet they were wild. The band were an out of tune heavy metal band doing an Alice Cooper imitation. But the singer! Johnny Rotten was everything. And Buzzcocks, supporting? Mark E. Smith, 16 years old, thought he could do better. And wasn’t that what saw The Fall make their way to the first gig, at the musicians collective? And didn’t Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner recruit Ian Curtis and then, later, the metronomic Stephen Morris after seeing Johnny Rotten sing?

Hadn’t punk already reached Manchester? But it reached it again; it happened again. Event that happens the second time – Lenin after Marx, Paul after Jesus: postpunk was punk – punk was out of synch with itself; North Mancunions, said Mark E. Smith, thought The Velvet Underground already passe. Was it truckers’ songs he was listening to instead? Can and Krautrock? Stockhausen? Devoto would revert, with Magazine, to his Eno-like ambitions, said Mark E. Smith. Pete Shelley took Buzzcocks towards the charts. And The Fall? Masterpieces, one after another – just like Joy Division.

But more interesting to me was the simmering over of the pot of Manchester that happened just as punk broke. Manchester – and Leeds – and Sheffield. Simon Reynolds covers each ‘scene’ admirably. Scenes – no, these were assemblages. Marvellous comings-together, crystallising along lines of flight. Marvellous flashings of bands for whom the city withdrew itself just enough to – what? To make, to create – what? Psychogeographic city. Phantasmagoric Manchester. Ballard’s crystal world along Deansgate.

In the Wake

Represent the past: it began with this, with X; it all started there. But where did it begin? Retake the past: it began now, today. Today – as the past gave itself again. As the old music becomes weird. As the new music is enweirded by the past. Retake it – receive what has never been received before as the past. Not the past received anew, but the new as the past, as the retaking that gives first of all what happened.

That’s what I hear on Time: the Revelator and the early Palace albums: the past, yes, but also the future – do not reduce either to their influences, for that is only to represent what happened as though it sprang from a set of causes, and ultimately a singular and determinable Origin. There is a music which scatters the Origin and scatters representation – by awakening, from the past, those series of singularities that were never before thus assembled.

But what are they, those singularities, those micro-events and part-happenings? The open-throated Pentecostalist, the leaning-together of bluegrass voices; the ballad-voice which confirms blank fate and blind destiny; the non-regular rhythms of Blind Willie Johnson; fragments of Anglo-Celtic folk: all this; and doesn’t Will Oldham protest that he was as much a listener to Dinosaur Jr. as to Jimmie Rogers?

In truth, it is not a question of Dinosaur Jr. nor Jimmie Rogers, if both would name a body of work, or even the musicking that work would ossify. Not Dinosaur Jr., but a sound that reached the ears of Will Oldham. And not Will Oldham, either – he is not even himself, but the one reinvented by the past. Reinvented – no, because there was no first time; this past did not exist.

Invention, and that from the first; retaking, and that at the beginning: what returns at the past had never arrived. What comes are those singularities arranged in new singularities, and according to new rules of grouping. Rules? Not even that – locally, provisionally, once and then not again, the past arrived from the future. For the first time – for the last time, the past claimed you from the future. I listened – what did I hear? ‘The Ohio River Boat Song’, taped from the radio in 1993. My past come again.

And with Gillian Welch? I had Revival, it is true; I already knew Hell Among the Yearlings. But Time: the Revelator? From the very beginning, I knew – but with what kind of knowledge? – that what had come by way of the first song, its opening, was the langour of the no-time, that was before and after life. After it – wise with a wisdom that sees all from death, that stares back and sings like the narrator of Sunset Blvd., but from before life, too – before the world came together.

There was no God, then; the skies and waters were undivided, and the stars had not been set in the sky. Nothing – and not even that; a rustling, a murmuring: the unbeginning without determination. From that past – scarcely the past; from the future – scarcely the future. From – and the present was turned aside from itself. From – and the flood came; I was not where I was; the river was where I could not step once.

Streaming – that in place of me, and revealing place to have been the usurpation – not, now, of anyone in particular, but of the no one who -sists when there is no one to be there. Wound, recording surface, what wrote itself in you was the past. That’s who I was – but who was I?

Absolute music! Or music that dissolved the terms of all relation! Can I call it immediate? Only if it names an event that reached me in the unknown past. Only if that past was the way the future arrived – or that the future arrived from the past. No Origin – and there is not even Gillian Welch, and not even Will Oldham. Non-Origin: by what courage was Time recorded with just guitars and vocals? By what immense courage was it set down in RCA’s Studio B?

And by what courage was Palace Brothers recorded in a kitchen on a cassette recorder? Days in the Wake – that’s what the latter album came to be called. In the wake – of the future that moves through the past. Of the past which comes from the future, just as surely, as lightly, as the wind which passes through the barley in the field when the Doctor turns from the dacha at the beginning of Mirror.

Superwolf

Are you writing of yourself? Barely that. Of music? Barely that.

If I call them the oldest songs, the obscurest songs, it is to set them into a past that did not occur. Songs out of phase with time, songs that seem to repeat in their lyrics, in their old-time sound, what was never recorded, not even in Harry Smith’s anthology. And even that phrase: old time music seems to miss them.

Old time, the wearing out of time – the past, now, is not an archive with an origin, with delimitable boundaries. There are no genres, and not even singers – only parts of song and half-remembered performances, only unrecorded records and the forgetting that wiped out memory in advance.

Will Oldham, how is it that you were older than time? How is it that you wiped time out? Perhaps because it was the name Will Oldham you wanted to wipe out, as surely as Bill Callahan wanted the word Smog whispered when he placed parentheses around it. Namelessness: it’s the songs that matter, says Will Oldham, not Will Oldham. Hence his changing names. How to call yourself nothing at all? How to drive away the name from music?

Old time: what returns with Will Oldham is what never occurred. How did he dream up his old wierd America? How did that America dream itself in him? The oldest songs, the obscurest songs: how is it you weren’t recorded until now? Because they are older than time, and older than memory. Was it forgetting that dreamt of you, Will Oldham? Was it oblivion that gave itself your name?

Around the grit that finds itself by chance in an oyster’s shell can form the pearl that is made of the inside of that shell. Alien particle, outside inside, how did you find you way into the heart of Will Oldham? Because what grew there was a pearl; what was dreamed there were songs too old for memory. Remember, heart, that splinter around which you came to yourself.

But that remembering is too strong for one man, and Will Oldham is a horde, not a man. Half-beast, animal half changed into man, how can you sing of what was always forgotten. Animal-songs, songs of wolf and lepoard, Will Oldham is a crowd, not a man. He falls asleep; the animals wake up. And when they sleep, he wakes up. Another America is waking with him. Old America, oldest America, archive of parts of beasts and parts of songs, how is it you stir yourself in him, Will Oldham? Because he is made of the old, wierd America; it is what turned itself out to make him. And will it turn itself inside out again? Will it leave him, Will Oldham? Will it strand him and strand us on the beach of the present?

Do not place your faith in names.  The songs, not the singer. Unrecorded recordings, unmade, unmakeable albums: how is it that your best work has never been heard? Because it is what unworks itself in your recordings, what turns them aside from every ear. Refusal: the songs retreat; they hide themselves in the past. Somewhere, far away, they are becoming animals again. Somewhere they are howling and running in the forests of the night.

The Revelator

Time: the Revelator, but what does it reveal? The oldest folk ballad, born with the world and enduring with it, which knows the destiny of all things, the long fall into oblivion. Wisdom: Gillian Welch’s voice is sung against oblivion, but not in the manner of the young Oedipus, who is headstrong and defiant. She sings, but hers is a voice like the blinded Oedipus, who, led by Antigone, looks only for a place to die.

To die, to rest: this, in the oldest ballads, is enough of a task. To find peace among things. And her voice as though comes from that afterplace – resigned, knowing death has come for her as it will come for all of us. But a voice, nevertheless, that is sung against death, which sets death back, if for a moment. It is coming; night will fall, and everything will be forgotten – that is the work of time, but meanwhile, revealed, is time’s work unworked.

Time attenuated, voided time: how is that these songs seem to drift without moving forward, which well, half-numbed from their own posthumousness? Songs not of death but of surviving death. Survival songs, but sung from death, out of it, in a voice stripped of personhood. Who are you, singer? No one at all. Who are you? No one in particular. Numbed: because they have already been stunned by death.

Does it matter that you appear or disappear? Does it matter who you are? But it is because it does not matter that it matters: revelator, what you show is one indifferent to showing. This indifference is everything. No desire to please. No ingratiation. Time says: I am the sky that opens indifferently above the world. Eye that sees without judgement, eye that has seen all, which has run up to the end of time and back. Blind eye for whom every day is the apocalypse, every day the end.

Revelator: It’s finished; it’s already finished. We will not find purchase on time. Where Gillian Welch’s voice leans, we lean too, drawn by its indifference. Fate says with her voice, you are dead. Fate says in her calm voice: you are already dead.

The Face of God

Who are you, God, of the songs of Will Oldham? I can’t even remember them, those songs. I can’t remember – but I remember God, who, in these songs, has slipped from Himself. Is the name, God, for what unnames all names. Of whom does he sing, Will Oldham, when he sings of you, God? Of no one, I know that. No one: who am I, listening? No one yet. No one, even. Changed in my place by what will not lest me rest in my place.

Non-resting, streaming: God says: you are no one at all. Will Oldham’s God says: you are no one; nothing at all. And what does he say to him, Will Oldham: I am no one, as you, too are no one. Mask upon mask; and if his music, Will Oldham’s, belongs to the past, it is one which has never been present. Mask upon mask: it was never there, it never began, there was no Origin; the music rests upon nothing – or it is music, mask, all the way down?

And what of God? Who are you, Will Oldham’s God? For I share Him with him. Shared: mask of no one. Noh mask, blank mask, to whom do you belong? To drive away the face of God – yes. And when God’s face is the driving away of God’s face? When it is that face without face: the void, the mask of stars?

Long Sunday

Work – there’s nothing to distract you. Work: but there’s the whole weekend to distract me, hours in which nothing need happen; I’ve no appointments, but for all that time is too full, too present with itself. How is it that I seem to have fallen beneath its passing, that time, now, is only concerned with itself? Unwritten book, unwritten articles – now that unwriting has become active; it is the very work of time as it passes without me.

What’s happened? What’s happening? The new book is unwriting itself; my new chapters are coming apart and the pages are turning backwards as line after line is erased. Who am I to hold on to what it was, this book? Who am I to resist its unravelling? Once upon a time, I wrote; once, there was writing. A long time ago. All of time ago. And now? The unwriting of the book streams above me. It is there, like the clouds that disappear as they ascend, and I am here. But where am I?

In the flat. In the quiet flat. The office is for later; now, the flat. I pass from one room to the other, there, on the other side of the bevelled glass, to the bedroom, and then back here, to the desk that is up against the window, and at the level of most of the yard, which raises itself to the backstreet on the other side of the wall. I should be writing, that’s true enough. Clear and well-structured prose, that’s what’s wanted. And instead?

Work: there’s nothing to distract you. Work – but nothing happens but distraction. All of time moves forward, but not here. Long sunday without monday. Day that cannot complete itself.

Great Monday

What was it you were supposed to do? What was it you had time to do? Where was it going, this weekend? Where was it directed? Unto what Great Monday was it pointed like an arrow? Laughter: your hardbacked notebook is open on the pillow in the other room. Laughter: a word document is open in another window. Not a line written. Nothing done. And you have all the time in the world – all the opportunity. All of time, which is to say, too much. All – but already too much; time’s already turned from itself. Laughter: time says: every day is Sunday. Time says: every day is like Sunday.

Tiredness

‘Extreme tiredness.’ – ‘Extreme, how extreme – you can write can’t you?’ – ‘Only because tiredness has gathered itself up; only because it’s folded itself into one who can write of tiredness. Of tiredness? No: tiredness writes. Tiredness speaks of itself, of its coming to itself.’ – ‘But you’re still writing.’ – ‘As the avatar of tiredness. As its proxy, one born in the instant to be unravelled in the instant. Born to write and then to fade. I will not last – do you think I will last?’

The Plateau

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

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

Weakness

I’ll rest on my own strength, but I am not strong. On my own strength: but I am weak. Who am I to support myself? So much money spent. So much money – every day. To the cashpoint and again to the cashpoint, thirty pounds a time. Never any money. Crisis always. Used to it, though – but sometimes, feeling week, I am unused to it again and look up at the sky, and think: when will I have money so that it accumulates monthly in my bank account? When enough money not to worry very much about money? Enough to let it gather, month upon month.

Weakness: tired in my office and hoping no one will come in. Weak, and hoping to be left alone. What will I say? What am I to say? The crisis continues; it’ll continue until at least the end of the month. Crisis – but when I am strong, it never bothers me. Strong, I am a player among players. Dress smartly, I tell myself, wear your jacket. And so I do; wander about in my jacket. Work carefully, I tell myself, don’t be caught out – and so I work with great care, rounding off every task. How organised I am! But then weakness returns. I am weak again; my nose bleeds, rising nausea and the old, old tiredness. What will happen? How will it all turn out?

Folly

Work stress, work bullying, as unpleasant as it has ever been. Wouldn’t I have phoned dad to tell him about, not long ago? Not to complain, but to laugh – to agree on the folly of the world. Bitter comedy, but there was sharing in that laughter – we laughed together; it confirmed what we knew: the world is a vale of tears, but folly, all of human foolishness, is funny. And now? I can’t ring him, and must admit to myself that it was not only to laugh with him that I used to phone him. Wasn’t his an authority from which I reconfirmed my strength?

Efficacy: why is it that I like to feel efficacious? Because when my strength is required it flatters me that I am strong. This afternoon, in the gym, I felt the bile rise when I was bench pressing weights. Felt a kind of sickness: vile world! And then, showering, my nose began to bleed. As I soaked up the blood, later, with balls of toilet paper, I thought: there is no one’s strength but my own, now, on which I can draw. My own strength, and no one to laugh with at the folly of the world.

Posthumous Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Demise

Today, what shall I write today? A question that looks for no answer. To attain writing itself, to leave a mark – that’s enough. But what is it? Isn’t there writing already on the other side, in the other world? Why does it need to double itself here?

To write clearly, to construct an argument, to appeal to a reader – that is the writing on the other side of the mirror. And on this side? That I can even contrast writing in the world with what is here is sign of demise. There is no division – if the word ‘I’ comes apart here, if this is an ascetic writing, written to drive away each day the face of God, it is because it is always dispersed; and if it appears gathered there, in the book I am writing in the world, this is a lie and dissimulation.

But then how to make a mark here? How to draw writing into its advent when that requires, first of all, the dispersal of the writer? Writing marks itself; writing, the to-write, binds what is written to dispersal. Binds? Disperses it in turn, rather; relation without relation, leap without leaper.

The Adversary

The new book laughs at me. Not a line, you’ve not written a line. The new book is laughing: do you think you can write me? Do you think you can bring me to birth? But you’ve not written a line. Not a line! Rather, you’ve crossed out everything you’ve written! Rather, in your tiredness, in your vagueness, everything you’ve written has crossed itself out! Idiot, why did you think you were as strong as me! Dazed ox, wanderer through the day, why did you think you could even begin to write me!

I’ve watched you, says the book, as I have always watched. To the office, and then to the shops. To Marks and Spencer for your salad and you sandwich, to the Refrectory for your wrap, your little circumnavigations, your vague perambulations, your movements around and around town, the return of the same: I am watching, watching and laughing, watching you fail and laughing at your failure. Did you think you could match your strength with mine?

Last weekend, says the book, you ruined yourself with caffeine, didn’t you? Half a cafe mocha, that’s what you thought it would take, didn’t you? That’s what you thought would give you the strength, wasn’t it? Saturday – do you remember that? Saturday, wandering around town, cursing yourself for not working, going out to buy a paper, and then to buy some envelopes, and then to buy a snack, and then, god knows, to the charity shop to look for books, and then to the secondhand CD shop to look for albums – what a day! What a failure of the day!

But there was still Sunday to come, still Sunday, when you woke looking more tired than ever, more ill than ever, when you woke and washed and dressed and went off again to the office. To the office! On a Sunday! Nothing better, the world quiet, world can be done, you thought you’d meet me on the plane of Sunday, you thought we’d do combat on that open plane, you thought we’d meet at last. Laughter. What happened? Sunday rotted. The day was rotten, like an old log in stagnant water.

Nothing, nothing: no work. Down to the streets, down the cobbled alley and into the town. The same salad, the same sandwich. The same wandering, I saw you, dazed ox, I saw you and I laughed. Another half cup of mocha. Then, when that didn’t work, and your tiredness and vagueness seemed worse than before, half a can of Irn-Bru. Then, for a time, I drew back. Then, was it for an hour?, I drew back. You wrote, I admit it. You began to write me. A whole weekend, and now writing began. It was five o’clock, and you began. After nine hours in the office, and you began.

Blissful hours! You were happy, weren’t you? Joy at last! You’d missed the deadline, or so you thought, but at least you were working! The deadline had passed, but you thought: I’ve written something, I’ve put something together, that’s how it was. You thought: I’ve pushed back the illness, I’ve pushed back tiredness, I’ve cleared a little space for myself, I’ve met my old adversary on my own terms; I have written. And you wrote, with that little space cleared. You wrote, and I fell back into the forest, I was lost there.

Even I was impressed, says the book. Even I thought: he’s earned it. I retreated, not laughing anymore. I went, not laughing, and not even looking forward to the time when, I knew, I would laugh again. He’ll exhaust himself, I told myself, but now shaking my head. Tomorrow, the same wandering. Tomorrow, the same dazed ox, wandering around town.

The Other Room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noon

Was that the morning? Was that it, the morning? Was that it, promise of the day, beginning of the new day: the morning? What happened, then? Why did you get up so early, then? Why that urgency, why get up so early, then? What was it you were waiting for? For what were you looking forward? What was to arrive in the morning and by way of the morning? What were you hoping for in the dawning of the day, in the morning?

A cure – is that what you wanted? Lightness – is that what you wanted? But there was no cure, and no lightness. No cure – and the whole weight of the day, of what did not begin as the day, pinned you to the bed. Do not rise. Fail to rise. Nothing is coming; do not rise, give up on the hope of its rising. It will not come, there is nothing to begin; the future cannot be reached here – give up. Lie down, then; admit it: you’re ill, and there’s only illness. Admit it – there is illness and nothing but illness.

Give up – nothing’s coming. Give up, it is not coming, it will not come. The coming day – is that what you’re waiting for? It will not come. You’ll never get up. Lightness – is that what you want? But there’s only heaviness. The cure – is that what you want? But there is only the illness of the non-beginning, the oldest illness, the heaviest illness. Fail to rise. Give up.

The Present

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

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

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

All Days

Up early enough, ready to work, but the usual tiredness. Up early – before eight o’clock, and read for work, ready to write, ready to pull the chair to the desk to begin, but tiredness, the usual tiredness, and vagueness, the usual vagueness. I was up early, ready to begin, even as I knew I was too tired to begin, too tired and too vague, and there would be no beginning made, that today was not the day for beginnings, quite the opposite, today is the day of non-beginning, the day in which it returns as it has always returned, the non-beginning.

Up early, as I am always up early, ready to begin, as I am always ready to begin, but I was already vague, I was already tired, though nothing had happened, and the day was just beginning. Early – but already too late. Up early – but I’d got up too late; I missed the beginning, I’d lost hold on the beginning, and how was I now to begin? Up early, but already dazed – early, but the day was too much; I’d lost the beginning, I’d lost hold of the beginning, I’d failed to keep my appointment, or was it the beginning had failed to keep its appointment with me? – No matter, there was to be no beginning, not today.

Nothing would begin, on today of all days. Today, yes, the day of all days, the eternal non-beginning, the day that turns around the same impossibility of beginning. Today of all days! That was it – that’s the formulation! Today is the day no day can begin. Today – the non-beginning day, which turns around the same. Today – the eternal to-come of non-beginning; failed day, botched day, failure as the to-day, botching as its coming; advent without advent.

It will not begin, not today, today of all days. Not today – all the days that did not begin are here, all of them. All the days pressed and concentrated here, in this non-day. Up early – and for what? Ready to work – but for what? Pulling the chair to the table – but for what?

Light

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

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

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

The Avatar

‘I remember.’ – ‘What do you remember?’ – ‘I remember.’ – ‘But what if memory does not permit the perdurance of the I?’ – ‘I remember.’ – ‘And if it is not the "I" that remembers, but memory that remembers itself, interiorising itself, hardening itself into a form with limits, with determinacy?’ ‘ -I remember.’ – ‘Unless what you are is given by memorising, by the contraction of memory into determinate events in linear sequence.’

‘I remember.’ – ‘And what you are is the folding of memory into interiority, the act of synthesis blind only to the need to secure the form of the self.’ – ‘I remember.’ – ‘The power of memory remembers itself in you. Memory memorises, and so is the remembering self born.’ – ‘I remember’. – ‘No one remembers; the "I" comes after, as an effect of memory’. – ‘I remember.’ – ‘Memory desired you. Memory wanted you to be born. Remembering asked for you. The power of memory asked for a body. Remembering wanted to be born a mortal. You are the avatar of memory’.

‘I remember’. – ‘Avatar, you are the game memory plays with itself. Once, the gods asked Shiva how it was he could live as an ascetic when he had never lived, as was required, as a householder? Straightaway, Shiva gave birth to himself as a mortal; he married, had children, lived a long life and died. When he opened his eyes, an instant later, it was as a god again among other gods. So with remembering, which is not even a god. So memory, which is the internalisation of the exteriority of time’.

‘I remember’. – ‘Proxy, yours is not the power of memory; you do not own it. The power to remember is given, not taken, and what is given can also be withdrawn. Do you remember? That is not your power. Remembering happens; memory invents a body for itself, the event reduces itself so it can lend itself to the fiction of interiority’. – ‘I remember’. – ‘Memory remembers itself; memory is the pearl that invents the shell; who are you that are born from the chance of remembering? Who that comes to himself when memory deigns to give itself an agent?’

Augury

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

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

The Deadline

Today, what happened today? No books – or at least, no non-academic ones. No writing – or at least, no non-academic writing. The office, just as yesterday. A deadline – actually, one already passed. I’m too late, I found out. Too late, but I finished anyway. Cold February. I should remember there’s always a cold snap around this time. Cold, and the city seems to reduce itself to itself. What does it become? Only what it is, but it is more obvious now.

The same supermarket for the same salad. That was my lunch. A sandwich – the same sandwich. R.M. texts. She’s in Geneva, on a coach to the mountains. And what am I supposed to be doing? The deadline, oh yes, but I’ve missed the deadline. Tomorrow I’ll go begging to ask them to consider me. I was ill, I could tell them. The letter was lost, I could say. But why didn’t I finish? Because the days are full and the evenings are full – I’m busy. One day, another – busy. Where did the day go, I ask myself, because it is already evening? What happened to the day?

Meanwhile, W. is haranguing me by e-mail. Why aren’t you writing any philosophy? But I am, I tell him. Does he believe me? I’m working on a new book, in a completely new area. I’ve been seized by enthusiasm, drafted a first chapter, and thinking of a second. When will it complete itself? The whole book could be done by the end of the summer. But is that what I want to do with my summer? The deadline – it’s already passed. It’s already too late. The summer will be the time of the too-late, after the deadline, after everything should have been done. In fact, that is my life, it’s what happens after what should have happened. It’s extra-time, before the penalty shootout. Anything could happen; it could go either way.

No thoughts, though. No thinking. One hour a day – working intensely. One early hour, before the office: work time. I write, drawing on bits and pieces I’d begun last year. It’s pleasant enough; ideas coalesce. But there’s no thinking, not really. It’s automatic. I’m back doing what I do. It’s different this time, that’s true enough – a different topic, at least on the surface. But it’s an extension of the same thoughts. I am of my time, I tell myself. I am absolutely of my time, there’s nothing surprising about me. Of my time – a symptom – but of what? Of what disease?

As though I’d been hollowed out. Nothing inside. That’s the disease, and it afflicts everyone. We’re all dead, I tell myself, and especially today, when it’s so cold. What’s the point? What’s the point of all of this? Why isn’t it warm, that at least? Why isn’t the salad nice, today of all days? Why can’t the sandwich be nice and not half-stale? Why don’t I take the dead plant out to the bin? Took a year to die, that plant, leaf by leaf, and yesterday I knocked the last leaf off. There’s only a green tip atop the bole (is that the word – bole?) . A green shoot. Too late, though. The deadline has come and gone.

Today. What happened today? Nothing happened. The same happened – the same bowl of salad, the same sachet of dressing I cut with dirty scissors. Tuna and potatoes at the bottom of the bowl. With my plastic spoon I scoop up the tuna and potatoes. It’s a salad Nicoise. And later, a tuna sandwich. And today – a treat – fizzy water. In the cold office, with the fan heater on. In the office, piles of newspapers. Surf the net, wait for the caffeine to hit. It’s not hitting, though. Half a cup of tea that did not hit. Half a can of Irn-Bru that did not hit. When will it hit? Because the hours are passing, and I’m already late. Because I’m already too late. The deadline has passed.

Today. What was it that was to happen today? What was to have occurred? Dawn, 6.30: the world had turned from darkness into light. Dawn, and sunrise at 7.00 – light had come, spreading everywhere. Grey light! I leave for the office through the grey light. It’s all downhill. I take the bike into the office. It smells of oil. It’s early – before 8.00, and the shops are still closed. Nothing for it. Yes, that was the morning. And lunchtime? And the afternoon? The earth was turning in the light, but no one can see the sun. There is no sun. The sun has been scratched out. Instead, grey light, the whole day: grey. And cold, with cold wind, a little rain.

Out of the office to the streets. I was ill for 10 days, but now I’m better. Ill and too tired to make it to the bottom of the shopping street, but now it’s an easy trip. Concrete. The same shops. Go and get a salad, and a sandwich for later, because it will be closed later. Get a paper, even though you dislike papers. There’ll be empty hours to fill, you can count on that. Empty time, you know that. Today – how will you get through it? It’s easy enough. You are carried through it, after all. Borne – that’s what happens with time. It carries you, you don’t have to do anything. Do nothing then. But you want to know time is passing. You want to read to know time is passing. The papers. The net. You want to gauge and callibrate time. To measure it.

But you’ve already been measured by time. Measured and found wanting. You missed the deadline, didn’t you? You missed it – you were too busy, and it slipped past, didn’t it? You missed it, missed the appointment. The day is extra-time. Before the final reckoning. Before the shootout. The sun sets at 6.00. Sunday in the office. 3 more hours, and I will be done. 3 hours – and I was done. Triumph – I finished! It was all done! Too late, but all done! I came home. Banana beer in the fridge – whose idea was that? Tescos brought it, but why did I order it? A banana beer in my glass – horrible, really. And the TV on silent. And then a drama – you know it’s a drama, because no one speaks as people speak. Full of actors you’ve known for years. A drama, dealing with Big Themes.

So I turn on the computer. I type the words, ‘Today. What happened, today?’ No better words than those. Words to which any words could link themselves. Gregarious words, which seem to call for more words. But they are perfect as they are. Perfect, even as no other words have come, not yet. Suspended – words in which the day, today, seems to infinitise itself. What returns is eternity. What comes back is the whole of time. The same day is turning. But the deadline has passed. The deadline has receded and carried it with me. So who am I that outlived myself? Who am I that lives in the day which has outlived itself?

The Postcard

Strange that you can mourn in advance for the one who will die. Mourning: when I found, while he was alive, the postcard to me addressed, daddy, I was already in mourning. For whom? For the child I was? For the child whose father would call himself by that word and not, dad, as he would call himself later? He found it absurd, that change of names. Absurd – that what he was to me was to receive a new name. He shared this with others who had come from overseas and for whom English was not his first language.

There it was, the signed postcard: daddy. Was it him I mourned, already – he in relation to me? The relationship had changed; when I found the postcard, I was already grown up. Yes, grown up, but not grown up enough – had I not returned there, to the family house, when I should have been too old to return? How old was I? I do not want to remember. But then, it is customary in India to live, as a bachelor, with your family. And that’s what I was – a bachelor. We were in the house, together, just as we were when I was a child.

In the house – because it was too expensive to live elsewhere, because I’d fallen off the edge of a contract. Months would pass, and soon there would be a contract again, but in the meantime? Invisible, these struggles where the child become adult is too old for the family house but too young for the world. A life not begun, or hardly begun – a life interrupted, but for how long? But wasn’t that where we got to know one another as adults, each facing one another across life, I facing forwards, and you, hoping I would find my way into life?

In the evenings, I worked in the room that was now mine. I wrote. And in the day? I cycled out, and sometimes, when she was down, I went out with my girlfriend into the woods. Difficult times. Life like a trail that had stopped abruptly in the woods. One evening, by the lake, there was mist as though rising up from its surface. Extraordinary, and only us to see it. I kept that memory, but did she? We split up soon enough. Soon after that – nothing; oblivion, another trail run to nowhere.

He kept quiet about all of this, dad. He listened without judgement. What did he expect would happen? He kept quiet. Asked, he would have spoken with insight. Perhaps I asked him. Meanwhile, life had stopped in the woods, to which I would go every day. Mediocre woods, a lake that was more a pool, a muddy path. Where was I? Nowhere in particular. And life? Going nowhere. Look up in the woods: the broad sky. Then cycle home, go to my room; work.

I found the postcard before I moved back to the North. I found it; I mourned. He was upset I was moving. Then he understood. I was to go; a year later, one job, and a few months later, another, and I found myself here, further north. The woods – I remember them. The path that led nowhere – I remember that. And the relationship that ran to nowhere?

Him. Behind and before all this. The context, ever-present, then as when I was a child? Or was he falling into the past? Was it that falling that I mourned when I found the postcard?

The Flat

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be Said

How is it that as I feel I come closer to what there is to be said, there is less and less to say, or rather, that what I write, however much that is written, seems yet more inadequate? Write, erase writing. Write, and find by erasure what requires first of all to be written. So is writing a kind of sacrifice, so writing burns up without anything being destroyed. The words remain, the same as before, but they are blazing. But nothing is blazing. There are words, only words, and nothing besides. Write less; pare writing away. Be more economical; limit yourself. Do not write of this, not of that. Then will you find writing itself? Then will you run it to ground, what there is to be said?