Morning. Freedom to write whatever I please. But to write what? It pleases me to write, that is true – to form a phrase and then a sentence – to complete a paragraph, but what to write? The old dream: to mark nothing by writing except writing. To mark only the advent of writing, the ‘I was here’ scratched into the wall of the day. Then, when I look back, it is as though I left my scrawl on every day that led me here. Only it is not my scrawl I want to find, but a signature that trembles because it cannot mark the one who writes. The trembling signature: the name I write in order to sacrifice the name. I would not have been the one I am, and isn’t that the task: to mark the one I’m not, the one I have not been, these days and weeks and months?
Unlocked
Be grateful, says the day, you’ve stayed six days; you are a normal person again. That’s true: after the stresses of the last few weeks, open, bright days and reading; no longer rising with first light and working before I have to be in the office. Am I reading? Remembering reading more than reading. Letting my memory reread books that are locked inside me.
Locked: like the ice that locks itself in the earth all winter. Then comes the spring and the thaw, and the earth starts to breathe. What was it called, in geography, when the whole surface of the unfrozen earth starts to move? Solifluction? Then there are those who are locked in, who are unable to move anything but their eyes. What is the name for the awakening from that state, if it comes?
Unlocked: I imagine the sprawling of a house so large that it lets the inside becomes outside. In one room, it rains, in another, there is a desert over which birds vanish (Mirror), or a forest in which wolves run (A Company of Wolves). Memories of reading, of viewing: the thread of Ariadne leads me into the labyrinth, not out of it. But this is not nostalgia – or, if it is, it is that nostalghia (with an ‘h’) about which Tarkovsky made a film.
Memory, non-memory, it is the exposure of the past to what did not occur: not to what would have been possible, then; not to the path untaken or the door handles untried, but to a kind of retaking of what occurred, where the whole of time moves. Solifluction, the unlocked earth: everything is in movement: to remember, now, is to receive everything anew, my past come again.
The Photographic Negative
Dream image: an eye open in the middle of the palm of my hand. By writing it down will I make that image go away? Another bright day in the South. But I couldn’t sleep last night, and carry the night with me; the day has not really begun, or rather, it has not separated itself from what went before. No new beginning: the lost night voids the bright morning. The day is turned inside out. It is a photographic negative of what it should be.
Isn’t it in just such a negative that Mishima’s Toru finds himself? I remember the first pages of The Decay of the Angel, the last volume in The Sea of Fertility, as a series of horizontal lines. Short paragraphs, each a sentence or two sentences long, which precisely lay out a situation. The coast. A ship that comes across the horizon. Remembering, I say to myself: it is at this point Mishima knew the Absolute. At this point that he began to write as a dead man. For it was upon the completion of this volume that he took his life.
Toru: the photographic negative. Mishima, already dead, already seized by the movement of dying. It is as though he had cut his wrists, and his blood was already mixing with the horizon the ship crossed. The sea at the beginning of The Decay of the Angel is a sea of blood. Toru, the fourth incarnation, is only sixteen, but he is wise from a life lived three times over. Wise? No, not even that. He has seen everything. He knows everything. Later, in a botched attempt to take his own life, he makes himself blind. But there was nothing more to see.
Morning: my head is thick with cold. I cough, and blood from my nose spatters on the white sheet. It is the night coughing. The day has begun, but there is still the night from which it was unable to separate itself. Mishima, who wrote at night, would have separated night from day with a sword stroke. But just as in those grotesque accounts of botched executions, where the executioner strikes again and again at an unseverable neck, the night is part of the day, flooding it, I imagine, as an octopus’s ink runs into seawater.
Now I remember another dead man, another who lives as life-in-death: Tarkovsky’s Stalker, who, when he lies down in the Zone, is joined by an Anubian Alsation. The camera pans over water, and there we see items from Stalker’s nightstand encrusted with algae. How is those items have crossed over into the Zone? Or does it work the other way: how did those items cross from the Zone into the world? The camera pans. Is this Stalker’s dream? Is he dreaming? Or is it that the Zone dreams in him? Either way, I tell myself, he is dead. He has already died.
A final dead man, protagonist of Gene Wolfe’s Peace. Alden Dennis Weer: I should have kept the book here, in my childhood home. It was in this town I discovered it, the book with close type and yellow pages. The book with the uprooted tree on the cover. I took it with me when I met my friends at the pub. It was 1989; I was at the bottom of the world. The town was like the floor of a well. I read the book there. I reread it, and only gradually did I come to understand what it narrated.
And at that moment, I felt cheated, just as I did last night, upon rereading a childhood favourite: plot becomes all, plot becomes everything, plot sweeps up the whole story and the possiblity of narration. Is it any surprise that I came to prefer the horizontal lines of The Decay of the Angel? That I would discover books in which the plot was like a half-grown garden maze, whose hedges you could look over? I do not want to be lost in the labyrinth of a plot (with one exception: Kafka). I do not want to be led to the secret heart of the narrative, like the enchanted garden in Diana Wynne Jones’ Charmed Life.
Nostalgia for my first reading of Peace, for my second reading, when that book was as light and as open as Tarkovsky’s Mirror. Each episode was a tableau, each spread itself horizonally, moving across, with no forward rush of action. Still book, hovering book, book that suspended the world. Book like a low archipelago of islands from which one could leap from one tableau to another. Book like the jostling ice-blocks across which the child leaps in Pelle the Conquerer.
On my desk in my office, a few hundred miles to the North, is my book of Tarkovsky’s polaroids. Pressed between those pages, like a flower in a flower press, time reveals its juices, its sticky essence. The pages of The Sea of Fertility are sticky with blood.
Morning. The golden statue of Ganesh in front of the window. The pine trees behind the houses opposite. The brightness of the white garage doors, reflecting the sun. The spindly new plants planted along the garden border. What had you intended to write about?, asks the blog. To follow one dream after another, I said. To dream with books that dream inside me. The photographic negative: was that the thread that was to lead you through this labyrinth?, asks the blog. I dropped it; and besides I can see over the hedges. I want to get lost, not find the exit.
The Youngest Ghost
It is the same with nearly every book I read: to tell a story, to narrate, means to pass over a more primordial struggle. What would it be to narrate the way in which the event struggles with the non-event? In sense, the beginning is already the end, like the river which spreads its distributaries into a great delta. The end: for what is actualised, what hardens itself as event out of a more general haze comes after the struggle, after the succesful wrenching of what begins from what does not begin.
Reading Auster, say, is pure pleasure, but it is indulgence, too – the swiftness of his narratives, the lack of extraneous detail and those musing passages in other writers I so enjoy, bears me joyfully along; I am a happy reader. But with Kafka, who likewise never permits himself to muse, for whom nothing must be illustrative, I am brought back to the haze; what seems to speak keenly, clearly sets itself against the arrhythmia of the non-beginning, the Word which will never pronounce itself.
(For that is what the Castle is: coextensive with the village, nothing other than it, but also everything that is other, all that sets itself against the bustle of the day. Do not seek recognition from the officials of the Castle; do not seek to know your role. K. falls down exhausted when he tries to approach it, but by this exhaustion does he know it, as when, later, he falls asleep when he is told of the Castle’s secret. Castle, Word, you speak only to the weary and asleep.)
Word, non-Word, I think I discover something of you in Sebald, too – that the narrative detours of The Rings of Saturn, which are like so many ox-bow lakes alongside the streaming of the main story, are what prevents the book from being devoured in one gulp. Extraneousness. Detail. Ventriloquy: sentences which may or may not be quotations. Indirect speech: these are no mere techniques, but arise out of the non-beginning to which the book is tied.
Disributaries spread in a great fan, eventually disappearing into indefinite swampland, where fresh water meets sea water. In the end, like an old junky’s arm, there are no veins of water left, only general sludge. Sebald’s East Anglia is that sludge; human history spreads itself indifferently across his pages. Everything has happened; nothing has happened.
But here is the wonder: that nothing-is-happening is allowed to speak of itself. Not the Word, but the counter-Word, which undoes what is made, or rather shows how the present is redoubled by an indeterminate past. Anything could happen. Anything could have happened: the surface across which his narrator walks remakes itself as he does so. He is the last awakened of the ghosts; the youngest one. The world of the dead is still wondrous to him.
Reading (I am almost at the end), I remember the soldiers who cross the marshland in Tarkovsky’s Mirror. Crossing, trudging, they no longer belong to history. One of them, his cap-brim bobbing up and down, walks more quickly than the others. No matter: he will still miss his appointment with time. The young girl in another sequence, being evacuated because of the Spanish civil war, turns suddenly to the camera. What does she see? The melting ice-plane, the expanse in which all the dead are buried and from which all the dead will arise.
The Word
Write, says the day. It’s bright, the air’s fresh and clean. There’s something of the North in the wind: it reaches me from keen Arctic places, from blue glaciers and the frozen-over sea. Were it possible to write with the same ice-clarity, the same precision!
A single sentence would be enough. A single sharp sentence, and not the usual fug. How is it nothing keen can announce itself here? How is it I cannot write in a single gesture, ice scratching on ice? Not the usual disappointment with each phrase. Not the botched sentences and muddled paragraphs.
Precision: to write what is essential, to uncover the Word, to let it speak. But what if the Word is the undoing of words? What if it turns all words from themselves? Behind this day, the keen day, there is another. Apocalypse: what reveals itself is muddle. The world will dissolve back into the mire, the great stagnancy to which my life is linked. The day turns in itself without issue, writing and unwriting itself.
Is this what Cy Twombly has painted? Words obscured; part-sentences and broken phrases. It makes no sense, or rather, sense brings with it a cloud of non-sense. To the sharp and keen the simple stroke of the calligrapher, who writes in a single gesture. And to the muddle, the great fug of the day?
Stunted writing; deformed sentences. Paragraphs like the swamplands that open when Spring comes to the far North. And always the haze, like the haze of mosquitos. Nothing settles; nothing completes itself. Ruined writing, because it bears the trail of non-writing like ectoplasm.
In the beginning was the Word, the non-Word. In the beginning, the non-beginning, from which no action will separate itself. Mishima, is this what you tried to resolve with your suicide? Did you dream of opening your insides to the sun? But our insides are infinite, and our intenstines the labyrinth in which we all wander as through the rooms of the house of memory.
Death is clouded with dying, writing with non-writing. In the beginning was the Word; but in the beginning, too, was what drew it back to the non-Word that allows nothing to begin.
The Counter-Day
Obscure day. It is often muggy in the Thames Valley. Return home late at night, or go out to bid visitors goodbye, and the air is moist; the grass, like the tarmac, covered in a layer of moisture. I am here for – how long? – today? tomorrow? – working on this and that. The Rings of Saturn accompanies me and as I began to read this morning, having given up the letter I was trying to write, it is as though it had set back in me that backdrop against which memories can come into appearance.
Set it back: if I call it forgetting, this is in no way to be understood as the opposite of memory, but rather, a kind of patina, an encrustation which ages each memory, bringing it forward, already old, with the whole of the past. Reading, the day loses its hold on time and seems to fall indifferently into the past. Counter-day, how is I have always known you by what failed to happen?
Obscurity: Sebald’s East Anglia is my Berkshire, but neither is itself. Time’s arrow is lost in the sand; every day happens at once. How old am I? I lived in the same house when I was fifteen, and then again when I was thirty. How old am I now? Five more years have passed, but no time has passed.
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.
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