Waiting

Everything to write, of course. And indeed, I write it, or I begin to write, but then, just as quickly, I delete what I’ve written, the cursor goes backwards over the words and there is nothing again. Why this need to write, and the need to erase? There is a great deal to write. Much to report, but still, I don’t want to report anything, to say anything, but rather to write and then delete what I have written, to write and then to sacrifice writing until it is no more, until the Post Introduction is empty again, and there is waiting again. What is being waited for? What is being sought? What is to be lost, and what found?

The Cell

It is true I gave in to the desire to make a work of what I write here. True that I printed out the writing of this or that month and read through those pages in bed, underlining this and correcting that. I thought it was time to assess my progress, to discover what works and what does not work. Time, I thought, to set the blog on a firmer course, to discipline my waywardness and discover, through the patient work of many days, the form of the work to which, all along, my writing would have tended.

How foolish! What stupidity! The hex fell on me almost as soon as I set a course for myself; didn’t I understand there was to be no course here, and that to write was blindness, and what was written was written blindly? Not, here, the step by step movement that would beat the path to the work – not the slow accumulative advance whereby each day would let the work come to itself. Only rewriting – only the same said again, writing coming to itself and then dispersing as soon as it made its mark.

So what have I learnt since those days of ambition? The print-outs are put away and all thoughts of the work have fallen from me. I am like the figure in Munch’s painting, whose arms have fallen by his side. Nothing is to be done with this, this writing. Nothing can be made of it, this writing so weak it barely comes to itself.

The soul, after death, needs to be fed and looked after; it is search for the doorway to heaven – or hell, depending on its deeds in life. And in the meantime? It searches; it is vulnerable. Pity too this writing, which barely sets out on the journey only to disperse again. Strange gathering that is the beginning of dispersal; strange work that unworks itself, leaving nothing but the attempt to come to itself anew, to begin, to make a beginning, and then to lose hold of the beginning and fall back into nothingness.

Nothingness: that’s what divides these posts. Life is not lived elsewhere, only here; life comes to itself only here – writing marks the return of life to itself, and its imminent dispersal. That will have been your life, that by which you marked your days like a prisoner in the cell. That was it, those lines and cross bars, where weeks pass, years pass, but nothing passes.

But then I know too that by the same strokes – by the same non-strokes – in which passage fails to mark itself that there is also passage of a sort. It is enough to pass from one day to another – enough that what returns does so across time, and not as the same instant endlessly repeated.

Across time – comfort of a strength that does not fail to find itself. Each stroke says ‘here I am’, and I was here – then, and then, and all those times. Strength of weakness – strength present even in the weakness of a writing that speaks of nothing but its advent.

Here I am

What day is it? What night is it? The curtains were closed when I came home; I opened them and then opened the window. Now to write something, I told myself. To write – what? I began to write on a topic to which I felt attuned by my sadness. I gave up; it gave me up. I saved what I had written and opened a new window. Again, start again.

I pour a glass of Cava. Sadness. But the question comes, what can I make from this sadness? Where will it lead me? Silence in the flat, but for how long? My student neighbours absent, but for how long? Make the most of these hours, I tell myself. Write. But why write? Why the desire to live as it were over again – to record this moment, if only the moment of writing?

Begin with nothing at all, I tell myself. Write; form nothing, seek nothing. Just as the yard out there in the night is open, so should writing should be open. Just as it is open, the yard to the whole sky, to the night, so too must this writing be roofless, open to the night like the Roman temples to the sun and the moon.

How many times have I sat thus, and not only since I started writing the blog? For a time, I wrote letters to friends, and then imaginary letters to friends who were too busy in their own lives to write back to me. Letters like the one which open Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet in the Quartet Encounters edition which seem to say very little, nothing at all – letters which, like Blanchot’s to Monique Antelme, contain barely anything but a greeting, a ‘here I am’. But who is here?

The temptation to begin writing by noting the date, the time, and my own age. It is February 17th, ten minutes to eight, and I am —. Surprise, always, that it is as late as it is, that it is 2006. How could it be? How have I grown so old? And how is it, as I begin to write, that nothing has happened – that nothing seems to separate these acts of writing, these dates I would mark, from one another.

Once, I wrote, it is 1994, February 17th and I am —. What age was I then? I remember the letter; I remember a whole stream of letters; they’re all lost now. I didn’t keep copies and my recipient, I knew, burnt the letters a few years afterwards. Burnt those letters and others as she sought to purge life of her presence. To purge the world of herself. Happily, she didn’t succeed – she is alive as I am alive. And doesn’t she still write – she did so just the other day – to say ‘here I am’?

She is there, in the South, and I am here in North. It was ever thus, always distance for letters to cross. That distance is what gave us hope; we never met – but one day, we would meet. One day – we would meet, and what would happen then? We met and nothing happened – or rather, we met, and what did not happen was enough to make that distance that separated us a kind of closeness. We knew what we would not be to one another; that was just. The issue was settled; justice was done to us both. But there were to be no more letters; e-mails, yes, but letters, which reach the other by way of distance and in the discretion of an envelope – no.

So I gave it up, writing, even as I took it up again here a few years later. Writing – I can hardly call it that. Writing that only marks itself and speaks of this marking; writing that is no more than a record: I was here. But who was there? Who was it who wrote letters in 1994 and posts in 2006? Who would mark his presence by way of writing?

It is already too late. 2006 – I should have stopped years ago. 2006 – why haven’t I stopped, why couldn’t I have brought it all to an end? I’ve missed some vital stage in life, I took the wrong turn. Here I am – but who is here?

Why this need to clear a space, to smooth down the page, to open the Post Introduction? A kind of worship perhaps – an act of prayer. But to whom? To what gods? Perhaps to what, too, ruins the gods, to the darkness like that above the yard in which there is neither sun nor moon.

Ruination Day

How tired are you? Too tired to write? Never too tired for that, but too tired still to complete something by way of writing. How tired? Write, yes, but you will not complete what you write, and that is it, isn’t it: incompletion, the rendering incomplete of the complete, unfinishing the finished.

You’d like to bring it to term, wouldn’t you, to finish, to complete a work, to round it off, to achieve by writing something finished and complete? Curse of tiredness, curse of the non-event: nothing can be finished, not here. Nothing will be finished, and you will discover nothing new. Rewriting of writing, the wearing away of writing, every day the same, the non-completion of the same. Or is that what it is, the same: non-completion, non-event, the ruination that asks anew to botch success?

Accompany it, the day, as it comes to ruination. Be with it, the day, as it wears away the day. Today: the return of the nothing-will-happen. Today: the wearing away of the day, of every day.

Botched

Today – the day has failed, it’s all over, nothing can begin. Today – over at once, botched, you’ll do nothing today. Did you think to make some advance here, to invent some new way of writing, some new way of saying the same? Did you think to make a success of failure, to find hope in recording the botched, in writing, in  a new way: the day is botched, and nothing can begin? To make a beginning of non-beginning, to lodge yourself in an event which will not come to term?

Botched – the day is ruined. No: the day is ruin; today is the ruin of all days, today is the ruination of all days, their coming apart, their failing. Today I will fail – but today you have always failed; this day is always the last day and the very last. The last day – but no new day is coming. No new day announces itself. Fail then. Your day is ruined. Fail again, fail as you have always failed. But succeed as you redouble this failure in writing. Succeed as you record what is botched, what cannot come to term.

Dub Life

As dub is to original, so writing to my life. Take it again, this time with space, this time with reverb and echo, this time with a tiredness so massive nothing can complete itself. Lie down. You’re ill – too tired. Later, write. Retake it: dub echoes, dub reverb, or take it over and again, wear it out. The worn out tape of There’s a Riot Going On, this time without vocals, without music, just tape hiss and tape worn out.

Dividing bedroom and living room, there is a window in my flat, a sheet of bevelled glass, quite big, to let in light. And that is written life, to look at it through that glass – too see, but also not to see, every event smeared and without detail. Vast, slow movement, backlit by indifferent white light: blurred life, life without contour, where no event is divided from any other, and nothing completes itself.

Events, now, without determinacy, bleeding into one another as the same not-happening. Eternal life, eternal non-event. How to write about that?

The Placekeepers

We saw you then, we do not watch you now, you’re no one to us, not anymore. Lost to us, that’s what you are – lost, and who will ever find you? We will not; we are not looking. What interest have we in you; we have other things to do; we have our tasks, our projects; we are busy, always busy, and for that reason you are always far from our minds.

But sometimes, unbidden, a memory comes. Sometimes one of us looks up and remembers: him. Him: you. That is how we remember you, by starts, by turns, and we look up from our labours, we who are so busy, and it comes to us, our early days, when we were young and you were young, but it was really by your youth that we were young; in truth, we lived from your youth, we drew strength from it, for it was the youth of hope, of the great dawn. It was our youth: the whole sky, the dawn; everything was possible; the world gave itself anew.

Who were we, so young with your youth? What had we become? Ah, we were young, then – young as you were young, and full of hope! But our youth was a second youth – or a third; our innocence was innocence regained. Your splendour was that you lived youth and innocence for the first time. What splendour! How splendidly did you greet the day! How splendid, your strong arms that stretched up towards the day!

The morning of the world, that’s what we called it. And you were a son of the morning, just as we, watching you, likewise became sons and daughters of the morning. But what happened? When did it set in, the long decline? About when did it start, the decline? Because things are different now, aren’t they? Things have changed irrevocably, haven’t they? It’s all changed; the earth turned from light into darkness; the great earth turned its great bulk away from the light. Night was coming; darkness was coming, the long wane of strength.

You were stronger than us, then. Stronger: you had not lived before, as we had lived before; you had been innocent from the start, but ours was a borrowed innocence; it was not ours, not truly. We became weary before you’d even noticed how the day had changed; for it had changed. As a boy, you cycled around the housing estates. Older, you walked around those estates at night with others, and a bottle of Thunderbird. Older still, and you fell ill in those estates; you fell and did not rise, and so passed the afternoon of your life, recumbent, the sun no longer at full strength above you, no longer the splendid sky; now the white and indefinite expanse; all cloud, a single, unbroken cloud that had covered the world.

What chance did you have? Yet older, and you rose, but you did not stretch your arms up in the morning. Something in you was destroyed; strength had turned against you; you were not young. Who were you then? And who were we? Shadows of ourselves, who were only shadows. Shadows of what we were, and we were already shadows, nothing more. What a curse you were! What a burden! It was if you lived from us, that you took our strength.

What could we do but let you go? What other fate awaited us? If let you go we must, then … We let you go; you went; lightened, we imagined, disencumbered, we imagined, lighter in step. Where would you go? The day was yours, the housing estates spread in all directions; the whole world had been conquered. Space was accounted for, and time – time was worktime, and it was time for you to work. You disappeared; we busied ourselves with tasks; we watched everyone, we watched no one, we who had taken the place of the old gods and were waiting, yet for the new gods, we who were only placekeepers, the ones never quite there, the waiters, the watchers, the ones without power.

But now we fear we will be stronger than you, who were once so strong. That is why we do not look for you. We are afraid; afraid to know in you our own ruin – afraid to have it confirmed, to see what we were not and never were, to see it in you. Who are you, now? Where are you? Forbidden questions. We do not speak of you. But sometimes, still, memories come unbidden. Sometimes, yet, we remember your youth and your hopes, and how our youth and hope were reborn with you.

The Affront

We all hate you, we’re all disappointed with you, but we’re finished with disappointment, just as we’ve finished with resignation. Do we hate you? Yes, we still hate you, but our hatred has become diffuse, as if it cannot find you. Hatred is the whole sky just as what is hated – you – is as diffuse and spread as widely as the city.

Hatred – the last bond between you and us, but one that is infinitely attenuated, that is not really a bond at all. We would like to be completely indifferent, to sever all ties with you, who so disappointed us, who were always such a failure, but perhaps near-indifference is enough.

Sometimes, a little twinge of disgust: he’s still alive! Still there! If we looked, we’d find you. But it goes away. Sometimes, a little hatred: he’s a living affront! His stupidity! His vacancy!, but that, too, disappears. Do not look for him; forget him – this is what we tell ourselves; forget that he existed and that he ever existed, he who was so disappointing, he in whom we placed our hopes.

Our hopes! What folly! Who were we to hope – and in you? In you! What foolishness! Perhaps it wasn’t your fault. Perhaps it wasn’t your fault, but that does not mitigate it. Still the same – disappointment. Still the daily refutation of hope. But it is an old wound, and healing over. An old wound, and nearly forgotten.

Perhaps, we told ourselves, he’s there to remind us of what cannot be hoped for. Perhaps it is that he reminds us of our limitations, of our futility. It is as such we despise him, of that we are sure; but we have become reconciled to them: our horizons, our limitations. There is much we cannot do. There are many possibilities that are closed to us. Is it because we are older that we do not mind what we cannot do? Is it because of our age – how old are we now? – that we no longer protest?

You disappointed us, that is true. You failed to rise to his vocation, or perhaps we were mistaken, perhaps there was no vocation, perhaps you were too stupid, too stupid and too blind ever to have a vocation, let alone rise to one. Up and down Oxford Street you went, fooling no one. Up and down, like an idiot, not a thought in your head. We watched you, we waited, but nothing happened, you did nothing, you seemed incapable of everything. Why him?, we asked ourselves. Were we so stupid? Were we so deluded? Where had we gone wrong in choosing you, in picking you out from the crowd?

One day, you became ill. You lay down; you didn’t get up. This was appropriate, we thought. You shouldn’t get up, we thought, your story was over. You’d disappointed us – and died. This was apt, this was fitting. Disappointment – and then death. But you survived, didn’t you? You lived, didn’t you, well insomuch as you ever lived. Were you alive? Too alive, although just barely alive. Still too alive, still breathing.

And one day you rose. One day you became vertical again, one day you went out to the street and before long were going up and down Oxford Street as you used to do. It was as if nothing had happened: up and down the road like an idiot, going from cafe to cafe, like an idiot. What an affront! We sighed. Was there no longer such a thing as destiny? The old world was bound by that – destiny, but the new one?

Where are you now? We haven’t kept up. It’s only occasionally our thoughts turn to you; we are momentarily vexed, and then turn back to our tasks and projects. Where are you? Everywhere and nowhere, we tell ourselves. On Oxford Street? No doubt; but elsewhere, too – elsewhere and everywhere, a living affront.

Nothing in Particular

Begin with the yard, end with the yard. Nothing to write? Write about the yard, open the curtains, there it is: the yard, as disappointing as ever, as mediocre as ever, but still there, still the yard enclosed by three walls and the back of the flat – still there, with the white sky above it and the wheelie bins in it, there with the rotting plants and the grime on the concrete and the algae on the concrete.

Write about the yard. Write about what is absolute about this yard, which sets it apart from other yards. The yard: nothing happens here. It’s the same, always the same. The same yard, the same enclosed space where nothing happens. Doubling that nothing is happening I carry in my heart, that nothing happens that is my hollowness. What has my life amounted to? Nothing. Where is it going? Nowhere. Nothing in particular, that’s what I call the yard. Nowhere in particular. Space enclosed by three walls and the back of the flat below (mine) and the flat above (the students’).

Nothing happens here. No one goes out in the yard, except to take the bin into the street. No one sits on the bench in the yard. Occasionally, cigarette butts are flicked from upstairs onto the surface of the yard, but that’s all. Once a workman came over the wall of the yard via his ladder. Up from the back street and then down into the yard. He was here to fix the pipe, upstairs’s pipe, which was leaking into my kitchen. Soil water soaking through the walls of my kitchen, mould up and down the wall, disgusting. And still the wound where he pulled the pipe from the wall, that workman. 

Sometimes a magpie in the yard pecking at the binbags when the bin lid is up. Otherwise nothing. Once or twice a blackbird poking around the drain. Looking for what? Only slugs here, slugs who find their way into the kitchen how I cannot discover. Looking for what? There’s nothing here. That’s why I’ve only seen them twice, the blackbirds, or is it a single blackbird that has visited twice. I keep the bin lid closed now, so no magpies. Blue slug pellets along the edge of the kitchen door. No slugs have come in recently, but I can’t see any dried up slug bodies by the door, either. Perhaps they turned back because of the slug pellets.

Nothing happens in the yard. Nothing is happening there. Vacancy within me where nothing happens. Event endured by no one: within me. Event, opening, where no one is present. What’s happened? Nothing. What is happening? Nothing in particular. Returning, that nothing in particular. Coming back, wearing out time. Returning – the non-happening that divides time from itself. An event? Rather a non-event. What does not happen, and keeps not happening.

It never began; nothing began here, nothing will end here, there’s nothing to end. The non-event cannot be brought to term. Nothing happened, nothing is happening, just the return of this nothing is happening. What happens? Nothing. What is happening? Nothing. The yard, open between three walls and the back of the house to nothing in particular. It’s my soul, I tell myself, that opening to what does not happen, to the non-actual. My soul, which is the return of the nothing-is-happening.

Today you are in idiot, says the day, and tomorrow you will also be an idiot. Today: idiocy and tomorrow, more idiocy. You are the yard, says the day, open and blank. Nothing is happening, says the day. Lie down, says the day, give up. We’re all disgusted with you, says the day, and above all, you should be disgusted with yourself. Lie down, says the day, and be ill. Admit it: you’re ill. Everyone’s ill, but you are iller than everyone. Ill. Lie down and be ill, says the day, I’ve won, you’ve lost, you’re finished and I’ve just begun as I’ve always just begun.

Between three walls and the back of the house that has been divided into two flats, one above and one below there is the yard. Nothing happens there. Everything is finished there. Every morning, the day dawns above the yard, the day comes, but nothing happens. The day highlights only the nothing is happening. The plants are dying, the concrete is streaked with green, nothing is happening, nothing is reducing everything to itself, to the same level. Mediocrity and disappointment, that’s what is shown by the way. Detritus: a brick, some rocks, some dying plants, the wheelie bin: nothing in particular.

Inside

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hibernating

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staying In

Ill, and the city is spreading all around us, in all directions. Ill, and the city is bigger than us and how will we ever escape it? Ill from the city. Illness – from the city, and by way of the city. You’ll never leave, said the city, and you won’t even stand upright. You’ll never get up, said the city, you’ll never be vertical again. Lie down – accede. Lie down, give up, I’ve won and you are mine. Lie down – you’re mine.

Are we ill from the city? Are we sick from the city, and the extent of the city? It’s everywhere, and who are we, lost in the afternoon, getting off the bus into the day. The city – everywhere – and who are we who go to and fro beneath the day? Give up – get sheltered housing. Give up, find a flat you’ll never have to leave. ‘Doctor, I’m ill, I can’t get up …’

I’m going inside, you said, I’m never coming out. In – and never out, you’ll have to come to me, the world will have to come to me, I’m staying in. I’m inside and the world is everything outside, the light across the windows, the traffic jam on the street. Inside – that’s where I am, I’ve given up, you know where to find me.

Projects

I have many projects, all of them idiotic. I keep busy, I think up projects, but all of them are idiotic, I know that. I am idiot, I am reconciled to that and my projects are idiotic, do you think I don’t know that? But still, it’s better to have projects than to do nothing at all, that’s for sure. Better projects than the absence of projects, the twiddling of thumbs, the passing of time. Better projects and not idleness.

Do something, that’s what I always tell myself, hence my projects. Do something, begin something, it’s better than sitting around doing nothing, that’s what I tell myself, and come up with my projects. Every morning, lying in bed, I think of my projects. I turn them over in my head – what shall I do today? what does today hold? In the morning, first thing, I think lovingly of my projects – I will do this – and then that. This, and then that: not one project, nor even two projects, but many projects. The projects of an idiot, it is true, but projects nonetheless.

They told me I was good for nothing, and they’re probably right, but even an idiot can have projects, I’ve proved that. An idiot’s projects – in the plural. If one goes wrong, there are others. If one project fails, there are others which may succeed. Of course I know they will all fail, one by one. I know it, I’m reconciled to it, I’ve lived long enough to know what I can do and what I can’t do. What I can do: nothing. What I can’t do: everything.

But still, projects – still there are projects, still I can keep myself busy and let the days turn. Still I can get on with my projects, I can get out of bed, having thought about them and then begin one project or another as the mood takes me. One project – another, I can drop one and start another, I can try to do two at once, one and another, but what’s important is that I’m active, important: my non-idleness, my preparedness to do something, to make something of myself. Of course I know I am making nothing of myself, that I’m wasting today as I waste every day, but there is always the illusion of progress, and I am happy with illusion.

It’s important to begin, I tell myself. Important, too, to finish, but first of all to begin, albeit with the hope of finishing, with the hope of completion bound up with it from the first, but there is the beginning first of all, the head of the waters, shining and splendid at the outset of the day.

Stupid

God knows I’m stupid, I’ve been told often enough. Stupid – I know it, stupid in every fibre of my body, stupid from head to toe. Yes, I am stupid, I have it said to me and I say it myself: I am stupid. What else am I but that – stupid? At least I admit it; at least I shoulder my stupidity. I can declare: I am stupid. It is a fact. The sky is blue; I am stupid. It is February; I am stupid. A fact among other facts and nothing to be done.

Am I stupid? Certainly I am stupid. Am I am an idiot? Certainly that: an idiot, a drooler, that’s what I’m good for. They keep me among them for reasons of contrast. I am an idiot, which means they’re – not idiots. I am dimmer than any of them, they know that, which is why they keep me amongst them. An idiot – to provide a contrast, a backdrop. Idiocy – that lets their intelligence shine forth all the more splendidly. Idiocy! Foolishness! To let them radiate brilliance in all directions! That is my purpose; I have my place.

Stupid – that’s what I am. Stupid through and through and blinking in the sun, lost in my stupidity. Droolingly stupid and lost in it – my stupidity just as the summer road is lost in haze. How vague I am! How lost, how retarded! I’m late for everything, even myself; I lag behind everything, even myself; I drag myself behind myself, every step is an effort. But I am used to it, I know what it is never to arrive all at once – I know that vagueness which dissolves everything.

Stupid – stranded in a past that is not mine. So lost I cannot come to myself. Snagged – but by what? What caught me then, so long ago, before I was born? On what was I caught so that I could not assume my existence? There is something that obsesses me – in my own past. I am writing to uncover it – I’m looking for it, the root of my idiocy, idiocy’s radicle. But I can’t find it. Where is it buried? Where has it buried me?

Sometimes I dream I’ve found it in the earth, the root – my idiocy. Sometimes I dreamed I’ve uncovered the dirt and found him, the non-idiot I also am. There he is, unmoving, pallid, not dead but dreaming just as I am dreaming. I am an idiot – but who is he, the non-idiot? I dream of him and he dreams of me. In another life, I am not an idiot, that’s what I tell myself. In another life – but how to find it, the other life?

The Obvious Ape

Is that it, have you got anything else? Is that it, is that all, haven’t you got anything else? Is this how it’ll end? Because there’s nothing here, nothing of interest. You’ve bored everyone to death, they’ve all left, they’ve got some sense, they got out a long time ago, they despaired of you a long time ago, but you kept going, didn’t you? You tried to keep going, didn’t you, long after it’d finished? What’s the point? Why bother? Writing nothing for no one. Amusing no one and interesting no one and boring everyone.

Not so long ago, you thought it was going rather well, didn’t you? It wasn’t so long ago that you thought it’d continue forever, day after day, from now until eternity, didn’t you? But that’s not going to happen now is it? Nothing’s happening, is it – it’s coming to an end, the blog’s beached itself at the end, the blog is like some vast and disgusting whale that’s beached itself at the end. There it is, no one’s interested, but some vast and disgusting body is rotting in the sun. A vast and disgusting body, a vast and disgusting body of prose no one’s interested in and no one’s excited about. Vast, disgusting and without point.

Who’s interested? I can’t see anyone, can you? But still you go on. Still, every day, a little effort, one more effort, but nothing is said, it’s already posthumous, it’s all finished, you’ve outlived your welcome. In truth, no one was especially welcoming. In truth, you were met only with indifference, everyone’s back was turned to you, but you’ve worn even indifference away, haven’t you?

What rubbish you write! What contentless rubbish, day after day with no purpose, no point! What are you trying to reach? What are you trying to achieve? You’re wasting your time and if anyone were reading you’d be wasting their time, too. Luckily no one is reading, no one reads, they’ve got better things to do. And haven’t you got better things to do? Haven’t you got pubs to go to and books to read and a job to do? Haven’t you something better to do than this?

It’s like some great, vile protest, a protest against nothing in particular, a rebellion against nothing at all that is ignored by everyone. Like a dirty protest, shit smeared all over the walls of your room, shit on the bars, shit on the floor, shit on the ceiling, shit everywhere, but a protest without point, a protest without purpose, just stupidity, stupidity and waste incarnate, a kind of dull and stupid tenacity going on and on, day after day, one day after another, writing about this and then about that, and finally reducing yourself to writing about writing or not-writing, writing about the writing you cannot write, and the writing you write in lieu of writing, in lieu of any content other than whining about not being able to write, and who’s interested, anyway, who’s interested, do you suppose? No one, that’s the answer. Not one person, no one’s interested in your dirty protest, no one’s interested in the filth in your cell.

I know who you are, I know your face, I know your heavy body and your heavy, apish hand. I know who you are, ape – Kafka’s ape, the ape captured, the ape who watches others and plans to imitate them, the ape who resolves to become one of them, one of them outside, one of those who walk to and fro in the world, men in suits. That’s who you are, isn’t it? The ape! The ape not yet escaped! The ape who, unlike the ape of the story, stays in his cell. The ape who fails to imitate anyone succesful, the ape through whom everyone can see, the obvious ape, the ape who can do nothing but ape and is obvious in his aping.

For a time, it entertained them, your readers. For a time it was amusing to see an ape hop about and imitate others and pretend to write, crouched over a pad, mouthing the letters as he formed them. For a time – laughter at the ape who thought who could be anyone but an ape, but who in fact remained an ape, as was obvious to anyone: an ape, and that first of all, but not an ape in the jungle, not the cousin of other wild apes content to scamper about the jungle, but a half-tame ape, an ape who’d like to pass himself off as human, an ape lost in the dream of becoming human but all the while only an ape, merely an ape, not an ape among apes, but an ape in a cage.

What happened? Is it that you failed in your apish imitations – and not only once, but twice – failed in terms of what you wanted to become, and failed even in your efforts to become what you are not? Doubly failing, failing once and then again, failing for a first time and then another time, first as an ape trying to be human, then an ape trying to be an ape – but you failed a third time, didn’t you? If you’d failed only twice, you’d be an ape like the others, an ape content once again to be an ape, to run with apes and to scamper about with apes. You could have been released back into the wild, couldn’t you?

But that’s not what happened, is it? You can’t be released, can you? You don’t have that, do you – the charm of a wild beast, the charm of a beast who should be lost in the jungle? Because being an ape is not enough for you, is it? Being an ape is not enough and being human is impossible, is it? Merely being an ape is not enough for you, not now. You’re after something else, aren’t you? Now it’s not enough for you to write pretending you’re human, just as it’s not enough to keep quiet, is it? Neither ape nor human. Neither writing nor silence, but this instead – this beached and rotting writing. Neither nor, neither one nor the other, ne uter, that’s what you cry isn’t it? Ne uter, ne uter, that’s what you whimper in the corner of your cell, isn’t it?

The Second Person

You would like what you write to be the abode of – what? Who is it you would like to meet here, on the page (or in Post Introduction)? Who would you like to feel pressing towards you, as though from the other side of the computer screen?

I write to catch – what? To entrap – who? Even as know that by writing I must let you escape. ‘You’ – is this your word? ‘You’: word without horizon. ‘You’: word that keeps place for you, whoever you are. Word that is a cup. Word from which to drink, to take into your body.

And when I call myself ‘you’? When I address myself thus, in the second person? Who are you, the second person? Who are you, whom I can approach only with this word without horizon?

‘You’: that’s what I’ll call myself. ‘You’ – name of the one whose body is the place where you are arriving. Who will I be tomorrow? Who is coming tomorrow? ‘You, you …’

Exhaustion

Lost from writing of exhaustion, what is there left but exhaustion? I’ve recovered myself just enough to … what? Nothing to write, nothing to be written, and not for lack of urgency. When was urgency ever enough? There must be something to write about, and more than just the desire to write – that is not a theme; it is not theme enough.

Content: that’s what’s required. But what kind of content? From where is it to come? Nothing that is not given out of itself, that was the rule: writing was to draw itself from itself, like a conjurer’s scarf. And when nothing comes? Write about this or that book – write about an author, a philosopher. Address yourself to the affairs of the world. But that’s not what I want, not here. That is for the day – for the morning after dawn and the long afternoon. And in the evening after the pub? And in the early morning?

No content; nothing to say. Should I take a break? But what happens when you unmoor exhaustion from writing? At least let writing return to itself, if only to mark what cannot be written. Or should it be allowed to run into nothing – to disperse itself without marking itself, ink running into water?

Affinity

Here is the complete text of ‘Affinity’ by Lydia Davies, collected here.

We feel an affinity with a certain thinker because we agree with him; or because he shows us what we were already thinking; or because he shows us in a more articulate form what we were already thinking; or because he shows us what we were on the point of thinking; or what we would sooner or later have thought; or what we would have thought much later if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have been likely to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have liked to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now.

The Last Day

What day is this? The first day, the supernumerary day. The page that has dropped out of the calender. What day is it?

Dawn, the head of the day. Why get up early? To catch the day’s arrival – to be there as it comes to itself. You will have at least seen it appear, you for whom later the day will come apart. But isn’t that also the day: dispersal, the stagnancy of time? Is that what is dawning today, in the return of the first day, not the beginning, now, but the day as interruption – the first day as the last day, as the coming apart of days?

‘When will you come?’ – ‘On the last day, the very last’. – ‘When will you come?’ – ‘When you have exhausted waiting, when no one waits for me’.

Misdirection

How is it as soon as I committed firmly and resolutely to a direction for the posts on this blog, I was unable to write in that direction and any direction? Do I have to misdirect myself in order to write – have to write about anything but that in order for writing to be possible? Frustration: there was clarity, I knew what had to be written. I brought home a book to inspire me, and put it beside my bed. That book, I said to R.M. this weekend. But it was too obvious – the book became a monument of what I wanted to make. The cliff stood before me: no, I wasn’t to climb.

Why is it impossible to write in a single direction? Why impossible to dream of completing a work by way of writing, this writing? Nothing is to be completed; the blog outlives itself. It was set up for that – but it is long past that. Then what’s it for? What is it that should be completed here? I wanted to write a post called The Street, I wanted to write an epic post called How It Was, How It Is, How It Will Be, but I’ve written nothing.

Misdirection: make no plans. Do not print out what you’ve written. Rise and early, open the curtains and there is the yard. Only before the yard does writing find its necessary poverty. The yard: the wheelie bin with the number 98 painted on it in white. The kitchen wall which, when I pressed my fingers to it yesterday, wondering how the slugs still found their way into the flat, was completely soaked. Another wall to be damp proofed?

The yard: I will have to buy some concrete mix and fill in the scar where the pipe was ripped away from the wall. Then I will have to paint over it and paint over the wall, from which flakes of paint have fallen, and across which the algae is spreading. Now, I tell myself, I am writing, and of nothing in particular. Nothing in particular: that is my name for the yard. That’s what it is called. By misdirection will I write of nothing in particular and then find my way back to writing.

Keeping Death

Do not seek to keep death; do not detain it. Give it back to itself, death – release it, let it turn back to itself – that it appeared in life is no reason to keep it there. Let it fall back to wherever death goes. And doesn’t it fall back in you, too – don’t you know death’s retreat in your own body and in the struggle of your body against death?

Your own body – but in that moment, it is not yours. That’s how you know it, death: in the body that turns against you and will not do as it is required. But that is also how you do not know it – for in this turning, it also turns itself from memory, from the power of recollection. Death keeps itself, but it does not keep memory of itself.

Death is forgetting; death forgets. Nothing lasts of it, it has no legacy. Who is present to remember? Who remembers in your tirednesses, your exhaustions? Who keeps death’s place? And yet dying leaves traces of itself. Traces, remnants, so does death indicate itself in life and non-knowing in what is known. But what is left will not be kept; what is remembered must be given to forgetting. It gives itself thus – it is given as it withdraws, as that giving-withdrawal whose face is never met.

Forgetting will not face us – this is sadness. Death is without death; it has no hold on itself. Death is not yet itself – first of all, it wanders. First of all, errancy in life, and it is thus that it seems to call for mercy.

Pity it. Keep a place at the table for the one who cannot come. Keep it for the one who comes as dispersal. Keep a place in your soul for what is without place – keep it in your tirednesses and your exhaustions. Your body knows as you do not. It is known, even as you do not know.

Dying – is that a name for the soul? Forgetting: is that the soul’s name?

The Beast on the Wall

It’s true that when I thought of you, I thought forgetting had drawn back before writing – I carried a torch into the darkness and observed the expanses of my history, like the beasts from ancient cave paintings. It came to me almost all at once – you, and the world I encountered with you, through you. Then I thought: I haven’t changed, my world’s the same – I relive the same over and again; is this the truth I’ve been made to confront, as if the beast on the wall, splendid and terrifying, embodying by itself the forward-movement of an animal, its soul, was only another version of the beast I was? I saw myself; I remembered myself – confirmed was the past that wouldn’t cease to arrive.

But then, another experience, this time of the darkness around the beast and from which it emerged. How was it the shining ochre of the beast gave darkness itself more depth, more presence? The night itself became dense; darkness was more heavy and more strange – without form, without name, it was of oblivion that the beast was made to speak. So forgetting, which is not merely the absence of memory. So forgetting which is what redoubles itself in writing, for it is memory that is made to draw back, not the opposite – memory that sets off forgetting, in which forgetting presses forward with its own force.

I remember you, but I also forget with you. That is, as it came to me, a world – our world, the world to which you introduced me and that we lived together – brought with it what was not yet a world and would never be: the return, from the past, of that for which forgetting is only one name. Oblivion: it is not that the soul comes back to itself in successive rebirths, but the opposite: what is lost over and again is the soul; what cannot lift itself from the flesh is the soul; what dies there repeatedly, over and again is again the soul.

The soul: locus of forgetting-in-memory. It is with the soul that I remember you and that I forget with your memory. Come close to me, bring it to me, let it return: death must be reborn in life, forgetting must give birth to itself in memory. That is how I remember, and it is how remembering draws back before forgetting. The beast is coming forward, but now it is made of darkness and not light. The beast: forgetting, the forgetting that is memory.

Wicker Man

What does it mean to be reborn? By what power might you give birth to yourself? What must draw back in order for you to live? Soul, that you do not live is because you are too close to memory. Let it draw back, memory, remembering. Write, but not to remember, but to set forgetting off against memory. Write – not to remember, but to allow the shining of remembering set off the darkness of forgetting, and the return of forgetting.

Do not write in order to conserve. Do not seek to bring memories forward by means of writing. I remember – only to forget. I remember – but only to sacrifice my past to forgetting, and that is writing – sacrificial ritual, the Wicker man of memory. Writing, cage that binds together those memories that will be sacrificed by writing. So does writing sacrifice itself to itself. So does it seek to return to itself as a calm, burning surface – sun that is lit from the sacrifice of time.

Today, Today …

‘How long have you been unemployed?’ – ‘I’m not unemployed’. – ‘How long have you been unemployed?’ – ‘All my life. Today and tomorrow. – ‘What have you done with your life?’ – ‘I’ve got a job, a flat’. ‘What have you done with your life?’ – ‘Nothing. Nothing at all’.

Today, today – why does these words seem to toll like great bells? Today – the imperative. Today you must do something. Today, it must happen. And yet my today is only the nudity of the call. It says: you must act, you who know nothing of action. Urgency: act! Today is the day for …  But for what?

What is the question that is also a tearing apart? The question which dissolves the answers it seeks, and perpetuates only its answerless opening? The question – live in its space, its call. Live in its scepticism, in the ‘perhaps’ it inserts before every statement. Live in the perhaps, live and die –

Ill

The specialist’s office was in the basement. I was sent to her because of my symptoms. ‘We have an in-house specialist’, said the G.P. Very well; I’d see her – I was happy to see her. I’d been feeling tired for months, and worse than tired. Anything – I’d do anything. Down to the basement, where there is a multiple choice to fill in. When do I feel most tired? Do I feel pain? Do I ache anywhere? ‘Everywhere’, I wrote, across the boxes. I ached everywhere – I was tired. No pain, unless pain was that diffuse throbbing which filled my whole body.

Then, later, the diagnosis: there’s no question about it. I have it myself, you know. So the specialist. She had it too! We both had it, the pair of us! And my sister has it, she told me. She stays in bed. Someone else is looking after her children. The specialist tells me how to handle my symptoms. Take it easy, she says. Plan everything when you have strength so that when you feel weak you are not overwhelmed with worries. Arrange your life so there’s no panic. Very well; why not.

It’s common to highly successful people, she tells me. I laugh. ‘I’m hardly successful’. Highly motivated, intelligent people, then. ‘I’m hardly intelligent’, I said, ‘and motivated? I don’t think I’m that’. Wasn’t that the problem? Wasn’t it the lack of motivation that was the illness? Wasn’t it the draining away of motivation, of all forward movement, a life that had lost its grip on the future. Is it really an illness?, I asked her. It was an illness, she said, and I saw that for her it had to be an illness. We were both ill, physician and patient. Both of us – ill.

She lent me a book. ‘Read this’. It was full of practical advice and cartoons. The list of symptoms was endless. All this was one illness? Then it was everything and nothing, this illness. It was like hysteria or neurosis – a name for everything. Home on the bus. I can’t stand the bus. I get off and sit on the wall, alcoholics around me. Are they ill? Is it the same illness? Then, I walk along the narrow pavements. They’re all ill, I thought, looking around me. Everyone’s ill, I thought, I know their secret.

Do they know of it – their illness? Probably not, I thought. They haven’t been diagnosed, I thought, and laughed. They haven’t been diagnosed by a fellow sufferer, I thought. It takes one to know one, I thought. But I’ll diagnose them, I thought. I will diagnose them all. I’ll put notes through their letterboxes: you’re ill! – and crosses on their doors. We’re all ill! We’re all tired! Time’s passing us by, it’s over! There’s no forward movement! Nothing’s going to happen! Nothing’s ever going to happen, not now and not ever and we’re all ill!

Inside

You were in sheltered accommodation, you said. A woman brought your meals a couple of times a week. ‘I don’t go out much. I can’t go out’. We drank tea in your flat that evening at rush hour – the cars were jammed outside. ‘I’m too clever, my doctor says’. Too clever – but for what? Who was she, cleverer than us, who had to be kept away from us? She kept herself away. ‘I don’t go out much. I can’t’.

Outside – you were frightened of the night and frightened of the day. Food was brought to you, money came to you. Your flat was dark. When we spoke, it was in darkness. I had promised to call on you. A mutual friend had said I should phone and call in on you. ‘You’ll get on. She’s interesting. Besides, she doesn’t see anyone. She could do with company’. In the evenings she smoked pot. Where did she get it? ‘A friend sends it to me’. The flat stank of it. ‘I need it. It keeps me calm’.

What did we talk about? Of your former life and your present life. Of your intelligence. You were very bright, you were convinced. ‘I read a lot’, you said, so I brought you books. We’d talk about them. ‘One day, when I get better …’ you would begin. What then? What would you do, you who’d come back to this city after a breakdown, who’d put on so much weight and now never left your house? What would you do, with your panic attacks and exhaustion. ‘I ache – all the time’.

You saw the same illness in me, you said. I went for tests. ‘They don’t know what it is’, I said, ‘but I do feel tired’. You told me of your doctor. ‘Go and see her. She’s really nice’. I saw her, a large benevolent woman in a shared practice a bus ride away. She asked me some questions, I knew what to answer. Would I, too, get a flat in sheltered accommodation and a woman to bring my meals? Was that what I wanted – to disappear for a few years, to live inside for a few years? I was sent to a specialist. The diagnosis was confirmed. I was to attend counselling sessions.

‘I thought so’, you said, ‘I thought there was something wrong’. I remembered The Magic Mountain. ‘I don’t think I’m ill’, I said, ‘just tired’. You thought I was ill. ‘Don’t fight it’. I looked around me, the flat was dark, outside, the rush hour traffic. It’s true – I was frightened of it, the outside; I wanted to stay inside, in a flat of my own, in the darkness. ‘I’m not ill’, I said, and that was the last time I visited.

Not ill – but what was it I feared? Why not admit to it, and fall into the arms of illness. Why not claim the sick instead of the dole for a few years? I had the diagnosis, a sympathetic G.P. … I could sign off the rest of my life and live inside. I was tired, my limbs ached. I was afraid of everyone I passed. I got off the bus, panicked. Was it contagious, your illness? Had it contaminated the books you gave back to me?

Several times, your voice on the answering machine. You were hurt and drowsily high, as you were in the evenings. Your voice – temptation. I left the room when I heard it. I left it and went outside, to prove that I could. Outside! Terraced houses in both directions. I was frightened and thought of others, too, who were frightened, who’d given up on sleep and on waking up. Thousand of them. Thousands of us, all over the city, stranded and sheltered.

Being Born

We both belonged to the everyday, that’s certain. Both of us – you came to the cafe in your car, and I on foot. How could we not meet? The cafe: that’s where we coalesced, briefly, from the dispersal of the afternoon. The cafe: for a moment, we were as real as anyone else; we gained by sitting alongside them, the real people. We were flesh – like them. We were alive – like them. But were we alive?

That’s where we met, the cafe, through your ex-girlfriend, who used to visit me at the house to drink tea in the garden. Your ex-? Could she be called that? A week, she had said, my tea-drinking companion, that’s all it lasted. And didn’t you have a week long affair, too, with that soap star? A week – why not longer? We spoke about it that day, do you remember? You said: ‘I couldn’t stand it. I felt trapped -‘ And then told me you wanted to sell your house and move away. ‘But I can’t – I’m ill, you know’. Ill – you were on the sick, you said.

Ill – or was it the day itself? Ill, or was it the eternal afternoon from which you materialised, and into which you disappeared? You rose late, you told me – never earlier than midday, and went to bed in the morning. ‘I’m always exhausted – it’s terrible’. You’d drive to the gay club on Friday nights and Saturday nights, and one night you took me, too, and while I danced inside, you spoke in the stairwell to gay men. On the way back, you said, ‘I’ve never known men like that. I’ve never been able to talk to men like that’. And who was I, a man, to you?

One day we walked out in the Ees with my handsome housemate, and he named for you the birds in the sky and the trees and plants. Later you said: I think in love with him. With him? I was shocked – you loved him, who was a man like me? Yes, that was how it was. Soon enough, it is true, you grew tired of him. But you could love men, too – very well.

When did it begin, our affair? It was your birthday – or was it mine? We went out shopping, didn’t we? You told me of your love for my friend, didn’t you? And then you said, ‘but I love someone else more’. Was it me? We talked in the cellar. The hours fell away. It was late, you called a taxi to take you home, but when it came, I sent it home. That morning, very early, we walked out in the dawn.

So what had begun? To what story did we belong? Not to yours’, that was true. It was to be secret, our relationship, you told me. Secret – but didn’t everyone know? You would visit me in the early hours, after your trips to the nightclub. In the day you were a lesbian and in the night you were a lesbian – but in the early hours, who were you? You’d just come out to your mum, to your brother and your sister, you said. You’d left your old friends behind, and your old life had fallen away, you said. It was as a lesbian you drove to the cafe; it was as a lesbian that you wanted to live.

My housemate showed you a medal with the number 1 on it he’d been given after attending AA for a year. I’m 1 year old, he said. And you said, I’m not even 1. Not even that. Birth was still ahead of you, wasn’t it? You had not been born, you thought; your life, your new life had not yet begun. You’d made the great step – you were a lesbian – but where had it taken you? Were you a lesbian yet?

‘Why aren’t you a woman?’, you demanded of me. Then, an idea: ‘Couldn’t you have the operation? Couldn’t you become a woman?’ Two women. Two women together: that was your plan, your alibi. You called up your friends and told them about me. He’s trans-gendered, you said of me. Trans-gendered: this meant I could be part of your new life.

And when I laughed? When I told you it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard? You left. You never came to the house again. Where did you go? Busy being born in another part of the city, no doubt. Busy at the brink of a new life, in another part of the city.

The Yard

Between its walls, you will have lived your life. The half-painted wall along the back, with two unopenable doors, then the diagonal brick walls which come down from the roofs – you can’t see over the fence. Absolute privacy here. That is a word for the yard: absolute. It relates to nothing but itself; all possibilities are contained here. How large is the yard? 20 foot by 12 foot of concrete, the back of the yard much higher than the front. It comes to a kind of wall behind which rainwater used to collect in a small lake.

When he came, dad drilled through the wall and inserted a plastic pipe so the water could drain. That’s what it does now, once you clear away the vegetation that accumulates at the top of the pipe. The water comes out of the pipe and into the kitchen drain. There are plants, too – ill looking, stripped of leaves on lower branches. I should’ve put some stones at the bottom of their pots, says a gardening friend. They need better drainage. No doubt. And for a long time, the upstairs drain ran out into the rainwater, and the concrete was covered in foamy washing up water. Now it is fixed. Now the concrete can be drained. Now it faces the sky, its grey-green surface facing upwards. Smooth stones from the beach on its surface. A brick. One of the bins – where is the other? On the other side of the back wall, out there in the street.

The yard. We’re never out there, my neighbours and I. Sometimes I’ll find cigarette butts flicked there from upstairs. And there is white kitchen towel I use to pick slugs from my wall and then throw them of the door. Mediocre sight! This is the yard of those who have not settled in life. Yard of the transitory, but of those nonetheless whose lives are kept within the walls of the yard. This morning, though it is still early, it is as if I’ve already lived and died in this yard. It’s over – everything’s finished. There’s no tomorrow, only the return of the day. Nothing in particular, that’s what this yard is called. The same nothing which returns each day. The nothing  in particular which reveals itself in the morning, bare, held up to the sky for the sky to inspect.

All of the world is like this, I tell myself. This is what the world is like in all its quarters. It ends here, I tell myself; it begins and ends here. Why leave it? Why leave this room which faces the yard, in which I sit at the same level as the back of the yard, for work and for the office? Everything that can happen will happen here. Everything will happen; the sky will brighten and then the sky will darken. For that is all that can happen – the day returns and then the day disappears. Nothing happens, nothing changes but that. What mediocrity! But this is an absolute mediocrity, it is the law of the world, of the world’s appearing. What day is it? Every day. Who am I? Anyone, everyone who passes beneath the day.

The Path

A path has been beaten diagonally across the field. Through the long grass – but who owns this field? who wants this grass? – the path. What year is it? Which summer is this? Always the path – and the passing diagonally across the field to the river. Across – but now it seems as though it takes forever, and that I am still there, on the path, crossing the field. How is it that the path turned itself into the enormity of all summers?

You were between relationships, you said. Tired of one relationship, and waiting for another: that’s when we could see one another. How was it my friendships began and ended in the time of suspense? Was I your confidante? But I do not believe what you said to me could not be said to another. You spoke lightly as you always spoke; you wanted to speak, of that I was sure, but speech was easy for you, and if it was not me to whom you spoke, there were others.

Yes, speech was lightness itself – you spoke, and I spoke because of the lightness of your speech; did it matter what was said? I think we said everything – I think we spoke until everything was said. And then? Begin again; start speaking again. But did I not sense, sometimes, a different kind of lightening? Was it not as though speech itself had worn thin, that it was stretched, now, as the sky was stretched, and it belonged to the path that unlimited itself and became the whole field and then the whole sky?

We spoke – we exchanged words, but what also declared itself by way of those words, that exchange? The currency of common language is worn out, said Mallarme. So will his poetry set itself against what is commonly exchanged; there will be a new standard, a greater one, which belongs to the Book that is always to come. So would his poetry be magnetised by that coming speech: by the gold standard of the Book. What magnetised our speech, in the field, on the path? Because it did seem to be drawn from itself – that what was exchanged belonged to no common measure. Incommensurable speech! Speech by way of the path’s dispersal! How was it that the blue sky spoke of itself in our words?

Soon after, you found the boyfriend of whom, for a while, you spoke about on the phone. I remember your excitement – already, you were trying for a child! After three days, and everything seemed so right, and you were trying for a child! You had stepped across the threshold, and who was I, who remained on the other side, hesitant in life, at the brink of life, but yet to step into the other world? The phonecalls stopped coming; that was just. You disappeared, I barely saw you – that too was just. And did I recognise you when we did meet in your new clothes and your makeup and your boyfriend on your arm?

The next summer, the same field, and the same path. I was speaking to someone else – did it matter? It was someone else to whom I was speaking – but what did that change? The conversation weighed the same and turned around the same. You (the new you) spoke lightly, and I, confident in speech because your confidence, also spoke that way. Our words stretched themselves across the sky: what could not be said on this summer’s day, this afternoon, on this path? You were between relationships, and I? I was to be the one who accompanied you to the threshold’s edge.

Caress

It is grey, and it stands against a background of grey. It is made of a cool kind of stone, and turned slightly towards me. From where is it lit? I am not sure; its surface glows as though the light source was above and to the right. Is it real light? The light of a northern sky, like that at the end of The New World? A bluey-white? I am not sure. Certainly the stone seems to belong to the north, as I do. It seems to swell towards me, particularly where there is traced the image of a hand. A hand: splayed and open. A favourite image. As if to say: I have no grip, I can find no purchase. Or: my hand is for nothing; it is just a hand.

The sculpture (the image above) is called Caress. What kind of hand caresses that holds nothing, that reaches for nothing? Perhaps not to reach is also to caress. The hand rests in the air. It holds – nothing. It caresses – nothing. And now the shape of the stone, its form. Rounded and then upwards to two rectangular dips and then a curved ridge. Mysterious object! I do not know why I am drawn to you. From where did you arrive – from what dream? Is it that you are a dream that has not yet reached me? Or the image of dreams to come – all of them, as they will reach me from a future as enigmatic as your presence?

Sculpture, prophet, watch over what is written here. I fancy that your double is buried in my head, that my dreams come from cold stone. Or is it that you are somehow my gravestone, placekeeper of my dead body, from which a spirit that writes has been disturbed?