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?

The Window

Fiction, non-fiction: did what I record here really occur? Did it happen to me? I am not sure, though I would say it had some place in my experience – that it was born there, and was not yet the walking over air I imagine fiction to require. It happened – but to me?

I have always wanted to write of what seemed to happen of itself and to no one – to remember when time seemed to lag behind itself, and space could no longer be kept to its place. It has always seemed that life never coincided with myself, that life was divided into what I could live and what I could not. How was it I was already my own ghost? 

Perhaps it is our bodies are our fate – that we live according to their dark law. Sometimes, it is true, I am alive, active – a great deal is accomplished. Who has more energy than me in the mornings? Who is more awake – as though awakening turned itself out, and the morning was inside me, and it was I who contained the sun?

Sometimes the morning is my kingdom; I rise very early and by the time the world has arisen, I have already created the sun and the stars and set the day turning. But who has less energy than me in the afternoon? Now the stream that once cut its way through mountain rock and meandered across valleys now lost itself in a marsh that spreads as widely as the sea. I am lost in the afternoon – I do not live. How to write of such afternoons? How to summon them to me as ghost to ghost? How to press them into something real?

I will not assign them to a subject, to one for whom they occurred. That would be the fiction, and not the other way round. I will not lay claim to them, those experiences. Did something happen? Did an event complete itself? Or was it rather that what happened failed to happen – that experience did not come to itself and the event did not eventuate? Passivity without subject, without object, the indefinite: these abstractions do not help me. What matters is to give flesh to a phantom, to give what was experienced a definite outline.

Confine yourself to details, I tell myself. Write of what was seen and heard. Write of the world. But is there a writing that can speak of the undoing of the world? Is there a way of speaking of that? I have dreamt many times of the expanses of ice, a glittering surface and the stars in the sky and across the ice, the stars redoubled in the ice. Yes I have dreamt of that: the stars which flash out and the aurora borealis that flashes above the stars. Abstraction: when I hear these words, I imagine those stars, that ice, and the raw wind which passes between them.

Stick to details: write of what is seen and touched. Write of the monitor before you and the desklamp beside you; write of your television guide and your phonebill; write of the pot of moisturiser and the CD remote. But another voice says: write of what causes each item to fall apart from the others: write of what stops your hand from reaching them and your eye from seeing them. For that, too is necessary, even if it does not lend itself to the power of memory.

The world become ice. The body exposed, all along its edge. The body unravelled and flayed across the ice. What kind of images are these? Substitutes, allegories – but for an experience which will only permit allegories and substitutes: the sole content, I tell myself, of what is written here. I confirmed it this weekend, did I not, archiving all my posts, transferring them into Word? I saw it, didn’t I – it became clear how those thousands of ghosts seemed to condense into a single pane of glass through which I could not see but that seemed to look into me, pouring a gentle, glowing light into the room of my life?

For isn’t that, too, another aspect of the experience: at once, it is pain and dislocation but also comfort – the reassurance of a presence beyond me, as if I learnt the world was alive, the expanses, the sky and the ice; that we had merely exchanged places. But let me be more precise: it was that the experience voided me, flayed me, until my body was a single surface, occupying two dimensions. It was the ice-plain, it was the child’s idea of the sky in which the stars were pin pricks. In the end, ice, sky and stars were one – they were part of a single two-dimensional space that was twisted upon itself.

But it was also that when I was returned to myself – when the word, I, was mine again, I contained the same plain and the same sky; they burned inside my heart, where I was exposed. Instead of that beating organ, there was a hollow space, and that was what my body was, the same hollow container in which the silence reverberated and through which flashed the arctic lights. A container – but one whose inside was infinite in depth, extending in every direction. So was my body a shell that, when cracked, would let spill the entire universe, its light and its coldness. Every post I had written was a creature of that world – a ghost, but one of a horde of ghosts that, when pressed upon one another, let the outlines of another creature be seen.

What was it, then, that seemed to bend down to my window? What was it, this creature of light that crouched so it could peer at me through the window of this blog? I knew it was somehow also what I am, and that my hand, touching the window would meet his golden hand. How was it I also lived in that body? I was burning – but that was how I lived, there, on the other side of the mirror.

Night, and I can write again. A weekend has passed, and what had I done? Backed up the blog, that was true. Prepared some documents for photocopying. Did I know that there was gathering in me a kind of push? That my body, into which I’d poured a quarter of a can of Irn-Bru, was readying itself for ecstasy? It was a little after that, when I was cycling home from the station, that the pressure began. I thought, how will I write of this? And then, but this is only a prelude to writing – it is the push of writing, it asks for words.

So it was; that I write here, now – it is half-past nine, one hour later – is tribute to the strength of that push, which has borne me through these sentences and paragraphs. I will be doubly tired tomorrow, I tell myself. I can only bear so much! But what have I borne? Nothing that happened to me. Allegories, fictions – it’s the same each time. How to speak of what will not let itself be spoken? How to write of what bears all writing?

Anonymity

What should I be called? By what would I have you call me, you who summon me into your booth? What should you call me, interviewer, who would draw me from my anonymity? A letter: you are to attend an interview on … Addressed to me, to my name, that letter. And so am I here, in the waiting space in an open plan office.

Open plan – everything is open, there are only two rooms that are closed off. Otherwise, booths, booths and booths, to which I will be called in turn. Still the question: what would I like to be called? What name, here, would I like to be mine, I who barely own myself? What name could be mine, what would I like to hear, interviewer, from your mouth?

The office is a reasonable place, that’s clear enough. We are not to be kept waiting too long; we are called clients, we are accorded the respect due to jobseekers as we are called now. Jobseekers, not the unemployed. We are seeking work and not just marooned from it – not left on an obscure island in the middle of the ocean that great ships pass by and ignore. Above all, we are not to be stranded – each one of us has an advisor, each is supposed to attend sessions to assess our jobhunts.

Do we need any help? Can we be offered any assistance? Yes, it is a resonable place, little is required of us, other than we attend, every now and again, in person. We will bring ourselves to the office and present ourselves for questioning – isn’t this to keep our side of the bargain? Isn’t this to keep up with our responsibility? We are called in, and summoned thus from the uncertain space of the outside. Called in, and made to account for ourselves here, in person, in our own voice.

But how to translate what happens out there to the language of the office? How to speak of infinite days and nights – how to speak of the expanse each of us knows and is there behind our eyes? For truly we have been marooned – truly it is as if the great ships have passed and we’ve forgotten everything but our shipwreck. What day is it? What date? Crusoe kept a record of the passing of days, but do we?

We are anachronisms, we know that. We’ve been passed by, we know it. You who would summon us know it well: we are lacking in self-esteem, your clients. We’re lacking in motivation. We need to be formed and molded. They’ve met our type before. We’re all the same! There are so many of us! We are a type, that is clear. There’s nothing special about me and nothing special about you. What petty narcissism to feel different to anyone else!

That’s why we can be summoned in the same voice. That’s why the call can ring out and bring us in. Summoned – the reasonable voice has remit over the infinite. It speaks, and the infinite becomes finite – the undetermined folds itself into a knot of hard determinacy: a name, each of us is to have a name. But what is I would like to be called?

You are reasonable, interviewer. I am your client. A client – this is who I am, it is my unity. And your client – I am at your disposal. You call me, and I come. You tell me you’re at my disposal – that you would like to help me. This is welcome. Who can doubt but that I need help? I’m stranded – the great ships are passing by, and where am I?

Help – I need that. I need to think of my future, to direct my thoughts into a plan for escape. Else a whole life will be spent thus – marooned. I have to take care of myself, to unify what I am, to pull myself together. That’s where you help, isn’t it? By writing to me, by calling out my name in the office, by having me come to you as your client, I receive my name, it comes to me again. A name, a social security number, a case number – so am I identified, and brought back to myself.

Outside, I was never in possession of that, a name. But inside? A name is fitted to me; it is mine. By my name am I picked out from the others. Mine – it is my name; the anonymous has been banished. The anonymous, which corrodes me and rusts me like the old cranes by the docks, is held at bay; it is a new morning; I belong to the present.

Summon me, bring me to myself. I was sleeping for my whole life, I know that. I was asleep – I lived in dreams, in my dreaming – that was not a life. It is to begin here, a life – my life. I will be bound to life – here. We will be joined, one to the other – here.

But how is it that my name in your mouth seems to miss me? How is it, as at the doctors when a name is read and then a buzzer pushed, that the name does not reach me, sounding out in vain? Am I am not to designated? Am I not to be picked out from the rest? Did it bring me to the limit of my strength even to come here, even to sit among others in the waiting room?

What would I have you call me? What name would be mine? What name could reach me and reach you by reaching me? I would like it to be known: I am different to you. I would like that to be known: the fact of my difference and that I remain in my difference. I will turn to you without facing you, do you know that? I have no face, not here, not inside, do you know that?

Every name is mine. Every name that is called here is mine. Who am I? The one called by each of these names, the faceless one who comes to you without coming, who is inside without being inside. Who am I, the one who remains marooned when he is rescued, who stays unemployed even when a job is found for him? Am I not present, too, in your heart, interviewer? Am I not the one who is marooned in you?

Summer Friendships

I knew it couldn’t last, and it couldn’t last. I knew it – how could it last, when it was so fragile? How is it we could come together, such a disparate group, and not fall apart straight away? We fell apart, that was true – but not for a while. There was a summer, and perhaps a little longer. A Spring and a Summer, before it fell apart and we left in different directions.

How was it I was always waiting to be included in a life – to be able to call on others as they would call on me, to be one of a crowd, but also one upon whom others would call. How was it we could come together then, for that short time? On my birthday, in the sun on the Ees, we picnicked. When the Eurovision came on, we watched it together. And didn’t I call in, every now and again, and sit with you on the roof in the sun? 

But I knew all around the city faded into nothing. This was an island, a reprieve; before and after, the usual anonymity. Behind this foreground, there was a background; the city retreated from us even as it seemed to press its way forward. Were we friends? What is a friendship that passes only by way of the moment? It was fragile, I knew it – such a disparate group! – but it seemed we turned in a kind of friendship. You came round to mine, and I to yours – were we friends? There was friendship, I would say that. Friendship – and we were friends by way of the spring, the summer and by sitting out on the rooftops, the city around us.

Deep time. Months would pass without event – years. And then, as though we breathed in those empty gaps in time, as though we took them into ourselves, did they seem to bloom – exhaled. They made sense, the days of waiting; they were heading in a direction. For a time you could call on others and they would call on you. And when it disappeared again, that chance? When it fell back into a time without event? Nihilism: nothing meant anything. Nothing kept its form.

Dispersal – why did we leave in every direction? Why wasn’t it strong enough, our friendship, to hold us together? But it was a friendship by way of the spring and the summer – by way of the floating pollen and the summer winds. How could it end but in dispersal?

But for a time, I remember walking along the streets – the usual walk, the usual streets – in the faith that something, today, would happen. It would begin today! It would continue today! Yesterday’s good fortune would continue tomorrow and so on from tomorrow to eternity. Continuity! Day after day would turn in friendship!

But then the grip on time would be loosened again; tomorrow was an empty as today; no meetings – no friendship, only the autumn streets and the winter streets, and everyone behind their doors. How could it be otherwise? Nihilism – what promise did the streets hold? Where did they lead? To spring, to summer – yes, but they were months away. And until then?

Overground

We are out of date, we know that. It is nearly here, the new world, and who are we to hold it back? We would prefer to get out of the way – to keep to ourselves so as not to detain it. Why does it demand that we stand in the open like everyone else? Why do we, too, have to be counted?

For a long time, we went unnoticed. They had other concerns, the bringers of the future! They had their eye on the new technologies and new investments. Theirs was the fervid South of the country, where everything was happening. The North was the rustbelt; the cities were like broken machines, they did not belong to the present. And who were we who lived in the rustbelt? Ignored, passed by, we knew they would not come for us.

What use could we be? We belonged to the past and the rotting of the past. We belonged to the tower block and the council flats and to those dark estates that were like the estates of Poland. How many of us there were, and all over Europe! How many of us, lost in the past and in the rotting of the past! When was it that time stopped going forward? When was time turned back upon itself?

This was our pride: the city had turned back on itself; it did not look outward. Darkness everywhere – we belonged to it, the city, as it rotted. How was it the city’s decay could welcome us? How was it that we were included in its self-demolition? Because it was by decay that our friendship passed. The city was the third term in our friendships. How was it that friendship was folded into the city itself? And how was it that they were lost, those friendships, when the city opened like a new fan?

We no longer recognised ourselves; where were we? Where were our friends? The old haunts disappeared, and when new ones came they were not for us. What of the warren of passages through the old estates? Gone too when the regeneration came. Gone, the towers and flyovers and the old club in its concrete bunker.

2

And didn’t it end as the money came from new Europe to our city? Wasn’t it then, when the great light came and we had to hide in darkness from the light? What it seemed to take it also gave – music was covered in the newspapers, in new magazines; it was everywhere, but then, too, it was nowhere, for hadn’t it retreated from the complex of which, once, it was part?

Then music, which was once the map of our city, withdrew into itself. Music, now, was only music – or if it was not, then it was so only for those in the know, and who were we, whose friendships were failing and for whom the city was turning into a new dawn? We fell apart into private bedrooms; friendship was privatised along with everything else.

This was the time of the narcissism of the Couple: since there was nothing outside, the domestic was all – people moved on, they found other things to do with their lives. Why not? Jobs had come; the regeneration provided for them. God knows, there was even arts funding – it had reached us, here. But it was already too late. We went in separate directions. We had to look after ourselves, we who no longer knew ourselves in the city.

3

It was happening elsewhere, but not for us. We were too late for one world, and too early for another. The internet would not come for several years, and meanwhile? We sold our records and boxed up our tapes; if we read, it was alone, and we kept our books for ourselves, that used to circulate between us. And didn’t we retreat into our private idioms? I couldn’t understand you – and you, could you understand me?

It was the New Realism: each of us was on the way to a career. How could it be otherwise? We’d missed our appointment with the present, and it was time to catch up. The future was coming, when it would all be different. And wasn’t there an interval in which we, even we, could enter its kingdom? But if we did, it would be alone – every man for himself and every woman. Every couple for themselves, that’s how it was, we who were now dispersed across the city in flats of our own.

No longer could you call on anyone. Phone first – better still, plan in advance, make an appointment: we’ll see each other on Sunday, on Sunday night. And you couldn’t meet anyone by chance, everything had to be deliberate – we were to carry calendars in our heads. Feb 15th – ok, we’ll see each other then. But when you no longer live side by side? When your room was no longer next to theirs?

Now friendships grew up around work. The world had shifted; if you didn’t have a career, what then? There was no one to be unemployed with; the old haunts had gone. No more sitting at the cafe in the sun; no more free gigs and in-through-the-back-door gigs. Everything was official; the future had arrived, pristine and gleaming. New supermarkets and cycle lanes everywhere – how could you resist? Nothing could go underground, because there was no underground.

Friendships took place in the light and by way of the light. That is, there were no friendships, only potential contacts, only those networks which are the negation of friendship and the negation of love. For hadn’t it reached love, the New Realism? Wasn’t love itself privatised – contracted upon couples in flats who saw only other couples in flats? Contracted upon them, become narcissistic – there was no love, or love had been bent back upon itself, half-destroyed. How was it that love wanted to destroy itself?

The North had become the South, which we had fled. Now the North was the South, when we’d escaped to the North to be away from the South. What we had escaped had come up to find us; we couldn’t postpone it any further: the South was no aberration; it was the future and the shape of the future. It was spreading from there, from the South, as it was spreading all across New Europe.

The destruction of love. The destruction of friendship, all the slack taken up – and we, who were the slack, were to be taken up. Time was not to lag behind itself. We were to be on the same time, to set our watches by the future. No more wounds and tracts of time; no longer days wandering in the open. Sadness: the retreat of time, the end of the open day.

The Idiot

I am not a spokesman for anyone else, God knows, I would like just to be a spokesman for myself! To be that, just that: a spokesman for myself, that would already be enough. What did you expect when you asked me those questions? What did you want from me, with your questions? Did you think I could answer you? Did you think I could summon myself to the edge of myself and answer you? But I cannot speak for myself, that’s what I wanted to say. I cannot even speak for myself.

My tongue is too thick, it is too big for my mouth. And there’s my stammer, remember that. I can barely squeeze a word from mouth, and when I speak – whose word is it? When it is spoken, when words are spoken from my mouth, whose are they? For they are not mine. I cannot speak, I know that – and what I say is not speaking. I will not say a word. No words – not one, not two. I am not the spokesman of myself. I speak for no one, and not even myself.

You’d like to ask me questions, I know that. There are questions to extract from me, I know that, too. It’s your job, it’s nothing personal. You bear me no particular grudge. It’s not between you and I, two people, I know that. Is that why you’re so friendly? Is that why it’s all first names and shaking hands? Nothing personal – but still, the questions. Nothing personal, but there are questions to ask, and we might as well get it over with.

I am to be assessed. For how long have I been sick? I can’t remember. For how long have I been claiming them, the benefits? That, too, I can’t remember. If you force me, I will speak. I will say something, but in so doing, I’ve said nothing, and that’s what you have to understand. I cannot speak – understand that. I cannot say a word – can you understand that? Or when I speak, those words are not mine. There is speech, but look at my eyes – look at them, imploring. Eyes which say, ignore what is being said by that, the mouth. Which say: no one can speak for me, not even myself.

I am not my own spokesman, and I will not be my advocate. I am not in my own corner as counsel or advisor. Am I a member of my own prosecution? Not even that. Nor even a case for or against. Because I cannot speak – I cannot say a word for or against. Do you understand that, you who would ask questions of me? Do you understand, interrogator? I know I’m taking too much of your time. I know you have more of us to see, other clients – that’s what they call us now. I know you’ll be gauged according to your success for getting us back to work. No promotions for you, otherwise. And perhaps you’ll not be able to keep your job. Perhaps, one day, you’ll be in the position I occupy, I who cannot speak in my own name.

Deal with me then. Fill out the form. I will give you answers, any answers, but understand they are not my answers. Understand – I do not speak for myself. Everyone speaks, they are always speaking, there is speech everywhere, but I am the one who speaks without speaking. Unless everyone is like me, unless there are no speakers, and none of speak. Unless I am the only one who sees it; I am the one to whom it falls to experience it. I have no words. I speak – but they are not mine, those words. And I have no name, I who have fallen beneath all names.

My body says no. My body refuses. My body’s is the dark word of negation. And what does your body say? In what words does it speak? Does it struggle with you? Does it struggle against you and leap up against you so you know every word you speak is a lie? Does it ever turn upon you and say: ‘I will not’, except without those words, without the ‘I – will – not’?

How old am I? I have no age. Where am I? I am everywhere; my body is joined to the body of the world. Why do they want us to speak? Why is speech demanded of us? Why must accounts be rendered and these great structures impose themselves between us? I want to say to my questioner, you have a body like mine. I want to say, our bodies are joined, do you understand that? I will say, there are no words, and these are not words, only words that undo words. Only anti-words, which uncurl themselves in the ones in your sentences. Only the weight of words, their idiom, as every sentence falls in upon its own heaviness and draws the world into it.

No words, and no silence – not even that. No words, and not even the consolation of silence. Who am I, who speaks? The same no one who is writing now. The no one who, through the mercy of strength, is able for a few moments to write of what he cannot do. Who, strong for a moment, writes words that would undo themselves as they are written. Double negation: this post would be the white snow. This post would be a twig or a wall, obdurate and thing-like, contracting upon itself and taking with it the world, the whole of the world.

They’re going to dock our money, £10 for the first interview we miss and £20 for the second. We’ll be interviewed, each one of us, up against the wall. But why don’t they know – I can barely speak of myself? Why isn’t it clear to them: I am not even my own spokesman? Idiot – that’s the word. Barbarian – that’s the word.

But there are more like me, you should know that. There are others, too, like me – know that. Each of us bears all of the others, know that. Eliminate one and the others will come. Pass us through training, process us and send us back to the world, there are always others to be trained and processed. But that doesn’t bother you, does it? Questioner, interrogator, you know you are not a member of the S.S., but part of a vast, benevolent army. There is love in your eyes; you’re thinking of me – you’re sympathetic. And in my eyes, that give onto nothing in particular? What do you know by them – my eyes?

He needs a job, you tell yourself. He needs to get off the sick, and that first of all. He needs confidence, you say to yourself. He needs to return to the world. But what do you know of my needs? What do you know of the size and the shape of my desire? For it is without contour, my desire, and without shape. We are stretched from horizon to horizon, each of us. Our bodies are taut, and stretched across the horizon. We are each the size of the world. That’s what I want to say, though I can say nothing. That’s what I’d like to say, if I could speak in my name.

Dragging Down the Average

We are of old Europe, and the new Europeans are coming. Yes, we know it – of old Europe, of the old and the relapse of the old and this is not our time. The future! How bright and dazzling it is! How splendid! But it is not for us. Splendid, we know that, dazzling – its marvellous – but it is not for us, we’ve been counted out, and it’s only right. What place would we have there, in the new Europe? How would we know what to do?

Better old Europe for us, we old Europeans. Better the rust belt for us, we who are used to the old world. Let us rust with the rusting machines! Leave us there to rot, with the machines that rot! Do not let regeneration touch us! Keep the new European money away from us! It would be wasted, if it came to us. What would spend it on, we who have dim eyes and clogged ears, we who stagger to the pub in the evening and stagger home from the pub at night? What have we to spend money on? Let it be spent on others! Let the others be regenerated, and not us!

For we do not want bright new bodies. We do not want to be reborn in the new dawn! Better our bent and coughing bodies! Better the old degradation, the old wheezing and complaints! But you are coming, aren’t you, technocrats of the new order? You’re coming with your investment and your plans? No stagnancy – no corner of the world untouched. Nothing unregenerated and no one who will not acquire the new skills. We are to be trained, we know that. Everyone is to be trained and retrained, we know that. Our skills will be transferable; we will go wherever we are told to go; a new life awaits us and our bodies will no longer be so sluggish and so dull.

Why do we smoke so much? Why do we drink so much? Why our obesity? – it is a living affront, our healthlessness, our obesity. Because we are not yet fitted to the new world. Because our bodies, which could be the bodies of anyone, are holding us back. Why should Europe lag behind itself? Why is it that Europe is snagged by our pale, obese bodies? We are an affront, a challenge. Not an embarrassment, but a challenge. For the lifestyle gurus are coming to find us. They’ll track us down and find us. The life-coaches will get us. We’ll be assessed and our needs identified. We’ll be assessed and motivated and sent on courses and trained and fitted to the new world.

And those who train us will weep with happiness. Those who reform us will tell their spouses and friends about us. I’m working with the long term unemployed, they’ll say. I’m doing some voluntary work with the long term unemployed, they’ll say, trying to get them back to work. What miserable lives they have, they’ll say, they look terrible, they dress terribly and they spend all their money on beer and cigarettes.

We are to be made new. Millions will be spent on us – making us new. Because the new world is coming! New Europe! And all of Europe must be prepared – every corner! No one must be untouched! Our names will be called! Our social security numbers will ring out! Each of us will be judged and assessed and then trained! Each of us will report for training! And our lives will be like our podgy bodies – a residue. And our lives, trailing sickly behind us, will be a flabby residuum.

Old Europe! We will forget we were ever alive then, in the old Europe! We’ll be trained out of it, the habits of old Europe and the welfare culture of old Europe! Because the new Europe is calling! It’s time to be trained, time for the body to be slimmed down and toned! New bodies for new Europe! New, trained bodies for new Europe! Trained minds – and trained bodies! For that’s what’s coming: a lifestyle politics. That’s what’s on its way – a politics of the lifestyle, where training passes through every part of your life, through every sinew. How sleek we will be in the future! How fit and how sleek, we men and women of the future!

We’ve seen something like it before, that’s true. We’ve been sent on courses here and there, that’s true, and we’ve met them, our trainers, the Christian-capitalists, the socially responsible executives of the new order. We’ve met them and known our own failure. How could we measure up! What good are we who can barely tie our own shoelaces! The world has moved beyond us, that much is clear.

How we will disappoint them, our bright, new trainers! How we will disappointed them, us clients! Because they know we’re not happy, they’re certain of that. They’re doing it for our own good, that much is clear. For our own good! For the good of everyone! For the good of the new Europe, where everyone is equal and equally empowered! For the new common sense of the new Europe! That’s what you really want, isn’t it – to lay off the booze and lay off the fags? That’s what you really want, they say, speaking our language – to lay off the drink and lay off the smokes? It’s what you really want, isn’t it, an interview suit? It’ll make you much happier – losing some weight. Interview skills, back to work – it’s what you really want, isn’t it?

How stupid we are, how dense, we who do not dream with them! How slow we are, how stubborn, we who will not change in the flames of the future! For our own good, we know it, and hang our heads. They’re working for us, for each of us, and we feel ashamed. Every one of us – targetted and assessed. New Europe comes looking for every single one of us! New Europe itself in the sleek bodies of our trainers! What fools we are! How retarded we are! For they’ve come, the assessors and trainers, right to our doors! Knocking on our doors, each of one of us! They have our names, and their working their way down the list. One by one, by name, by social security number – we are all to be accounted for.

We know we’ve been spolit, we know we’ve had it easy. £50 a week – too much. £50 benefits – too much. They want to see something from us. We are to be helped to help ourselves. Old Europe has made us soft. We are too fat for the future!

For a long time, we thought they hadn’t noticed us. For a long time, after we were laid off, we thought – this is it, we’ll never be reached, we’re too low on the list. But New Europe has its eyes everywhere. New Europe – the all knowing, all seeing eye has our number!

Who’ll bother with us, we thought, there are more pressing matters, after all. There are wars to occupy them, the Eurofighter to build. There are regulations to prepare – they won’t need us. We won’t be needed by the New Europe. We are defunct, like the scrapped machines in the rust belt. We are as East Germany to West Germany, as the cosmonaut to the astronaut. We are the space station Mir falling to pieces in the sky. Why should they bother with us? Why shouldn’t we escape their attention? Because New Europe knows we are a cancer that devours it from within. A cancer – devouring it, New Europe, from the inside.

For my body is also your body, New European. My sluggishness, the vagueness of my thoughts – yours. Yours my dim eyes and clogged ears. Yours my fat body and blackened lungs. Yours – New Europe, never yet itself, never having achieved itself, you will not close the circle. It is our bodies that detain us. It is by our bodies that we will fall behind. What are your plans to us? What are your programmes? Who reads the brochures that fall through our letterboxes? Who listens at the training sessions and back to work sessions?

We resist – through inertia. We will endure – because we can’t be bothered. Happy stubbornness of our limbs and entrails! Happy our shortness of breath! Happy that we die below the average age and drag your averages down! Happy that we smoke in doorways and on thresholds! Happy that we take no exercise, except to stagger to the pub and stagger home from the pub, all the while getting fatter, all the while dragging the averages down! Happy that we fail or drop out of every course you tailor for us! Happy the cancer that will creep through our bodies!

For that’s what we are: a cancer. That’s what we are – disobedient cell, that has not heard the signal. New Europe is calling – but we are not listening. New Europe is blazing above us – but we are not looking. 

The Errand Runner

Does the failure know he’s a failure? I know it, everyone knows it. I am watchful on the street, lest he see me before I can avoid him – watchful, but also fearful, for I do not want to see him, I want to avoid even that. In truth, I do not even want to see him. The failure: how can I bear to look at him, I who am a success? Why should one successful be even confronted by them, by any of them, the unsuccessful?

By any measure, I’ve succeeded, that’s clear enough. I’ve worked my way clear of non-success; I made my way, though it was difficult, and took much concentration; though it is difficult still, and I am always concentrated on one task or another, even when I descend to the street. Even when I pass among others on the street, and perhaps especially then. For a successful man never relaxes. Concentration is the price of his success; he must keep his eye on the ball, must be watchful and careful, and keep himself in good condition.

Oily fish every day, a visit to the gym every other day, five portions of fruit and vegetables a week: such is what is required to maintain success and the trappings of success. Health! You can’t take it for granted! As a successful man, I must keep up my health; I exercise. And you, who are not successful? You who drink too much and smoke too much and have red eyes and yellow teeth? You whose body is neglected and walk hunched over? Why should I consort with you?

How is it you still presume to recognise me? How is it I still recognise you? What is it in me that knows you, I ask myself that. What is that betrays me? Some measure of non-success, no doubt. Something in me that is not yet successful – or, worse, that I will never be able to transform into success. Then it is a mirror I confront when I see you. There for the grace of God go I, they say, the pious, when they give a quid to the alcoholic. But I say nothing; I cross the street to avoid them; I avoid underpasses where there are beggars. I am of them, which is why I avoid them.

And you, the failure – why is it I would avoid you who are shiftless? Why do I avoid you, workshy one, non-worker, for whom the afternoon is his kingdom? I am at work – and you? I am working as I walk, as I do my errands, and you, wanderer, how can you tell one day apart from another? I was up early this morning, and you? I forewent my lunch hour – and you?

They’re hunting you down, every one of you. They’ll hunt you down, unemployment claimant, disability claimant. One by one , you’ll be caught. Punished – by degrees. £10 if you miss you first interview, £20 if you miss your second: that’s what will be docked from your wage. £10, £20, for not joining our brave new world. But it’s for your own good, failure. For your good, I know it, you know it. For I know you fear me, too – I know it.

Wouldn’t you like to have what I have? Isn’t it what you want, what I have? There is desire in you to work, I know that. You’ll only have to be straightened out, I know it. Straightened – then all your desire will work in the same direction. No dissipation, no vagueness: concentration, concentratedness – life lived in a single direction. And you like me will serve the whole and the good – the greater good. We’ll work alongside one another, at different firms, perhaps, at different agencies, but you will be a worker like me and I will not fear to meet your gaze in the street.

But until then – there’s a long way to go. Until you get there, still a long way. Still must you be straightened out and enskilled, still you will need lessons with flipcharts and teamwork, still there’s a long way to go before you even begin to be employable. And until then? Stay away from me, unemployed one. But you are already with me, I know that, which is why I hate to see you. Below my office, in the broad streets of the everyday, there are dozens of you – anyone on the street could be the non-worker that I dream I am.

Anyone – the unsuccessful are everyone, anyone, and this is the horror. For isn’t my body the body of anyone? One day it will come, the crossover. One day, I will find myself on the other side of the mirror. Who am I, I will ask, who drinks all night? Who am I without a thought in my head? Who am I that my desires run out towards the far horizon? Yes, that is what I dream. Or is it the other way round? Is it that I am one who dreamt he was successful? Is it that I failed and had failed from the first? Then I must ask myself, Who am I, the failure? Who am I, king of the afternoon?

Afternoon, no one’s kingdom. Afternoon, kingdom of no one in particular. The successful have not yet come – and who are we, who have not succeeded? Substanceless, our light borrowed, we are dull moons in the obscurest orbits. Occasionally, one of them will pass us by. Now and then, one of them will come, one of the successful, on one errand or another. They pass us by – how can they do otherwise, we who would only slow them down! They pass us by; our time is rotten – every day, for us, is a wearing away of the same, but theirs? Theirs is linear; it is unidirectional, thrust towards the future’s edge. What it must be to plunge into that future like an eagle plunging to its prey! What keen eyes they must have! What sharp talons!

We see it in the ones who descend to the streets – these are men and women of the future! Theirs are the sleek bodies of the future! How pale and flabby we are! How ill-disciplined! They are all concentration, and we are all – dissipation. How is it that it as though they have stolen our substance? How is it their strength seems drawn from ours, we who are so weak? Some among us talk of revolution, or at least of dragging one of the errand-runners into an alley and showing him or thing or two. But the rest of us, who have heard it before, who have heard everything before, know it’s too late and it was always too late.

It’s part of the order of things, the way things are that there are the successful and there are the unsuccessful. What good is there complaining? What good raising our fists? For they’re hunting us down, one by done. Hunting us down – we are to be trained, enskilled. We are to attend interviews; they’ll summon us up from the street – £10 if we miss the first one, £20 the second, we who only earn £50 a week. They are training us, our pudgy bodies, one by one. One by one – but don’t they understand that we are without number?

I am not one, not a unity, not even that. Not one, and not zero either. Not nothing and yet not a unity – how can I be expected to hold myself together. I can’t count – to one. Who can count, among us, the people of the street? None of us is one, each of us is everyone. I cannot count – who is there to count? But when one of you passes us – when you descend from your offices on one errand or another, it it as though I am awakened from a long sleep.

How quickly you move! How straight your back, as though a cord pulled you upright through your body! How purposeful you are! How concentrated! We wake in the wind of your passing – we come to ourselves then. It is as though each of us were a little eddy of your energy. And do we change you, too? Do we change you, we whose bodies are so heavy and thoughts are so vague?

Sometimes I have dreamt I was one of you. Sometimes, when I am strong, a dream comes that I am one of you, who has come down from the office to the streets. I am the errand runner, that’s who I am, with a lean body and focused mind. The errand runner! To think that I could be trusted to run errands! To think I could blaze with my own light! But already I am moving out of reach of my dream. Soon, again, I will be unable to write, I who only possess borrowed strength. Who am I? soon I will not know that either.

Indifference

Am I lazy? I am not sure. Certainly my old ambitions have withered from me. I no longer write; I do not read difficult books as I used to, and whereas once I would copy out a fifth of the book I was reading to lay bare its arguments, its strategy and the way theory and practice came together, I take no notes other than a few phrases here and there. Laziness! I do not practice French; German is long since out of my grasp. I do not keep up with films; my television is never on, and slowly I fall from the surface of current events. Why have I no kept up with the elections in Latin America? But I have not, just as I no longer watch the news or read the better papers and weblogs on the news. How is it that my world has collapsed upon itself, until it assumes no more than the dimensions of this room?

Indifference – it is true I feel a great tiredness, especially in the afternoons. How many afternoons have been wiped out this way! I read novels, it is true, but only short ones, easy ones and of those I keep no record. I can hardly say I’m reading; a whole oeuvre passes before my eyes in a week, but what have I learnt? What I captured from that reading that I can bring back to my life? Nothing. I leave no record of my reading. Sometimes, I will read the essay of a friend, or write a brief essay for a friend, but that is all. My friends are noticing. – ‘What are you reading?’ – ‘Nothing’. – ‘What are you working on?’ – ‘Nothing’.

And what has this blog become? Once, it was a place for the play of voices – an experience, an experiment, when different tones and voices were allowed to vie with another. That was the thought: I would learnt to write, learn to make idioms, and speak in a happy idiocy that was not allowed elsewhere. And now? Those voices have fallen back upon this one, with which I am least satisfied. Reading back in the evenings, I know a disappointment: where has it gone, the outrage voice, the voice of sweeps and gales? Where is it, the comic voice – and above all, that was what I seeking: the comic, a writing that sweeps with black, bilious laugher?

Is this the voice left to me? Is this the one which remains, amalgam of author’s voices, pale and imitatory, residue of too much reading and not enough living? This, I know is the voice of this room which spreads out indifferently around me. Indifference: I used to think there was a curse on the weblog for whenever I tried to write of it, this room, the prose would go wrong. Whenever I tried to write of crossing this room, I would have to abandon the post. Of course you could cross it in two steps – but when those two steps become an eternity? And I used to avoid the phrase ‘the head of the day’ for the same reason: those were my writerly superstitions, even as I dreamt from the first, of a writing without topic and without speaker; a writing whose ‘neither … nor’ gave and withdrew that of which it spoke.

Sceptical writing that allowed nothing to stand. Could it be that my indifference is the path to that? But there are no paths, not here. Just as Bela Tarr sometimes leaves the plot to bring us close to beer glasses, to a concrete wall, this weblog voids itself. There is nothing here but this room, and, before it the yard. Nothing but the room and the yard as though they stood at the head of creation as the stuff from which everything was made. Indifference – wasn’t this the state Krishna commends in the Bhagavad Gita (a clod of earth, a lump of gold, a beautiful woman: all mean the same to the wise man)? Ah, but that was indifference coupled with an awareness of a supersensible God. What, then, the indifference of one without God?

Sometimes I rebel against it, this indifference. Looking back over long posts, I see a desire desperate to fill itself with content. But how hollow those posts! How unpersuasive! I will have to delete them just as this post, in turn, will have to be deleted. My new dream – how naive – is to marry in each post form and content so that an idiom is born in which there crystallises a writing that embodies and speaks of what there is to say. Each post or string of posts will become a universe enclosed upon itself like Schlegel’s hedgehog. How foolish! Is this the last dream? Is it the last remnant of the dreams I had? But it only spreads itself, this dream, like the aurora borealis above the frozen earth. And in truth, this writing room and the yard before are that earth and I am like the traveller of Basho’s poem who has fallen asleep while his dreams wander on.

Leela

I saw them so recently, the three surviving brothers, their smiles, the shapes of their profiles. They are old, but they are young, young in their smiling. The oldest brother walks me up the stairs and says, can you sit on the floor, and when I say yes, we sit cross legged on the bedroom floor and go through the suitcases that my father left when he died. Here we are, an old man and younger one, on the site of that patch of land in what was called Madras where the family lived in an old building that was demolished so that the present one could rise, four-storeyed, many-balconied in its place.

How is it that the dead do not die all at once – that the deceased is also alive in our memories, but also in that forgetting which leaves a gap in our remembering, a loss irrecuperable and necessary if the dead one is not to be forgotten; a necessary forgetting, and one intertwined with memory, accompanying it? I remember by way of them, the three brothers, but also in the others – in their sons, in their daughters, and in the sons and daughters of the dead sisters and the dead brothers. By way of them – by way of their faces and their smiles, above all their smiles. But I also forget – if forgetting is the name for that hole in memory by which the memory of the dead is to be kept alive.

Irrecuperable loss. Mourning without cease – henceforward that will also be part of what I am. But are you not there, too, dead one? Are you not there, witness, the one who watches in me? Are you not there – dead one who survives in me; alterity of the dead? When I think of you, the other that is the you in me also thinks. He watches, the other in me, the dead one. I am alive, this is true, but with me I also bear the dead. Alive – but with me, the dead one, who keeps watch within me.

When I asked myself that night – when the question was asked in me as I crossed the Byker bridge – I knew what you would have wanted: a cool head, a practical mind. And so it was. Strange hours passed. I went to collect my bike, and then to meet R.M. at the station. It was already late – I had left a party when I heard, then I heard. Back here in the flat I made R.M. something to eat. The next day, we woke early and biked to the station and then down south and biked across London and then the train to the west and we biked from the station to the house. A cool head, a practical mind.

And now? It is as though I have been tuned to perform the most solemn raga. As though I was the instrument itself – or rather, the raga, as it denotes a framework that is not to be played, but played within. So is my loss what attunes my living. A steady sadness that accompanies everything; I can only play on these notes, not others; this is the raga that I live.

What is nihilism? Forgetting which does not live, which is not of the gap which resists the other’s incorporation. What is it, nihilism? The destruction of memory, the destruction of that propitious forgetting by which the dead bring themselves to us and live in us. Do not forget that forgetting. But what choice is there? It already keeps watch; already it is there, on the brothers’ faces and on the faces of their sons and daughter and the other sons and daughters. And wasn’t it there, too, in Madras, which is now called Chennai? We were there. A week ago, we were there.

On Chennai beach, the tsunami struck. 800 died that morning. But there are still people on the beach, that night as we walk along it, still sellers of shells and snacks; still a few out wading in the water. A few hundreds yards of sand to the sea. The bay of Bengal, which stretches along the east coast of India. My cousin speaks: not far from here is where they carried what remained of his body, my father. Carried out, ashes and remnants of bone, into the water. And he speaks, my cousin, of the thirteen days after death, and of the rituals that will endure the soul of the departed reaches the other shore. So, I am sure, did it reach there. Above us, the wide night – some stars are visible. Rishis, says my cousin. They are Rishis of our family; they watch over us. As he, too will watch over us. But I know, then, that he watches, too, within me.

Watches, and what do I see in this city? My cousin stroll downs to the beach some lunchtimes, he says. It is his Chennai, this city; he is happy here – it has everything, he tells us as we walk back to the car from the beach. Everything; it is all here. He had picked up my father from the airport; he seemed fine then, some trouble walking, but he was safely delivered to the flat in which he would say. But then … the details are known to us. But we are told again, and in my cousin’s voice, they acquire a new significance. He was there, my cousin; he speaks, simply and directly, of what happened. He was there, and we relive it through him as we drive through Chennai.

Oblivion: unto that were you delivered, ashes lowered into the Bay of Bengal. To be scattered in water, that was your wish. Why that, water? Why the vastness of the ocean? Along the coast, driving to Mahabs, we see crosses, markers of the Christian dead of the tsunami. Thousands died, all along the coast. The Indians asked for no foreign aid. Asked for no aid, but provided of themselves, and we see the thatched resettlement villages on the long drive. Thousands dead! So many dead! All the dead taken by the sea whose great crashing waves we see at the Shore Temple at Mahabs. How fierce those waves, from the Bay of Bengal.

The brothers carried the body into the ocean. Carried it out into the same sea from which the tsunami came. Catastrophe, benediction, brought by the same waves. And the sea is all of life, and death – it is the cosmos that rolls in and away in the waves on the sand, just as it is the cosmos we see above the orange glare of the streetlights of Chennai. It plays, the cosmos, we know that. It is a divine sport – lila, it is called, or leela (the spelling of my sister’s name). The divine sport, which can also be capricious, cruel. But it is the matrix of all things; from that, all things are given and all things return.

Given, yes, but as they are given, can you not detect the great departing wave, the darkness which sinks back through all things? Does it not leave its trace thus, in all the things, the trucks and rickshaws, the new construction sites and advertising hoardings of new Chennai? Departing – but also, too, coming forward, reaching us by way of things – by way of their play in the granite statuette from Mahabs my sister and brother in law bargained for, and in the CDs which I bought in Chennai and Delhi. Given – but also in the smiles, the brothers’ smiles, and in the play of resemblance between us all. The cloud-shaped nose, the dimpled mouth – don’t these, too, witness the play of leela?

The Bay of Bengal is a name for all oceans, and the oceans for the cosmos, and that for the giving-witholding of leela, by which we live and we will die.

Germs

They piss everywhere, the men here. They piss, unashamed, and on the walls you can see where they pissed. A damp patch, darker than the wall, and then a trail across the pavement and into the road – someone pissed here. Smell it! Pungent, acrid! Smell it – evidence of a recent piss.

As you drive, you can see them pissing. Men, backs turned to the road, and an arc of urine, they do not spare us that – the golden arc. They piss by the roadside and drive off again.

Sometimes you will see children squat by the roadside, taking a shit. Shitting children and pissing grownups – how has it come to this? The adults are pissing, the children shitting: this is how it is.

And what of us, who are driven in our cars? Is our driver – one of them? Does he, too, when we are not looking, piss with his back turned to the road? Are the hands that turn the driving wheel of our car covered with piss? Are there germs even here, in our car?

We close the window as tightly as we can. The air-con is on as high as it will go. What of us, we ask ourselves – are we ever clean enough? Are we clean? At the dentists they give you a dye to show you were you are not brushing your teeth. And if there was a dye to show germs – germs all around us and all over us? We shudder.

We are in charge, we know that. We rule here, we know that, but for how long? How long with the germs multiplying, with men pissing and children shitting? Isn’t it the germs who rule? Aren’t we ruled by them – the germs? Germs: hold a magnifying glass to your skin and you will see them: men pissing and children shitting. Germs: pissing and shitting in our hearts.

Dogs Fucking

The dogs are fucking in the sun. The dogs, back to back, fucking – in the sun. It’s sunny, and on the grass, away from us, there are dogs, a small group of them, one lying in the grass, one sniffing along the edge of the rocks – and there are two who are fucking. Fucking, the dogs in the sun, tongues out, panting, not ardent, not distracted, fucking just as they would do anything else, sniffing, playing – it’s all the same. Fucking, playing, sniffing: all part of the whole, part of a dog’s life.

Who owns them, these dogs? Whose property are they, these sandy coloured dogs you find from one end of the country to another? Why aren’t they neutered? Why can’t someone disperse them, or lock them up in pounds? For they are everywhere, these dogs, fucking contentedly. Resting in the grass, playing in the dust, sniffing along the pavements and then fucking, wherever it strikes them to fuck. In the sun, generally. In the sun, before everyone – fucking. Dogs! Fucking! It’s a long, hot day, and what else is there to do? A dog must fuck; it’s part of what it means to be a dog – to fuck. To play, to rest and then – to fuck.

In the dust, on the grass, along the pavements they go, packs of sandy-coloured, medium-sized dogs, inoffensive, really, keeping to themselves, pausing only now and again to fuck. Pausing, in the heat of the sun, in the long afternoon, for a fuck. Sometimes you’ll see the bitches with their teats hanging down. More dogs – always more to come. More dogs, and if there are dogs, aren’t there rats? Dogs – but where are the rats? Because dogs and rats go together. Where there is a dog there is a rat, and where dogs fuck, somewhere, not far away, rats are fucking.

Dogs – plenty of them, and rats – plenty of them, enough to crawl over the pavements and the dust and the grass. Enough to crawl everywhere, until the surface of the world is a million-footed rat-body. The dogs are the amiable counterpart to the rats. But if there are dogs, there are rats, that is the law. Wild dogs – and they are wild, for who owns them? Who lays claim for them? Who is responsible for them? therefore wild rats, one and the same. Dogs, check – and rats, check. I haven’t seen any, but they come with the dogs. The dogs chase the rats and the rats stay underground, but they are there, nonetheless.

And what about the cockroaches? Where there are rats, there must be cockroaches. For any one rat, a dozen cockroaches – two dozen. Do cockroaches fuck? It is hard to imagine them fucking, one hard-carapaced cockroach atop the other. One cockroach doing it to the other. But if rats do it, cockroaches must do it. First the dogs, then the rats – then the cockroaches. Everything is at it, all of nature is at it, in the grass, in the dust, along the pavements and beneath them in the sewers and the pipes, it’s all happening. Everything is fucking. There will be more and more of them, the dogs, the rats, the cockroaches. They’re on the increase.

Why doesn’t someone do something about it? Why isn’t something about them, the dogs. The rats are underground, but the dogs – above ground, unashamed. But if they did something about them, then the rats would come overground, that’s the truth. To lock up the dogs would be to encourage the rats. Rats, fucking in the sun – it’s unbearable. Rats, everywhere, brushing your ankles as they swarmed – terrible. And what if you got rid of the dogs and the rats – that’s the worst. Dogs, rats gone, then the cockroaches would be everywhere, crawling over your face as you slept, falling into your mouth. Cockroaches under your blankets and in your fridge. Better rats. And better still the dogs, who fuck in the sun.

Crying in my Bovril

Conversation with W. He’s reading Radical Thought in Italy. ‘It’s pure DOGMA’, he says. ‘They’re all mates. No quotes, no references, they all have the same ideas and write about them as if they were world-historical’ – ‘That should be a DOGMA rule’. – ‘Exactly. Write about your ideas as if they were categories in Aristotle’. W. sends me a quote:

Forms of behaviour such as opportunism and cynicism derive from this infinite process in which the world becomes no more than a supermarket of opportunities empty of all inherent value, yet marked by the fear that any false move may set in motion a vortex of impotence.

‘You can mull it over in your stupidity’, he says. We have a new rule, now that we’ve become co-writers: we have to give each other a list of books to read. The first one is Radical Thought in Italy. ‘That’s how we should write’, says W. Co-writers: he’s coming to visit me here, and I’ll go and visit him there.

‘I keep getting up early’, I tell him. So is he. 5.00, the pair of us. ‘What do you do when you get up?’, he says. – ‘I’m writing an essay’. ‘Why don’t you try reading? Why don’t you read something?’ – I tell him I’m going downhill. I’ve reached that age in which I can’t do anything: ‘It’s like all these artists who begin well and end up ropey. I could never imagine it, and now it’s happening to me’. – ‘But they produced something before they went downhill. What have you produced? What hill have you climbed? How do you go downhill from downhill?’

I tell him I’ve been reading X. – ‘what did you think?’ – ‘He mesmerises me. He’s everything I’m not; I feel guilty when I read him’. W.: ‘He’s a swan and you’re a bear’.

I tell W. I’ve been feeling ill. it’s my stomach. Perhaps I’m going to die. ‘You’re not going to die. You’re just fat and greedy’. W. says I should read more. ‘I can’t be bothered. I’m getting old’. – ‘You’re not old. 35 – that’s when philosophy begins. When you’re 60 you might have something to say:’ I tell him it’s too late for me. ‘I’m done with it. I’m not writing anymore’. A year ago, W. had said I was nearly running on empty. Now he says it: ‘your tank’s dry. You’re empty’.

He doesn’t like the recent posts. ‘Go back to doing what you do best. Whining. Go back to whining, like an ape crying in his Bovril’. He’s not persuaded. ‘Stop trying to be profound. You’re not profound, you’re an ape’.

The Interval

1

I am happy that the month is so long – happy there are so many days, eleven more, in which to make up for the days I was absent. In lieu of writing, writing to catch up – but how is that each day I write the same thing? The month is long; I am glad, but of what did I fall short? Days missing, days not underlined in the calendar; a great deal happened – everything -, I was on the other side of the world, but it is of the same I write, which is to say, of nothing at all.

Nothing begins, but this is fitting. I live in the interval; real work has not begun; there is work, to be sure – tomorrow (Saturday) I will be in the office as I am in every day, but I know I will push even the few tasks I have left away from me. Those affairs do not concern me. It is not because I resent them in particular that I push them aside, but their urgency offends me. Nothing is urgent. My attention is elsewhere. But what is it, my attention? What is it, this salt-marsh of the interior? Am I stagnant? Has life ceased to flow? Why then do I imagine of my heart that what was once closed is now opened, and opened beyond itself so that it becomes a new organ? My heart – and this is what I am – is all surface, and that surface is touched at every place by the outside.

Is it jet-lag? I am out of synch with the world; it is five hours behind me. Five hours: what might I perceive in this, the interval?

2

I’ve just finished a book. I took two hours and finished it off, the novel that lies face down on my pillow. I lived and died with its protagonist; right now, because I accompanied her to death, I feel wise. We died together, she and I, we lived a long life, she and I; but I also survived in the man who was with her.

I died; now I am alive; I have passed from one room to another. How is it that the flat is now large enough for me? How is it that I do not feel the usual claustrophobia? ‘I pass from one room to another’: in truth, I have wanted to write this sentence for a long time. Wanted to write of my passage through a room, as though that room were infinitely large, or the crossing infinitely long. As though the room was the desert, and I would never reached the promised land. Or was the room to be desert and promised land at once; that to wander was also to discover, and that this was the meaning of the diaspora which occurred across my sanded floors?

3

In the pub, a tall Zimbabwean presses his fist to my cheek when I ask when he and his friends come to sit around me that he reserve a seat for my friend. ‘Of course I will keep a seat’, he says, and now they sit, the ‘Z-club’, talking of their country. I thought, I would like to record this moment. I thought, is this what the interval requires: that I should remember the small events of the day?

I remember. My attention slackens; memories float indifferently like dust in the air. What else should I write? Where are you, interval? Now I know I cannot reach you by writing, even though it is by writing that you call. How to write of the failure of events, of the drifting air in which the dust motes move? I would like to stuff a book with details, that is true; but how then to remember what must fall between them?

Interval, hinge, it is you who open between each post; it is you who interpose yourself so that no continuous narrative is possible. Always a break; always white space between posts, even when they are written as they are here at the moment three times a day.

Three times! But there were sins of omission; I did not fulfil my quota; there is a pressure of writing behind me and I must write. Interval, it is of you I must speak. Who waits? Who waits inside me? It is my inside-out heart, which aches along its surface. Three times – but my heart asks because it waits; the marsh is open beneath the sky. Asks – and there is a landscape that is a question, like the exposed wood of the floorboards in the flat.

The End

What if all you had in common was what would, in time, set you apart? What if that was all there was for you both – that prospect of being set apart, one from the other? Doesn’t it make you draw closer to one another? Isn’t it, now, that you come closer because you will soon be set apart? You are close to the end, you know that. But you are close, now, only by way of the end and it what is you know in one another. Might there be a way, in that knowing, of deferring the end? Isn’t the end deferred by that knowledge until it becomes the beginning, once again, of your relationship? Friendship born from its finitude, friendship as infinite contestation of finitude. 

Hour of the Wolf

I’m tired, I know that, I see the evidence. Tired: heavy eyelids and darkness beneath the eyes. Why these early mornings? Why, early, do I want to write, and that first of all? To write, yes, and before the dawn – to begin before the day begins and even before it begins to begin. For it is not yet dawn; there is not yet the intimation of light which does not glimmer, but comes all at once, the whole sky, not glowing – this is a northern city, in winter – but blandly and flat, the whole sky at once. The dawn will say: I am here, I am absolute. The day in the dawn will say: I am arriving; you will not resist me.

But it is not yet dawn; the day has not begun to begin. What, then of this hour, which is not yet dawn but lies at the end of night? The hour of the wolf – is that what it’s called? But I’ve never heard anyone call it that; it is something I have read. And isn’t it too grandiloquent a name for these hours, mine, at the desk by the window? The wolf? – There are no wolves here. What mammal could find its way into the concrete back yard? I’ve never seen a cat jump down to the yard floor.

Sometimes, birds come – magpies, to peck at the bin bags when the bin lid is open, and blackbirds, inspecting the muddy grime around the drain. There are insects, of course – a summer trail of ants from my kitchen to the wall opposite, under the bench. And towards the end of last summer, a daddy long legs, creature of the threshold; and then there are the flies circle in my rooms. When did I last see a wasp?

But this is not a place for animals, for life; nothing comes here. The concrete is absolute; it has no relation to life. Even the plants are dying – slowly, it is true, it may take years, but dying nonetheless, rotting up from the potted earth. No animals, no wolves. Only algae, which spreads itself greenly across the wet concrete. Algae, which makes the ground slippery when I go out to put bags in the wheelie bin.

What good is it to me, the yard? An open space, that is enough, a temple open to the mediocrity of the day, that is enough. But without it, what would I be able to write? How would I be able to take in the first breath that would allow me to begin? For that breath is necessary, even though I betray it. It is necessary, that first openness, that receptivity: the divine afflatus. Begin, it says, and even though I never begin, even though writing never unfolds itself into a narrative, I am in love with the thought of beginning. Who says that writing has been discovered?

Not yet dawn, and I can see nothing of it, the yard. In the predawn, there is blackness and dark indigo and the orange glow of the street lamps and that is all. How many more days will I live like this? I would like many of them, passing from one to another and so unto eternity. I would like to live a life like this, rising before dawn. But these are aberrant days, I know that. These are rare and exceptional days, I know. And I am tired, too tired; my eyelids are heavy and there is darkness below my eyes. How heavy my body, how dark! Heavy, and robbed of potential like a wave that falls back upon itself without breaking!

Yesterday, I set myself the task of writing of my body and the destiny of my body. Yesterday I thought to write of fatigues and vagueness, of that being out of tune which robs me of the ability to find my way through the day. Sometimes I find myself lost among objects; where am I?, I ask myself, what am I doing? There are tasks to perform, many of them, urgent tasks, but I fail them one by one. Tired, I lean forward in my chair, I open a book or surf the net and am lost from my duties, sinking below them. Is it because I use my strength elsewhere? Is it because it is already used up, my strength, before I come to my tasks?

The wave does not break; the sea roils in itself. There is no issue, no result. What is preparing itself here? What is about to unfold? But the sea does not reach its shore; it is ferment without event. It is the non-event which happens; writing speaks only of this, of what does not begin. How close I have come to it, writing – but to what am I close? Only to the event where writing seems to become possible and then, at the same stroke, moves out of reach.

Writing, beginning, non-beginning, is it not thus that you let speak the address that you are? Is that your call, and that first of all – the saying, now, which reveals in everything that is said? But I am not close to you; or if it is so, then it is another in me who is close. The stranger, the companion who writes in my place. Does he write? Or isn’t it that he stops me writing even as I write? Is it because of him that I do not begin?

Hour of the wolf, how laughable! Non-hour of the non-wolf; hour without wolves, without animals. Out there, green algae on concrete and the dying plants; I can’t see them. Out there, the concrete space, whose contours I cannot see.

The Membrane

Too much, here, for anyone to read, that much is obvious. Too much – but why so? Why this too much of writing which seems to pour endlessly from itself? Morning again, the pre-dawn again, the curtains closed again: I am at the crossroads. Or it is the crossroads have returned, and that they have only ever returned. Why, on these successive mornings, have I been so close to what returns thus?

Imagine me, reader, on the other side of what is written. Imagine that, as though writing were a screen between us. Imagine that screen is alive with a kind of light – that it is made of skin, that screen, or a kind of living membrane through which soft light comes. It is to that light to which I imagine I’m close as I write; the light of creatures of the deep sea, the deepest creatures with strange fishing rods of light and glowing, macabre bodies. And isn’t it at such depths that life strips itself down to light and to the attraction to light? Or imagine a membranous creature dug from the earth: a land-jellyfish, but who does not move, who only waits, impassive, in the earth, glowing. That is what this writing is. That is what is shared by way of writing.

The pre-dawn again, writing again; the room with closed curtains. What time is it? Any time, every time. What time is it? All hours cross here; all of time is present here. Nothing begins, but everything is gathered for the beginning. Nothing begins – this is where beginning fails, where the day is curled back upon itself, unable to dawn. It is a warehouse of things which will not bloom and will not potentiate; possibility is suspended here, even for me – especially for me. Space without place, time without production. Space without dwelling and time which gives no purchase on time.

But still, what is that light between us? What is that light, like the milky white lens of corrective glasses? I imagine that what we share is blindness, that what we see is blindness. Yes, that’s it: the creatures of the deep, the jellyfish in the earth glow with blindness. They cannot see us, but there is sight nonetheless. Blind sight, sight subtracted from itself – you, membrane, are alive with what knows without seeing, with life as it understands so it does not have to see.

The Companion

Without blogging, I would have given up any ambition I had had to write. Let me rephrase that: without blogging, I would have written on writing at one remove; I would have kept myself from writing. A second rephrase (but how many are required?): without blogging, I would have been content to let it go, this writing, which will not be arrested in thesis or argument, and whose method is to go by going, to live as pure means without end.

This writing – but what is written here? What is allowed to write? I will call it a push – a counterpush: that force of resistance which presses back, out of itself. Writing: pushing back against what is written; pushing against the said and the order of the said, who is it you would address?

Without blogging, I would not have written without name. Without it, there would always be my name, and writing would have lagged behind itself. Writing, saying: what kind of companions will you call into existence? What readers do you seek? And I am not one of them, the first reader, but one among others? Am I not the first and most avid of readers, the one who will feed writing his own life; who will let what he writes become the said through which writing would speak? Yes, the keenest reader, the one who writes in order to know the surprise of what resists him in his own words.

My words – not mine; who are you that writes on the other side of the mirror? Who are you that struggles with me and that I know only by his resistance? Sometimes I think I would like to reach you, like those rubber-gloved mirror-crossers in Orphee; sometimes it is into your darkness I would drown like Blanchot’s Narcissus, who sees in the pool only what he is not. I tell myself, then, I am coming, and think these words will bring you close to me, close in your distance. But then I know that you are not here even when you are here; that I miss you most when I know your proximity.

For aren’t you there in my own heart? Isn’t it in my heart that you live, close one, distant one? My heart is already the mirror; what is inside is outside. I write to find you, but also to surprise you. Did you know I was coming? Yes, you knew; you had already set out to find me. You had set out from the furthest part of the universe to find me. How was it that you were waiting all along? And how is it that you still wait, that all you are is waiting? You will never arrive; and will I arrive for you? I know you by the blindness of your push – but by what do you know me? By this writing: you who have never lived ask for my life.

What am I to write? It is 7.30 at night; it’s dark again, and I’m at my desk again. 7.30 at night, when 12 hours ago it was dawn and in 12 hours time it will be dawn again. I should tell you a story, companion. I should speak of my life, and know you draw close. But what will you understand, you who I know as a mother her unborn child. You push; you reach me from inside. You are not alive, not yet. But it is as though you had died, you who had never lived.

Isn’t this what Kafka feared – never to have lived, despite living? To live meant more for him than to exist. Existence is what you do not possess, companion. It’s what I give you. Stories, that’s what you ask for. Events. There must be material. And through that you will push, through writing will I know you, as, perhaps Philip K. Dick knew his dead twin through the Dark Haired Girl.

Without blogging, I would have eluded you, that I know. Without it, I would have forgotten you, golem, on whose forehead I write these words. Will they wake you? But you will never wake. Unless there is an awakening that is also a slumber – a vigil that is kept in a dream. Sometimes I imagine you are dreaming of me, companion. Sometimes I think you know me. Why, when I imagine your face, it is mine with the eyes sewn shut? Why, when I think of it, is it mine without eyes and without mouth?

One day, on the other side of the mirror you will mouth the name that will dissolve my own. One day, every word I write will be unwritten. And until then? Write to lose; write to forget. Write – lose; write – forget.

2

But let me continue these reflections. Without blogging – what then? A book a year; a book and several essays a year: slowly I would find my way to work of which I would feel unashamed. And now? – ‘What are you working on?’ – ‘Nothing’ – ‘What have you been reading?’ – ‘Nothing’.

How confused he is when he is told, the narrator of Tarkovsky’s Mirror, that he is dying. Confused – is it a dream? I think it is – a dream. How is it that that scene draws the whole film around it (what does Lacan call it? A quilting point?)? But what is it to dream you are already dead? What is it to experience your life as it was dreamt by the dead one, by your companion, death-in-life?

Statues move for the Alexander of Bergman’s film, and Ismael can see the boy’s wish fulfilled. All the while, Alexander’s dead father, who died playing the ghost in Hamlet, reappears to his son in a white suit. He says nothing; he looks doleful, but he is there for Alexander, the son (and doesn’t he appear, the ghost, to his own mother, as a living reproach, as an entreaty, saying: help my son?). There – but is he there?

Without blogging, which does not require a name? I would not know you; you would not have come. Or is it I who comes to you, as the ghost, the companion. It is dark and I am unsure. Who is the ghost? Who lives? But this is the sign: we are merging; I have reached the crossing point. You are as close as you can come. Will it be possible to press my hand into the glass as into a pool of water? Of course not. But tonight I know whose hand it is that presses against mine.

The Sacrifice

The day: white sky, light falls evenly; leafless branches, the white garage door. How ugly, the two wheelie bins, numbers painted on their sides! And why is the concrete floor on the yard always wet? All that fails to happen, happens now; the day triumphs in its blank enormity.

Then I see it: the yard is like those Roman temples to the sun and moon that were left open to the sky. And isn’t this writing, too, an offering to the sky, a way, for a moment, to hold itself back, to retrieve my measure so I can give to it as I have been given to? But then I know that my writing is a ruined temple and that it is the day that has come here to write of itself; the day that shimmers across a writing that is voided of content.

As supplicant, I would like to offer the garage door in sacrifice. I write, garage door – but the words do not reach what they name. How is it that sense suspends itself?

Brahma to Vishnu: ‘Without a sacrifice, nothing can received. To create a new world, what shall I sacrifice?’ Vishnu: ‘sacrifice me’. – ‘What shall I use as the sacrificial knife, the sacrificial altar and the sacrificial post?’ – ‘Use me’. – ‘Where do I find the sacred fire and the sacred chants?’ – ‘In me’. – ‘Who shall be the presiding deity?’ – ‘It will be me. I will also be the offering and the reward’.

So with the day, which is both sacrifice and supplicant. So the day that asks for writing to sacrifice writing. New day, when will you reach me? Sacrifice, when will you happen? I write, The leafless branches, the garage door; the two wheelie bins, the concrete floor, but it’s no good; they mean nothing. Who am I to think I can use language? The day is part of these words; it shimmers across them. It has already happened, event, non-event, in the blandness of the sky, in the blankness of writing.

The Exception

Morning again; the pre-dawn again; this time I’ve kept the curtains closed. The room is an island that belongs to no particular time. The window cannot see me and I am not witnessed by the night. The exception – what it is to have awoken earlier than anyone! What it is to awaken upstream of the day and know its unfolding as it separates itself from night! I know at this time I am close to the gods and to my ancestors; here, at the crossroads the spirits awaken, and am not I, too, a spirit?

There are ragas of the morning, afternoon and night. Why shouldn’t there be a writing, too, that belongs to a time – or rather to a time that seems to unjoin itself from time: the pre-dawn? Who are you, exception, that writes these sentences? The one who knows that any life lived away from writing is a double life; the one who waits for his return and is no more than this waiting. For the appointment will not be kept; the pre-dawn is not punctual. What returns does not cease to divide time from itself.

Exception, will you always miss what you seek? But writing is also divided from itself; the saying of writing and the said are not one. How then to hear the address of the exception that would bear what is written here? How does it reach you, this saying? When a cat seeks your attention, it reaches a paw to touch you. How soft this touch! Barely a touch! But you are reached; the cat’s paw has spoken. Dream of a writing that would touch by way of what is said. Dream of a saying-touch that would reach you by way of writing.

The castle K. sees from the wooden bridge is neither strange nor familiar, neither remote nor welcoming; it is at one with the houses of the village. So it is with saying, the address – nothing other than writing, but other than writing. And isn’t K., by standing on the bridge, elected? Isn’t it that the castle has chosen him to witness its neither … nor? So too with the writing that elects the exception.

The pre-dawn: space without place and time without possibility. The pre-dawn: name of the event in which writing divides itself. Exception: name of the writer and name of the reader; who are we, elective community? Who are we, set aside from others and from ourselves by the address?

The Altered Night

7.30: dawn is coming. Purple light; the outline of the pipe that runs along the kitchen’s edge, the white wooden door to the road; the wheelie bin. Purple and black and white: those are the colours of this threshold. This morning – is it morning? – I feel as though I have kept vigil all night; that I have seen to it that the body of the departed was watched over. I watched; I was vigilant – but who was it that died?

I kept vigil over my own death; I was awake aside the corpse I am. You should not die alone and no one should be alone in their death. Of course, it is in the memories of others that you will live – your friends, your sisters and brothers give you a kind of life. As long as you remember, you will remain in limbo; neither in this world or the next. When will they release you into forgetting? When they, too, are forgotten. But when will that day come?

Last night, this night, which is becoming morning, I outlived myself. Upstairs I can hear my neighbours passing from one room to another. Water drips from their bathroom into mine: there are others around who are alive. But last night, was I alive? Who was I, who watched over my own death? Who was I, companion to the one who died?

Ulysses passes among the shades, but where do I pass? Alongside myself; among myself – but that is not right either. The body is a stone withdrawn into itself. The body has turned aside from the world; its attention is turned to its heart. That is sleep: the body is turned to the heart and the heart expands to become the whole night. And you who watch over your body? You, awoken, who watch over your own sleep?

I still remember how the night was altered. I remember it: altered night, hell spread across the world. When Sankara speaks of the witness it is by first evoking the self that sleeps. Who is the locus of deep sleep he asks – and then we are told to imagine a sleep deeper than sleep. Witness, vigilant one, who are you that withdraws from me now, at the shore of morning?

Light in the bathroom of the house opposite; the sky is light blue, and the colours of the world reveal themselves. It is 8.00 AM; two hands wrote this post. As night crossed into morning, so was there a crossing from death to life. The body has awoken; its attention is drawn into the world. The companion withdraws; no one is required to keep vigil.

The Crossroads

5.00 AM, and what I can see by day in the yard has not yet emerged from darkness. What do I see in the window? This room; the light from my desk lamp, the back of my monitor – this room, and behind it, the darkness of the night. This room and there am I, too, in the window, the light of my face, the green of my dressing gown filled with darkness as though I were already a ghost.

Am I dead or alive? For myself, now, it is as though I surprised myself returning from the day – as though I had met myself returning from the future. I crossed myself here, before dawn; my future came towards me and my past rose up to meet it. And who was I, at the crossroads?

The protagonist of Peace by Gene Wolfe is awoken from his grave when the oak tree falls that was planted on his grave. He wanders through an old house whose rooms are joined across the decades of his life: it is the house of his life, the closed space in which everything happened. To wake up at this time, before dawn, is to wander through that house where everyone is alive but you.

It is said that everything is recalled at the moment of death – you remember it all again, your life. And at the moment of awakening? It as though you recalled your death – that it is death that remembers, like the night behind your image in the mirror. What do I remember? Death remembers itself in me; death – forgetting – destroys my memory.

I lost my place in the night; I slipped from my place and all places. I should be asleep; I am not asleep. I should be dreaming, and my dreams anchored by my sleeping body, but I do not sleep and if I dream, it is merged with my wakefulness. It is very late or very early; this is the crossroads of the night where the soul wanders from its home.

The Last Word

Consolation of writing: to return to the page over which I would be the master. The last word is mine, I could say; I keep the right to the last word. But what if it is only that writing is driven into writing itself; in which, rather than enacting a kind of revenge on the world, writing revenges itself against me, who would have turned to it after the fact?

No longer is writing belated; I do not keep the last word, but writing keeps it for me. The last word? No: one which erodes all words from within – which attenuates, by stretching it beyond its limit and beyond all limits, the possibility of preserving anything by writing. What is kept by way of writing? What lets itself be kept? No longer anything that is possible for me.

The last word: impossible writing which is only the etiolation of writing. Writing blanched, writing on writing like the silk on silk rugs I saw in the Kashmiri shop which shimmered as though possessed of a life that was more than that of the intricacies, the details of its weaving even as it was no more than those intricacies, the patient work of weeks and months. 

The last word: cancer of language, devourer of stars, it is you who turn at the heart of light and around whom the day whirls like water to the plughole. To speak is not to see, says Foucault. It is only with cancered eyes that I can see the shimmering of language.

Concrete

Yesterday I had great plans to write here; what happened to them, those plans? Coming back up on the train, great plans – I would write this, and then that, and writing would be freedom, the free act I would have waited for all the time I’ve been away; but today? Perhaps it is that I had too much coffee yesterday. Too much coffee on the train coming up. Perhaps it is because I barely slept the night before last, and there is also the jet lag -. Or was it that yesterday I was borne too strongly on the wind of a strong book – that divine afflatus, not mine, that would allow me the reader to dream that I could become the strong writer.

But isn’t there a great deal to write? Haven’t I had experiences enough to narrate? It should be no effort at all, to write. No effort: make a beginning and then narration would bear me from one experience to another; I would be able to write and even experience the benediction of writing – the saying that, regardless of what is said, is writing’s beatitude, the gift it gives of itself and from itself like the emanation of the good in Plotinus. That’s what I would experience, spreading the page on which I would write open like the new year, and allowing that newness to bear what I wrote.

I am back at the flat after a couple of weeks away. Back, and the water drips through the bathroom ceiling from the shower upstairs. Back, and the same mediocre view through the window: the sewage is gone from the back yard, that is true, but there is still the soaked concrete, still the walls with flakes of paint missing. Mediocrity: it is dawn, but dawn comes late in winter. I should buy some paint and fill in the long scar left when they pulled the pipe away from the world – the pipe that had leaked dirty water into the walls of my kitchen and even into the kitchen itself, until blackened water ran along the tiled wall. They pulled it away, but there is still the long blackened scar, still the evidence of the damage done.

Out of the window: clothespegs on the washing line, an oval rock from the beach on the concrete. The backs of the flats opposite and above them the trees. This is what I see in the dawn. This is how the dawn is no new beginning, and the new year brings the return of the old, untransfigured and obdurate. Isn’t the yard the place where the beginning fails to begin? Isn’t the concrete yard the failure of the beginning and the failure of any beginning? Everything that begins also ends here. The end is here, where there should be beginning.

Of what could I have written that would not have ended here, where time does not advance and space is voided of itself? What saying could be borne by writing that would have spoken by way of the concrete that is saturated with rain water? Nothing begins here; everything that begins fails again. What would a narrative be that did not begin and end with concrete?

You would imagine, wouldn’t you, that to write of the yard would be merely a clearing of the throat, only the step into writing, writing’s occasion? You’d imagine, then, that the occasion of writing would then be absorbed by writing and lifted into it, as though the contingent would become necessary and mediocrity redeemed. But what if writing’s occasion becomes itself the saying of writing – a way in which writing speaks of itself, as if the concrete yard is an allegory of what leaves itself behind even as writing seeks to leap beyond the circumstances of its birth?

Concrete: mediocre substance, beginningless and endless. Concrete that closes the earth to the sky – crust across the dreaming earth that would answer the dreaming sky. Nothing begins here; there are no dreams. Nothing begins – there is nothing that can lift itself from what cannot begin. Over the last fortnight, I’ve travelled, I’ve read – I was overwhelmed by experience. So many thoughts! Marvellous conversations! So much drama! But today? Today – this perpetual first day on which writing begins only to fail to begin I know that what I have learnt is already covered by concrete. Today, the day did not begin. Today, writing did not release itself from itself.

Have I failed? Has writing failed? Or does saying let speak by disengaging the beginning from itself. Bataille will call himself the man of unemployed negativity. What will he do, he asks, with his dissatisfaction – what can he make, what can he affirm? He wants to know whether his unemployment is significant – what does it mean and what can it mean today, when everything is finished? Or is unemployment the experience of the endlessness of finishing, of the endlessness that voids time from within?

I cannot begin; I cannot advance. By this non-step does writing succeed in its failure. It’s true, I’ve failed and failed by writing. It’s true I’ve fallen behind the said. But by this lagging behind, by this division of writing, doesn’t writing let speak the saying that it bears by way of what it cannot achieve? A great deal has happened; I travelled, I read, I conversed. But today I know these adventures are only another way of living what does not begin.

Move it On

I am incapable of the leap into fiction, that much is true. How would I begin? What story could I tell? I learn from Appelfeld and Coetzee the importance of details; the novel must proceed by way of details and observations minutely recorded. This shouldn’t stall the novel (Handke’s No Man’s Bay); isn’t Kafka the master of minutae that moves the story on. There must be movement – plot, incident. Coetzee’s Michael K. moves. Appelfeld’s Bartfuss moves; so does Handke’s Sorger – and the world through which they pass, and their passing, is minutely rendered.

It is true I lack the patience for such rendering. Always the leap into abstraction, as if the world could reveal itself at a stroke, all at once. Always the leap into reflection; description becomes treatise – and not even that: pseudo-philosophy, pseudo-musing anchored in nothing and speaking of nothing. What could I write, assuming I could write something? For what is my non-talent, my obduracy fitted? What I write always bears with it the circumstances of its genesis. The occasional: I cannot exclude the room in which I write, the view from the window. Thereby I remain at the threshold of fiction, unable to begin. But isn’t there a way of carrying the threshold itself into fiction? Isn’t there a way of fictionalising the non-beginning?

I would like to write fiction; I sit down at my desk and my keyboard and the back yard is outside, as disappointing as always. I sit down to write – but I remain on the threshold without crossing it. I am here – but where am I? At the beginning, trying to begin, and unable to advance beyond the beginning. At least Handke can write of the natural world, I tell myself. At least he has the attentiveness and the vocabulary. What patience he must have! But I am impatient; I want to write in grand gestures – to reflect without letting the cogwheel of the plot engages with its material.

Move it on, I tell myself. Begin. But it as though I am fascinated by the act of beginning. To pass across the threshold is an effort too far. Here I am – but where am I? Beginning, not beginning.