Lars Iyer's Blog

Trap a wasp in a jar and in a day it will begin to look ragged. It stops buzzing and stands still, energyless and waiting. So do I feel today – ravaged by the Westerlies which bring hot and humid weather to this country. I feel sorry for W., who is that much more exposed to them on the south west coast of our island and remember how D.M. and I, back in Manchester, used to sit back in our armchairs and say to one another: nothing can be done today. But I am on the other coast now, and it usually much cooler and fresher here.

Conversation with W. He’s reading Rosensweig still, in German, each page taking him an hour. ‘I don’t know whether I don’t understand because it’s in German or because it’s really hard’, he says. Then the conversation takes the usual turn. ‘Your tanks dry‘ says W. to me, after asking me what I’m reading. W. is busy preparing his Spinoza course and thinking loftily about Michel Henry; I’m not reading a line, nothing at all. It’s all admin, admin spreading everywhere, piles of it and more to come.

In between, I’m writing a little essay on Bernhard, rereading bits and pieces by him, and … It’s at this point this post should lift off like an old Wright brothers aeroplane, but it’s not lifting. How tiresome to count on writing to mark something done in a long day like this one! W. is one of those people who thinks then writes. But I never have a thought in my head …

I know I’d like to write about Dizzee Rascal, who I saw last weekend (though I didn’t see him walk down the quayside with his posse; nor did I see Mark Eitzel strolling in his hat, though I’d heard him sing earlier, coming forward and backing away from the microphone, moving from the side to side the better to exploit his powerful voice.) Dizzee Rascal: lazily, without thinking, I would want to write about the way he intimates a bass line, keeping a place for where it should be without it being quite there. The same goes for melody which is fractured across the soundscape.

H. and I, watching him, were awed. He is so restained with the tempo, I think to myself. Until one of the last songs, which really pumps. Back to H.’s to listen to both albums again. ‘He’s like Rimbaud’ I said, amazed by his age and reading the liner notes on the album over and again. ‘It’s all there, complete, intact … How is it possible?’

Repetition sits on my office desk unread. I am still on chapter five on the book I have at home, Speak, Memory. I know I’d like to write a post which include my friend’s report of his new neighbour, a woman in a full burkha whose sons he teaches to play cricket. She’s attracted to him, he thinks and keeps tugging the burkha down over her eyebrows. ‘But her eyes …’ he said on the phone, ‘her eyes say everything’.

But that is back in Manchester. It’s already late and tonight I’ll treat myself to sleeping on the wooden floor of my living room. There is Speak, Memory waiting for me. These hours, just before sleep, are when reading becomes most pleasant as the rhythms of the book intermesh with those of the body preparing itself for sleep. To have come through a long day, as this one has been, is like having lived a whole life. The day’s wisdom, life’s wisdom, both are most present just before the end, in the peace of old age or of the hour before sleep, all desires dispersed evenly across the body.

‘He writes as though he lived in the nineteenth century’: I’ve heard this sentence not once but many times of this or that thinker or philosopher. But I have known them, the ones who live in another era, and at one time they were all around me.

Who were they? Monks, hermits, and those who choose to live on the fringes of academia, snatching a few part time hours here and there – although they are well into their fifties -, conversationalists, impassioned intellectuals, scholars of Sanskrit or Hebrew, speakers of a dozen modern European languages and a half-dozen classical ones – belong to another time. They are relics of a civilisation whose time has passed. Above all, they had time, hours to read and think and talk and when they came to our house, it was to spend a full and leisurely day in our company as I imagined people did in the 1940s or 50s.

A household of sadomasochists with an S-and-M dungeon built into their cellar (I saw it – fur lined cuffs and strange machines) would visit to discuss the Philokalia. One would always bring half-size bananas with him. When he visited on his own, after the big row which severed his household from ours, he would work back to back with me, for there were two computers at that time in the lounge. He was a DJ and liked to speak of those who danced in his club: the bears and cubs who, one day, were surprised to find that another friend of ours brought women to the club – women, who hadn’t been seen there in living memory.

That friend, whom we all thought was dying, was still alive to my delight when I saw him at the funeral last year. Why hadn’t he visited in the last years of the house?, I asked him. He had had a heart attack, he said, and needed a bypass operation. But he was bright and happy, and though he walked with sticks he was a healthier man than the one I knew, who had thought death was coming and used to plan his conversion to Orthodoxy and his funeral service. I have photographs of him in a leopard skin top with a monk’s arm around him – that same monk whom I heard from a young lad who stayed with us (the son of a Professor) had tried to abuse him.

That lad, as pleasant as his mother was eccentric, came to live with us after his elderly father died. He had been expelled from school for drinking at lunch time; later, telling me the story of the monk, he drank himself into a coma. I spent a panicked night at his bedside – I who had taken him to a party in sympathy where we drank punch as we would orange juice, cup after cup, while talking of monks and their ways. When I came home later that night, still drunk, I confronted the monk and he denied all charges. Who knows whether he was telling the truth?

Then there was the princess who always visited with a 6 foot crusader’s sword she used to ordain knights of the order of which she was a kind of royalty by dint of marriage. Her busband had died, and she was alone, this middle aged teacher from Yorkshire – an ordinary woman whom we always called the Princess. She delighted in that. There were other itinerant Royals around – princes and princesses of vanished Byzantine kingdoms. One, who had inherited a concrete block manufacturing plant in an African country, only to find it was an elobrate front for a drug smuggling operation, appointed me his imperial pimp. He was looking for a wife, he told me, and we would go out to Latin American clubs in search of candidates.

This immensely fat man, who would only wear tracksuits prepared for him by his staff, was eventually proved to be intersexed, which accounted, perhaps, for his massive and unpleasant misogyny. In search of a legitimate business, he thought of importing Roobush tea from South Africa to England. I told him he was too late, and that the tea was readily available from the shops, but he never believed me. Later, his cousin, co-inheritor of his estate, would try and murder him by cutting the brake cables of his car. But he survived, the visitor to the house and survives still, although his country is in near civil war and one day the doors of his compound will burst open to the revolutionaries.

There were often alcoholics and sometimes drug addicts living in a dry and a drug free house. When they were out, I would fetch beer from the off license and we drink a few guilty glasses of wheatbeer or kriek. Sometimes they would fall off the waggon and speak impassionedly of the great secret vouchsafed to them by drinking or by drugs. What was the secret? I would never know; they never got to it, for all its importance. One of the drunks, a burly rig-worker turned student, was, I was warned, wrestling with his sexuality. ‘Be careful, he’ll rape you’, said David. But I felt responsible for him and upon learning he’d gone back to drinking as I returned from holiday, I went to search for him in the bars, finding an appalling booze-soaked man picking fights until calmed by a pretty and patient girl. We asked him to leave. A few days passed. Every morning he would come down, red faced, booze-ridden, and go out for more drink. We feared violence (he was a tough man) but eventually he left. What became of him? He retrained as a teacher and I thought of him in his native Glasgow when I saw the film My Name is Joe.

One summer, a melancholy Texan came to join us in the house. Depressed, he took occupancy of one of the vast, deep armchairs in the lounge and watched American teen shows all day, a three-litre bottle of Coke by his side. He would eat only chicken, and we would make to make sure there was a whole one there for each evening meal. How we tired of him! The lounge became a dead zone, the life drained from it by his melancholy. We remembered how happy he seemed when he first came to England to study: what had happened? He was another ex-boozer, and though he stayed off the drink, was prone like other drinkers I knew, to great changes of mood.

For a long time, we hardly saw R., who lived in the self-contained flat in the attic. We made it a house rule never to knock on one another’s doors. There were phones in most rooms, each with a private line, and so we would phone one another. ‘Fancy a cup of tea?’ But R., severely melancholy, would only rise in the evening, working all night. Sometimes, he would go outside for a smoke and interrupt the burglars who would come to peer through our windows. I would hear hordes of burglars running through our garden, which they used as a run through.

Still, there were happier times with R. We formed, he and I, a secret society called the Friends of the Kitchen. We would meet so I could watch him smoke in the old stables in the garden. We’d look back at the house over the long grass we’d let grow so we could enjoy its flowering. R. knew an immense amount about flora and fauna. We’d sit outside, summer or winter, and sometimes venture out to our favourite cafes. Often we’d remember his arrival at the house, a bearded vegan hippy featured on a German documentary as a saver of turtles on a Greek island, and how he was transformed into a businessman who wore crushed red velvet trousers. For a while the pair of us became dandies, encouraged by my then girlfriend who like to make us up.

But all this belongs to the past. I was unemployed then; vast days opened before me. I had no money and so I took up residence, as did many others, in a house of retirees and the unemployed who lived in another century. Often, it was madness. But the years passed pleasantly until I left that city for this one, moving further north. When David died, we, his tenants and vistors, were scattered. He was the centre of that world and we orbited around him like the moons of Jupiter. We are scattered now and for all of us, I think, it seems like a long dream, those years we spent in another century, where talk was always of God and of services, where famous composers would ring daily for advice and David would compose vast fantasy novels no one would publish.

The 1^st June. I had promised myself that today I would begin to work again – to give evenings and weekends back to the effort to make a book, or at least a few essays. But what direction to take? There are, it is true, essays I’ve been asked to write, but I never wanted to make the mistake of scattering them into the wind. There must be a common theme, an underlying movement that would allow them to be grouped together one day, to come together into a book, or at least the draft of one.

I remember the notes I took a few weeks back in my reporter’s notebook. I said to W., who was there (it was a conference), ‘I’m onto something’; if I’ve never reread what I wrote then I think it is out of shame for the themes to which I am drawn. I would like, you see, to be drawn to other themes, to the pressing political questions of the day, or even to those philosophical ones in whose space they open. I feel trapped in the closed circle of my interests. Looking out of the window (it is before dawn, still dark) I can see myself and the lit box of this room just as, as Eco complained once, the novelist is trapped in his memory, his personal experience.

But what does Eco know? I am supposed to stop reading novels today, this 1st June, and return to philosophy. Ambitions for the summer: to become conversant with Bergson, and in particular Matter and Memory – not just to read it, but to know it through and through, to let it permeate my body so I can recall it without effort. This is always the test. Then there is Spinoza, whom W. is reading. And shouldn’t I read Benjamin, too? R.M. reminded me that I had said I would.

Then, the broader project of learning to write about music – to write, but to teach it, too. Next academic year, I tell myself, I will really make an effort. Students, when allowed, write on music and science fiction; v’ry well, I will learn to teach philosophy through both. Then, still more, the project of becoming completely conversant with Deleuze. But I remember how many books I have read over the last year which still require substantial notetaking lest they die completely to my memory. This is wearying.

No surprise, then, that novels are much more attractive. I’m tired of philosophy of reading and writing philosophy. Tired of the perpetual catch-up, the oceanic sense of knowing nothing and of being the avatar of a kind of thinking with which I am not keen to identify myself not because I disagree with it, but because it belongs to a time and a milieu when infinite nuance and subtlety were allowed and even indulged. Who am I to insist on this or that reading of X., distinguishing it from that proffered by Y.? Whence our ‘philosophy dogma’, W. and I, which means in my case the attempt to write as clearly and as simply as Flusser. But then, as I remind W., Flusser had a great deal to say.

How to find an idiom in which to write limpidly and profoundly? The second book, it is true, is an advance on the first, just as this blog is an advance on what I wrote at the previous one. Year upon year something is gained, if only a little. When I allowed myself to write prose passages no longer those of commentary in the first book, the effect was strained and pretentious. In the second, though I wearied of the book as I came near the end, it was less strained and less pretentious. All the same, neither book is a book, that must be remembered. Neither is even a beginning, but a kind of toiling before the beginning. Simply an attempt to write and to sustain a writing project from beginning to end. That was enough in those books, even as it means neither is a book.

Is it patience I lack? I think so. That and a too-great desire to write, to write anything, even this (how ridiculous!) Dawn. I couldn’t sleep, you see. Now my face vanishes from the window. What do I see? A white sky, daylight without depth. The world divided from me by the windowpane. It’s the 1^st June, I remind myself, and time to begin work again. But my attention slackens, falling from writing. I read a few pages from Speak, Memory in bed and then remember the first thirty pages of Handke’s Repetition, which I began to read yesterday. Which prose do I prefer? Which is closer to me even as it seems farther – close and distant at once? Which one carries speech forward in me?

I had wanted to read books about memory ever since, last summer, I reread Rose’s Love’s Work. As though it were possible, remembering, to fold out a life, to explicate it, opening beyond the closed circle of interiority. Yes, to open that closed space beyond the particularities of a personal life. What does this mean?, I ask myself lazily. Why this perpetual desire to evacuate the self? I will not be able to answer this question or even to ask it, really to ask it, except in a prose that could not be paraphrased: an absolute idiom, collapsed into itself as a star collapses into a black hole. Where each word counts, each sentence, but only as they become something like echo chambers, letting speak the weakness that any firm and decided speech would betray.

It becomes clearer to me that such a writing cannot be made from the abstractions to which I tend, but must be embedded in detail, in the concreteness of detail. It is Handke who seems to give me an indication of such prose, and not Nabokov. As I read Repetition, I remember Bresson’s A Man Escaped, a film I have not seen for twelve years. Watching it with great attention (I had heard the director’s name, but only came across this film by chance on the television I had in my bedroom that dreadful year) I wondered at its modesty. I thought: v’ry little happens, but it is as though ev’rything happens, a great deal. We know little about the prisoner, but that little is enough as, for a time (the interval of the film) he becomes the cipher for something – but for what? For the ingenuity of a human life. For its patience, its suffering, its resistance. Today I think to myself: the film was made of details and no lofty talk. The well off characters of Bergman films seem so indulgent by comparison, always searching for drama. And then: Bergman is a theatrical director, a man of the theatre. He should not have had the temerity to criticise Tarkovsky.

But these are idle and intemperate thoughts. As if, today, there could be a choice between this or that auteur director! Think of Handke instead, I tell myself. And think of that curious fact about Auster: he allows himself to write clichés, stock expressions, to get the writing going. And it does go, making itself out of details and weaving a plot from itself. That it goes at all is marvellous.

This morning (it is 5 o’clock) I remind myself the first entries on this blog were about the narrative voice. That was eighteen months ago. Writing the last book on this topic and others, I tell myself, it is as if I had experienced that voice for the first time. As I finish this inconsequential post which I will have forgotten by 7 o’ clock I remember those friends who died over the previous years and the way we, their friends, have been scattered by their deaths. There is nothing to bind us. There are memories, yes, but no longer that central, radiating point from which light and warmth travelled in all directions. Each of us, as former friends, has been cast into the darkness, travelling a long way from our orbits like those probes (Voyagers 1 and 2) which have disappeared from the solar system.

Speak, memory. Remember what happened again even as the earth turns into morning and it will be time to go to work. Remember but let this memory appear against the darkness of that great forgetting which sets each of us on a course of our own. Only a simple prose, stuffed with details, made of them, will do. Through such details reported in a simple prose, the shame of living a personal life, closed upon itself, will be redeemed and a book will explicate itself beneath the pallid sky.

Nabokov:

Happy forgetting that allows memories, personal memories to evaporate! How I would like to replace all my life with the streaming of words!

Morning again and I am listening to Mark Kozelek’s What’s Next to the Moon as custom dictates (it is a morning album just as The Complete Brass Monkey, to which I was listening before is an evening one). Yes, morning, but it was difficult to sleep and I wake tired, drained and with an ache in my stomach. But one thing makes me want to write (but my prose is already disappointing): last night, insomniac, I began Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and in a couple of hours had read nearly a hundred pages.

How I would like, now, the sails of my prose to fill with that wind which billows through his! I am two fifths of my way through his book and already I fear reaching the end; I am in suspense just as the narrative is suspended in the Russia before the Revolution (is the word this suspense: interregnum). I know terrible times are afoot for the Nabokov family and no doubt they deserve to lose their wealth but for a time, they are happily prosperous. Happy, yes – but Nabokov is narrating their tale from another time, from America, much later.

But I do not want to write about Nabokov now, let alone begin a new category called ‘Nabokov’. This is going to be a lengthy love affair, I think – there are many books to read – and I will need to see what happens to the books in my memory. What will happen to them? Don’t write on a book for sixth months – that’s the new rule, which I have already broken with respect to Leiris’s Manhood.

Piles or ricecakes, some solo, cylinders of Oat and Rice Cakes (it says on the label) some twinned (one cylinder bound to another with yellow tape) and discounted (only £1.25): they are plain Rice Cakes. In the other corner of the room, 29p fizzy water bottles from Tescos. A half drunk bottle of Marks and Spencer’s wine on the table beside me (£3.49) … This morning the lounge seems rather wretched as though a battle had been fought and this were the aftermath.

Why was it I wanted to write? Perhaps to mark a place for the post on Bernhard’s A Child I’ve written, which Typepad will not publish without peculiar paragraph breaks whenever I use the word ‘every’ or ‘Salzburg’ (I can’t erase them, even when I play with the html). But no – that’s not the reason for writing. I dreamt, but the content of what I dreamt does not matter so much as the prose with which they were bound up. Yes, strands of prose entwined themselves in whatever it was I dreamt about and I wanted to attest to them here. Alas, I’ve failed and what I’ve writtten today is only an attempt to mark a place where writing, real writing could have begun.

To keep place – this is already a reason for blogging. To press the ‘save’ button and publish these words onto the internet, subjecting them to that great detour which takes them out of my mediocre morning and into something like the world. I will forget them as soon as I write them, it is true, but it allows me to think: I could have begun today that book which would have allowed everything to have been said. Such is my version of Roubaud’s Project and these words a poor imitation of the book called Destruction.

In truth, this week, where I have written a great deal, is an in-between time (I would like to use the word interregnum, but I am not sure if it is the right one; there is no dictionary here and my dial up connection is too slow to search for an online dictionary and then for this word): there was work to be done (the book, now finished), and there will be more work to be done (a revision of the book, once it has been proofread, but more importantly, the papers which will have to delivered at the end of the long summer). I have a sense of urgency – now is a time without project, in which a smaller writing is allowed. Write a great deal, I say to myself, mark this interregnum in the passing of days just as, when a child, you would be asked to write a few words of your ‘news’ (this weekend, I …)

A new project will begin, no doubt. But I have a sense of a new apocalypse – a devastation of the world – after which the calm sentences I have set down here will seem as full of a lost security and well-being as the pre-Revolutionary interregnum Nabokov recounts.

I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch were my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the celing. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

I can smell the toast from next door; it is a pleasant smell. But this afternoon, I had four discounted wraps from boots, priced 75p each. That should have been enough; and I’ve just drank two glasses of wine, finishing off the bottle I opened last night. Why did I drink? To repeat last night’s magic. Last night – already it seems impossible. Why? Because it was possible to write anything, everything. Of course it couldn’t last; I knew I had to rise early this morning, to go to the office – there’s work to be done, a great deal of work. A report to write; examining to finish. Of course, when I got to the office, I couldn’t begin. Nothing could begin; I was stalled in the afternoon; I went to the gym and managed only 25 minutes. It was lamentable.

Lyotard: ‘And for each connection, a divine name, for each cry, intensity and multiplication brought about by experiences both expected and unexpected, a little god a little goddess, which has the appearance of being useless when one looks at it with globulous, sad, platonic eyes, which in fact is of no use, but which is a name for the passage of emotions’ (Libidinal Economy). Is there a god of boredom, of the everyday? Ah, but there is no intensity, but only its dispersal – there is nothing to be marked which is why I write posts like this. To mark – what? To stamp the everyday with the mark of time. To draw the dispersal of time back into the calendar.

There is no god, pagan or Christian, of the non-leap, of the fall from the tightrope. Recall Zarathustra: the tightrope walker falls because a buffoon leaps over him. Yes, the passage across the rope to the overman is not completed. The tightrope walker has a double, the one who leaps, who causes him to tumble. He falls and dies; Zarathustra drags his dead body with him. The gravediggers laugh at him. Eventually, having left the city, he leaves the body in a hollowed out tree. What of the buffoon? He will return as Zarathustra’s doubles – there are many of them, parodying his way of speaking, of prophesying. He returns from the mountain at the end of Book 2 (or is it Book 3?) when a child shows him in a mirror that his teachings are being distorted. He must return because a buffoon might leap over him.

Denton Welch, the short story writer who died marvelously young, leaving us with his drawings and his exquisite fictions (what writer has written more vividly of food – but I am thinking of toast again), writes in a tale in which, I know, he pictured himself as protagonist, a young woman trips over. What does she see? The whole sky, spread above her. Later she meets a young woodcutter. The other great moment of a fall comes in  Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, when the postman falls in the house of the protagonist. Oh the postman! He is a holy fool, familiar from Dostoevsky, but now reborn on one of the little islands, I think, which lie around Stockholm. A postma- fool, who falls – tumbles – on the wooden floor. And laughs in a way that suggests he knew he would fall. Yes, he knew, as he knows everything in Tarkovsky’s film.

A third fall. Bataille’s Blue of Noon. The narrator tumbles; it’s night, and -. Well, that’s enough. A great deal has happened. To fall, to become horizontal – it’s similar to the way in which Tarkovsky’s protagonists are allowed to become muddy. Mud does not concern them. They are far beyond notions of cleaniness and dirtiness by the time we have met them. Water pours from their ceilings; they are already Outside. To watch one of his films is to join them, yes – the evening parts, the television screen parts, the movie film is like an opening sea. Now you go between the shores, and all because a character has fallen, is caked in mud.

Patriot Games is on television. It is the opposite of everything I would like to think about. Harrison Ford is in bed, injured; there is his wife, his child. Outside, late, it is growing dark. I should draw the curtains on my unlovely garden. How is it I feel stranded in life, and not gathered up into a larger movement? Because a buffoon has leapt over me and I am falling. Which is a way of saying that I have fallen from writing, and writing lies impossibly far above me.

Nearly midnight. I’ve opened a bottle of wine from Marks and Spencers. How could I resist? There were three bottles lined up on the shelf; now there are two. I am thinking of cheese, but, knowing myself too well, I do not keep any food in the flat. Today I went to the gym, but couldn’t manage more than half an hour; I do not deserve a square meal.

Freedom! What it is, even on a Friday night, to write whatever I like! Where will the blind desire to write lead me? How many times the same situation and the same question? A question asked by writing, in writing. I know I’d like to write on the figure of the golem, following some reflections at Charlotte Street a while back, but my notes are in the office. I deliberately stripped my flat of books; there’s only a dozen or so here, kept so R.M. can see at one glance what I bought on my trip to America. They are in the other room, one I rarely use. It is there, open, barely filled, empty as though it were thinking for me, in my place. This room is where everything happens when I am alone. But what happens?

I wonder to myself: what if I were to attempt to uncover the latent structure of my world? What would I uncover? And my first response: rooms, a succession of rooms where writing was succesful or unsuccesful. But why is my memory as though snagged so it is always in a room I think of myself? If I had it to hand, I would reread Flusser’s beautiful essay on architecture, on a house which did not enclose a place but opened it, offered it to the air. I think of Rilke’s Open, too and even as I write the word Rilke, I feel both calmer and as though an animal were watching me.

In Monterey, we sat in the morning sun, my sister, her husband and I, and discussed what animals they were to get when they returned to London. A puppy? A kitten and a puppy? Or – best of all – a kitten, a puppy, a pony and a parrot? Drew said I could keep the parrot, and I thought to myself: I would rather not have an animal at all. To have the eyes of an animal on you is to be interpellated, called, such that writing is difficult. Yes, to write with an animal near is to do so as an ‘I’, as an intact and self-present ‘I’, sure of itself as one who is responsible for animals, who keeps them, tends to them, in that space where he is master.

A second glass of wine. Now I think to myself: you were a reader of speculative fiction, of science and fiction and science fact – what happened? You started this blog to broaden your field of interests, to write on what you had not written, but what did you find? A narrowing – there was an intensity of focus, it is true, but on themes which were already entrenched. Ballard writes his imagination were as though hardwired at age 15; he had survived a prisoner of war camp, of course, where he had witnessed the weaknesses of his parents. His father, he recalls, although physically affectionate, was one to whom Ballard felt less close after the war. He had seen too much weakness! The film-set world of old Shanghai fell apart rapidly.

‘All you can do is cling to your own obsessions – all of them, to the end. Be honest with them; identify them. Construct your own personal mythology out of them and follow that mythology; follow those obsessions like stepping stones in front of a sleepwalker’. That was Ballard. One of the great idiocies of Eco was to claim the novelist is trapped in her memories and her psyche. Why didn’t he understand how our world, for each of us, is full of a latent content which outstrips anything personal? My gratitude to Ballard is immense; I read him at an early age and immediately loved his work. I will not speak of it today, except to note that it attests to the infinite opening of the world to each of us, of a private pathology which breaks all our horizons. It is the key to blogging, do you understand that?

I listen to A Bed of Roses by Lal Waterson and Oliver Knight as I type. I am waiting for ‘The Last Days of Disco’ to start and turning through Ballard’s Quotes. ‘Inner Space: that’s the name to which Ballard linked his fictions in the 60s – as opposed, of course, to outer space. ‘My characters are almost all engaged in mythologising themselves and in then exploding that mythology to the furthest end, whatever the price’. To explode one’s mythology – but what does that mean?

Understand that The Kindness of Women was where I stopped reading Ballard. This book made me shudder. I saw him speak around that time and that ended forever my desire to meet authors. I asked him to sign my copy of one of his books, ‘TIME ZONE’ in capital letters, remembering what he wrote of deep time and archaeopsychic time – of private time systems and synthetic psychologies, of space time and the halfworlds which can be glimpsed in the paintings of the mad.

(I am thinking of the piece of sheep’s cheese I left in the fridge in the apartment in San Francisco. The Fall are performing ‘Blindness’ on Jools Holland. It’s as fine as ‘Sister Ray’. Mark E. Smith is wearing one glove. His wife is beautiful, with the beauty of R.M. whom, as I type, is attending a military ball in London.)

Half past midnight. Today, exercising in the gym, a collection of images occurred to me I did not want to lose: 1) the idea of a turn, or of taking a turn which would turn me over to what is normally missed, 2) the old cliche of the play of nearness and distance, that the near is the farthest etc. This image: a turn which would bring me close to what blazes in the present instant. As though, in that instant, the universe itself was fire.

‘Religions emerge too early in human evolution  – they set up symbols that people took literally, and they’re as dead as a line of totem poles. Religions should have come later, when the human race begins to near its end’. Ballard again. But I am thinking of what Holderlin knew: the sky is empty, the gods flown, and what remains is the time between the god’s absence and their return. Yes, their return, for there are old gods and there are young gods …

I woke just now after uneasy dreams, but I didn’t find myself transformed into a giant insect. Of Neighbours, which I haven’t watched for many years. I turned on the television and there was … Neighbours (Susan has cut her hair – she looks severe). Then R.M. rang and spoke to me of Darcey Bussell. The best CD to put on to ease you into the day is Mark Kozelek’s What’s Next to the Moon?; it’s playing now, but I am much too late for the day. Why so late? Because I woke at 3.00 AM and read Leiris’s Manhood for several hours. I thought to myself: I wonder if this is how Blanchot woke to read the books he had under review?

Lightness now the book is done. Confession: last night (this morning), before I read Leiris, I read my first book. Why? Sudden horror, after reading an online version of James Williams’s Lyotard and the Political that it (my book) was all ripped off Lyotard. What does it matter? But the second book is off with the publisher, and that is what is important. Lightness, as I say. Oh there’s plenty to do; I am busy, with piles of administration, reports to write and so on. But beyond that … I’ve ordered two bottles of Tequila. I have a new stack of books to read (the new biography of Kierkegaard arrived yesterday); the gym beckons.

Yesterday, walking in to work, I remembered my plan to write 50 short essays on Smog. I’d seen, by chance, 50 Short Films on Glenn Gould on my first few days in San Francisco, as I finished the book in front of the television. But how would I begin? I put this to R., one of my musical friends. ‘I don’t have any musical knowledge’, I told him, and said I would like at least to know the names of some chords, or what a vamp was (I was thinking of Reynolds’ book on the Smiths). He reassured me, and I dreamed again of an unpublished book called Bill Callahan and the Everyday, in the style of some of the posts here and here.

I had two strong dreams last night. I woke and jotted down some notes in my new Moleskine reporter’s notebook as I imagined Michel Leiris would have done. Firstly, remembering, no doubt, my sister’s comments on having few friends from her childhood who’d followed her through life, I dreamt of the friend who brought with him all of the past. The friend who was your past, such that when you came close to him it was your own past you approached, only now your past had become foreign to you, unfamiliar, the steady burning of a curtain of flame.

Secondly, a dream which was more like a dream of a dream, or a dream which could only be dreamt by one who was insomniac (a waking dream, a half-awake dream): I dreamt of the nakedness of time passing, all of time and feeling a dull fear at its passing. I was old, I thought, and by that I meant: aging is fearful because everything in the world remains the same and meanwhile time passes. Everything remains the same, but time is rushing inside me. And I thought: insomnia is what presses me up against the passing of all of time. But then: it was time pressing up against me. Time spoke. Time murmured through me.

The second dream was an indication of my philosophical intentions this summer: to grasp Deleuze’s general account of time, of being, in contradistinction to that of phenomenology. I told W. I understood it all in outline. ‘Explain then’, he said, mercilessly, ‘tell me about Spinoza’. He’s teaching a course on Spinoza, he told me, 12 weeks long. I had no such intention and I was never any good at explaining anything when put on the spot. But that is this summer’s project.

W. and I are planning our Dogma Philosophy papers for September.  Will it be a fiasco? Of course. What were the rules of Dogma again? I’ve forgotten. But Badiou has beaten us to it. The magnificent preface to the English version of Ethics … it’s like drinking a pure draft of water. Drinking from the highest spring, the head of all waters. Suspicion: that this is itself an effect. That’s it too late to drink from such a spring. Annoyance: why did Derrida never write on Being and Event? Why the book Archive Theory instead of a book on Badiou. But isn’t there an unspoken code among the French not to write a book on anyone else until they die? Lacoue-Labarthe’s haste in producing a book on Blanchot in the wake of his death …Besides, I have it from A. who has it from Paris, from X., that ‘Faith and Knowledge’ was addressed to Steigler, so presumably there would be a way of reading Paper Machine or some other book … Stop! This is the opposite of Dogma Philosophy (or is it Philosophy Dogma?).

Empty loquacity. How nice to write, as Moominpappa would say (a post on the use of the word, nice, as it is found in the translations of the Moomintroll books. Passages on the use of incidental detail in Jansson’s books, for example, ‘mermaids followed us. We fed them oatmeal’ as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world to encounter mermaids and that it is the most obvious thing in the world to feed them oatmeal). Today, what will happen today? I have to write a report, fairly lengthy. What else? Plenty of things. But a gentle light is falling everywhere, it is beneficient. All is favourable; I slept and now I’m awake. What’s Next to the Moon? is finished and now it’s time to go out into the world.

I am now in the state of Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, or, as I prefer to think of it, the narrator of Blanchot’s When the Time Comes. What time is it? When is it? Night or day? This year or last year? I dreamt on the train coming north that the book was unfinished, but it is finished and sent, though, going over the manuscript on the plane, I found more mistakes.

I arrived home at five, spread my bed clothes in front on the TV and let Richard and Judy play above my head. How did I fall asleep for the Simpsons? – but I did. I’ve piled up the books I bought on my trip beside my makeshift bed. The Borch-Jacobsen looks good; Corngold’s The Necessity of Form.

On the train, I reread Kafka’s ‘The Judgement’ and ‘The Stoker’ and then put the book, hearing within me sentences similar to those of Kafka spinning themselves from nothing. How nice it is a book can live in this way! Merleau-Ponty remarks on exactly this phenomenon: to read a novel is to imagine one could write it. Then you see what a novelist must have: the strength not just to begin but to venture at once into the middle of the narrative. How crowded with details Kafka’s narratives are! I thought to myself: he was a great observer of the world. The details are exquisite; everything is there. From where did that strength come? From what necessity?

Thinking about this, I remember Thomas M. Disch’s comments in his history of science fiction on Philip K. Dick. He was a guru, Disch notes, keen to arm wrestle his interlocutors into submission on the issue of the theophany he experienced in 1974. He craved attention, Disch notes, going from one 20 year old girl to another. Perhaps. But there are the books, too. The books written each one of them in a week or no more than a fortnight, which unfolded very rapidly from themselves. Each time a world was born; true, the worlds overlap, but what impresses is the necessity of each birth. His is not the prolix talent which creates first this world and then that, but that ranks the world he creates according to how close they would be to the real world.

That is the lesson of the novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in Dick’s The Man in the High Castle: it speaks the truth; it bears on what really happened. Thus Dick’s novel does not lay before us an alternate history but a false one. Dick is always looking for something, but what? The power to fabulate this world, to write of what is simple and close. The truest hero of Dick’s novel (but which novel does this come from? I’ve not read one for more than a decade?): the tyre-regroover, the one who works against entropy to stabilise and order.

The ‘real world’: how naive this sounds? Isn’t it by attempting to reach through the veil of fiction to the real world that Dick sought to leap from his books into the world, our world? He writes to escape writing; fiction is only a means, for him, of coming to the truth. Why, then, not put down the pen altogether? Why another tab of speed and the daily retreat to his writing shed? Dick writes a great deal; four novels a year and dozens of stories. He writes, but why does he write? To find himself on the shore that lies beyond writing. Meanwhile, there are the works in which dark-haired girls and tyre-regroovers multiply themselves …

‘What day is it?’ I asked R.M. on the phone. ‘It’s Wednesday’, she says, en route to the ballet. ‘I thought it was morning’, I tell her, and it’s true, I feel young as I always do in the morning. But I should be feeling old instead – doubly old, having missed a night’s sleep.

Now the summer is spreading out before me. No major projects, a paper here and there, that’s all. For the first time in sixth months, I will have time to write here, but on what will I write? It’s a little too late to write on cruelty, following Jodi’s example at I Cite. And there is the frustration that this blog is not private enough, not secret enough, but this is foolishness itself, for a blog must be public, writing must find its audience and to write is to let that of which one writes to be born anew.

What I’ve written here over the last months appals me. I am reminded of what Lacoue-Labarthe says somewhere about the originary role of acting. You begin with the mask; you are always an actor, especially and always when you write (but this is my extrapolation …) With whose voice do I write? Whose style is alive in mine? I would hope to find a style which is neutral, from which speaks the surprise that there is meaning, sense, that there is language. Yes, that’s what I would like to find, and it is against that which I measure the weakness of what I have written.

But is this, too, not a pose? The desire, like that of Dick to step from a fictional world into the real one? Staggering jet-lagged about the flat, I wonder whether I come close to the condition of the narrator in When the Time Comes (how ridiculous …): close to that point where fiction frays and what approaches is not real, if this would mean the world of ordinary things and ordinary people, but an immediacy which burns up everything but itself. As though all our experiences assembled themselves in that flaming, amidst it, and we live like salamanders close to a truth we cannot grasp.