Lars Iyer's Blog

The flat. The living room, the phone cord unplugged. Do you know what would happen if I plugged it in?, the poet says. I'll get phonecalls, dozens of them! I'll get phone assaults from my friend the drunk.

He thought of him the other day, when he was walking past the tennis courts. A leather-jacketted drunk with a six pack in a plastic bag was wandering up and down the courts, asking for a light. Outside the courts, on the other side of a chain-link fence, children on BMXs laugh at the drunk. That's your dad, that is!, says one to the other. The children shout at the drunk, and the drunk shouts at the Indians playing tennis. Great shot!, he says. Love-thirty, he says. Say hello to your dad, says one of the kids.

It's began to rain. The Indians stop playing, and the drunk follows them out of the tennis court, and I see him close up. He's young, though his face is ruddy and hard. He looks happy, more than happy. Beatific, muttering to himself and smiling. Alright, mate, he says to me. Have you got a light? No light, I tell him, and he walks away, then turns and gives me the kind of wave you might get from passing royalty. He's king of the afternoon, I thought to myself, and we – the Indians, the kids on their bikes – are his subjects.

That's when I remembered my friend the drunk, the poet says. He's king of the night, king of the late night, holed up in his flat in another part of the city, already drunk. Drunk and getting ready to go out to make trouble. To stagger out of his door, full of aggression, and steer himself up to the drug dealers of Hulme and Moss Side. He's a romantic, my friend the drunk, the poet says. He sees himself as a beat poet, as a kind of seer.

A few years ago, I moved into a dry house – there was no alcohol there, no drugs. We all had our troubles, the poet says. I had mine, though it's none of your business. I took the room of the guy who became my friend the drunk, which was still full of his things: the plays he'd tried to write. A kind of journal he kept. His books on new age religions – on shamans and astral projection and the like. His Kerouac and Ginsberg. His Vonnegut and Heller. He'd been evicted, because he'd started drinking again, my friend the drunk.

It was a dry house, a calm house. We were there to put our lives together again in peace. There to slump in the great sofas, and sit out in the back in the old stable, smoking our cigarettes by the beheaded statue of an old saint.

That's where I'd sit with my friend the drunk a year later, when he moved back in, hoping, ever hopeful, to keep off the booze. I gave him his old room back and moved to another, vacated because another tenant – another Scot, like my friend the drunk, a worker on the oil rigs – had started drinking again and was threatening to rape me.

My friend the drunk arrived with his mess of possessions. He had joined the Hare Krishnas recently, and been expelled. He still had his saffron robe. He had been expelled from the Buddhists, too, but had kept a collection of Buddhist tracts and some Japanese art prints. Two big bin bags of dirty clothes. Beanies. Hippy gear. A box of LPs. A broken turntable. He'd pawned his hi-fi, he said.

He wanted to get back to his writing, he said, my friend the drunk. He wanted some time to think, some peace. He hadn't had much peace, of late. What had happened? I knew from others he'd been arrested several times. The police had come to our door more than once, my friend the drunk having giving them our address as his permanent residence. He'd been bothering people in a bar. He'd been driving under the influence. The police would take him into their cells for the night, and release him blinking into the morning.

He used to phone us now and again, my friend the drunk, filling the answering machine with his sing-song. We ignored him. He drawled. He accused us of things. He thanked us. He asked whether we were his friends. He said we were his friends, and that he knew he could count on us. He drawled. His voice filled the house. Sometimes he would appear, at the back door rather than the front, banging on the window, and my landlord would give him a couple of twenty pound notes from the rent I'd just paid him, and my friend the drunk would stumble out again into the sun.

*

Once, a long time ago, my friend had been an environmentalist. He'd dropped out of university and went to defend the hatching places of turtles on a Greek beach. There was a documentary made about him in the Netherlands. Later, when he'd moved back in, we watched it together, my friend as a young man with a beard, a bearded Adonis, speaking with great earnestness about the threat of tourism to the Greek ecosystem.

It was Germans, he told me. The great fat Germans with their beachtowels. The newly hatched turtles couldn't move for Germans and for beachtowels. How could they find their way to the sea? And sometimes the Germans sat on the turtle eggs that lay buried in the sand. What a fate for the young sea turtle, my friend said, to be squashed by a great fat fucking German!

So he moved back in, with his pile of stuff. My landlord gave me two twenty pound notes: take him out, he said to me. So we went out to the Chinese restaurant and ate for the first time in twenty years. He ate all the meat on the menu! And my friend told me how he'd decided to become a yuppie, to shave off his beard and buy a suit. And that's what he did: he bought a suit and shaved; he was handsome, he didn't look like a drunk; his olive skin was clear and unlined. Older than me, he looked younger, bright and strong and handsome.

Months passed. He ran a computing business from one of the rooms in the cellar, and we played network Quake there on the weekend, chasing each other's avatars through gloomy corridors. We downloaded Stan Ridgeway and Wall of Voodoo songs and sang along. We downloaded Ghost Riders in the Sky and Islands in the Stream, and sang along to them, too. We watched the X-Files and the WWF. We formed a society called Friends of the Kitchen. We sat out by the headless saint and chatted about life.

Months passed. My friend took the upstairs flat, and moved his office up there. But now he was away from us, away from the household who would always eat together every evening. He began to drink, smuggling bottles of wine into the house. He no longer appeared at meals. Soon, he hardly came down at all during daytime.

You could hear him moving about upstairs. You could ring him, on the internal phone. He didn't want to speak, he said. He was busy. He would only come downstairs at night, when everyone was asleep. At 3 AM or 4 AM, he'd sit out in the outhouse to have a smoke. So he was evicted, and took his possessions downstairs in boxes, loading them up into a van.

The police visits began again. He had been caught drink driving. They stopped the car and he came after them with a golf club. He was going out to murder someone, he me later. It was lucky he'd been arrested. He was full of murderous rage.

He was sent down for a year. He staggered; they held him. They led him down from the courts. They drove him off first to Strangeways, and then to a low security prison. He asked us to send him a package every month. He wanted stacks of FHMs, he said. They were a prison currency, he said.

Later, he told me he passed his time smoking dope in his cell. They all did. He was tough. He could look after himself. No one bothered him. The days passed, almost exactly alike. And then, six months on, he was let out.

Fresh air! He exclaimed, when I ran into him on the street. There's nothing like it! He seemed happy. He had great plans. He'd revive his business, he said. Revamp it. He'd expand into new areas. He was going to throw himself into work.

For the third and final time, he was allowed to move back into the house, although not into the flat or the cellar. He was to stay in a single room, which was to be his bedroom and his office. And we preferred, we said, if he joined us for dinner. So in he moved again, bringing his things up the stairs. His books. His records, though he still had no hi-fi. His clothes.

He painted the walls of the room a disgusting purple, and pinned up pornographic pictures of Czech models. He set up what was left of his computers in his new room, though he left them turned off. He was sick of working, he says. He went on benefits like the rest of us, and he and I would go out walking along the river. 

*

In those days, which I remember as an eternal summer, the last of the good times, we used to be visited by a bedraggled cat, whose owners had bought a dog. Henry – that's what we called him - used to sun himself in our garden, rolling fully stretched in the dust. 

His long white fur was always matted and dirty. His nose, too, was flecked with dirt. There was dirt round his eyes and his ears were torn ragged from a hundred fights. You could feel his spine when you stroked his back. Great tufts of white fur sprouted irregularly from his tail. He was sticky, too – never quite clean, although sometimes my friend would comb out all the dirt from his coat. Then Henry would stand purring in his glory; he was handsome again, proud and young. He stood up and arched his combed-out tail, a ragged plume.

Henry was my friend's cat, really; or my friend was Henry's man. Cat and man recognised an exile in one another. Both were loners, really – they had their own problems – but for a time they enjoyed the luck of a house that welcomed them. Henry was old, and these were his last months.

I wasn't there when my friend discovered Henry's body stretched out on the kitchen floor, and I wasn't around when he started drinking again. By the time I'd returned – I was visiting my family in the South – he moved out for the last time. He'd got a flat in the suburbs and lay drunk on the sofa all day, drinking.

At night, he would head towards Hulme and Moss Side, looking for trouble. He smashed a troublemaker's face in with a bicycle U-lock, and won the respect of a high up dealers. They smoked crack together in Platt fields at dawn. How do I get out of this life?, the dealer asked him. But he wanted to get into it, said my friend.

He addicted himself to crack deliberately. He was bored, he said. He wanted an experience. Now they would hangout, my friend and his dealer, watching films together in his flat and taking puffs on the crackpipe.

They visited the crack houses of Levenshulme, smoking with the others. He was liked, my friend; he was generous. The Gentleman, they called him. He liked it. He had a street name. It was pretty fucking cool. He'd buy crack for the whole house, and they would watch University Challenge together and he'd get all the answers right.

Prostitutes would sit on his knee, and sometimes he'd go back off with them into the bedroom with a painting by Stubbs on the wall. He was the one who identified it as being by Stubbs. They liked horses, the crack whores, my friend thought. They reminded them of their lost innocence or something. 

*

I've long since moved away, but my friend the drunk still rings me. Write down my exploits, he said, I want it all written down. He intended to write himself, he said. Have I read Trainspotting?, he asked. We spoke about Burroughs; he loved Kerouac and for him Leonard Cohen was the greatest of all drunks. Then he turned to the music he had loved as a child when he lived with his divorced mother. They would listen to Kris Kristofferson and Glenn Campbell. Now when he phones he sometimes holds the phone to the speaker. Not a word except, listen!

The last time he rang, he was very meek. He had no friends left, he said. No one rings him. Instead, he has to ring them, and he knows they don't trust him. We speak of our great mutual friend. She doesn't trust me, he says. It was 11.00; I was tired. You don't want to speak to me anymore, he said. Alright, I'll just go. I said, it's good to speak to you, I'll give you a ring sometime. He said, yeah in six months or something. I put the receiver down and he is still speaking, half-resentful, half-aggressive. And I'll come and see you, he says.

He speaks of the woman in the burkha next door. She has beautiful eyes, he says, but it's not enough. He plays cricket with her sons and sometimes she invites him in. It's not enough, he says, but her eyes are beautiful. Write that down, he says, everyone should know about me. He always asks for that – for his life to be recorded and for me to record it. One day he will write it all down, he says, but in the meantime, I should record it and share it with others.

He speaks about himself, his business. It's always about to fail, but there is always hope. He speaks about golf, and then football in which he knows I have no interest. He speaks about music, and finally, just when I show signs of leaving, he asks me about myself. But he's not interested; he cuts in, he becomes aggressive. You think you know everything, he says, but I'm pretty clever. I may not be as clever as you, but I have a great general knowledge, he says. Then a name I don't recognise. Do you remember that name?, he says. And then, it was from that game of Trivial Pursuits we played, do you remember? The pole vaulter.

I was a legend, he says, and I'm still a legend. Are you going to remember, he says, are you going to write this down?, he says. I'll write it down eventually, he says, like Burroughs, do you remember that line, "Me and the Sailor were working the yard", he says. You should keep a record, he says. Do you remember when we went out to that restaurant when I first moved in, he says, when you made me eat meat? You should write it down, he says, it would make a good story. Someone should write it down, he says, it's worth remembering. You think you're so clever, he says, but you should try and live my life. Go on, write it down. That'll give you something to write, he says.

You wouldn't last a minute inside, he says. X. (the dealer) respects me, and do you know why?, he says, because I'm hard. It goes back to when I was inside, he says, I handled myself. I used to trade cigarettes and FHMs, he says. They respected me, he says, the lads. I used to trade cigarettes with them, he says, they were so stupid. Write it down, he says, you should write about real things, he says. I'll give you something to write about, he says. You wouldn't last a minute in the crackhouses, he says, but they respect me. I talk to crack whores about Stubbs, he says, what do you think of that? Write it down, he says. You should write about real life, he says. I'll tell you about real life, he says.

Did you think crack whores like Stubbs?, he says. She didn't know it was Stubbs, he says, I told her it was Stubbs. She showed me a painting and I said, it's Stubbs, he says, and they were really impressed. They had this painting and they thought it was an original, they thought it was a real Stubbs, "is it worth anything?" they said, he says. So I picked it up and looked it over very carefully and I said, I – think – it's a copy, he says. But they were very impressed, he says. I always buy enough crack to go round, he says. We all smoke it, he says. It's not like you think, he says, actually it's not that addictive, he says. Not like drink, he says.

You should write this down, he says. Real life, he says. Not middle class life like yours, he says. And I'll tell you what, they were so tight in that house, he says. They wouldn't buy proper Coke, only Panda cola. They used to buy Panda cola because it was cheap, he says, it was really funny. I told them to buy real Coke, he says. It's the real thing, I told them, he says. They didn't know how to take it, he says. They're not used to having the piss taken out of them, he says. You couldn't have got away with it, but they thought I was okay. They trusted me, he says. I'm quite hard, he says. You know me, I can handle myself, he says. One day I'll write it all down, he says. Have you read Trainspotting?, he says. Like that, he says. You wouldn't understand it, he says, it's in Scots. I love bagpipes, he says, they make me cry. They remind me of the old country, he says. You never cry, do you?, he says. You don't know anthing about life, he says, real life. It's going on under your nose, he says, and you know nothing about it.

Stubbs, he says. "Me and the Sailor were working the hole", he says. It doesn't give you enough, the burkha, he says, you can only see her eyes, he says. But she has pretty eyes, he says. But it doesn't give you enough, he says, you can't see what she's like, he says. I play cricket with her lads, he says, and she makes me dinner, he says. She likes me, he says, but then I'm a good looking bloke, he says. Always was. Not that you aren't good looking, he says, but I was the good looking one, he says. It's because I'm tall, he says. Women like tall men, he says. Can you hear that?, he says, it's Leonard Cohen, he says. The greatest drunk of them all, he says. Can you hear that?, he says. It's Kris Kristofferson, he says, Sunday Morning Coming Down.

No one trusts me anymore, he says. You don't trust me, do you?, he says. I have been drinking a bit, he says. Business isn't going too well, he says. Haven't worked for months, he says. Been playing golf, though. You have to play golf for business, he says. Anyway, he says, I'll let you get on. I know you don't want to hear from me, he says. You've never rung me. How many times have you rung me? Twice?, he says.

Stubbs, though, he says, I knew you'd like that story. Write it down. I'll write it down one day. I'm reading again, he says, I knew you'd approve, he says. Vonnegut, he says. Have you read him? he says. Hilarious, he says. And I know you don't like Kerouac, but Dharma Bums, it's great that, he says. "Me and the Sailor were working the hole", do you remember that?,  he says. Burroughs, he says. Anyway, I'll leave you to it, I'll let you get on, he says, I can see you want to go. What are you doing? Turn the television on, he says. It's Dylan, he says. He's great, Dylan, he says. Shall I tell you who the new Dylan is?, he says. Shall I tell you?, he says.

You don't know anything, he says. I've got the answers, he says, I've lived, he says. I've seen life, he says. Stubbs, though, funny that, isn't it?, he says. But I won't keep you, I know you've better things to do, he says. You never want to talk to me, he says. No one wants to talk with me, he says. I know I ring too often, he says. Three times a night? Yes, sometimes, but I just want it to be like the old days, he says. Do you remember?, he says. No one has a sense of humour anymore, he says. Witchita Linesman, he says, listen!

Or imagine it this way, the poet says. Imagine reading the biography of a writer – one of those huge biographies they publish nowadays, one of those tombs. The early chapters tell of the early years, telling of struggle and despair, the inability to find a voice, the inability to be published, you want to reassure the one of whom you read. It's going to be olay. Everything will come right.

Later chapters see the first works are published, one after another, with a kind of necessity. And you want to say, be patient; hold something back; your great works lie ahead of you. Your early books are juvenilia, they are perfectly worthless, measure by what is to come, poor indices.

And then the years of triumph. Then the great bridge of the central chapters of the biography, arching up. Having read the first few hundred pages of the book, the account of our author's parents, and his parents' parents, you feel you've earned the right to revel in the reception that greet the masterpieces that stream forth from his pen.

You suffered with him, struggle with him, read of the critical reception of the early works as they came out, and now the masterpieces come that have given him immortality. There would have been no biography without them. He would have been but a minor author, forgotten with all the others.

Read on. Even the years of decline mean nothing to you. Even the marriages and divorces, even the fallings out with old friends are insignificant, for the masterpieces surround him, for it is upon them that his fame will rest. Does he know his own greatness? Somewhere, it knows itself in him. His genius knows itself in everything he's done.

And then, still later, when he had nothing more to say – when he can no longer ascend the plateau of his mornings, the open space beneath the sky where possibilities spread out all around him? Ah, but he has lived his life in one sense. The biography is nearly finished. The story of his final years will take a handful of pages to tell.

So he no longer leaves his house except in slippers: so what? So the glass of water beside his breakfast in his mornings is really a glass of vodka: what does it matter? One part of him is satisfied; in a sense, his life has already been rounded off. What is he but the ghost of his own authorship?

In the mirror, he sees a crumpled verson of that middle aged man posed seriously on the dusk jackets of his five-hundred-page masterworks. Crumpled: but he is the same man; his books will tell you, the assurance of his genius.

He wanders from room to room in the house he earnt from his royalities. He sits in an armchair overlooking his garden. Leaves on the grass. It's autumn, he thinks. Tomorrow, a journalist is coming to photograph his workroom, what irony! For he no longer works, not really. He is a potterer, a ghost.

Seventeen books – isn't that enough? Hasn't he written enough? And now imagine the biography of this life after life, of a writer who's written enough, and who writing refuses. Imagine a biography of the aftermath, of the life in decline – of a writer in involuntary retirement, whom writing has shut out from its garden, and whose workroom is only a place where dust drifts in the afternoon air, and the house that his royalties bought is as much of a tomb as the biography of him whose pages you turn.

Outside, autumn leaves on the grass. Outside, the grass that needs cutting – its last cut before winter. The old writer should rake up his leaves and build a bonfire, or he should ring someone else to do it: he's in retirement, after all. He should pour himself a glass of something and watch someone else at work. But why should he bother?

Then his gaze wanders out over his beech hedge to the fence that separates his neighbour's garden from road. Then it wanders out over where the road must be – he sees the roofs of cars, sees the upper windows of large houses like his. Sees bare branches of great trees, chimney pots, and imagines his gaze leaping street after street, and pressing towards the centre of his city, towards the bars where he used to wander with his writing friends, when he had friends, towards the restaurants in which he would host whole evenings and then to the river where he had strolled with this lover and with that. Where he had spoken inspiredly into the open air, where he had wooed by his genius, where his great reputation ran along ahead of them, he and his companion. And where they had kissed, a whole galaxy of light lighting up the water, the bridges beyond. Life, life!

Outside. He fears it now, he says. Where would he go if he were to step outside? How would he get there? Stay in, instead. Keep inside. After all, they can reach him here, the journalists who phone him for his year end book recommendations, his agent who still secures deals for his back catalogue, his editor who issues volumes of his occasional writings.

Sometimes an academic will write: they organise conferences on his work; students write PhDs. Sometimes enthusiasts, letters passed on by the publisher, who lament the great days when literature was at the centre of culture, when everyone knew our author's name.

But it's still famous enough, his name. It's become an adjective that joins it to a sensibility like Kafkaesque or Ballardian. His name crowns him, but it rides above him. How glorious his reputation, and small and crumpled he has become! Oh, how gloriously it rides, but when a young author who's weasled out his address knocks at his door to meet him, our author knows he's disappointing.

So what should he do, our imaginary writer whose biography we are reading? Imagine him in his workroom, the poet says, where the light falls aslant on his notebook. Imagine the whiteness of the page, and his hand as it runs across its grainy surface. Imagine the tub of sharpened pencils he keeps by him as the light falls evenly across the page.

What will he write, he who has already written enough? What to write, for the one whom writing has deserted? Not a story, but the undoing of stories. Not a narrative, but its unravelling, its absenting, like rivers that run away into the sand. A thousand and one beginnings, but no real beginning – his is a writing that unravels itself.

Imagine him, our writer, the poet says, there in his first floor work room at the front of the house, looking out over the street at mothers with three-wheeled pushchairs, dried up leaves on the pavement, car after car parked along the street, front wheels turned in to stop them rolling down the hill.

Now, he can begin it, the writing that occurs after writing. Now it can begin, the story of one who has the gift of writing, but nothing in particular to write. The light on a windshield: write of that. The crack on a paving stone: write of that. The trees half stripped of leaves, branches and twigs upraised to the sky: write of that.

The double decker bus that stops a hundred yards away: write of that, write of its passengers, write of the people who waited at the bus stop. Write of the weather, the autumnal sharpness in the air. Write of the pale blue sky. Write of the sharp edged disc of the sun, of the cirrus clouds. Write of the light that falls evenly upon all.

He's been given time, our author realises. Given it, and now he must let the writing on his page develop like a photograph from the gentle pressure of light. He will make an impression of time. Of the neglect of time. Of time's malaise, as it seems to sag from itself over the course of a long afternoon. Of time as it lengthens the afternoon into all of time, as dust motes drift and moments drift, prolonging themselves obscurely.

He's not writing anything right now, he tells his agent on the phone. Oh, just his journal, nothing important, he tells his editor. He scribbles away at a kind of diary, he tells the journalist. There's nothing personal in it, no secrets. It's of no interest to anyone, he says. Even he's uninterested in it. Rivers run into the sand. Clouds melt away in the desert air. What does it matter, what he writes now? What does it count for, when it will lead to no particular publication?

Writing adrift; errant writing. Writing that wanders along the edge of everything. That bespeaks its own nothingness, its unimportance. Why does our author feel he's attained writing in some way?, the poet asks. Why is it only now that he thinks he has come across writing, like he might some wild animal in a woodland glade?

He remembers a deer he saw crossing a field. It didn't see him. It hadn't sniffed him out; the wind was blowing in another direction. But there it was, alive, unscared, and living according to its own law. There it was, in the open, there where it thought no one was looking.

And so, now, with writing. Writing, at last, has been allowed to ignore him. To write itself by way of him, with his hand, but by ignoring him. And isn't this what he wanted? Wasn't this what he wanted all along – to be a way of freedom, a kind of corridor for something else?

He sought an open form: spacious, diaphanous. Sought to lift the events of which he wrote, to lighten them so that no continuous narrative was possible. There must be blocks, breaks – white space. So that writing might breathe. So that the present might breathe, and then the past.

So he wrote every morning, as the morning separated itself from the night. What time was it? Any time, every time. What time was it? All hours crossed there; all of time was present there. Nothing began, but everything was gathered up for the beginning. Nothing began – and it was no dawn that he sought in writing, even as it began to dawn outside. Nothing began and nothing would begin; the page would be where the beginning failed, and the day was curled back upon itself, unable to dawn.

How can he explain it to me? Imagine it in your mind's eye, the poet says. Rising early, each morning, and preparing to write. Rising early, at the head of all streams, the day sprawling out like a landscape seen from a mountain, hazy and indistinct, but majestic and broad.

Imagine it: the trickle that will become a stream and then a river. A place of beginnings, of the ability to begin. A place where the writing gathers its strength. But then imagine this: imagine not being able to write, the poet says. The trickle has become a desert. White fog obscures the view.

It rises to meet you, the page, the white page, on which nothing can be written. It looks back at you, the page without writing, and that allows no writing. The whiteness is intolerable. The page's white-in-white burns intolerably.

Its indifference. Its withdrawal. A bank of snow upon which you can make no impression. A wall of fog in which the hand of your outstretched arm disappears.

You cannot mark the page. Ink will not touch it. It will not lie down beneath you. You will not bend over it like a creator god. And it is intolerable. Have you gone snow-blind? Sky-blind? You've gone page-blind, the poet says, imagine that.

To be anyone at all: what kind of fantasy is that? Why did he want to be no one in particular? It's the opposite of narcissism, the poet says. Narcissus, looking at his image in the water, sees nothing at all. If he falls in, it is not beause he is bewitched by his beauty, but by the dream of his absence.

Every morning, he wrote, the poet says; every morning he stopped writing. Or writing failed him, trailing off in a million ellipses. Once, he had thought that by writing, you saved something from death. Preserved it – this memory, that – so as to arrest the flow of time.

Wasn't that why he kept a journal as a teenager? He had a sense that childhood was falling away. Adulthood was here, and time was rushing forward. Write, then. Remember. Hold fast to what would fall away.

And now? He wrote to forget, to experience what he could of death. Ellipses trailing. For an hour, he had written; he was a writer. And now? He was the ghost of his morning's work, which had shut itself off from him. The doors clanged shut. He was an exile from what he had written, and from himself as a writer.

Would he ever write again? He'd forgotten how. Forgotten, and each morning, would have to remember anew, find his way to writing anew. Make his mark. Mark it, and then fall away from marking. And now the pages he had written were like the Marie Celeste which everyone had deserted. It was writing that gave him life, and now it was writing that took it from him.

*

For the Hindu, the soul, after death, needs to be fed and looked after. It's search for the doorway to heaven depends on its deeds in life. And in the meantime? It searches, it is dreadfully vulnerable. Pity too his writing, the beginning he made each morning by writing, the poet says, which barely set out on its journey before it dispersed again.

Strange gathering that is the beginning of dispersal. Strange work that unworks itself, leaving nothing but the attempt to come to itself anew. To begin, to make a beginning, and then to lose hold of the beginning, and fall back into nothingness.

Nothingness: that's what divides the paragraphs of Solar Journal, the poet says. Life is not lived elsewhere, only here. Life comes to itself only here, on the page. Writing marks the return of life, hope, to themselves, and then their imminent dispersal. That will have been your life, those paragraphs by which you marked your days like a prisoner. That was it, those lines and crossbars, where weeks pass, years pass, but nothing passes.

But then he knew, too, that it was by those same marks – those lines, those crossbars – in which the passage of time failed to mark itself, that there was also a passage of sorts. It was enough to date the paragraphs – to mark the passing from one day to another. Here I am, each mark says, each dated paragraph. There I was, he could murmur to himself as he scrolled down the document, there I was, that day and the day before that …

I thought I lacked any real discipline, the poet says. I thought I lacked some faculty of application, the patience to proceed day by day on a greater work; to labour at anything where gratification is not immediate. It was enough, I thought to be able to write anything at all – to make a kind of mark on the page, to sink another pole into the earth, attached by telegraph cable to the one planted the day before.

But those marks, over time, let a kind of continuity appear – the days behind me had been stitched together by what I'd written. The thread of writing was drawn through the skin of my life. I thought I had written nothing at all, that bare continuity was enough. I needed just to breathe, to practice. Just to press the instrument to my lips.

Continuity: strange miracle. It was from a thousand beginnings that a book might be made. I had set an example to myself, I who lacked discipline, even as I remembered by what was written only that writing had been possible.

So I had written a book. A book, though it was made of a thousand beginnings of a book. But a book nevertheless. I gave it a title: Solar Journal. I turned its pages alone in my flat. I thought: it has its own light. It glows. I thought: it has nothing to do with me. I wanted to push it away, to let it live according to its own law. A horse nudging a just-born foal: get up, stir yourself, live your own life.

It was to be given to others, published. I want to lose it by seeing it in print. And so it was, the poet says. My work of three years, of a thousand botched beginnings, appeared between cream-coloured covers. Solar Journal, said the title. My name, though I wish my name hadn't appeared on it. Solar Journal: the book you want to translate.

I suppose a voyage in writing is not a real one. Or it is as journey that must be recommenced each time you write. Every day was always the first day. 1+1, as was written on Domenico's walls in Nostalghia, always equalled 1.  

Abandonment: I think that's how writing arrives. I think it abandons itself to life, and gives itself as it is lost, and as it loses its writer. I wanted to be abandoned by what I wrote. Wanted it to look ahead of me, ranging out.

You have to fall to find writing, I think, the poet says. To fall from the world, certainly. From the satisfactions of life – its complacencies, to be sure, but also its goodnesses. But you have to fall from writing, too, that's the second phase. Writing must become nothing at all. A wrong turn, an accident – it must be as though you accidentally brushed the page with your pen; that you accidentally began to type.

Casually, happening of itself, there was writing. There it is, dropped from the sky.

I do not keep the last word, but writing keeps it for me. The last word? No: one which, rather, erodes all words from within – which attenuates, by stretching it beyond its limit and all limits, the possibility of preserving anything by writing.

*

'Was it here I disappeared?', he said. 'It was here you stopped disappearing. Here where your absence could no longer be hidden', said the day. – 'Was it here I lost my ability to write?' – 'Rather that that inability spoke of writing's inability; that your malaise became the malaise of writing, and it spoke, rather than you'.

By making a past, narrating it, you also unmake it, the poet says. The story might be onesided, partial; it might be retold in another way. Then, too, it might only be a surface effect of another narrative, of another way of telling. It might only be a decoy, distracting your attention while the real story goes untold.

How then, to tell while remembering the artifice of telling? How both to make and to foreground the unmade, erasing what you say as you say it, so that only its utmost edge remains, like the circles a sparkler makes as you turn it in loops, that fade quickly in the night? That fade, and let the night draw forward, that let what is told wear the cloak of what cannot be told.

*

In some theologies, there is a kind of darkness that shines. There, in its negative radiance, lies all we can know of God. His absence is bright, present, although his presence is the opposite of all the ordinary things we keep about us.

Or is God what is there as those same things become extraordinary, when a kind of shadow stretches out from what we think we can see? Perhaps the condition of light hides itself from our seeing, and we each of us bear another seer altogether, with eyes all pupil, eyes all night?

He wants to explain it to me, but how can he explain? How can he put it into words? There is something triumphally unimportant about writing, he says. It does not matter; it matters to no one, and not even to itself. It adds nothing to the world. It takes nothing. It's as if it were born only by accident, when someone wasn't watching. As if it were born by a kind of neglect, and lived on in neglect. As though it wandered like an amnesiac, without memory and without sense.

How to follow it, then? How to fall to its level? By not caring enough. By not wanting enough. By writing as one might casually brush away an insect.

It does not matter: that's the condition of writing. Neglect, absentmindedness: that's how it begins. Isn't the abandonment of ambition its condition? Or rather, of ambition abandoning you, like Isaac Luria's God, who created the world only as He fled it, and for whom the universe is only the space torn open by His escape.

To be abandoned, then – but not to yourself. To a kind of distracted solitude, like a child on the road, singing to itself. It doesn't matter. An abandoned notebook; a grafitti tag no one needs to understand.

Why write? To let writing abandon itself. Why? To let writing not matter. To write of nothing at all, nothing in particular, making no claim. To write as the most ordinary person would write, who drifts with others in a crowd.