Weeping at the Threshold

I am a flounderer, says W., anyone can see that. I'm perpetually floundering at sea, says W. That's the word for you: flounderer. There's nothing that doesn't set you off balance.

W. has always feared for my emotional balance, but it's getting worse. Take what happened on the way to the Jandek gig, he says. You thought we were lost, horribly lost, when we were actually not lost at all, he says. You were asking everyone where the gig was, he says, all those tramps. What do tramps know about Jandek?, says W. Why were you bothering them?

And then, on the brink of the venue, at its threshold, you collapsed, didn't you?, says W. It was a horrible spectacle, says W., a grown man who'd lost control. You were weeping at the threshold!, says W. with great emphasis. You wanted to turn back, didn't you? To get a taxi going the other way? W. was concerned, he says. It was never as bad as that, he says, not before. Weeping at the threshold! A grown man!

Still, he learned something about me from the whole episode. Or rather, it was reconfirmed for him exactly the kind of person I am. A flounderer and a weeper, says W. At the threshold.

The Low Tables

I'm a terrible influence on W., everyone says that. Why does he hang out with me? What's in it for him? The great and the good are shaking their heads. Sometimes W. goes back to the high table and explains himself. I am something to explain, W. says. He has to account for me to everyone.

I don't feel I have to answer for myself, W. says, that's what it is. I've no real sense of shame. It must be something to do with my Hinduism, W. muses. You're an ancient people, but an innocent one, W. says, unburdened by shame. On the other hand, it could be simply due to my stupidity. I'm freer than him, W. acknowledges, but more stupid. It's an innocent kind of stupidity, but it's stupidity nonetheless.

It's been my great role in his life, W. says, helping him escape the high table. He's down among the low tables now, he says, in the chimps' enclosure.

The Fisher King

W. says my horror of books is gleeful, unlike his horror, which is just horror. Bookshops fill me with a kind of gleeful joy, W. says, whereas he just feels sadness. The packages of review copies keep arriving, he says: his office is full of them and he can't bear to open them. All those books! It depresses him, he says, but no doubt it would fill me with gleeful joy.

I'm perfectly suited to the end times, W. says. It's a perfect fit. Glee, that's your Grundstimmung. I'm not capable of sadness, says W., not really. The apocalypse doesn't really perturb me. W. spends all day in his office, surrounded by books in parcels (which keep arriving, he says), mourning the end of civilisation, whereas I take glee in the coming end.

He's like the Fisher King, says W. He's wounded, mortally wounded, and there's nothing left for him to fish in the waters of the history of philosophy. Am I one of the knights who tries to cure you?, I ask W. Am I Percival? No, W. says, I am his wound and his impotence and his dream is someone will come along to save him from me.

Conic Sections

W. is still lost in Cohen, he says. What's it all about? He could be reading in Dutch for all he knows. Nevertheless, he sends me some notes for my edification, he says. This is what real scholarship is all about, he says.

I read. Not the apparatus of knowledge itself, but in its outcomes, Ergebnis. Namely, science. And a little later, Unlike all the other fundamental concepts of Erkenntnistheorie, the concept of the infinitesimal does not have its roots in ancient thought.

I'm impressed, I tell W. You're always impressed!, W. says. Anything could impress you, monkey boy.

W. says he can only stand reading Cohen for two hours a day. Two hours, from dawn to six o'clock, then up for breakfast and into the office. He never understands a word, not really.

W.'s come to the section on conic sections, he says. Do you know what a conic section is?, he asks me. It's a transverse section through a cone, I say. It's something to do with Kepler. Now it's W.'s turn to be impressed. You have odd corners of knowledge, he says. Like the German for badger, for example. Remember when you told me when I asked the German word for badger? Der Dachs, I say to W., that's why you get dachshunds.

Anyway, W. says, there are three types of conic section: hyperbolic, parabolic and the other one – it isn't anything -bolic, it's just normal. I think that's what it's called: normal. Anyway, which one are you: hyperbolic or parabolic? Do you view yourself as a hyperbolic man or a parabolic man?

What is decisively new in Kant's conception of reality is that it does not exist in sensation nor even in pure intuition, but is a presupposition of thought and this is true also of the categories such as substance and causality. This is why reality is to be distinguished from actuality, Wirklichkeit.

Sometimes, W. dreams we will become mathematical thinkers, I the philosopher of infinitesimal calculus, he the philosopher of conic sections. 

Mathematics is the organon, says W. pedagogically. Do you know what organon means? He didn't know himself, W. says. It comes from Aristotle, and refers to an overall conceptual system – the categories and so on.

W. is growing increasingly certain that the route to religion is a mathematical one. Maths, that's what it's all about. Take Cohen, for example. And Rosenzweig. Of course no one can understand Rosenzweig on mathematics and religion, W. says.

For his part, W. has been reading his Hebrew Bible again, and wondering how to mathematise it. He's serious, he says. He is currently in an email exchange on the topic with one of his cleverer friends, he says.

The infinitesimally small is not a concept of thought, but of science, and the science of magnitudes, Groessen. But does not the idea of magnitude presuppose intuition? Thus there appears to be a contradiction between thought and intuition. How can the infinitesimal be a magnitude and at the same time not an intuition?

W. says he's since discovered that Groessen, in the last paragraph, can also be translated dimension. He's not sure what the implications of that might be, though.

Bottom Feeders

How depressed are you?, W. asks me. Very, I tell him. W.'s in his office in the southwest of the country, and I am in mine in the northeast. W. says he's looking out of the window and thinking of his failure. How has it come to this?, he's thinking, over and over again.

Unopened parcels of review copies of books surround him, W. says. His office is thick with them. What can he do? W. says I am the only person who would be interested in such books. They sicken him W. says. They're like the ballast attached to a body to make sure it sinks, W. says. And he is sinking, he says.

It's different for you, W. acknowledges. You get some satisfaction from office work. It makes you think you've done something. W. can't bear it, though. Why does he come in, then?, I ask him. What's the point? He could take a few days leave. But W. feels something significant might happen in the office at any moment. He has to be there, W. says. What? What will happen? He doesn't know, says W. Something momentous.

We're bottom feeders, W. says as he often does. We live on scraps. Soon there will nothing for us, then what? I tell him the apocalypse will decide it all for us. It's coming, we agree. One of our intelligent friends says so. In 2014, wasn't it?, W. asks. 2012, I tell him. He's revised his estimate. Four years, says W. How will we survive until then? What will we do? Meanwhile, W.'s waiting in his office, the rain falling.  

– Where do you situate Nostalghia in the context of your body of work?

– Nostalghia is an extremely important film for me. It is a film in which I have managed to express myself fully. I must say that it has confirmed for me that cinema is a truly great art form, capable of representing faithfully even the most imperceptable movements of the human soul.

– What struck you most upon seeing, even if only once, your completed film?

– Its almost unbearable sadness, which, however, reflects very well my need to immerse myself in spirituality. In any case, I can't stand mirth. Cheerful people seem guilty to me, because they can't comprehend the mournful value of existence. I accept happiness only in children and the elderly, with all others I am intolerant.

Tarkovsky, interviewed

Comin’ Back To Me

'Comin' Back To Me', Rickie Lee Jones' cover of the Jefferson Airplane original on repeat. 'Comin' Back': how many times have I heard this song over last two decades (it is nearly two decades)? Her low contralto (is it a contralto?) warm, close. It's intimate, very close to you, the listener. She's telling you a secret. You have to stoop to listen. Bend down, lie down. The song asks for you to listen at its level.

Comin' Back … 'I saw you, I – saw you …': held back, restrained. A song that doesn't say itself, the capacity to sing, to play. That seems to issue from an incapacity, a kind of interruption. Singing wasn't possible. There was no one to play. And in infinite weariness, in a kind of wearing away, infinite. Singing bound to its own impossibility, playing to what it cannot do.

I'm sitting up by the window. Sitting up, the monitor before me, the wall behind me with Blue Note jazz albums reproduced: The Incredible Jimmy Smith, Our Man in Paris … she's a jazz singer, too, Rickie Lee Jones. Pop Pop, from which 'Comin' Back to Me' is a jazz album, and with the usual jazz vices: too much confidence, proficiency, too much complacency as it remains within an idiom, bathing in it. Pure indulgence, pure smugness (there's not enough asceticism in jazz).

And yet 'Comin' Back to Me' … yet a performance, like those of Tomas Stanko that opens jazz right out again, right open. That opens it to the afternoon and the wearing of the afternoon, to the great erosion that robs us of ourselves. That doubles it up, that wearing away, hardening it into a form – impossible! That gives it a body, a kind of consistency – impossible! That thickens the afternoon in the afternoon.

It is what I want in artworks, I think. As though art was by definition a denial of the afternoon. As though it could let the blankness of days harden into glass. As though it could slow light down, could set the passing of the day on pause. You caught it: the day. You caught it out, interrupted it, as it would interrupt you.

'Comin' Back to Me': sung below psychology, below expressiveness. Played down where the lake reflects the sky. It's a horizontal music. It is music lying down … a lake, an expanse. A lying down that expands the space around it, lets in breathe. That draws the days to itself, letting it turn around itself. That turns your attention elsewhere, losing it across a shimmering surface.

'But I saw you, I saw – you, coming back to me …' A song sung after song. Music after music, after everything's been played, everything sung. And now it's coming back, it's returning. Now you're coming back, the song, the centre of the song, as you set out from the far corner of the day to find me …

Works In Progress …

The effort to begin again. To mark what? To say what? Tuesday afternoon, summer. Tasks I set myself: to organise works in progress into the six drawers of a tallboy. Pompous phrase: works in progress. What does it mean? Bad half essays and bad notes towards essays. I entirely lack the temerity to finish what I've written. I've lacked it for a long time.

Do I believe in what I've done? Did I ever? How did I ever raise myself above the page (rather than being collapsed alongside of it). Above it, and in command, letting sentence follow sentence: how is that possible? How to finish a single, determinate line? Half-essays, notes towards essays, three dots constantly turning any sentence from finishing. A few phrases, and then three dots.

Incomplete thoughts. Thoughts of incompletion, unfinishable, uncontainable. Sentences cored out and worn away. I lack the temerity to finish. The belief. I believe in none of it. Still, there they are, half-essays and notes towards essays. There they are, more than essays in lieu of themselves. Perhaps they believe in me, I tell myself. Didn't I write them? Don't they attest to my power to write? A power, it is true, that has dispersed in all directions.

There's no one here, I tell myself. Perhaps the half essays, the notes towards essays, will bring me back to life, as a mirror image conjuring an original. Once you raised yourself above the page, I tell myself. Once you were capable of that. And now? Every beginning is arbitrary. Nothing can harden itself into a origin.

Half essays, notes towards essays: how to mark what does not allow a beginning? How do you mark it, the incapacity to begin?

Regret

Regret, but not for what happened. Regret for what didn't happen, what failed to happen. A whole life could have been lived here. A whole life, opening out of itself like a universe (opening as a universe is said by cosmologists to open from a foam of popping bubbles). You are a placeholder for what might have happened. Your place marks the failure, the non-beginning of things.

I failed … No, it failed. Nothing happened here. Nothing could happen. And your place is to watch over that nothing is happening, to remember it and reflect it back into every other instant. You will watch over what fails to happen in everything that happens.

But then the sense that this watching is undertaken by someone else, further back in me. That everyone bears a watcher of this kind, one who regrets and who watches over regret.

To Say …

Nothing to say. The afternoon, the desk and computer, a pile of CDs (Miles Davis' Dark Magus is playing) … It still speaks, the nothing that says itself by means of everything (the afternoon, the desk and computer …). Nothingness that exhausts plots and treatises. Nothing but the 'to say' of language as it says itself between ourselves and what we would say by means of it.

The 'to say': a murmuring before signification, a sonorousness before sense: how is it that the heaviness of language resonates with the heaviness of the day? Ceaseless rain, westerly after westerly: only language is as heavy as the day. Only the 'to say' of language as heavy as the grey clouds, full of rain.

Apocalypticism

Above all, W. admires my apocalypticism. When I speak in a calm and certain voice of the great disasters that are about to engulf us, he stops everything to listen. He clears space for me, stands back, and lets me speak as though I was a witch-doctor or a holy fool.

If there's one thing I'm right about it is the the slew of great disasters that are about to sweep us away, W. says. I've always been right on these matters, W. says, just as I am wrong on every other matter. In fact, it's my chief attribute, W. thinks, my sense of the apocalypse and the absolutely seriousness with which I talk of the apocalypse.

Sometimes, W. thinks he chooses his friends on the basis of their apocalypticism. If they manifest no apocalypticism, how can someone be his friend? One way to tell, says W., is their reaction to that song by Godspeed, what is it? oh yes, Dead Flag Blues. He plays it to everyone, W. says, and reminds me of the lyrics. These are truly the last days, says W. That's what you understand, isn't it? It's the only thing you really understand.

Alan Smithees

So what are you working on?, says W., knowing the answer. Nothing, nothing, I tell him, it's enough just to survive from day to day. I'm not like him, I tell W., I don't expect much from life, or from myself. I'm the troubled type!, I tell him. I'm perpetually troubled! W. finds this immensely funny. Your mighty oeuvre!, he exclaims. Your great contribution to humankind! How do you think you'll be remembered? What'll they put on your gravestone?

What's that name Hollywood directors use when they want to disclaim involvement with a film?, W. asks me. Alan Smithee, I say. That should be what we sign our work, says W. We're Alan Smithees! Nothing we intended to write was how it turned out! It wasn't our fault! It was everyone else's fault! It was the system's fault, for allowing us to write!  

Book Parcels

What will he write about next?, W. muses. What'll be his next project? He's casting about, he admits it. Wasn't he supposed to learn Greek this summer? Protestant guilt keeps driving him into the office, he says. In he goes on the bus, thinking he ought to be doing something, but not quite sure what. He sits in the office among the parcels of review copies of books he keeps receiving. There are dozens of them, piled up all over the place. They depress him enormously. He can't bear to look at them.

For my part, W. notes, I still have a stupid excitement about books. It's because you're illiterate, W. says, because they're slightly above the level you can understand. Whenever I visit, I insist on opening the parcels and filling up W.'s shelves, reading him the funniest of the blurbs. It must be the bright covers that attract me, W. muses, whereas they depress him horribly. All these books!, he says, with weary horror. Look at them!

Captains of the Titanic

Conversation with W. Why has everything become so absurd?, I ask him. Why has it all come apart just at the moment when we might have got somewhere? But W. reminds me of what we both know: that any success we've had is premised upon exactly that absurdity.  

We're like captains of the Titanic, we tell each other. W.'s already steered his ship into the iceberg. It's wrecked – all hands lost. W. remains on the bridge, the last man standing, but there's not long left. It'll be your turn next, says W. How long do you think you'll last?

The iceberg's looming, I tell W. I'm mesmerised by it. So was he, says W. He knew it was coming and that it could only come. He knew that any success he had had was premised upon this greater and pre-ordained failure. He's dignified in defeat. Not like you, he says, gnashing your teeth and wailing from the rooftops.

Westerlies

In they come, depressive weather systems from the Atlantic, reaching W. first (in the southwest of England) before reaching me (in the northeast of England), bringing grey days with constant rain. The Westerlies are destroying us, we agree. When will it end?, W. asks.

This summer, he tells me, he's become even more stupid than usual. W.'s reading Cohen in German on the infinitesimal calculus. But he barely understands German! He barely understands maths! The English mathematical terms he finds in his dictionary to translate the German ones are equally opaque. What does it all mean?, W. wonders. 

For my part, I tell him, I've been thinking only of admin. It's my only concern, I tell him. It's taken me over. It's all I think about and all I dream about. I'm unable to read. I can't write. I haven't a thought in my head other than an administrative thought. What's happened to me? What am I becoming?

– Are the middle classes really at fault here, squeezed as they are between the workers (soldiers, policemen, builders etc.) and the ruling elite who use the workers to maintain and build order? What else are they supposed to do? This comes close to a very important theme for Hard Mag, just what is the role of the middle class intellectual/artist/writer/thinker? What is the responsibility now? Have things changed much in the last 50-60 years? What would you be interested in seeing happen in the next 5-10 years? How far can you see things (such as the art spectacle, middle class attitudes of unfairness and intolerance) continuing to accelerate?

– The middle classes aren’t at fault. They are the yeomen class, who have given loyal service to the feudal lord, refining their archery and swordsmanship, and now find that they are no longer needed, since the feudal lord has hired foreign mercenaries equipped with the new wonder-weapon, the flintlock. As for the special problems facing the middle-class artist — it looks as if alienation is going to be imposed on him whether he likes it or nor. Most artists and writers in the past have been middle-class, the surrealists to a man, with backgrounds similar to those of the Baader-Meinhof gang. However, the middle-class world against which they rebelled was vast and self-confident. Who today would bother to rebel against the Guardian or Observer-reading, sushi-nibbling, liberal, tolerant middle-class? I think the main target the young writer/artist should rebel against is himself or herself. Treat oneself as the enemy who needs to be provoked and subverted.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed

The most disquieting section of the Joy Division documentary is the cassette recording of Curtis being hypnotised. It's disturbing, in part because you suspect that it is many ways the key to Curtis's art of performance: his capacity to evacuate his self, to "travel far and wide through many different times". You don't have to believe that he has been regressed into a past life in order to recognise that he is not there, that he has gone somewhere else: you can hear the absence in Curtis's comatoned voice, stripped of familiar emotional textures. He has gone to some ur-zone where Law is written, the Land Of The Dead. Hence another take on the old 'death of the author' riff: the real author is the one who can break the connection with his lifeworld self, become a shell and a conduit which other voices, outside forces, can temporarily occupy.

Mark E Smith once understood this very well; perhaps still understands it, even now, sitting at the bar at the end of the universe, his psychic antenna dulled by booze. In a very different way to Curtis, Smith at his most incendiary was a depersonalised host for stray, strange signal. Where Curtis's dispossession was concentrated into a single and singular voice that sounded as if it was already dead, Smith became a cacophony, an 'ESP medium of discord', a damaged transmitter that was like Baudrillard's schizophrenic: a switching centre for all the networks of influence. That is partly why the Smith 'auto' 'biography' is so disappointing. Biography is an end of history form, deflationary and reductive in its rush to reassure us that it was always about people. The point that artists come to believe it it is all about them – and not about their ability to channel externalities which erased them – is usually the point at which they lose it.

… the Mark E Smith persona has solidified, become a ‘national treasure’. Mark E Smith, the sort of no-nonsense bloke everyone would like to have a drink with. A fancied wit, still sharp, sarcastic – he’d keep you on your toes – but at the end of the day, he’s as pubbish and blokish as his one-time mentor John Peel, only with added prole cred. Mark E Smith, who gives his own life story to a culture in which biography has passively aggressively defanged fiction. See, we can explain it all now. True life tales. Nothing odd to see here.

This Mark E Smith is a doppelganger who has gradually all but replaced Mark E Smith the psychic and the schizophrenic, the ‘righteous maelstrom’, the dissonant vorticist transmitter who heard voices and spoke in tongues, the medium and media-channeler. The Mark E Smith who could make himself a riot of voices. People think of themselves too much as one person – they don’t know what to do with the other people that enter their heads.

Mark K-Punk

It would be a mistake to read The Unmamable's 'I'll go on' redemptively, as the triumph of some indomitable spirit, human or otherwise. Beckett makes contact instead with an intensive negativity, a purgatorial continuum in which things can always get worse, without ever reaching the relief of the worst. Total negativity would yield quiescence, yet for Beckett, as for Ligotti, silence and stasis are unattainable, they lie outside texts which might be for nothing but which are not, cannot be, nothing. Those afflicted with being might yearn for nothingness, yet even their dreams belong to being.

The ontological haemorrhage to which Beckett's 'characters' in the Trilogy are subject – the collapsing of Molloy's world into the worlds of Malone, Macmann and the Unnnamable – is echoed in Ligotti by the repeated 'moment of consummate disaster, when the puppet turns to face the puppet master'. Just as 'the Unnamable not only imagines characters, he also tries to imagine himself as the character of someone else' (McHale) …

Mark K-Punk

You do not make it very easy for the audience. Compared to Simenon’s novel where the story is very easy to follow, you omit a lot of things, you do not show only indicate many details.

Not the story that matters. First of all, I respect my viewers as much as myself. If I do not like primitive, stupid, simple stories, then I won’t humiliate my audience with a story of this kind. Because I suppose the viewer is as smart and sensitive as me, so I have to make a great effort to present the best I can. I always have to do my best and have to speak supposing that the viewer is as clever or more clever than me.

The other thing is storytelling. We talked about this last time: every story is the same. It is not worth caring much for telling a story. We shall not tell a story. There are things which are already known. We can omit them, because that is not the point. The point is whether fate is there in the characters’ eyes on the screen. There are big stories, but they can be authentic only if there are real human destinies presented in them. The point is how deep you can present or approach human fate. If you suceed in it, then you could do it.

Bela Tarr, interviewed

– In one of the editions of Crash, you write, “The fiction is already there. It is up to us to invent the reality”.

– I think that is pretty true on one level. We live in a world of entertainment culture that’s informed by relentless television, hundreds of channels, by advertising, by politics conducted as a branch of advertising, by consumerism as a whole. It’s seen as a reality because people are quite serious about it, but it’s completely devoid of real elements.

My father as a young man, or my grandfather as a young man, or my grandmother, would have recognised reality. They had a clear understanding that reality was work. That isn’t true any more. The whole thing is a huge fiction. This is why we’ve sort of lost our direction as a nation. We assume that everyday reality is as real as in our grandparents’ time. I think even our present Prime Minister is to some extent a prisoner of his own fantasy world, who doesn’t realise it and has started to believe his own fictions.

I don’t think it can be reversed — the other world, the reality, has become so fictionalised. Any points of reality we have are in our own heads. Our obsessions. Nodes of anger, greed, hope, the need to remythologise our lives — these are the only realities we have. To my father’s and grandfather’s generation all that was just nonsense. ‘You’re dreaming boy. Go to work. Wake up’. There’s been a sort of switch of polarities.

J G Ballard, interviewed in 2006.

Boredom … To think without anything in us thinking, but with the exhaustion from thought; to feel without anything in us feeling, but with its anxiety; not to desire, without anything in us refusing to desire, but with the nausea of non-desire – all that is part and parcel of boredom without being it, and is nothing more than paraphrase or metaphor. It is, as far as our feelings are concerned, as if, over the moat encircling the castle of our soul, the drawbridge was suddenly raised and there remained nothing between the castle and the adjoining land but the possibility of looking at both of them without being able to cross from one to the other.

Boredom … To suffer without pain, to love without desire, to think bereft of reason …

Pessoa's Soares, The Book of Disquiet

There's a lot of clever people around who write songs', Dylan says. 'My songs, what makes them different is that there's a foundation to them. That's why they're still around, that's why my songs are still being performed. It's not because they're such great songs. They don't fall into the commerical category. They're not written to be performed by other people. But they're standing on a strong foundation, and subliminally that's what people are hearing.

'Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book', he adds. 'All my beliefs come out of those old songs, literally, anything from 'Let Me Rest on That Peaceful Mountain' to 'Keep on the Sunny Side'. You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. I believe in a God of time and space, but if people ask me about that, my impulse is to point them back toward those songs. I believe in Hank Williams singing 'I Saw the Light'. I've seen the light, too'. Dylan now says he subscribes to no organised religion.

From Dylan on Dylan

Office Summer

Day after day in the office. Day after day, but it is as though one day buries into another: that days, great sheets of light lose themselves in days, falling without settling. How many years have passed this week?

No meaning in work, no purpose. Administration, endless administration, wearing me away and wearing away everything. Is this the end of something? The endless end, the end that forgot to end.

This a period of unfinished posts – who could gather themselves together on an afternoon to finish something. Who'd have the belief, the drive? Meaningless, all meaningless.

Read Pessoa instead. Pessoa who has strength enough to make the afternoon into a pocket in which to write. Who folds it around him, around Bernardo Soares, the clerk, and writes a book in his name.

We share the same afternoon, I tell myself, Soares and I. Only I lack Pessoa's strength, being unfolded by the same afternoon he was able to draw around himself (around his absence in the shape of Pessoa).

Cranes outside; I'm high up – the sixth floor. All the building and rebuilding. Dust in the air. Very quietly through my computer speakers: a Shostakovich string quartet, the 5th. Books on the other side of the office – what are they? Golding's Free Fall, finished.

Didn't I mean to say the other day something about the Shakespearean distance of his prose (what a stupid phrase)? The sense of a whole other order of talent (another stupid phrase). That a kind of writing was as natural to its author as breathing (what an idiot I am!)? Never mind the plot – what plot was there? And his The Paper Men, next up to read. Aren't I still halfway through Saramago's Blindness? And shouldn't I make a start on The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis? But it's the afternoon, when nothing's possible.

Lie on the floor then, I tell myself. Open up that Cy Twombly catalogue, read that, look at the pictures. Boredom. No, far beyond boredom. In a state known only to advanced monks and administrators. You've worn yourself away, I tell myself. You're just like anyone else, anyone at all. In fact you're more like anyone than anyone.

I go out to buy some water. Dust in the air from the streets. What are they building? Big green cranes. Scaffolding. Some new frame around the station. To open up a greater station inside the station. They did the same in Manchester, I think to myself. A new station in the station, all that retail space, I think. I was there the other day, passing through, I think.

Unfinished posts – how to finish this one? Why bother?

A Holding Pattern

Of course there's something fussily indulgent about placing each post in a category. Nothing worse! It's pure bad faith. There's something of the collector about me – it's revolting. A collector of my own 'work' – what laughter! Work, as if I'd know the meaning of that word!

What day is it? I look at the clock like a sleeper rolling over. It's the afternoon, the afternoon. The day doesn't matter. It's any day, it's everyday. But haven't you said that before? You've said nothing else! Not a thing! And all your categories laid out, your archives! Imagine that, having archives! Who could presume to have archives but you!

But there they are, the archives, the categories, a way of pretending to yourself you've achieved something. But what have you achieved, what really? Swimming in place – is that's what it's called? A holding pattern – that's it, isn't it?

As though it were enough to mark the day by writing. A prisoner marking the wall with a line, and then another – and then, after a few, a scratched line across the others. Except you'll never get there, will you? It's the same line, the same attempt at a line every time. The same attempt to make your mark in the day, when the day is in fact the very impossibility of making such marks, a black surface and nothing else.

Back to your admin, then! Back to it! You love it! You're so good at admin! It keeps you from doing anything, from writing anything! It's a perfect excuse: I've too much admin, when in fact you're relieved that admin exists. For what else would you do in these perfect, open days, the one falling through the other? How else would you pass this expanse of time?  

So, there’s a sense of apocalypse. Rather, a sense of foreboding because maybe the apocalypse isn’t coming?


Apocalypse? What is this? Sure, I’ve read something in the Bible. Maybe we are in it, who knows?


Lars Rudolph, who acted the part of Valuska in The Werckmeister Harmonies, from an interview (or is it Bela Tarr himself speaking? I can’t tell.)

Everything in me can be summed up as an urge to be immediately something else; an impatience of the soul with itself, like an importunate child; a disquiet which is always on the increase and always identitical. Everything interests me and nothing retains my attention. I apply myself to everything by continually dreaming; I pin down the slightest details of the facial expressions of the person I am talking to. I register the intonations down to the last millimetre of what he expresses; but, even listening, I do not hear him, since I am in the process of thinking about something else, and what I remember least about our conversation is precisely what is said – by one or the other.


So, very often, I repeat to people what I have already told them, I ask over again a question to which they have already replied; but I can describe, in four photographic words, the facile expression which they employed to say what I no longer remember, or this tendency to listen only with the eyes to the story which I do not remember having told them. I am two – and both of them keep their distance, Siamese twins linked by nothing.


Soares

I have lived so much without ever living! I have thought so much without ever thinking. Worlds of static violence, motionless adventures heavily oppress me. I am sated with what I never had nor will never have, annoyed by non-existent gods. I wear the scars of all the battles I avoided fighting. My muscular body is exhausted from the effort I have not thought of making.


Dulled, silent, nothing … The sky high up there is a dead, unfinished summer sky. I look at it, as if it were not there. I sleep what I think, I am prostrate when walking, I suffer without feeling anything. That immense nostalgia I have is nothing, it is nothing, like the high heavens which I do not see and which I stare at impersonally.


Soares

… irony has two stages: the one exemplified by Socrates when he says, ‘I only know that I know nothing’, and the other exemplified by Sanchez when he says, ‘I do not even know that I know nothing’. The first stage reaches the point where we doubt ourselves dogmatically, and every superior man attains that level. The second arrives at the point when we doubt both ourselves and our doubt, and very few have attained that during the brief, but already too long, span of time which we, humanity, have seen alternating the day and the night on the variegated surface of the earth.


Soares

The whole of life is an attempt to make life real. As everybody knows, even if we act in ignorance, life is totally unreal in its direct reality; fields, cities, ideas are totally fictive things, born of our complex realisation of ourselves.


[…] To speak! To know how to speak! To know how to exist using the written voice and the intellectual image! Life is worth nothing more; the rest are men and women, imagined loves and false vanities, digestive subterfuges and those of oblivion, people who race around like insects when a stone is lifted, under the vast abstract rock of the unfeeling blue sky.


Soares

There is something sublime in wasting a life which might have mad utility, in never completing a work which would necessarily have been sublime, by abandoning halfway the assured path to success!


[…] And I who talk like this – why do I write such a book? Because I know it to be imperfect. Total silence would be perfection; once written, it unperfections itself; for that reason, I write it.


And above all, because I defend what is useless, absurd – I write this book to lie to myself, to betray my own theory.


Soares