Slightly ill, a low fever, as it should be, a little resistance, it helps work. Vague noise from next door, again as it should be, never get too comfortable, never rest. For a long time there was, almost every night, the noise of stomping and music and laughter all through the night. My neighbour lived on American time; he did American business; he entertained American clients; when he moved out, his son moved in who worked in nightclubs in town and came back with his friends and partied till dawn.
This was months ago; but I couldn’t write about it then. I knew what I wanted to say: those nights without sleep reminded me of what became of Husserl’s reduction first in Levinas (not Heidegger’s anxiety, but physical pain, insomnia, awareness that there was no escape). No escape. I said to myself: Sleep with earplugs. Spread the mat, the sheets, the duvet on the floor of the lounge, sleep there; the bedroom ceiling is too thin. And if that fails, the bathroom floor. Yet conscious - but is this the word? better: aware, with a kind of impersonal awareness, of the source of every possible noise. No longer was this a flat, but the burrow of Kafka’s story, and what I feared was the Outside …
Genet rented rooms near the station so that he felt he could make a quick getaway. I imagine, rather fancifully, that it is a kind insomnia which propels the great gust of his work. Insomnia? He experienced that unravelling which asked of him to be nothing at all, but then to be everything - to relinquish himself but then to find in his place the power, the non-power to allow his characters to pass through him very quickly. Until he was the site of an immense streaming. Why, then did he abandon first the novel and then the theatre? To lose himself again; to disappear.
Ah, more on Genet another day. Meanwhile, a few days off; I’m travelling ...
