Spurious

The Pulley

What day is it? Monday afternoon. But which one, which Monday afternoon? Any one, any Monday at all. Stolen time in the office. An empty desire to - what? Write? Is that it?

Begin by quoting someone else, I tell myself. By making an occasion for writing, I tell myself. Writing needs that - an occasion, and particularly when one Monday afternoon is like any other. But who should I quote? A book by Bolano on my desk - I haven't opened it yet. A daunting book by X. ... shouldn't I be writing in the direction of something like that?

The inescapable feeling that it all went wrong somewhere. That writing turned a corner and ran into a swamp. And what is this afternoon but that, that swamp? Begin with an observation, I tell myself. Test your powers by observing the world. A hazy blue sky through the row of office windows. A view of the suburbs from the sixth floor. What should I write about them, the suburbs? And what of the sky?

If I was writing on a horizontal surface I could say I wanted the page to mirror the sky. A page written without occasion, lost in the mirror play of Mondays all exactly the same would lose itself in a sky that belongs to no particular day. A Monday sky like any other; a Monday page like any other. But the page (it's not a page, but a monitor, exactly like every other monitor) is vertical, and I'm typing, not writing.

There's no notebook here. No handwriting. Words appear letter by letter behind the vertical line of a cursor. There's no occasion, nothing to mark by writing, and no reason to write. But it's Monday, and I would like to begin. It's Monday afternoon and I would like to mark a new phase by beginning. I suppose you should have projects, something that you're working on. I suppose that is the way it's done, a way to bind day to day, to assemble them in a single chain and pull yourself up through the weeks and months. The project as pulley; the task that turns the swamp of Monday afternoons into a cliff face.

Climb, then; haul yourself up. By the task you will continue to be born. I'm working on ... I'm writing ... And when you're without projects? When your task has come apart and there's no movement through the day? You've failed the beginning; you've failed the test of beginning. Writing, that would need an occasion, has none. Even the poorest writing has that, an occasion. The poorest part of an oeuvre: occasional writing, merely occasional writing, still has that, an occasion, which you so signally lack.

Monday afternoon. One hour, that's what I'll allow myself. One hour ... I want the wheel of the day to turn. It's Spring, the days are lengthening, and therefore it's more important than ever to get the wheel of the day to turn. Nothing worse than the sense of being stranded in the middle of the day, when it becomes eternal.

It's the indifference of the day that's frightening. At least you can huddle against the night. At least close the curtains and turn on the light ... The sky's not as wide, the day's not everywhere. At night, a kind of beginning is made by switching on a light; in the day, the eternal day, the light was already on, and will always be on.

No beginning, then. No occasion when the day's back is turned. It'll drive you mad, the day. There's a kind of claustrophobia in its sheer breadth. Light falls upon all, equally. Light upon everyone, and eroding everyone. We're all dying, and I'm like anyone else and, I tell myself, especially similar to everyone else, though it makes no sense.

Opacity

What is a day? A span of time. But what is it, what is a day?

A lifetime; I often think that. As though I was born upon waking, lived my adolescence in the morning and my middle age in the long afternoon.

And what am I now? An old man writes; an old man remembers and writes. And if I live my life as I have done today, what then? There will be nothing to remember, for nothing happened. I was born; I lived - and now, close to midnight? close to death?

Nothing happened today. A blank page in the journal. A day that did not catch fire. A lost day, that I will not remember. What happened today? I rose; I worked; I went to the office and then to town. I came home; I cooked a late lunch. That was my middle age. And then ... and then ...?

Close to death (is that what is coming - death?) memories thicken themselves into nothing. What is a day? What was it? An opacity; the white lens of corrective glasses. Light thickened until it is no longer a medium. I can't see - I'm lost. The day disappeared into itself. The day contracted, light into light.

What happened? What happened today?

The Flag

I think there is a god of the same, and of the Same of the same. A god lost in the heart of the turning of the days and has gone mad there. Mad because turn in the same element. Because the same can only happen again.

Why make anything at all? Why begin, or seek to separate yourself from the hours stuck to one another like grains of glutinous rice to make a beginning? I think it is to translate the eternity of the day, its exhaustion, the madness of the same into a new eternity: to mark by beginning what fails to begin or to close itself into an ending. Only to mark it again - to make a mark to let quiver the interminable, the incessant. Perhaps art is only the attempt to make a mark. To double up the everyday, to lend it another kind of consistency. To give it form, even as that form is allowed to tremble.

But why seek to make? Why the desire to form? Are you the child that would make a yo-yo of the day, like Freud's grandson, sending the death of his mother away from him and back, as if to master absence? To the master the day, then - or the Same of the day. Not to be trapped. Not to endure their blind turning. And this is why the makers are those who attuned to the Same, who suffer it. Who suffer the everyday as what it is: blank time, dissolution.

It is out of a kind of exhaustion you must begin. An exhaustion so great it dissolves you. Only there's a minimal doubling up, a minimal reflexity. Something of you is there. Something of you crawls to mark a place, like the flag in the Sea of Serenity. But what you've made is only part of the day, a change, an alteration, and nothing else. And what you are is only a limb of the day, a way the Same can know itself.

Rafts

I would like to work, say that. I would like to begin, say that. Tiredness can be greater than we are. Or that what we are emerges out of a prior field, a kind of ocean that floods up, returns, when our hold on ourselves has gone. I think that is part of what it means to be alone: not to have others who address you, and call you from that vague drifting. Others who call you to attention, awakening you from that other waking state into which you fall. In which, alone, another awakens in your place. Or is it that your vagueness spreads you open like a picnic blanket, out beneath the sky?

To work, then. To think, there where thoughts need the form of the 'I' to support them. But there are other thoughts, I know that - or someone else in me knows, where knowledge is only opening, unfolding - thoughts that are of that same unfolding, thoughts like clouds that drift without you. Mist-thoughts that have not coalesced. And I think their condition, too, is a kind of solitude, in which, somehow, you are not alone. Or not, at least there to be alone, no one wandering in your place.

Where another knows, and another thinks. Or that knowledge and thinking are each shaken out like a sheet to be tucked freshly round a mattress. Then how to speak of the other thought, the other knowing? How to bring it to speech, to let it bring you there, like the spread sail of a land-yacht, or the great sails that will, some say, catch the solar wind and bear us between the stars?

To let speak a kind of desolation, an exposure. Solitude without consciousness, blank absence, anaesthesised space ... but these formulations will not do. How to speak of an absolute concretion, or a thought that is the opposite of abstract? How to think a universal that is one with matter, with all that is?

I will tell you how I imagine it. Days pressed upon days. Days congealed with other days, hours stuck to other hours. Each day a gauzy veil through which the other days are seen. One day like another, the same routine. One like another until time breaks from chronology, until it separates itself like an ox-box lake or an eddy. Time that turns in the same day, eternally. The same as it returns as this day, as all the others.

Yes, that is how I see it, as I hear its dull murmur. As I hear all the days like sheets rustling on a washing line in the wind. All the days, and everything that happened, stirred by a wind that moves through them equally. A wind like a ripple or a wave. A single wave that crosses all at once, the wind that bows the heads of corn.

So are my days brushed by the eternal. So does eternity make my days bow their heads, humbled. And now I imagine great bells that ring out from the heart of time, there where time does not turn, and one day is like all the others. Bells that sound only to the solitary, in separated rooms, in flats, cast out on the ocean like waterlogged rafts.

A Line Undrawn

6.00 AM, a cup of coffee in my ragged dressing gown. 6.00 - too early, and there's sunlight in the yard like a mockery. Too early - the days are too long. Eternal light. Light eternal, before you rise and after you sleep. When will darkness ever come? Not for 20 hours. There'll be 20 relentless hours of light.

Nothing's happened yet. The day opens before me. Nothing's happened. Silence, some birdsong. Blackbirds nest in the outhouse. Waste from upstairs' soil pipe runs down the wall. Last night in bed I saw a new dark patch beneath the white wallpaper in the bedroom. Spreading splotchily beneath. Waiting to darken the surface like a liver spot.

And the kitchen still strewn through the flat. The washing machine beside me here; the microwave; a stranded set of cupboards piled with Corwood CDs. Time to write, I tell myself. Time to draw the line from which to begin. And so I have my coffee. And I sit at my desk, ready. And I have my books at my side - a hardback, from which I read last night, and a softback, over which I've glanced.

Begin, then, I tell myself. It's morning, the day has spread its billowing sails; time to catch those winds that will carry you to work. To begin - but what's that? To be carried into beginning, becoming a worker - what's that? To disappear into work; to write and patch up the holes in the text. To write transitional passages. And edit. And then, after a trance of work, to look out at the yard and say inwardly, I'm done. Done, and braced against the day, having made my stand. Done and the day pushed back into the beginning, the day made to make sense. The day steered, the day ridden all the way until, tired, I dismount and pat its back and return in righteous tiredness to the house of my life.

Yes, that's what it would mean to begin. To push off from the side of the pool. To swim the lane, one length and then another; to plunge into work like Brancusi's sculptures would plunge into the sky. To be a ship of work, held together by work, streamlined and burning off the inessential. Until your whole life would be just that: work. Until you become a projectile of work, arching through the air, inevitable. The day aimed, the day directed, every hour accounted for. Every minute burning forward like a rocket's fiery tail, and the hours jettisoned like the unnecessary fuel tanks that boost a ship to orbit. Until, at the end, the whole earth is beneath you. Until, weightless, it is the whole earth you see spanned beneath you and you sleep in the air like a swift.

What it would be to work! To work - and to live, work and life as strokes of the same movement! To work and to live, one step and then another! The steps of a giant in the sun! Of the lusty fellow on Whitman's Leaves of Grass, shirtsleeves rolled up, forearms tanned, ready. Of the carpenter Kafka would like to be, as he tells Janouch, who catches him in his exercises of the afternoon.

Am I ready to begin? Worthy - of the day as work, of the hours bound to one another like the carriages of a train? Ready to steer myself like a cowboy's herd across the desert? But the herd is scattered and the carriages lie upturned. Or there was no herd and no train. Nothing began, nothing assembled itself to begin; all the forces were scattered; the army deserted in advance; the troops have joined the partisans. And so is the line of the beginning scrubbed out right away. So are life and work lost to one another. So I advance like a hemiplegic, with one side paralysed and then another: work and life, both numbed.

A line in the sand - is that what you'd like to draw? A line that would let work be work, and life, life. To make a criterion, there where you stand; to pitch a tent in the midst of exile. But the wind is rising in the desert. A sandstorm blows in these morning hours. There is no line and no chance of a line. The pitched tent has spun away. A whirlwind turns in these hours. Life and work unravelled. Life and work spun apart. What did you think you could do? Of what did you believe yourself capable? Of writing a single line? The clear stroke of a single line? Laughter: the line is lost and the desert is everywhere. No work and no life, but the desert grows.

The Day

Write at dawn, as day lifts itself from night. The day is coming: write that. The day has come: write that. So is its arrival lifted into eternity. The white page: there, alone, can writing arrive, for look, outside: soon evening will come; soon the day will fall from itself. Then the white page is the day, and more day than the day: the eternity of sense, the supernumerary day of black on white.

The flag of writing flaps in the wind of time. Time mocks it: 'you say the day has come, but it has not come', but writing mocks time: 'the day completes itself on my page.'

Night comes. Time says: 'isn't night the ink of writing? Doesn't the day live by the blood of night?' Time pauses and goes on, 'You have killed the day to make the day. Writing is also a tomb, and the words "the day has come" is the trail of blood running from the lips of a dead man.'

And writing laughs and says, 'you know my secret. In truth, I can only write of the day in the ink of night; I bring the day only by way of deep oblivion. Somewhere else, another day is rising, a brighter sun. Somewhere else is rising the day to which all days are mere indices. How to write of the day itself, free from night? How to write in white ink on a white page, or in darkness upon darkness?

'I know this is your dream, time, which is why you look for me.'

The Same

The same: the day comes to itself each morning. Comes to itself: the same day, the same each time. Why is it necessary to accompany it with writing? Why, if not to help the day complete itself, to complete it in a written act that sets its seal on its coming? The day comes to itself on the page. Or what is written marks its completion, redoubles it.

The day has arrived: that's what writing says. But writing keeps its arrival; it does not need to come to itself anew. The day has come: write it now and it's written forever. Why rewrite it, then? Why does it have to be rewritten? Now I wonder whether writing marks what the day does not have. Whether it is in writing, and writing alone that the day can come to itself.

Is that why it asks to be written, and each morning? Is that what it seeks, in the writing it asks for? Mark the day; mark the turning of the day. Mark what can never complete itself, once and for all, as the day's coming. Set the seal on its coming; write: it has arrived; the day has come, even if, as you write, you know the day cannot come, or can only come to itself in writing.

Footprints

I rise very early to write something or other; but what? Enough just to write - or rather, to be brought to that moment before writing anything, with a sentence fragment or two floating in my head and a sense that that fragment calls for others, and that soon a post will be knitted as sentence joins itself to sentence.

Just to write, and by so doing, have a kind of headstart on the day - to have made my place before the light comes, to have set up a kind of base camp. Sentence fragments come (but whose voice carries them?), but I think what matters is the origin against which they set themselves back.

I can begin, sentence linking to sentence, but the origin, without beginning, accompanies me. I think of it falling back, silently. And then I wonder what it would be to make sound out of silence, to speak not by adding noise to the world, but by subtracting silence from noise, as you draw with your finger on condensated windows.

To speak by subtraction - to let silence sound and to speak thereby: isn't this what Blanchot means when he claims it is by a violent tearing away that the writer begins to write? That it is by stopping his ears to the Sirens whose song has already drowned him?

But to begin is not to draw the origin into the beginning. Something of it remains, murmuring, non-silent, to rush into the silencing of its noise through which the act of writing can begin, as, perhaps, water rushes in to fill the imprints your feet leave on the sand.

He says somewhere it is the tone of the work that differs from writer to writer - the way, perhaps that murmuring noise is allowed to call in the work. The way the Sirens call, but in a different way with each author. As if those finished books were footprints the sea fills up, until the impression is nearly erased. But still the imprint, still the traces feet leave on the shore - a momentary silencing that cuts into the anonymous streaming of noise.

And isn't that the company you seek by reading? The footprints of others, of Man and Woman Fridays - the others who sought also, in my fantasy, to write upstream of the day, to go where the river runs clearest, and youngest? I know I have company; there are others who want to push their way to the head of all waters. And by this relationship, I know a kind of amity with them, with the others, whom I know only by their traces, half washed away. 

The Mark

To mark a date, a time - to have been capable of marking it with a little writing, if only to scratch a mark on the walls of time - why is that enough, at least for me? why is it necessary, so that to fail to scratch means, like a prisoner kept unaware of the date, that I forget in some sense what day it is? What day?

Not that I cannot tell it's Wednesday, or early December, but that the day without writing fails to open for me. As though, by writing early in the morning - and didn't I, this morning, wake at half past one? - I've a headstart on what occurs such that it might happen not to others, but to me.

I will have a stake in this day, that's what writing announces. It will be partially mine; the hours will part for me like the Red Sea to the Israelites - they will let me have passage, and so join the passing of this day to the passing of others, and so on, through my life, letting it be mine, and letting me live. And better still, for me, the knowledge that I will have forgotten this, what I have written, by the time the day is over: that I am like one who loses his memory overnight, so that each day he must find himself again.

A liberation, because it breaks me from the dominion of the past by a neglectful forgetting, and lets the future open to me as it is not measured by the past. Is it this eternal youthfulness I want, a wheel propelling itself, like Zarathustra's child?

I think this is how I want day joined to day, each morning: this that will be the hinge of my days, or the point around which they turn: that happy forgetting that means writing must come again to mark the day, to say: here I am, even when, by the next morning, I have forgotten yesterday's mark, and must mark it again, and that that is the condition of memory, and passage.

Here I am: then it is not the succession of days I would mark, but the rebirth of the day. The mark must be marked again. Here I am: but where am I, when I've forgotten by evening that there was a mark at all?

Arm of the Sun

Imagine it this way. Just as the sun sends out great flares from itself, great fiery loops which arc back to its surface, so is what you write an arc of the day. Imagine a sun that was made of such arcs; that is nothing more than their leaping. You, writing, are an arm of that sun, a mirror held up to the day, and by which the day will know itself.

But this, too, is analogy, for what can the day know? Its first trait is blindness. It does not see. Its second trait is unconsciousness. It does not know.

Sometimes I imagine that it dreams, and its dreams are those solar arcs. Or imagine that, as a writer, I am like the astronauts who orbit Solaris. The day speaks; I write; but it does not know that it speaks, and I do not know what I write. Do I dream? Or is it that the day dreams in my writing, that to write is also to dream with the day?

Now I know: my first trait is blindness. My second trait is unconsciousness. I am an arm of the sun, of the day, by which it continues to unknow itself. To unknow, to forget: isn't that the task the day sets for writing? To betray the day: isn't that what it wants? To betray it, yes, but only by way of telling the day - of speaking of those events, great and small, that belong to the continuity of time.

Tell. But the sun arcs through you. It speaks, and you do not. It dreams, and what you write cannot reach it. But you know its return. You know it by writing, by the whole of your writing, as the day uncouples it from itself.