Summer nearly over, R.M. here for a last weekend before she starts her job in the city; term starts next week. What happened this summer? 5 84 hour weeks in the office – not to work (R.M. worked, who was here all along) but to drift, reading this and that, writing little, wandering out into town to find snacks. What happened? Deleuze and Guattari, a paper on money and time, a half-written essay on Heraclitus, little work on the new book (untouched since June ...) Vague summer illnesses, incapacities (but these are not unpleasant) ...
The perpetual struggle: to wrest a day of work from the fog. A day of work – one hour of writing takes five hours of surfing and wandering, of reading newspapers and grazing. Temptation to drink coffee – but you’ll pay tomorrow when you are more tired still, with dark rings under the eyes. Or to drink – but there are too many hours between now and bedtime to lose in the haze.
Still stranded before the tasks ahead, you make excuses: too much administration. Secretly, you find it liberating; it allows you to say to yourself after another unproductive day: I've done something. Filled out some forms. Filed a report. Prepared a document in officalese ...
What to do when the administration is done and what is called 'research' is impossible? Post. Write about the impossibility of writing when there’s an essay to complete and a review and a book. Dream vaguely of another kind of writing. Then post about the impossibility of that ...
Now and again, simple contentedness when nothing seems impossible: it is a state which is dangerous because what is born or created is not wrenched from what resists such birth or creation. Never a sense that to make something, to write a line, is to have lost something, to have missed exactly what called for writing. In contentment, everything is possible, especially writing. Vile loquacity. No longer is your misery implicated in the misery of the world. Nor that bitter laughter which arises from a sense of enormous folly.
Today, there is nothing to write, nothing to say. Summer looms behind me. And the future: the plunge towards Christmas, always eventful, sometimes joyful: life, life. In the meantime, the simple desire to mark this day by posting here. To leave a mark whereby I might retrace the path back to the expanse of these weeks in the office with R.M. working alone and together (she at her desk, I at mine). Back through the door to summer ...
Kerans, protagonist of J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World, scrawls on the wall of a ruined building in the sunken London through which he passes on his way South: TIME ZONE. Where is travelling? Back to that expanse of time unmarked by minutes. To the great past. But I am travelling back North to the measured time of tasks and projects ...