Spurious

Insomnia

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 ...

Ellipses

Woolf: ‘I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past’.

Completion, incompletion. To write sentences trailing off in three little dots to open them in the direction of that future that will allow their meaning to become indefinite, to shimmer. So many of Bataille’s sentences end in this way as they reach for the reader who would pass them on. This is why, he said, he wrote in friendship for his unknown readers.

Friends: I learn from a biography that this is what Godard called the viewers of his films. Friendship …: why this word, today? It is a small word, a pathetic one. To want friends – and not an audience. Because the films gather each of us. A film like In Praise of Love breaks across each of us anew. Is reborn for each of us. Why, in the press kit to this film, did they supply a summary of the plot? I barely knew what it was about, it took several viewings, each one pleasurable. And why do I know? Because I read a summary somewhere on the internet, this was my impatience, my laziness.

How many times have I watched the opening scenes in Tarkovsky’s Mirror? The field. The man who crosses the field; the woman – the mother – who sits waiting on the fence. For what? For her husband? He is absent; meanwhile, her children slumber. Then – a change – the children are up, there’s a fire in a neighbouring barn. We watch it burn in the rain. We hear a poem, very beautiful. And then: the ringing of the phone. Then another scene, a man’s voice on the phone as the camera tracks round his flat. We see on the wall a poster of Andrei Rublev. We recognise the three angels of the icon and think: this is a story about Tarkovsky. Perhaps, perhaps. But he gives the film to us, Tarkovsky. It trails off in our direction like a sentence which ends not with a full stop but with ellipses …

Do you have complete emotions about the present, or do you have to wait to find them anew in conversation, in recollection, in writing? I never find completion, only a kind of infinite fall, a trailing into an open future. Somewhere, Tarkovsky writes of the day: what happened?, he asks. What emerged? Nothing … a few images stay with you; this was a day like any other; the days, similar, do not fall one upon the other like cards in a pack, but are superimposed, ghosts projected upon ghosts. A routine: I return home in the evening, as it grows dark; I watch the seven o’clock news, I eat; I make a phonecall. Days accrete, but nothing is complete, nothing completes itself. The future, what of the future? Days like these, neither happy nor unhappy. Days through which as through a window something can be seen. But what? Vagueness, formlessness …

None of these emotions can complete itself. By writing, nothing comes to completion. This is a writing which opens the sentence ...

Looking for what? Friendship? But with what? The unknown, the future.

Incapacity

Relief after two days when too much was possible to experience the old incapacity, that inability to begin, vagueness, a day spent doing this and that without focus. When the future is not a distant horizon, but is never farther than this or that obstacle, when it is a matter of negotiation of what is here and now.

Incapacity: really, there is an immense amount to do, too much, it’s overwhelming. But if there were nothing to occupy you, only the expanse of time, an open future which asked continually: what will you do? you would experience much more acutely that vertiginous desire to realise a Great Work, to fill your days with the Great Project that would make the future less indeterminate, less frightening.

Today, there is only the dissipation of projects, minutae, a number of matters which require my attention. Do you remember that scene in Pather Panchali when the impoverished Brahmin tears up the pages of his studies when his daughter died? Dream: tearing all the pages up, throwing it all away, discovering something of much greater importance. And do you remember the scene in Alien Resurrection with the alien-human hybrid, up against the wall of the spaceship, its innards sucked out and dispersed into space? That is a figure for the horrible/joyful experience of the pure future, of the broken horizon, the object of fear and desire ...

Cynicism

Is it necessary to know whether we are being duped by language? It is perfectly familiar: the words which stream round us, directed by the media, ruled by the demands of sales and viewing figures, are motivated not so much as by imparting information as of attracting interest. The same for our politicians, who seek to appeal to what they take to be the desires of their audience. But whose attention do they seek? The readers, viewers and listeners whose desires they claim to discover in focus groups and surveys. What they seek is to confirm a consensual reality - the circulation of words and things, values and signs according to the general equivalent of what are presumed to be the narcissistic investments of particular groups: the ‘caps and gowns,’ the ‘pools and patio’ etc. Ultimately what matters is drawing a line between our friends and families, people like us and the outsiders, prowlers and scroungers.

Are we so easily duped? We expect little else; this is the age of Sloterdijk’s cyncism: we know what we do, but we will do it anyway. Our leaders appeal to words like good and evil which echo feebly in a direction they cannot reach. Are they, these words, the sources of value of an older, more stable world? A world in which, unlike ours, meaning had not began to volatilise? But it is too late and this is why we are cynical: the great unloosening has already happened. There are no longer names and the values attached to those names, but a kind of streaming, a flow of language deterritorialised from traditional markers. Like capital in the Communist Manifesto, such language is the great liquefier of reality, stripping away every value except its own, which no longer has any intrinsic worth. What matters is surplus value, or in the realm to which the media and politicians seek success, surplus attention.

What does it matter whether we are being duped by language? Words, signs, hollow idols, believe and desire in our place. new commanders of language are like the capitalists Marx and Engels tell us are born from the streaming of capital. Are we are the workers to whom will fall the great task of remaking language and remaking the world? Workers who have yet to awaken to their revolutionary potential? But we have already awoken, and this is the tragedy: we know too much; we are no longer innocent; we know, but we carry on regardless. The great lesson of 1992 General Election in the UK: polls predicting the victory of the Labour Party were in error - why? Because no one wanted to admit they would vote Conservative.

End of the Season

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 ...

Fog

After a rare day of contentment and focus, when work was eminently possible and writing was easy, you slipped back into the usual fog. Tiredness, vagueness, wandering. No chance of finding a place to begin work. Only confinement to the office stops the infinite dispersal of attention. Even then, it is dispersed across the internet – message boards and celebrity gossip pages.

The 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. Suspicion: the fog is a result of gluten. So cut out gluten. Or dairy products. Cut out those. Or of drinking the night before. Well, stop that, too. Or a lack of exercise. Well, go to the gym.

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. Prepare a document in officalese. Now you can really begin work. Alas, you’ve finished all the administration. What else is there for you to do. Write a post for the blog instead. Write about the impossibility of writing when there’s an essay to complete before the month is done and a review and then a book. Dream vaguely of another kind of writing. Then post about the impossibility of that, too.