The clocks had gone forward without my noticing it. I rose at nine, not eight; I thought Popworld was on early. This is a work weekend: four whole days in which to write, following weeks of administration and bureaucracy (and similar weeks to come: the QAA, the audit …) But as with all work weekends, comes a time when you are too tired to work. I read James Lord’s splendid biography of Giacometti instead, which I found in London last weekend with R.M.
I should have gone out last night, I say to myself. That way, awakening, I would still be borne on the memories of the night before. Friends and company are essential to work, I know this now. That’s what Giacometti said to those who claimed his sculpture indicated his more general concern with solitude. Not at all, he said. Of course, he was our many nights with prostitutes. Then friends called at his studio.
What should I write today? A passage on the positive infinite in Hegel and the spurious infinite in Blanchot. A paraphrase of a small section of W.’s book. Finish off that little piece on Gillian Rose. All for the book, which has to be ready very soon. I still don’t have a complete first draft. If I was W., I would spend another year polishing the book, paring it down.
Yes, that’s what I would write, but I’m too tired. I am not in the office yet; the flat is warm but dark; I listen to Beck’s Sea Change, which is much better than I remembered. But my pot plants are shedding leaves, and the kitchen is messy. I haven’t rehung the pictures and mirror I took down when the new wallpaper went up.
New blogs appear. One reminds me of a conversation I have with friends on the phone about the fate of departments of philosophy. ‘So what of Warwick?’ The answer approximates to: ‘it has fallen’, which means the hordes have arrived and taken over. As though I were receiving battle reports like one of the doomed race of men in The Lord of the Rings (what of Rohan?).
I walked to the quayside yesterday, which I never do, and never alone. But I couldn’t write anymore; tired, I thought I’d risk a walk in the outdoors because I was content with what I had done; I was even moved by the introduction to the new book. But I remembered what Beckett said to Van Velde of a new picture of which the artist declared himself proud: ‘there’s no reason to be’.
Horror of philosophy: never a corner in which to hide and do your work. Always the biggest themes: truth, freedom, justice which demand to be spoken of. There’s no refuge. I always dream of escaping to another subject; I spend my time with musicians and with theorists of music and envy the determinacy of their subject matter. With philosophy there’s always too much at stake. And then there’s my miserable hackery: the desire to write, to write and all the while with nothing to say.
Still, the hordes are coming. Polite, well-meaning, they don’t even know they are hordes. They bring with them that facility in speaking, they speak, everything is easy, there’s a framework in which everything is to be done. What was the name of that famous horde member who said to the Chinese: there’s a way of doing philosophy which has sorted out all the basic problems? And then – wonderful irony – the Chinese took to Heidegger instead, or at least that is what I heard.