Spurious

The Fact of the World

Why write, why the need to mark time by writing? Is it to reclaim time, drawing it back to yourself, retreating to an intimacy similar to that of a familiar and intimate dwelling place? Remember Beckett’s The Unnameable:

Mercier never spoke, Moran never spoke, I never spoke, I seem to speak, that’s because he says I as if he were I … perhaps it’s not he, perhaps it’s a multitude, one after another … some say you, it’s the fault of the pronouns, there is no name for me, no pronoun for me, it isn’t that either, I’m not that either, …. He, I, no matter … no, I can’t speak of anything, yet I speak.

The words I and you are the open sites through which a passing occurs. Not you passing, not me but that great passage as through prison walls. But what are those walls? The pronouns themselves. Then to write would not be to draw time back to oneself. Perhaps it is to experience the passage of time in another sense, to experience its pressure, its pressing forward, not for yourself, as if it were an experience you could keep, transmitting to others and to yourself, but because in writing you lose time, and first of all worktime, in which something useful could be done. Thus the great last sentence of The Unnameable is a sacrifice of time, time put out of use, made to pulse with what is useless in time, sheer exorbitance.

To write, you might think, is to retreat. Why write? Remember what Kafka’s hunger artist said with his last breath:

‘I always wanted you to admire my fasting’, says the hunger artist. ‘We do admire it’ says the overseer. ‘But you shouldn’t’, says the hunger artist. ‘Well then we don’t’, says the overseer. ‘But why shouldn’t we admire it?’ ‘Because I have to fast, I can’t help it.’ ‘What a fellow you are’, says the overseer, ‘and why can’t you help it?’ ‘Because I couldn’t find the food I liked’, says the hunger artist. ‘If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else’.

The hunger artist fasts only because he could find nothing to eat. Likewise you would write because you like nothing else. What do you dislike? Ev’rything in the world by which you are separated by a pane of glass. That pane stands between you and the world. And so you write, in a room. Your life was lived in a succession of rooms. To pass through the outside would only be to seek what might be harvested inside, to pass through the world as Ulysses passes in the Odyssey back to Ith’ca, back to his home and then that place where writing could begin.

There is that minor writing which does not strive for Ulysses’s great journey through the world, contenting itself with recording what it sees from behind the glass – the world outside, the white sky, tarmac and plastic bags, the dead bird on the concrete. No longer is it a matter of personal memory. Memory does not animate what is written. There are facts: a cold morning, a white sky, a dead bird, and that’s all. This writing is the correlate of that which begins and ends by writing of what is found in the writer’s room, taking a voyage around framed pictures and plates of half-eaten toast, cold cups of tea and the fruitbowl.

But this is still to make a journey, in this case, a journey around your workroom. True, it is no longer guided by personal memory, by that great net of personal associations that Breton recommended as a route through the world. It lets the world be, one might say, just as Appelfeld might be said to give the world back to itself, to let it come to stand in its opacity, greater than us but also indifferent to us. Yes, there is the world, there where we are not. It is a blind face, a mouth which does not speak, it is not dead because it was never alive, it has no secrets because nothing is hidden.

Young children will speak to you of friend X. or friend Y. thinking you might know them. They do not yet know the vastness of the world; each person they meet must be close to ev’ryone else. There are only friends. Older children know the world is divided between friends and strangers; they are taught the danger which lurks within apparent friendliness. Still older ones know the world of concrete and tarmac but also that of grass and trees is no friend; it is neither the nourishing mother nor the tender father: it is the world, what remains of the world as it escapes the possibility of familarity: it is that mute, blind and indifferent reserve against which you can do nothing.

Older still, there is the indifferent passage of the world into which you must insert yourself. Find a place, a lodging, and be carried in its streaming. This is difficult, it is true; years stand between you and a job you might enjoy, and even when it’s yours, it might be swept away in turn. What is certain in such a world? Nothing at all. Fate is a word too strong for the world’s indifference. Now you understand the faces of others as part of the opacity. If you have children in turn, you must then protect them against that opacity as against the winds on the moor where Lear was stranded. Ev’rywhere there is indifference and it is such that, breaking yourself against the wall for the hundredth time, you will sink down in defeat and madness.

Blocked lives, stagnant lives: I think of that scene in Monster where the protagonist, Aileen Wournos tries to get a job as a secretary in the great buildings of commerce. She hasn’t the skills, the interviewers tell her over and again. She wants to look after her lover, but the world won’t permit it. She does sink down but rages in madness; it is still the madness of defeat and one without tragic grandeur. Meanwhile, there are facts: a murdered body, an abandoned car, bloodstains. She disappears into the penal institution to face another fact: the indifference of the world comes towards her in the lethal injection. She dies of the indifference of the world.

What of a writing too weak even to journey around one’s room? A writing as weak as the hunger artist as he slips into unconsciousness. Kafka was correcting the proofs of ‘The Hunger Artist’ on his deathbed. At least he had proofs and the prospect of a book that would survive him. What of those without consolation, who leave no trace in the lives of others, who will not be remembered? At least Aileen Wournos of Monster has her notoriety.

Our new economy, it is said, requires a populace educated enough to construct a ‘portfolio subjectivity’: what will carry you through your life are skills, transferable skills. With such skills you can survive short-term contracts and redundancies; they will see you through interviews. Skills, techniques: even for writing, they are necessary. But what of the barely skilled writer, the one so far from producing anything of worth he can record only what is happening in the present moment? What of the ineducable one without memory of the past or hope for the future, without the guiding hand of tradition or the hope of leaving a legacy?

Kafka and Beckett write in that space which brings us, their readers, against world’s indifference. No longer with them that technical facility which would allow them to realise a novel like other novels (remember the marvellous pillory of a conventional novel in The Unnameable: ‘They love each other, marry, … he goes to the wars, he dies at the wars, she weeps, with emotion, at having loved him, at having lost him, yep, marries again in order to love again …, he comes back, … from the wars, he didn’t die, … she goes to the station, to meet him, he dies in the train, of emotion, at the thought of seeing her again, having her again, she weeps’). This is an unsentimental writing. It does not console; it does not wring tears from the suffering of those close to death. It is a writing of facts, and if this word fact seems crude (Nietzsche: ‘facts are stupid’) it is because it is used while forgetting there is only one fact: the brute existence of the world and our brute arrival in it.

Many have said the human being is born prematurely; the infant’s head is too large, it is said, for the pelvis of the mother to contain; thus it is that a human infant is less able to survive than the infants of other species. Thus it is that a human baby needs care and devotion, a full childhood of adoration. Thus it is that the lesson of the indifference of the world is so acute for the human being and all the greater for the prolonged childhood of the middle class, through school and sixth-form and university and even into those first years of work when they will still be dependant on parental support. In truth, human life is lived prematurely, and the struggle to bring ourselves to birth is the struggle of a whole life. To have a child is to transmit the struggle and the means to struggle to another generation. So the generations are born and die.

What, then, of writing, of a life lived in a room behind a pane of glass? Outside there is work time. Outside, the time of a world bent upon the struggle against its own facticity. Work is a name for this struggle; but what does one struggle against? One day you will be unable to work. One day, the means will fail you. The weak writer knows this. He knows it in his weakness. He knows it as he fails writing by writing. Knows that non-writing is within writing and not outside it.

Kafka: ‘Nothing is granted to me, ev’rything has to be earned, not only the present and the future, but the past too – something after all which perhaps ev’ry human being has inherited, this too must be earned, it is perhaps the hardest work’. Perhaps there are bloggers too weak to write of themselves, of their lives, who write to earn back their lives, from the indifference of the world and the omnipresence of work. But perhaps they are too weak even to mark by writing the mark that witnesses their weakness. Perhaps they cannot write and have no access to the internet and not even a room or a pane of glass. They pass between the great buildings of commerce. Their wandering is blogging, if this means to mark one’s presence in time. Just as Aileen Wournos’s murders were blogging and so were the journals Beckett kept in the years of war.

Celebrity Crash and Burn

There is always hubris in the celebrity. We envy it; it is impressive. She is like us, the celebrity, only with hubris. At first, it seems to be only a kind of luck. She was picked out of the crowd to which the rest of us belong. Like us, she is a person of mediocre talent. But luck becomes ambition. She finds an agent, signs a contract; an autobiography is ghostwritten. She finds romance with another celebrity and is pictured in Heat. Now she is an invitee to the opening of new films and to awards ceremonies. Who blames her?

But then her ambition becomes overreaching; she drinks too much, perhaps, falling out of too many limousines; an ex-lover publishes a kiss and tell; she retires to a rehab clinic; or her love-rat celebrity husband, whom ev'ryone warned her about, goes out to the newsagent and never comes back. Ah, she drinks for us, laughs for us, enjoying ev'rything in our place. How wonderful it is to have a delegate in that world!

But who is happier than us when a celebrity crashes out of her world? Such only confirms to us the wisdom of the quotidian, a kind of fate that await those who overreach. It is magnificent: she was unable to profit from the randomness which lifted her from our world, and now she is returned to us. She is not one of the gods; she never was. But does she show us, then, that all gods are sham gods? Or does she, rather, confirm them in their godliness?

We can admire celebrities for their power of endurance. Ev'ry storm has been weathered and they sail magnificently, again and again into port. What have they endured? The indignity that would have floored us. How did X. survive it being claimed that her child was not that of her husband? How did Y. survive accusations of infidelity? But they endured and that is wonderful. It is as though a kind of wisdom shines through them. Yes, they are wiser for what they have endured.

Think of the interview is the one where the celebrity speaks to us of what she has learnt. At one stroke, she is one of us – she is as vulnerable as we are – and she escapes us, with that magnificent power of endurance which will allow her to remain in the firmament of celebrity. What matters, her publicists know, and those who coach her for interviews, is that she circumvent those feelings of resentment in her audience. For that is what we feel when the celebrity is too superb or too invulnerable.

Some claim a kind of banalisation of celebrity has occurred. Shane Richie says when he is recognised in the streets, it is as the actor he is, rather than the character he plays in Eastenders; twenty years ago, this never happened, he comments. It is necessary to understand the ordinariness of the celebrity, one might conclude. There is a decline of aura. But that is not quite true. The ordinariness is now part of the dynamic of celebrity, existing in tension with that magical power of endurance which has allowed them to survive. It is what is pushed forward by the celebrity even as her magic is set back into a deeper mystery.

What is the source of this mystery? It is easy enough: the power of the media, the great diversion of attention from what matters. No doubt, too, the power of ideology, the great duping of the world which cannot be placed on this or that media mogul but rather upon capitalism itself, the streaming of capital from which we are born and into which we return. The myth of the celebrity has been purified. To be famous for being famous all the while being quite ordinary is to confirm, ultimately, the power of capital as it might lift any of us, each of us, from our obscurity. As it might lift us onto its waters and then dash against itself, smashing us. And to survive – what does it mean to survive?

Think of the celebrity who has been with us for many years. Of the ups and downs of his career. What he has endured! And all for that he was known for nothing in particular: he is agreeably handsome, but not especially so, agreeably entertaining, but not a wit, untalented, it is true, but his mediocrity does not offend us…. Who is he? At once no-one in particular and a god. In truth, he is an avatar, a part-god, a god reborn to reach us in his ordinary body, to pass among us in his happy mediocrity. But of whom was he reborn? Which god, in the sky of gods, took his body? In the end it is none of them. Just as the puranas were claimed by the Hindus to operate as colourful tales for those whose minds were too unsubtle to grasp the pure abstraction of the one god, the life of the celebrity without talent is a cover for the operation of capital.

To what P.R. machine does the celebrity belong? To what advertising campaign? To none in particular – not to this or that media agency, but to one embedded in what is taken to be the real. It is not a question, here, of opposing reality to appearance once again, of speaking of the veil of maya which capital lays over a world which was once real. The word simulation or simulacra echo in a direction they cannot reach. Rather, the world is a series of public relations exercises for capital; advertising advertises capitalism and nothing else. A campaign which involves ev'ry flower and the whole sky, work time and leisure time. Which does not press reality into service, but is reality, the whole weight of the real.

When can it be caught out, this work which is the work of ev'rything? When does it reveal itself, the glitch in the matrix? When the untalented celebrity who was no one in particular falls from the firmament of celebrity. But, too, when he was first lifted there. There is a moment when the body of the celebrity is as yet unknown – who is he? – before the great rush of information fills in the void. And there is a moment when, returning to us, to the quotidian, the celebrity’s body becomes unknown again, secret, and a source of magic is revealed in its monstrous banality.

[A glitch in Typepad prevents me using the word e-v-e-r-y]

Celebrity Ascension

It seems there really are stars and celebrities really do occupy another realm. The everyday lies beneath the communication networks which wrap themselves around the planet. It abides; meanwhile, there is a celebrity cosmology, a collective dream (or is it an advertising campaign?) alive above us like the aurora borealis. Sometimes a few of us are allowed into the celebrity cosmos; sometimes, a few of us return.

Take X., with her ample bust, an attractive face and stardom was hers almost instanteously. She accepted an agent's offer; she became uniquitous, earning thousands of pounds an hour for public appearances and hundreds of thousands a year writing columns for men's magazines. She appeared on the front of dozens of red top newspapers earning money from the photos used to illustrate the latest scandal in which she had been involved.

Terror as you hear the words, who blames her? She knows it won't last; she works hard. Men like her, it is said, because they feel they have a chance with her; she is not a goddess. Women like her apparently because she should would be like them, admitting to sexual fantasies (she is launching a series of women's erotica) - a liberator of sorts.

Meanwhile at work there is some crazy new initative. What can you do? Nothing at all, you tell yourself. The ride is prepared, ready, the tracks will run from here to perdition. The seat warmed for you which is the correlate of the place X. keeps for you in the world of celebrity. There is heaven of celebrities and there is earth; the one only mimics the other. Who blames you? You know it won't last. Redundancies loom. Your contract will come to an end. And in the meantime ...

But the meantime is all time. You're a placeholder for any other employee. Anyone could take you place and anyone would do exactly the same as what you'll do. 'If you don't want to do it, we'll find someone else ...'

There is a pragmatism operative which takes no heed of you. A strategy which works through you and everyone. This is capitalism cyncism, as Sloterdijk calls enlightened false conscousness. We know what we're doing, but we're doing it anyway. After all, anyone would do the same in our place.

Who is X.? Each of us, any of us. For a moment, a glorious moment - you've been following the story from the start - she was the no one in particular in whose place we could all imagine ourselves or a version of ourselves. If she is admired, it is because she has achieved what each of us would want. If she is despised, it is for the same reason.

It is not that the dream machine of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment supplant what used to be called real engagement with the world. There was no such engagement, the great bedrock of certainty and security is another myth.

What was there, then, that is vanishing now? Time, perhaps? The time of strikes and power cuts - the marvel of a few hours escape from time the dispenser. The time, too, of the great slackening of activity when computers crashed or, before mobile phones, the few hours you could spend outside contact as you travelled from one company site to another.

But now the slack has been taken up. The world advertises its efficiency to itself. But what is being sold as X.? The servo-mechanisms of publicity sell the one who is along for the ride back to herself. Yes, you know everything, you know what matters most - the ecological catastrophe, suffering allowed to become invisible - but you also know - although this is only the phantom of knowledge, it's ideological substitute - that you can do nothing.

Voices

I saw Daniel Johnston a couple of nights back, without having heard of him before. Hoss, my musical friend, introduced me to him a few days before. Listening to his recent Mark Linkous produced album gave me only some indication of what to expect. Listening to the album again after Johnston's short performance (he played only for 30 minutes and we were lucky, for sometimes he exists the stage after 10 minutes), I realised it betrayed the simplicity of Johnston's singing and playing: that Linkous had lost the joy of great melodies and the happy simplicity of a music which requires no ornamentation. There are albums and albums of the simple, solo Johnston, I hear, which he used to pass out by hand to whomever he thought might like them.

Later, back at H.'s flat, I saw some of Johnston's art and read something of his biography. What struck me in particular were his pictures of Captain America in whose mouth he would insert speech bubbles. What did he make him say? I've forgotten, but there was a sense of apocalypse and of Captain America not as a superhero but as one who would embody all the strength and the weakness of America. Yes, all of it, and all of America's past, reminding me of the narrator of Whitman's 'Song of Myself'. Then I wondered whether there were celebrities who might embody all of our world in a similar sense. That night, I dreamt of celebrities who were like gods and wrote the two peculiar posts that precede this one.

In whose voice were they written? I wanted to write simply but also as though swept along by an all-powerful force. That great force which, I imagine, caught Johnston in those moments when he is able to write dozens of songs and paint, and write. I drank two cups of strong coffee and wrote prose I will regret because it will have to be defended. With whose voice was I writing? Conflation: too many voices spoke. All of them, and all at once. Conflation, too, of ideas with which I would want to stand behind and with ideas which I would not (ideas stronger and weaker than I am).

What does it matter? These voices, and this one too, in which I would write of voices, dissolve themselves into a prior swarming from which no voice can issue without assuming the mask that the condition of speech, of writing. Is it that swarming to which Daniel Johnston comes close in moments of illness? The guy from Yo La Tengo recalls visiting him in hospital; he couldn't get a word out of him, he reports. But this is because there was too much to say rather than not enough. How many voices there are in all of us!

Hoss admired the passion of Johnston's performance. Johnston is a big man, and performs in grey tracksuit bottoms and a white tee shirt. He props a lyric book on a high stand which makes it difficult to see his face when he sings and plays guitar. A few songs later, going upstage to play the piano with big, simple chords, Johnston retreated, Hoss noted, as if he felt more confortable at a distance from his audience. No doubt. There are stories that when he hears the words 'more' or 'encore' he climbs out of the window.

I will keep the pleasant memory of Johnston's entrance on stage. He carried two cans of different flavoured Fanta which he propped on the piano. Later he reversed their order. Then he bent down for some minutes to get his guitar from his case, his arse turned to the audience. 'We didn't have to see that', said Hoss. Johnston played his guitar clumsily, finding the chords with his fingers. But it was tremendous against his voice, his wonderful voice, so sweet and youthful. To whom should I compare it? Brian Wilson's? Perhaps this is too lazy. And how should I write about the music itself, the songs?

Ah, but I've no strength today having given it all up yesterday morning. All I can remember is the elaborate cosmology Johnston has made from himself, where Caspar the friendly ghost plays an important role. Would it be possible to dream up such a cosmology of my own with celebrities in a starring role and the body of capital streaming? Perhaps this hides a desire for regression - to tell myself those fairy tales without pain. But then there is a powerful Christian inspiration in Johnston's art where Christ would come to the crucifix as a bridegroom to his bride, in Augustine's words, and his head does not bow but raises itself erect and with eyes open Christ welcomes his crucifixion.

The Gods Themselves

They are among us, the gods, you think to yourself, much in the same way as D.H. Lawrence, dying in the South of France, imagined the old gods of the sea were alive for ancient peoples. There were gods ev'rywhere, he thought. And men went slimly like fishes and didn’t care. And how do we go through the quotidian? Like slim fishes? Either way, the gods accompany us, and we know they are close. There they are, the gods, on magazine covers.

We read of the doings of the gods, of the young ones, Girls Aloud, and the older ones. We read and imagine it is they who are active, truly active, somewhere in the sky, while we are passive. But in truth, they are also alive in us, Aniston and Pitt, Jolie and Thornton. It is said young women like to read about celebrities who’ve had babies. It is necessary to follow their lives, these celebrities, to compare one’s life to theirs.

Are celebrities are part of the spectacle, that great evil? Are they woven from ideology, from the dreams that capital wants us to bear. Perhaps they are not unreal for all that, and besides, we, too are dreams of the great streaming of capital. The old division of orders of being was correct: capital is realer than us, and so too celebrities. The rest of us, barely individuated, live because they are already alive and live for us.

Some tell you that you should turn from the heaven of celebrities to more serious things. But you’ve seen them reading Heat, oh yes, reading it as it lies among other things in the office. Yes, you leave it there in my office and it calls out to them. It calls them and they pick it up, attracted by its brightness. And you think to yourself: what they despise is what is greater than them. They're full of resentment and what they resent, first of all, is their own desire for bright things.

Heat is a flower than blossoms in the office. It flashes around the office. How happy it makes you! There is something to talk about. Your attention has been seized; it turns you from what matters, but what can you do about what matters? Politicans lie; ecological catastrophe looms, but meanwhile there is the long afternoon of office life. Meanwhile, there are celebrities, the bright world of celebrities.

‘Meanwhile’, yes, but do not think Heat is a distraction. Celebrities are real, you think, and realer than us. Do you love them? Do you love them with all of your heart? How upset you were to miss the documentary on Agnetha from Abba who fell in love with her stalker. Truly she was a fallen god and more glorious for that! How well you remember Margot Kidder’s breakdown. She passed, it was said, through backyards and swimming pools. She went among us, mad, among the lawn sprinklers and wendy houses. Marvellous that she came to us, you thought! Marvellous that confused, dazzled, her great wings hidden, she passed like a fallen angel through our world!

You would like to write the words Mariah Carey, but it is unbearable. Will your heart explode if you write of her struggles, her unconfidence which led her from the toughest of upbringings to the house of Tommy Liotta? You have not seen her film, Rainbow, but you know you must. you’ve failed her, this woman who was always on MTV when you turned it on (the video for 'Honey'). You will not think of her breakdown, or that of Stephen Fry who, decamped like Oscar Wilde to the continent, admitted ‘I am a silly old thing’. You were relieved; the director of the play he fled forgave him. You would have forgiven him, have him kneel and then place a crown of laurels on his forehead.

Britney Spears passes among us, too, disguised as a mortal. She has allowed herself to be reborn as a young, pregnant woman. Will her rough husband mistreat her? Will he lead her to damage? Vishnu and the other gods once gathered to accuse Shiva of being unworldly. You are always meditating, they said., what do you know of life? Shiva opened his eyes and interrupted his meditations and caused himself straightaway to be born into the body of a householder who was then at the point of death. He rose, the Shiva-householder, lived a life and then died. All this happened, for the gods before him, in an instant. Shiva spoke of his death and his rebirth. He smiled. The gods went away and left him in peace. So too with Britney Spears. Do not fear for her, you think to yourself. A god inhabits her.

Meanwhile, capital is streaming. Pythagoras told us that if we had ears to hear it we could hear the celestial spheres grinding against one another as they turned. It made a great and beautiful music. Capital streams, but there is no music. A kind of humming, a rustling without rhythm or regularity. The air says: I am not capital. The sky and the trees say the same thing. But what can you hear beneath them, above them, permeating them and the whole universe? The great rumbling of capital.

Capital is the oldest god, the god before the gods. He is Chronos, the oldest one, the one whose name is a name for time. Understand that he is the dealer of time, and controls the fates. They answer to him. But understand, too, that he has no plan for us nor for himself. He is the god unaware of himself. Scarcely a god, he is an event, time’s division, the apportioning of time into the time of capital.

Team Aniston, Team Jolie

Choose your tee-shirt: Team Aniston or Team Jolie. Which side are you on? Aniston is troubled: estranged from her mother and long estranged from her father, undesirous of children, keen for her film career to develop; on the other, Jolie is likewise estranged from her father (you are not sure about her mother) and is likewise ambitious for her films. Of course, she has a child, who she had intended to adopt with Billy Bob Thornton, the actor-singer-writer who preferred to tour the UK singing songs called ‘Angelina’ than be with his wife.

She left him, who blames her, and then what? She speaks of liaisons in hotel rooms. And then there was Brad Pitt, a simple lad, pilloried in Living in Oblivion, intimate of George Clooney and a kind of replica of Jennifer Aniston. You’ve seen the pictures of Pitt and Jolie holding hands, of course. And the new movie posters for Mr and Mrs Smith. A beautiful couple more so for their dissimilarity. They complement one another rather than resemble one another.

Team Jolie, Team Aniston. Pitt wants children, it is said, and Jolie has one. Courtney Cox blanked him the other day. How upset he would have been! Did he really want a reconciliation with Aniston in the wake of the divorce?

Sometimes you dream of them, the celebrities. This morning, you dreamt Brad Pitt suddenly sat beside you to read your newspaper. You wanted to turn a page to the editorials; he was keen to remain on the pages that report international news. He spoke. He was tender. He went away. You thought, in your dream: he was tender with me. He is famous and I am unknown. He is realer than I am but he speaks with infinite solicitude.

A story you remember from a childhood friend: Prince Philip's car breaks down near the house of his grandfather. So his grandfather mends Prince Philip's car and sends him on his way. How marvellous! you used to think, hoping that Prince Philip, or the Queen might visit our school. You always loved the Queen, you loved the colour of her outfits. You are sure you will dream of her again, remembering perhaps the programme Paul Burrell made about her, where he imitated her voice. The Queen was infinitely tender, according to Paul Burrell. She spoke with patience and solicitude. He was amazed that she could deign to speak with him thus.

Team Aniston, Team Jolie.  If you met Brad Pitt in real life, you would be sure to call him Mr Pitt, thinking that by so doing you would avoid that overfamiliarity which must plague him. You know he would say immediately 'Brad, Brad', and you would be able to call him Brad. Ah, but you would have earnt that right! And if you met the Queen?

Team Aniston, Team Jolie.  No, you can't decide. These people are gods, and the gods really do walk among us. We resent them, these gods, which is why we like seeing them on bad hair days. But this resentment is part of the awe we feel for them. Awe! You can imagine Jolie would be smaller than she appears on movie posters and in films. How tall is Brad Pitt? Quite tall, you think to yourself. It's his proportions, you can tell. And you remember, all of a sudden, the picture of Johnny Depp, drunken, dissolute, with the British policeman who arrested him. He was tiny, birdlike. He was a drunken bird loose in London. You thought: his small stature betokens a god. He is a god and so too Vanessa Paradis.

Now you imagine the god-celebrities gathered outside my flat. They are large and small, larger and smaller than human beings and they are gazing through your window. They have golden yellow faces and speak in a language you cannot understand. Jolie and Aniston are there, reconciled, at one with one another, as they always were. Why did they allow themselves to appear in discord, you wondered. Truly the gods are strange!

Prefigurations

To leave a blank Word document open – the promise of writing as I go about the house, clearing up in preparation for the visit of R.M. Outside, a white sky, inside, a white Word document: two expanses. Did I drink too much last night to write this morning? I think so. Five pints and two tequilas, spread over a long night, it is true. Too much. Last night we sunk pickled eggs into our porter – an old Stoke practice, apparently, from the potteries. How lovely they looked! It made the four of us, the usual four, laugh happily.

I am listening to Malone Dies and clearing up instead of writing. Listening to Beckett’s words make it difficult to write my own, but there are several things I should write. I have printed out Steve Mitchelmore's essay on Roubaud here beside me on the table and then the book itself, much read, annotated, and I wouldn't say loved exactly but one which I waited my whole life to read. Which was prefigured in every day of that life.

Here is a passage on which I would like to write. Alix is the name of Roubaud's wife:

1178 days. I knew Alix 1178 days, and the moment of this new beginning (months on end have elapsed, vanished between the first and second fragments of this bifurcation) is the first to go by, 1178 days after the day she died. My obsession with numbering correlates one day of grief with each day of her love.

This is not going to be a proper post - a well-rounded little essay on Roubaud, a mini-treatise on his use of interpolation and bifurcations, however much I'd like to write one. I am hungover, for one thing and although all the signs are propitious for work, strength fails me (why did I let myself drink those two late tequilas in the nightclub?) And then there is the perverse desire to answer Destruction with a destruction of my own. But what does that mean?

Conversation (a while ag0) with W. He says he wants to be as clear as possible in what he writes. I tell him that's not my aim. He says, that's obvious and we laugh and then, speaking of the commentaries I've written I say: I want to let Blanchot's prose as it were carry my own prose, to bear it. To allow the book on which I write to continue a movement which began and continues to begin in his writing and that before everything. To exhibit a fidelity which would not be a simply imitation, but something else. Ah, I didn't put it in those terms, and besides, I completely failed in my ambition. But it is a pleasant hope, one which Derrida himself had and not just of Blanchot (of writing on Blanchot).

Weber distinguishes 'classical' deconstruction from what was to come later, after the second cluster of three books were published in 1972. Is this plausible? W. dislikes Derrida's attempt, as W. puts it, to become a writer. What do I think? The prose is so laborious. I'd rather read him speak about his prose than read it, with a few exceptions. And then, late on - in the 1990s - even the interviews come to disappoint, again with a few exceptions. But who doubts we are in the presence of brilliance? As I read, I ask myself not what Derrida is working towards but why he works in this way. He speaks wonderfully on the subject and says he feels distant from the others around him, all the others, except Lacan, the other one who takes written risks, for whom writing itself is a risk. He feels close to Lacan for this reason, he says, but then on another occasion, will write that it is to Deleuze he feels closest, even though their works seem to differ in so many ways.

I tell W. I've always felt a tenderness towards Derrida's texts. W., demurring, speaks of a sincerity possessed by certain writers, perhaps those who have passed close to death. You can only write when you've died, says W., and he mentions Hugh Selby Jr. and Bernhard. When you've died and come to life again. That's what he said, and I remembered a passage in Derrida's 'To Speculate - on Freud' where he suggests that the death of Freud's daughter Sophie is prefigured by Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle'. Yes - prefigured, and not, therefore, remembered in Freud's speculative essay as so many commentators would have it. Prefigured, meaning the temporality of Nachtraglichkeit would have in some strange way have to be reversed. It is not the trauma that awakens itself long after the original event, but a strange anticipation of the event.

I would like to use the expression 'dark precursor' here, thinking of its French sense as the gathering darkness before the lightning strikes, but I'm not sure how. 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' would be the stormcloud that gathers so the lightning-strike of Sophie's death could burst through the sky. That dreams in advance of the death of it's author's daughter.

Now I remember another peculiar scene. As recorded in 'The Instant of My Death' - a text repeated word for word, in its entirety in Derrida's Demeure after Blanchot wanted to withdraw his little tale from his publisher, who was preparing to print some anti-Semitic creed - Blanchot records what we must take to be his escape from death. In 1944 (but on what date? - I've forgotten) he was put up against the wall to be shot as a member of the Resistance. Then the resolve of his captors withered. He was free to go, and so he went.

I know it - do I know it - that the one at whom the Germans were already aiming, awaiting but the final order, experineced then a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of beatitude (nothing happy however) - sovereign elation? The encounter of death with death? In his place, I will not try to analyse. He was perhaps suddenly invincible. Dead - immortal. Perhaps ecstasy. Rather the feeling of compassion for suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal or eternal. Henceforth, he was bound to death by a surreptitious friendship.

What is strange is that the relation to death this incident would lead to is prefigured in Blanchot's earlier writings - his Thomas the Obscure and Aminadab, not to mention the manuscript confined from the house by his would be murderers and the many literary essays he had already written. Then he was bound to death in friendship before the the event in question.

Between W. and myself there is a contretemps about death and writing. I remember what W. said about Hugh Selby Jr. and Bernhard. Yes, they came close to death; perhaps they might even be said to have passed through it (how beautiful!) But I think of a marvellous commentary on Derrida's essays on psychoanalysis by Maud Ellman where she writes, after noting Derrida's claim about the prefiguration of Sophie's death:

Is this an attack of mysticism - or numerology - on Derrida's part? Or is he imputing to Freud's text the temporal inversions of Nachtraglichkeit [...] whereby the psyche strives to master trauma after the event by generating the anxiety that should have been aroused before the unforessen catstrophe? Or is he tracking down the deadly work of the compulsion to repeat, which overrides the boundaries between life and text, before and after, cause and effect, disseminating symptoms that refer to nothing prior to their own proliferation. If so, Sophie's death, rather than preciptating this compulsion, is swept into its maelstrom, rolled round in its inexorable revolutions.

It is a lovely passage. Derrida is fortunate in his best readers, but then he created the texts which allowed them to so read. What a gift! But then what happened, later on? What happened as more and more texts appeared while around them the swirl of commentary moved ever more quickly? Derrida, marvellously, knows that of which we might suspect him. Guiltily, promising myself not to tell W. of my purchase, I bought Derrida's Counterpath. There he recounts a marvellous dream about Blanchot he had on my birthday (May 2nd) and remembers his friend Blanchot's anxieties about his (Derrida's) willingness to travel the world to give lectures. It is a humorous moment. I laughed, and thought: Derrida knows, it's clear to him ...

I read Counterpath on the train returning north. That was some time ago. I didn't buy Rogues; I forced myself not to. Enough, I told myself. Writing this post, the issue that bothers me with respect to Derrida, to Derrida and writing, has crystallised itself in a question: can we speak of an experience of death through which the writer has to pass in order to write? Ah, you might say, existentialism! How hackneyed! But I would say in turn, this is a time which needs resoluteness and decision. How many books there are! How many books! This is the age of philosophy, whether you want to call it theory or not, when everyone in the humanities and the social sciences reads philosophy. Yes, it is everywhere, but that is also to say nowhere.

A decision is required. A decision about writing and about philosophy. One into whose space I cannot bring myself. I am lagging - why? Speaking of this to W. we come to a similar conclusion: it was literature. I am caught, snagged, by an experience of reading. Of reading literature. The same is true for W. Is this why we devised the rules of Philosophy Dogma. I am laughing as I write this, but still ...

The decision, then: for Derrida, the death of Sophie was prefigured in 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle'; death would be woven into a repetition which allows life to live, on this account. One need not think of a particular event as instigating that trauma which will then repeat itself according to the logic of Nachtraglichkeit (yes I know I should put in the umlaut). But then what of death? What of that death through which one would have to pass in order to write as it were on the same path as Plato's eros is said to wander in the Symposium. That path not towards philosophy but that is philosophy itself. A loving, a friendship - with death? That's what reverberates for me in Blanchot's text (in the passage I quoted).

Candour: I suspect it is Derrida who is right. What does this mean, then, for the decision, for resoluteness, for the whole thematics of assuming death in which 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' is implicated? I began this blog for many reasons, but one was to surprise myself writing, to learn of my unconscious as I wrote quickly - of that realm populated not only with images of fathers and mothers, the whole Oedipal drama - but of desires which might then turn me in the direction of philosophy. Laughable ambition! But a persistent theme - its persistence surprises me - is that of inadequation and impotency, of the fall and the buffoon. What do these themes announce? They prefigure an encounter with Derrida's philosophy (but also with Deleuze's): of an experience of difference and repetition. But an encounter buried deeply in my life, prefigured there from the first.

Now I would like the book which began 1178 days before Roubaud met Alix, prefiguring it. I would like to write the dark precursor that would end in a flash of lightning. And what is that flash?

... night for night, the palindromic distancing of time (palindromic in relation to recollection) brings me back to the moment of our meeting, then to the moment before our meeting, when from the tiny Mitsou car I happened onto the site of an incipient coincidence exactly below the window from which would give rise the sound of a delivery van that I mentioned at the start of the very first fragment of this story.

The book - my imaginary one, the destruction of Destruction - ends with Roubaud meeting Alix.

Sleeping Horses

Bill Callahan has learnt not to rush songwriting. If it happens, it happens. Meanwhile, he's got living to do. He drives from gig to gig, his guitar on the back seat. His favourite guitar was stolen once, but Bill Callahan regarded this as a liberation. 'You shouldn't own too many things. Or be too attached to any of them', he told himself at the time, remembering the teachings of the Buddha. Oh, Bill Callahan is no Buddhist, but there's some truth in Buddhism, he often thinks to himself. Besides, he likes the idea of living his life according a code. His code, which he'll keep to himself.

Bill Callahan finds himself in an unfamiliar town. He's playing a gig tonight, but there are a few hours to spare. He phones the venue. Yes, everything's okay. They're ready for him. Bill Callahan drinks his Heineken. He's long since given up carrying a notebook with him to catch ideas for his lyrics. Still, he likes to sit and be still sometimes, to see what ideas come to him. The barman has brought him his snack. 'Are you sure it's vegetarian?' Bill Callahan asks. Yes, it's vegetarian; this is the West Coast, so he can trust them. They've heard of vegetarians here.

Now Bill Callahan is thinking about horses. He likes to write about horses, but he doesn't take it lightly. It's a serious business, writing about horses. Right now, the expression 'let me see the colts' is going through his head. It's a name of a song he's been working on oh for a couple of years. 'Let me See the Colts', that's what it'll be called, when he finishes it. He doesn't take it lightly. It'll be a serious song; one to end an album with, perhaps.

Bill remembers a story his sister told him about when she used to look after horses. One day, she said, she went into the stable and found the two horses she looked for lying down, one on one side of the stable, one on the other. In the middle, there was the donkey standing upright, not knowing what to do.

Then, the miracle; a phrase comes to Bill Callahan: 'there's nothing as still as sleeping horses'. Yes, that was the phrase Bill Callahan had been looking for. 'There's nothing as still ...' he wonders whether this is true. Has he ever seen a sleeping horse? He thought they only slept standing up. But no, thinking about it, he has seen horses sitting down, their long legs folded up. 'There's nothing as still as sleeping horses': yes, this is the lyric he was looking for. Now he feels the song is complete. He'll try it out later, after the gig.

Bill Callahan on the Freeway

Drag City would like Bill Callahan behind the new Smog release. ‘Come on Bill,’ they say to him, ‘promote it. Do some interviews. Do an overview of all your albums for Uncut. Do a new photoshoot. Keep an online touring journal.’ But Bill Callahan has his eyes closed and he is dreaming. And when Bill Callahan rises, it will be to turn his old car out of the Motel and on to the Freeway. Bill Callahan is a stranger to the world and to himself. This is how he likes it. The landscape rushes by. Bill Callahan, eyes open, is dreaming.

Interregnum

Morning again and I am listening to Mark Kozelek's What's Next to the Moon as custom dictates (it is a morning album just as The Complete Brass Monkey, to which I was listening before is an evening one). Yes, morning, but it was difficult to sleep and I wake tired, drained and with an ache in my stomach. But one thing makes me want to write (but my prose is already disappointing): last night, insomniac, I began Nabokov's Speak, Memory and in a couple of hours had read nearly a hundred pages.

How I would like, now, the sails of my prose to fill with that wind which billows through his! I am two fifths of my way through his book and already I fear reaching the end; I am in suspense just as the narrative is suspended in the Russia before the Revolution (is the word this suspense: interregnum). I know terrible times are afoot for the Nabokov family and no doubt they deserve to lose their wealth but for a time, they are happily prosperous. Happy, yes - but Nabokov is narrating their tale from another time, from America, much later.

But I do not want to write about Nabokov now, let alone begin a new category called 'Nabokov'. This is going to be a lengthy love affair, I think - there are many books to read - and I will need to see what happens to the books in my memory. What will happen to them? Don't write on a book for sixth months - that's the new rule, which I have already broken with respect to Leiris's Manhood.

Piles or ricecakes, some solo, cylinders of Oat and Rice Cakes (it says on the label) some twinned (one cylinder bound to another with yellow tape) and discounted (only £1.25): they are plain Rice Cakes. In the other corner of the room, 29p fizzy water bottles from Tescos. A half drunk bottle of Marks and Spencer's wine on the table beside me (£3.49) ... This morning the lounge seems rather wretched as though a battle had been fought and this were the aftermath.

Why was it I wanted to write? Perhaps to mark a place for the post on Bernhard's A Child I've written, which Typepad will not publish without peculiar paragraph breaks whenever I use the word 'every' or 'Salzburg' (I can't erase them, even when I play with the html). But no - that's not the reason for writing. I dreamt, but the content of what I dreamt does not matter so much as the prose with which they were bound up. Yes, strands of prose entwined themselves in whatever it was I dreamt about and I wanted to attest to them here. Alas, I've failed and what I've writtten today is only an attempt to mark a place where writing, real writing could have begun.

To keep place - this is already a reason for blogging. To press the 'save' button and publish these words onto the internet, subjecting them to that great detour which takes them out of my mediocre morning and into something like the world. I will forget them as soon as I write them, it is true, but it allows me to think: I could have begun today that book which would have allowed everything to have been said. Such is my version of Roubaud's Project and these words a poor imitation of the book called Destruction.

In truth, this week, where I have written a great deal, is an in-between time (I would like to use the word interregnum, but I am not sure if it is the right one; there is no dictionary here and my dial up connection is too slow to search for an online dictionary and then for this word): there was work to be done (the book, now finished), and there will be more work to be done (a revision of the book, once it has been proofread, but more importantly, the papers which will have to delivered at the end of the long summer). I have a sense of urgency - now is a time without project, in which a smaller writing is allowed. Write a great deal, I say to myself, mark this interregnum in the passing of days just as, when a child, you would be asked to write a few words of your 'news' (this weekend, I ...)

A new project will begin, no doubt. But I have a sense of a new apocalypse - a devastation of the world - after which the calm sentences I have set down here will seem as full of a lost security and well-being as the pre-Revolutionary interregnum Nabokov recounts.

I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch were my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the celing. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.