You can't work all the time, it took me several years to learn that. Spent most of my life trying to work all day and all night. Forcing my body, when tired, when it asked for rest, to work more by forcing coffee inside it. Until caffeine ends up draining you still further, and too much coffee drinking one day ruins the morning of the next. Now nothing, less than nothing can be done and the cycle continues. You incur a vast sleep debt which you will be unable to repay. Your body shuts down and you can barely do anything; you owe too much to work which is to say to time. Your tiredness is not the tiredness of rest but owed time, slave's time, the time of the bad machine part.
It is absolute necessary to go out, to drink. Only through drinking can you unchain yourself from caffeine and from the intensity it engenders. And only through free time, in company, when your attention is allowed to lag and the whole world crowds in upon your senses and there is drinking and merriment is the next day refreshed and opened to you in the happiness of work.
That is a cause of binge drinking, as Theodore Zedlin pointed out on the radio (according to W.) and such drinking is a sign of health. For to work all day bound by caffeine to intensity is to change the structure of your brain. Intensity by day, tiredness by night. Until incipient manic depression reveals itself. One day you will try to forestall through drugs that are stronger than caffeine.
Avoid stimulants. Let them drain from your system. Let the caffeine pass through you and out of you. Then alone will you be uncaptured by work. Only then will work not steal the energy that is yours. Then you can give yourself to work, and work maximally but also tear yourself away from work. Now work becomes the yo-yo you control and you are not the spool that spins on the string of worktime.
Beneficient work! Happiness of a writing for which you were unprepared. A writing born of dreams and the unconsciousness. A writing of strange connections and leaps!
Unable to work this afternoon, I walked out into the world, looking for things to fill my attention. I thought as I walked: you dream in prose and so I was determined to dream in images, not prose. I thought: you need to bathe your eyes in art, and so I went to the library to look through picture books. I thought: you need your senses bombarded, so I arranged to see The War of the Worlds tonight with friends. And I thought: you need alcohol to pour through you, so I arranged a drink before the film and planned to drink after the film, not alone but in company.
In this way, I may find myself able tomorrow to write about God and Will Oldham. I know there's some pretty, imagistic prose inside me waiting to be born. I know there's something to be written about Will Oldham's claim that evil must be shared in song and sung out loud. Sing of evil, share evil in song and it is outside and not inside, he says in an interview. But what of God, of Will Oldham's God, God of one who does not what it means to believe in God? Ah to write with God and with evil, how marvellous! With them, you understand, and not aping the way in which these words have already given themselves to the rhetoric of politicians. God is little, I thought, and evil is little. Will Oldham knows that. Daydream of writing like a painter, dipping my brush in the colour of God and colour of evil and spreading their colours on my canvas.
The smooth paving stones of my city allow those in wheelchairs to glide through the city. There are school children and college youths in the streets and mothers with their pushchairs. I walk the long length of the mall, pleased because I know the way through its vast corridors. I think to myself: I would like to write of God and the mall, this mall. Then I wonder idly whether I should get a book out from the library on poetic metre. Will Oldham plays around with the grammar of his sentences not to fit words to the music but to unfit words from words and music from music. He is uneloquent, joyously so. The language of his songs obtrudes and brings the music to obtrude. You ask yourself: what was that about?, because words came together strangely, belonging neither to the ordinary language of the present or the flowery language of books of the past. Should I learn words about poetic metre to describe what Will Oldham does with words?
What is it that allows Will Oldham to give us a language which is out of time? And a music, too, which is irreducible to any particular form, any genre? A music as though unable to reach itself? A little music, to use that word which Will Oldham uses over again. A little music, a minor music, a music of corners and small animals. Will Oldham would not walk here, I thought to myself as I left the mall. He says he rarely goes out in public, but to filthy places, yes that was the phrase, though it should be taken lightly because Will Oldham always likes to surprise those who read his interviews by never answering the same question in the same way.
There are no filthy places here, I think to myself. Light is everywhere and the streets are exposed without secrets to the sky. Even the mall is full of light. There is nothing for God to judge, I think to myself, because no one can have any secrets. Where does Will Oldham find his filthy places? I wonder. Perhaps like his language they are outside time, I thought. Perhaps Will Oldham leaves time to find his filthy places, I thought. Perhaps they are those places where time lags and work is impossible, I thought. Perhaps the filth is the filth of worklessness - of that slackening which is not a break from work or the tiredness that follows from overwork.
I thought: that is time of God and of animals. It is the time of the one who is coming toward us. The time where Pushkin stood his claim. When the moon falls and the wounds are calling. I thought: Will Oldham sings about time, little time, forest time.
and a brand new baby child/ makes me trunky, makes me wild/ makes me trumpet of the swan/ a brand-new footprint-maker born.
I be ashtray, I be star/ I be monkey by Babar/ I be hippo calling far/ far into the forest.