Fear of Time
Why turn back? Why remember, after these years, those tracts of unemployment, those wounds no one suffered, for I was hardly there to suffer them? Because I would turn there to discover the secret of the same everyday I see through my window; I would smash the glass. Why look back and not forward? Why back and not through this window before you? Because I am employed, busy, even when I try and write on the everyday. I have betrayed it; the everyday escapes; it flees into what I take to be my past.
Why does it flee thus? It cannot be otherwise; if unemployment allows me to witness the everyday, it does not permit me to seize it. The word, trauma echoes feebly in a direction it cannot reach, for I am writing not of a wound or a wounding, nor even of a suffering, unless it is possible to invoke a suffering suffered by no one, a suffering with no one at its core, but which returns, ghost of what cannot complete itself and cannot come to term.
Suffering, then: name of that pathein which attunes, that mood which will henceforward sustain your life, that vagueness which returns and which you fear. Vagueness, suffering without subject, cosmic boredom: there is no name for what amounts to a fear of time. Agoraphobia is already misnamed, for where is our agora, our common space, such that it could be feared? There is no shared life; no life lived in common, and perhaps this is already a clue as to why the everyday flees even as we look for it. At the exhibition of the everyday life of the Phoenicians at the British Museum, I thought, only we today, we moderns experience the truth of the everyday; only for us is it presented and hidden, both at once. We have lost what we think we have found in another civilisation, but in truth we've found nothing, not even ourselves.
The fear of time: I am not sure what to call this new condition and I know I have mistaken it for what is so poorly named agoraphobia, for that dislike of open spaces, of the square in front of the town hall or the development by the quayside, but above all, for me, those roads on which I used to cycle when I was young, roads exposed, roads which exposed me mercilessly to the sky, as if delivered unto a celestial judgement.
The Judgement
And what was decided with respect to my case? What judgement was handed down? Ah, but there was no judgement and no one to hand down a judgement, I knew myself, cycling, to be seen, by the sky, by the white light as it saw me and was indifferent to me.
I was not a child. Perhaps that was the point; perhaps that was the first experience of the fact of the world that would not indulge me. Was that the judgement delivered to me: you are not a child, you are no longer young, what you are is what you will be? Was that the judgement: you are what you have become, there are no potentialities left to unfold? Nothing will happen that has not happened; the pattern is fixed, your future known: that's what the day said to me. A child is everything and I was nothing. A child has potential and I had exhausted my potential. My time was up; what could I become that I was not already?
Was that the content of the judgement? I wonder. Because it was also the case that the one I was, the cyclist, was already dispersed. Who was I? I cycled across the Thames Valley, going nowhere in particular; I cycled, going nowhere, for where was there to go? And so was I dispersed in that cycling, so was my attention claimed by nothing and everything - claimed, but so that attention emptied itself out, so its gaze surveyed all but saw the same in all, the same, but behind the same, hidden by it, as it can only be hidden, what I will call the 'there is' of the everyday.
There is the Everyday
There is, il y a, es gibt - the German is best because it speaks of what was given, of the 'there is' that is also a giving. But a giving that abandoned me to what was given thus, which said: this is fate. Not, this time, my fate, measured in terms of what I could or could not do; not the fate allotted to me, but to a time, to my time, to the epoch of the everyday, the great noon when the everyday came to itself and knew itself in the bland white indifference of the sky.
A judgement was delivered; I received it; I bore it. A judgement was delivered; I wrote to transmit its lesson. The book called The Judgement wrote itself. 160,000 words; 500 pages. Unpublishable, of course, unreadable, of course, and gradually, over the months cut down, distilled until there were only 5,000 words left; and then I saw that those words, too, were no good and would have to go. The Judgement: a blank page. Blank, ruled page of the W.H. Smiths diaries in which I used to write. Blank page on which nothing was written, but which bore, so it seemed to me, something like the judgement of the blind sky on what lay beneath it. I was judged; we were judged; the Thames Valley was judged, and by the Thames Valley the world as it in turn would be transformed into the Thames Valley.
I had seen enough; I had seen everything. What use was cycling now? I had seen enough; my education was complete, but in a sense I had learnt nothing, or rather, my education had only begun. For I was not there to suffer what I suffered, I was not there, which is not to say it did not happen. Oh it happened, it was ever-present; I experienced it as I watched Neighbours, as I rose at ten-thirty, but it happened such that it was never completed and determined as an object of my experience. I was haunted, not by the ghost of Hamlet's father who would spur him to vengeance, to action (but Hamlet vacillates; he does not act), but by vacillation itself (redoubled in my vacillation, in my non-action). Only indecision attested to the coming and going of the judgement.
Indecision
I studied; I learnt a great deal and forgot a great deal; I thought I had come up against the roof of my intelligence; I gave up studying and sold my books. I was back on the dole, back where I was at the start. But returning to me, despite everything I had forgotten, was a memory I am not sure I can call mine. Returning, then, out of the depths of a forgetting that was in no way the opposite of remembering, I knew the same judgement; it was passed again, over and again. How could I but misunderstand it, despite my learning, or, perhaps, because of it? I hadn't the tools; I hadn't the ability to speak of what could not be spoken not because it was ineffable, but because it carried speech away.
Years pass and I find myself here, this Sunday morning, surrounded by the debris of last night's entertainment - sucked lime quarters, Corona bottles and empty cans of Guinness - find myself tired and hungover. Tired, hungover, but with a great deal of work before me - papers to write up, books to read - but I am fit only to write here at the blog. What do I write? Suddenly I remember the phrase from the poem, 'in the end is my beginning' - perhaps I should begin with that, I say to myself, and see where that takes me. I begin; I open the 'compose new post' screen; I write without deciding what to write.
But in that indecision lies the truth. In that indecision I turn, I am turned; by indecision does the judgement return to me and I remember, even though it fled from memory. What had I seen? What had I been given to see? I am Lot's wife, turned into a pillar of salt, for what have I seen? What I did not see, the seeing of the sky, the day's gaze, the everyday as it saw me then in blindness and knew me in its blindness - yes, only now does it turn to me, that same blindness, only now does it return, the experience that, when it occurred, immediately set itself so far back into my memory that it became something like its condition. The condition of memory, but also its content, as though it were a priori and a posteriori at one and the same time.
The Threshold
Why turn back? Why remember, after these years, those tracts of unemployment, those open wounds of time? I am frightened of time, that is true; there is too much time, not too little, and it is not my death that encircles my awareness, distant horizon, but infinite time, the infinite threshold between one moment and another. Today, what is today? Today, who am I today? I remember that scene in Mirror where the boy who, we learn, lost his parents in the siege of Leningrad, is questioned by his drill-sergeant. What is he asked? Specific questions which need specific answers. How does he reply? Without specificity, at once vaguely and determinedly; he speaks with firmness of what has no firmness. So too does the everyday ask to be remembered here. To be remembered, which is to say, to remember itself by way of my memories. By way of them, but not contained by them, the everyday having judged them and become their condition.