Spurious

The Wilderness

In the Meantime

We're at the sand dunes - they're supposed to be building something here, but nothing is being built. A cliff of sand, a halted mechanical digger, a wide field of long grass: this is where us children play, the ones who will be the last to know patches of wilderness such as this in the Thames Valley. We bring our bikes here in the long summer, a few of us. And what do we do? Scramble up and down the cliff; start fires in the dry grass. Above all, it is a wilderness, it is not here for any reason; they were planning to build a school here, but did not; soon, it will be transformed into a golf course. But in the meantime?

In the meantime: that is our time. Our friendship includes our relationship to this space and others, that have not been transformed into places of leisure and work. Off by bike to find other such places - patches of land forgotten by others, woods behind houses, the barrows; all gone now, all disappeared. Now are the suburbs as if they had been there forever. The takeover is complete when all signs of a struggle have vanished. For us, at that time - we were eleven or twelve -, passing through a new housing estate was enough. An estate just like ours, but unalike in one detail or another. A lake, say, or a river - that was enough to make it exotic. But best of all, open space. Best of all, open space without function, a space torn from space.

Through the long grass to the pond with tadpoles. Through the grass, with nets and jamjars. Or, travelling further, to the lake under whose rocks leeches are to be found. We press them on our arms - suck! They never suck, but drop off into the water. We put scrap wood down among the trees and turn it over weeks later in search of slow-worms and toads. And there are snails with different coloured shells which we will place on one side of the road to watch them cross, risking being crushed by cars. Then there are the ant's nest between kerbstones, and that day when they swarm, and winged ants crowded the pavement. And the drains, down which we drop stones and mud and whatever we find: drains by which we sit and make up songs. Our wilderness, the gaps in the housing estates.

How is it the labyrinth of roads becomes a prison? How is it that the estates becomes the obstacle to our lives? We buy maps and cycle out to the larger expanses, the ranges the army claims as its own. We wander into plantations and through farmer's fields. What is it we're looking for? Why do we climb the low hills and look into the distance? There is something missing from our lives - what? Something is missing from our lives, but what is it?

We are friends by way of the wilderness. Our friendship is one of movement; we cycle - we search. So do the days of summer pass. One day, another - summer is passing. What will we have done this summer? Of what was it comprised? Day lies down on day. Days accrete, until summer acquires a shape, like a coral reef. That was our summer: we turn the object over in our heads. Yes, that was it, our summer, and our friendship which passed by way of the summer.

Later, when we are older, there are parties. Our days are spent waiting for parties; we count down each day as it comes. Forty-one days ... forty. We play computer games. We cycle to a far town to buy cheap cans of drink. All time is lived in the direction of the party; the days point ahead of themselves like an arrow. We live in the not-yet; the days stand out ahead of ourselves. For what are we searching? When will it come?

But they come, the parties. And then - the post-mortem. Detailed discussion of everything that happened. Analysis. Did it happen, what we were looking for? What happened, even as it seemed to vanish in the crowded details of the event? Our lives were turning. Our schooldays were ending. Was this it - life? Was this all it was? At sixteen, seventeen, our days were full of vast holes. We had time on our hands, all of time! But now time wasn't liberation, but oppression. Time became oppressive. What were we to do? What were we doing with our lives? Was this life? Was this it - life?

Still we were friends by way of the wilderness. But now it was the wilderness of waste, the expanses of waste. The days were closing themselves down; nothing new was beginning. Gradually, it became clear - gradually, it revealed itself: the extent of the day, the day's mediocrity. The fields were lost under houses. Sometimes we would go to the construction sites and break the windows of the new houses. One night we went on a vandal's trip and the security guards shouted at us and we laughed. What could we do? The fields went; the ponds were drained. Now came the companies - Microsoft and Digital Electronics! Now they appeared, the great companies and their workforces. What of our friendship? What of the wilderness by which our friendships lived?

Already they were succumbing to drugs, our friends. Already they were making a wilderness of their evenings, tearing time apart. They were disappearing, our friends - lost in hashish, lost in the smoke-haze. No longer scavanger's trips to the backs of the shops on Sundays to see what we could find.  No longer thief's trips to construction sites (rolling home a huge ball of lead). No more vandal's trips to the new houses.

Once, the wilderness was full of promise. Each gap in the world pointed beyond itself: there was the future - there it was in time subtracted from time, just as space was subtracted from space. The wood glade was an indication; the lake pointed beyond itself; the diving beetles prophesised. And now? The future had arrived; we fell out of the world.

And then, one day, I was the last one left. The others had gone away to study, and I was left. Now it came, the apocalypse. Now came the unveiling, whereby I knew the gaps were closed and there was no future. What did I see? The completion of the suburbs, the indefinite expansion of the housing estates: it was over, the world was over. Walls on all sides. Escape - but to where? I worked; I took no holidays. I worked - the day was over; this was the apocalypse.

No need to search, it's all - here. No need to travel; the world was expanding from - here. No escape; apocalypse: everything that was to happen had happened. Time had stopped going forward. It was a circle: time and space, a circle. I lived the same day over and again. And when they returned, my friends, from their holidays, it was only a brief reprise. When they came back, it was only to seize upon those few moments from which the last drop hadn't been squeezed.

We were friends by way of the wilderness. Now, when we visit them, our friends have disappeared from themselves. Haze of smoke; a rented flat - three of friends collapsed, half-dead. Was this it? This was the apocalypse: this was all there was and would be. I worked at Digital Electronics; I worked at Hewlett Packard: there was no more time.

Two Alterities

Time is the other, says Levinas; no surprise that it is to erotic love, to romance that he will first trace the gift of time (even if such love is subordinated by him to the engendering of the son, by which the relation to the infinite is accomplished). Love: is it by that the wilderness might be found again? It is true in those days I did find such love, even as it eluded me - even as it did no more than vouchsafe itself and disappear.

Was that enough to be able to look beyond the world - or at least, receive it, the world, by way of the gaps in its extent, its unbroken horizon? It was nearly enough. Nearly - but didn't it, that love, set itself against the apocalypse of the everyday so as to throw the latter more starkly into relief? Didn't it confirm the closure of the world it opened?

And would I say the same of reading? I know this: that it was not by success that such love as I refer to could be known, but by its failure. Impossibility was its path; the wilderness was revealed to me because of what did not happen. Only by its withdrawal could love be known: this was its pain, but also its promise.

By this love had I been elected - but to what had it returned me but myself? I could say I learnt then of a wilderness inside that was the correlate of an outer wilderness: that the horizon of the world was breached even as my own horizon - the closed space of my identity - was likewise breached. What was awoken outside was awoken inside me too; henceforward I would know that inner falling away by her name, the one I loved. So it became, this name, a magic charm.

And what of reading? I consumed books; I was hungry; I read several a week. Came the day when I could not consume the book I read: Kafka's The Castle held itself from me even as I read it. What was I reading? That by which I knew the meaninglessness of the world, its very extent as promise. This was miracle: an affirmation occurred by way of reading, of the very closedness of the world - or rather, that closedness, the wall of the world, became the blank screen upon which the world was projected, just as, by night, the window reflects the lit room with darkness behind it.

What had I discovered? Something like the nothingness of the world, only I did not suffer from what the world was not. Was it Sartrean freedom I had discovered? Heideggerian authenticity? Rather, it was the fall away from the self - the giving up of those contours which had held me intact and held the world apart from me. Who was I? The 'who' resounded without answer. In those two alterities, which came almost at once, I received the world again. But how long it took to learn the lesson of what I received by love and by reading!

The Ogre's Heart

But perhaps I never learnt a thing. Is it because I'm a certain kind of person that I was attracted to the thinkers I admire? Or is that what I am was made by that encounter; that I cannot subtract myself from what I read? Perhaps this is a false alternative: isn't that I was ready for the encounter and was changed by it, such that I was not myself thereafter? But I was already changed by what I encountered by way of the two alterities. How did I know that Blanchot would become important to me, I who could barely understand a line he wrote? But I understood and that reading laid the path I am following now. That was my life: is it possible to say that? Or is it that to live was to have been dispossessed and to have known friendship by way of dispossession. Wasn't it in the wilderness I was already lost? Wasn't that what I always sought - to lose myself?

The ogre in the fairy tale buries his heart in a chest somewhere far away; the hero, to kill him, must discover its location. What of me is buried in the Thames Valley? What is buried there, such I lag behind myself, snagged so that it is necessary to pass by way of the Thames Valley in order to speak of myself? My heart? Only if the heart is the organ that turns the body inside out. Only if it is by my heart that I am claimed by the two alterities that opened for me, then.

Others

Protection

How old am I - nine? ten? - when it comes to me that if I do not meet him, dad, at the top of the road as he comes home from work, he will die. Nine or ten, no older than that, and if I am not there to meet him, he will have died, I am sure of it. Do I already know he is ill? Or is it something else, a greater threat that I sense? Now it's up to me to meet him, to hide and then surprise him and then to walk home with him.

But why? Does he really need my protection? If I do not meet him, then what? If I am not there to meet him, what will happen? But I must be there, so I am there. As if he needed my protection - from me, still a boy. As if I, still a boy, can afford him protection. But then he is the only brown man in these parts. And didn't a girl reach out her hand in class to scratch me with her fingernails to see if I was brown underneath the surface of my skin, I who am not really brown at all? And think what my friend's mum says about the Jews who employ her: they so greedy! We are not Jews, of course not, but if they're in for it, so are we, that much is clear.

Us and the Jews on one side, the rest on the other. Us and the Jews on one side - and blacks, but there are no blacks here, I've scarcely seen anyone black since we moved out of Southall - and the whites on the others. The odds are stacked against us, that's clear. We have to stick together, and though I don't know any Jews, it is clear they're on our side. Jews, us, blacks - all of us together, not like it was in Southall.

Jews, us, blacks versus the rest. There's a Polish family up the road - on our side. And there's my half-Egyptian friend at school - one of ours. There's the rest, the whites, a great undifferentiated mass, the whites, hundreds and thousands of them, everywhere. All the whites! And then us!

Deaf 'Uns

Back in Southall, whites and the blacks got along fine, but the we played by themselves. The blacks had some cachet with the whites, and the whites, who never needed to be called whites, they were still the majority, rubbed along with the blacks, but we played separately from the blacks and the whites on the concrete playground, when the others played on the school field. They broke Baraj's arm, the blacks and the whites, but it was just rough and tumble, I knew that. His mum came in, crying, but it was just rough and tumble, boys will be boys, and so on. But we were best off avoiding the whites and the blacks, that was the lesson.

Sometimes, the whites and the blacks would together hunt down the deaf kids, the deaf 'uns. Off they went, a great hunt for the deaf 'uns. Summer on the playing field, hunting down the deaf 'uns and pulling down their trousers and their pants - that was the sport. The deaf 'uns, taught in a separate terrapin, and with boxes around their necks to help them hear - they were the Others, and they were for it. Open season on deaf 'uns! Chase them! Pull down their skirts and their knickers, pull down their trousers and their pants! Separate one from the other and give chase, all across the field!

Paki Shops

When we moved out to the Thames Valley, it was our turn to be Others, we who never thought of ourselves as exotics, but whose names gave us away. How unfortunate, our names! How unfortunate, to be asked to explain where it is our names came from! 'How did you get a name like that'? Now there are no blacks and only a few Asians, who run what are called paki shops. That's what they're called - paki shops. The mums and the dads of our friends refer to the paki shop - 'are you going to the paki shop?' Paki - that's the word, that's what they'd call us, given half the chance.

The Poles run one shop, the Asians another shop. It's clear: the foreigners are here to serve the whites. There are whites, and there are foreigners, and the foreigners serve the whites. How unfortunate to be lumped in with the Asians at the paki shop! A morose, expressionless old lady served there, her hand cupped for our money - how unfortunate to be lumped in with her! Back in Southall, there were Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs - but out here, just an undifferentiated morass: pakis, each one the same as the rest.

The vandalism is directed at us - pakis out; NF - initials in a circle. At us. As a reminder - we were not welcome here. My friend's mum would talk about the greedy Jews and the paki shop, so what did she say about us? We were pakis, to her, no question about that. To her: pakis, and though her son was allowed to play with me, he later joined the British National Party with her approval. 'It's a free country. He can do what he likes'.

Middle Class Hatred

She didn't like the Jews. She resented them, with middle class resentment. She spoke about their greed, with middle class hatred. Quietly, but with hatred. Satirically, but with hatred. We didn't know any Jews. Jehovah's Witnesses we knew, but no Jews. Mormons we knew, but no Jews. True, there was the Jewish home for the handicapped, where some of the mums worked, but no Jews, or the Jews amongst us had not declared themselves.

Where were they, the Jews? I wondered what their houses were like. Back in Southall, I'd visit Indian friends and drink sweet tea from stainless steel cups. We'd sit on the floor and drink sweet, milky tea from hot cups. What would a Jewish house be like? They were greedy, said my friend's mum, but she was not to be trusted. We had a German friend, and her house was different - a samovar and china and portraits of old barons; we were served Stollen and unfamiliar biscuits and she would speak to the children in German; and I had a half-Egyptian friend, a Copt, though there was nothing particularly Coptic about his house; his mother was Dutch, but there was nothing particularly Dutch about his house.

I knew the white middle class had a special punishment waiting for the Jews. I knew it, for they were loathed for being so similar to the whites. At least we weren't similar to the whites, us lot. At least there were clear identifying marks to tell us apart from the white middle class. But the Jews - what trouble! They had the temerity to look like them, the white middle class! What temerity! Special punishment for them, then! Special punishment for looking so similar and being so different! We'd be up against the wall, no question, but they'd have a special torture for them, the Jews.

The Pack

Later on, at secondary school, I was moved to the back to sit with the skinheads and thugs. Truce in the classroom, but open season in the playground. Truce in form period, when they'd carve WHITE POWER into their knuckles with compass points and Indian ink and talk about skinhead bands and setting their dogs on pakis and tramps, but open season in the breaks. But outside the classroom - avoid them! Keep clear of them! They went around in packs - avoid them! Keep out of their way!

Luckily for me, there were many Others, all sorts at our school. A sprinkling of all races - just a sprinkling. There were the weaker remedials, who were taught separately from the rest of us. Plenty of Others to pick out from the herd! Plenty of Others, where weakness and victimhood is all, regardless of anything else! So was the retarded boy thrown in the river in the winter. So did they break the ice with his body. So was the brown-skinned boy chased round the school and beaten to the ground and kicked and kicked. They were on the look out for weakness. For Others. Others didn't have a chance. They'd be found. No bolthole could hide them. They'd be driven out, exposed. It was time for a kicking. Time for a beating. For the most part, I escaped. Mostly, I was cunning enough to escape. But for the Others - no mercy.

Sometimes, they were made to fight one another, the Others. The burnt boy whose hair grew in clumps and patches around his scars was set upon the big lad with learning difficulties. Let them fight it out! Let them fight, for everyone's entertainment! Let them scrabble for a place slightly higher than the lowest rung, for everyone's entertainment!

Like dogs in the mud, they fought. Like dogs - fighting, and around them, the crowd, the crowd encouraging them. Fight! And they fought, pathetically, one against the other. Weak blows, weak neckholds - the Others couldn't even fight! How pitiful! They can't even fight! And so the crowd dispersed and turned away. The Others - they couldn't even fight!

Later, the pack would be kept busy with dramas with their girlfriends. They stand about smoking, their arms around their girlfriends, at peace for the first time. They've become gentler; soon it will be time for them to leave school. We come out from our boltholes and hiding places; they're busy, the pack-hunters, the thugs; the school is ours again to pass out the long sentence of our childhood.

The Protector

Earlier, before the rot. I am 9 or 10, long before secondary school. Dad's coming home in the sun. Would he die on the way home? Would he be stabbed on the way home? I'll surprise him, I think to myself. I'll meet him at the top of the road, I tell myself.

Then, behind me, an older boy on a bike calls out: 'what are you doing?' - 'Waiting'. - 'What for?' - 'My dad'. He cycles away. Then, later, when I am coming home with him, my dad, who has miraculously survived another day, I see him again on his bike, the lone boy, the lone hunter. Will he turn, this boy who would sometimes kick a football around with me on the wasteground? Will he join the great pack? I can tell: he's on the cusp. I can tell already: he's on the cusp. Like the others, he's waiting for a Hitler. Like the others, he's primed and ready and waiting for a Hitler.

But money is coming to the Thames Valley, and soon new people move into the area. The motorway reaches us; the big American companies set up in new industrial estates. In truth, this is what saves the region from being mired in hatred and mediocrity. It comes, the great tide of capital, and with it, new workers from all over the world. We are not the only ones anymore, the only Others. They have come, the other Others, from all over the world. The town is changing; the region is changing, it's beautiful. They're coming from all over the world, and there are plenty more of them to come. The white middle class can fantasise all they like; we're here - this is no longer pioneer country; we're here and Hitler's coming is infinitely deferred.

I won't have to meet him, my dad, from work any more. He'll survive. And now another story begins - no longer the violence of bullies and tormentors, but the slow triumph of capital. No longer discipline, but control.

Hopelessness

Hopelessness without hope - what does that mean? Hopelessness and no hope, without even the glimmer of hope - what does that mean? It is inconceivable - that you can think of hopelessness, conceive of it, already attests to the power of thought; to think is already to hope.

But what of an experience without power, where power drains away and you are immersed in the great marsh of the moment? You have lost your hold on time; you are beneath time; time gives you no purchase. But you cannot think of this, cannot conceive of it. To think is to find purchase, to move upstream of the great marsh; it is to discover the fresh movement of the river.

What is it to live beneath time? You cannot remember - to remember is to have grasped the moment and inserted it among others. Memory depends on the commensurability of such moments; it cannot grasp hopelessness, which is ungraspable.

Hopelessness: no purchase, no fleeing upstream or downstream. A wound in time; the wounding of time, imaginable as a wound in space - as the marsh on which nothing can be built and nothing began. What is it, hopelessness? The absence of time, time unworked. What is it, to lose hope?

True, I can remember nothing of hopelessness. But does it not insist, hopelessness, in my memory? Does it not insist, pressing towards me, as a non-memory within memory? As though forgetting were something tangible and present, such that it exceeded everything present and the measure of presence. As though forgetting brought to memory something more present than anything. As though it brought from the past the collapsed sun that consumes everything.

Now the past is the event horizon; now, across the past and the return of the past, disappears everything present, everything alive. Hope disappears; the past envelops you. Who are you, no longer alive, but not dead? The past has come. The measureless past has come close to us. It has returned, the past, but the past unremembered. It has touched memory, the forgotten past. And isn't this the way hopelessness comes? Isn't this the way it returns, hopelessness? It is the past come again; the stretch of marshes in which nothing is possible.

I am wounded; time has left great marks across me. Wounded, and the past has left claw marks in my flesh. I can't remember; I've lost hold on memory. But the past remembers; it remembers in my place. Who am I, thus forgotten? I am buried deep in the earth. Who am I? The dreaming one, whose dreams are the aurora borealis. I've forgotten; forgetting happens in me and across me. The wind scrapes the marshes; the wind flattens the marsh-reeds. Above me, somewhere above, aurora borealis.

Dreaming, Dying

From R.M., I receive a copy of Leiris's Nights as Day, Day as Night, a book of dreams. It is as important to know that such a book exists as to read it. Important to know that dreams can be remembered. Here are notes on three of my writing dreams (dreams dreamt while writing, not while sleeping).

Contorsion: image of the animal with a broken back. Image of the broken-backed creature crying out. I think of the teleported chimp in The Fly. What survives? Bones and flesh, twitching. Bones and flesh, grotesquely contorted, half-alive, still twitching.

Why is it that in bones and flesh do I see the truest image of the human, as though it was only in agony that a human cry could be heard? A human cry, and not an animal's - a suffering, now, that is endured in bliss. For though the animal, like the human, comes close to death in that cry, it is the human who endures death and survives it. Who survives and love death like the salamander that would live in its flames.

What is this happiness, this desire for death? What is it, this desire, in which death is lived and lived by dying? How magnificently the human being turns on itself! How strange, and how magnificent, this turn into dying!

What does the image of the salamander tell me? Is it a dream? I wonder whether it is possible to dream in writing, to let myself, by writing, be brought to this dream, this dreaming. Salamanders, the contorted beast: each is an image, and an image among others. Is it the beginning of a reflection - a kind of root, from which new growth could take hold? Or is it, instead, the bloom of a marsh plant, the result of a refusal to begin (the marsh: the place without beginning; the shifting earth that never permits the beginning-place)?

Another dream. The water locked in the ground, in the permafrost, is melting. Above: the flash of the aurora borealis, and each star is as though drilling into the darkness; each is a stigma in the body of the night. Disgusting flowers bloom from the damp earth. Disgusting insects swarm around the flowers. The earth has become fetid; there is no death, only dying. What creatures live here? What creatures survive here, in the midst of dying?

Below the earth, the dead are dreaming. Below the earth, as the earth is unfrozen, the dead dream. But they were never dead, only frozen. The dead were never dead: this is my third dream. I am among the dead in my third dream. I never died, in my third dream. And then I know that sleeping is a kind of dying, or a survival of death. That to dream is always to dream with the ones who cannot die. And writing, what is that? Writing: awake when every animal is asleep. Writing, awake even beyond death. Writing: the salamander, the marsh flower, the dreaming corpse.

Webs

It's the caffeine, I tell myself. Too much caffeine - you were always sensitive to it, and now it's the ruin of you. Patches of dry, itchy skin over your palm-heels - caffeine. Resurgence of eczema - caffeine. And reading back over the blog for the last few months last night when I couldn't sleep (I can't sleep anymore), I thought: this is terrible writing. It's the caffeine.

I remembered the experiments where they subjected a spider to various drugs and photographed the web it made. First, the marajuana-spider - a lazy web, just a few glistening strands. Second, the alcohol-spider, no web at all, a few strands collapsed on themselves. Third, the caffeine-spider, a very intense web, but a mess of strands, a complete mess. So too with this writing, I thought at five AM this morning. It's no good, I thought, as I weeded out the really terrible posts.

None of this is any good. A lot of activity, but for what? It's like the web of the caffeine spider - a mess of webstrands, holding nothing, capturing nothing. What was I thinking? That I could publish anything I pleased? That my anything-at-all was worth publishing? But nothing I wrote was worth publishing, and it certainly wasn't worth reading. Then it came, the dream: a cool, clear prose. Then it came: the dream of bell-like clarity, of limpid prose: the replete and glistening web.

But isn't that its sleight of hand, that clarity? Is precision precise - is calmness another way to stand apart from the world and from the streaming of the world? Isn't cool, precise prose the final temptation - the idea of a language that could say it all, in which everything could be said and could be said calmly: the many-stranded web on which the world would allow itself to be caught?

How I distrust it! How it is to be distrusted, the prose which makes nothing of itself, which makes no fuss! Clarity, precision: nothing worse. Measuredness, calmness: nothing worse. Better the web that laughs at itself, I thought. Better the web that knows it will capture nothing, I told myself. That laughs at itself, and is deliberately ragged. That laughs at itself and its own imposture. Better the drunken web and the caffeinated web! Better the web made on Cava and green tea! Better the revel-web that laughs at itself, at its own imposture, and that first of all!

Nothing worse that the calm and reflective voice, which is really the penitent voice, the craven-on-the-ground-before-God voice! Nothing worse than the sober voice, which is really the maudlin-drunken voice. Nothing worse than the voice that would lift itself above the others as if to deliver itself to a God's-eye perspective, to the summit of the tower of Babel!

Below: the swarming of all the voices, the vulgar crowd. Above: the voice of God, the voice that sails close to God. What is worse than this voice, which considers everything and assesses everything and is untouched by everything? What is worse than it - this voice, which would lift itself from the babble of which it is part?

How to have done with it, the judgement-voice, the transcendent-voice, the surveying-everything-and-decreeing voice? How to plunge it, this voice, into the Babel of all voices? How to dissolve it in the Babel of voices disgusted with themselves and laughing at themselves?

How I revolt myself! How I disgust myself! - But without this revulsion, without this disgust, which is first of all a revulsion at God and a disgust with God - without this mobile horde of destruction which is first of all self-destruction? Without the daily confusion of tounges?

The Waterwheel

How rare to have a day, a whole day, to myself. But here it is, that day, after weeks of travelling back and forth from one place to another. I am here in the South; the room is light. We watch Fanny and Alexander, mum and I; I have borrowed her laptop.

A Danish family does not celebrate Christmas on Christmas Day, but on the day before. Yesterday, it was Christmas, and today? Other people's Christmas. Books about India piled up on the floor. A new edition of Scrabble, which we played until the early hours last night. Jo Malone bags and a new diary and the copy of In the Shadow of No Towers I bought for my sister, and the set of Allen Keys I got from my brother-in-law and the bicycle lights I bought for him.

Why not write about our meals and conversations, the time at the pub - these events which make up the substance of life? Sometimes I imagine to myself these events are like the water that turns the waterwheel, flowing ceaselessly in order to turn it, time - that they do not occur, these events, within time but across it. Yes, that's how I imagine it: we exist for the sake of time, for the turning of events; so we are drawn into the drama of life and death.

Then it is by passing events across time that moments are separated from their original co-happening. As though everything happened together, all at once - and all events are overlapped, even now. It is a question of perception - of finding the right angle, from which all can be seen. How old am I now? How many Christmases have there been? But they have all happened at once; they overlap. What day is this? What year?

Leave time to itself, and what would it become? Leave it to itself, time, and what would it become? Non-event, non-happening; the return of what does not occur and does not happen.

Son of The Book

Books about books: you moan about them, don't you? Books about books - not books, but books about books - that's where you think the problem is' don't you? Books about books - and not books, that's the problem, for you, isn't it? Not enough - books. Too many - books about books.

Well then, are you going to write a book? Are you going to write a book that is not a book about books? What are you going to do about them, these books about books? Are you going to write a book - a real book - of your own? Because everyone's writing books about books, that's what you tell yourself, isn't it? Books about books, and not a single book, you whine. Books about books about books, Byzantism and Alexandrianism, the long decline, you whine. Books about books but no books, you whine.

So what are you going to do about it? Are you going to write a book that is not a book about books? Are you - a book and not a book about books? Is that what you're going to do? Is it? I've never heard anyone say, I want to grow up to be a critic, said Richard Pryor. You don't want to be a critic, do you? You don't want to be a writer who writes at one remove, do you? You want to be a primary author, don't you? You've bought the myth, haven't you? You want to write your own books in your own name, don't you? That's what you're dreaming of, isn't it?

A book. Under your own name. Not a book about books, but a book. In your own name. A book on its own two feet. A book alone, and that is not about other books. A book! And not a book about books! That's what you want, isn't it: to write a book! No longer writing at one remove, but a book! On its own two feet: the book! That will not even require your signature! That will dismiss you as soon as it is written! A book, all by itself, with no need for you, that's what you want, isn't it? To be refused by the book you made! To be given back to yourself by the book! To feel your own book slam the door in your face! To be dismissed by your own book!

Not a book about books, not a commentary-book or an introductory-book, but a book unto itself, a book on two feet, a book that raises itself out of nothing and hangs there in the void. The book like a star contracted upon itself. The book like the star that burns only itself, remote and distant. The book that does not need you. Pinnochio who does not want you to be his father. The golem who no longer obeys your commands. There it goes, the Frankenstein book, sufficient unto itself. There it goes, cleverer than you and better than you, the book that is sufficient unto itself.

Better than you, cleverer than you, surprassing you in everything: your book that is no longer your book. The book which says: I don't need you and disappears. The book which has already gone off on its own adventures, that's what you want, isn't it? To be dismissed. To be expelled by something you wrought. To create what finds you imperfect. To create what is more perfect than you. To be dismissed by it, its perfection. To be cast out into contingency and flux. To be exiled by the book, which is paradise. To be expelled, sent out by the paradise of the book, that's what you want.

To make something you could not make. To write beyond your abilities. To make - the book. And not a book about books. The book - on two legs, its own two legs, running through the forest like Baba Yaga's hut. The book - appearing and disappearing like Doctor Who's Tardis. The book - not a book about books, but a real book. Not a fabrication, but something real. Not dead, but alive - a living book that leaps up and runs about. A living book, a living flame, a star which consumes only itself.

And you, who will you be, cast into the outer darkness? Who will you be, measured by your book? Like a miserable father whose child surpasses him. Like a miserable ancestor of a glorious forebear, dismissed, cast out. That's what you want, isn't it - to cast yourself out. That's what you want: to dismiss yourself. To say, get out!  Leave! We don't want you here! To say it to yourself through the book! To hear it from the lips of the book! To hear the book say, get out! we don't need you here! and for the book to turn its shoulder to you. For the book to turn its great back to you.

You are not Fay Wray to the book's Kong. You are not Naomi Watts to the King of the jungle. The book does not want you; it wll not seek you. It closes itself to you. It will lie in your hands, closed and inert. There it is, in your hands, dreaming of who knows what. There it is, the book, but elsewhere the book is already adventuring. Here it is, sent by the publishers, the book - but it's already having adventures of its own. Adventures - away from you, dismissing you. That's what you'd write, isn't it - the book, and not a book about books.

That's what you're aiming for, isn't it? That's what will justify your life, isn't it? The misery and stupidity of your life. The pointlessness of your life - that's what will justify it, isn't it? That it's going nowhere, that it was botched, that it missed all the marks - that's what will redeem it, won't it? You remember what Zarathustra said about redemption don't you? It's to will your own past - to have willed that you lived as you lived. That's what you want by way of the book, isn't it? To expunge all the misery and failure, isn't it? To wipe it clean, the mess of a life - to remove the stain of your life.

For that's what your life is, isn't it - a stain. You've left a stain instead of a life. A stain - and not a legacy. And so you dream the book will be your legacy. And so the book becomes the dreamt-of-legacy, the anti-stain, the wiping away of stains and smears and scum. So the book will justify and redeem the misery of your life. So you can say: I willed it thus, my life. So it can be said: I willed it thus, willed that it happened thus, my life.

You will say: so was my life justified and redeemed. So did it make sense - through the book. Through the book which was not a book about books, but a book. Through the clean gesture of the book. Through the knife stroke of the book. Through the sword of judgement that comes down as the book. Redeem me, book! Redeem my life, book! Let me say: I willed it thus, all of my life. Let me say, as I cross the bridge: it was worth it, and let it come again, my life. Let me say: let it come again, all of it, the whole cosmos - let it come again, one more time, I will it thus. That's what you want, isn't it?

Because what would your life be worth otherwise? What will it have been worth? Because what else will your life have been but the attempt to write the book? Mishima got it wrong, didn't he - trying to redeem a life outside of the book - to redeem writing by a violent act. Isn't it that the act, too, must belong to the book? Mishima's ritual suicide lies outside of his book, and is therefore unredeemed. His death, his hostage-taking of the army general, his doomed speech to the troops lies outside the book, and means nothing. You will not die, you who the book will give birth like a son? You will not die, you who are reborn as the book gives birth to itself, father to the matrix that will bear you.

I will be the son of my book, that's what you tell yourself, isn't it? I will be the father of my book, which will give birth to me as to its son, that's what you hope for, isn't it? Whisper it: I will be alive and dead by the book. Whisper it: I will live in death by the birth of my book.

Quirks and Tics

You always take the easiest path, don't you? Always the easiest path, the simplest one. Think of the sacrifices everyone made for you. Think of what they did for you, all the others, to throw you a little farther ahead than they were able to get. Think of them, the others, who prepared the way for you and made things easier for you. And what will you do? What contribution will you make?

All you've ever wanted is a corner in which to work. That's all you want, isn't it: a corner, quiet, in which to work. Outside, the storms are raging, outside it's all going to pot, but you are in your corner, inside, warm and safe and taking account of nothing but what you call your work. Peace, that's what you want, isn't it? Peace, that would be enough, wouldn't it? Is that's how you're going to pass your life: in your corner, working away? Will that be what you did with your life, working in your corner while the storms rage outside?

Because the storms are raging and a world is ending. Because they are here, the great storms, and soon the old world will have passed. But you're working, aren't you? You're busy, aren't you, busy in your corner, too busy for anything but what you call your work. Do you understand what it is like for them, for the rest of them? Do you know what sacrifices were made for you and in your name? And for what? What have you done with your life, what have you done for anything but what you call your work? I'll tell you what: nothing.

And you've done nothing for yourself, do you understand that? You've not even done anything for yourself, do you know that? One day, another, on the same detour. One day, another, on the long trail away from life and meaning and purpose. For you took the wrong turn, didn't you? You let yourself get lost, didn't you? And where have you found yourself? In the corner, working in the corner. In the corner, away from the others, your back turned to the world, working.

And what is it you're working on? What is it that's so important you've neglected everyone around you? What is it of such world-shaking significance which means you can justify your neglect of everything about you? What is the mighty task for which you require such peace? What is so significant that you require such silence?

Think of them, your ancestors. Think of how they worked, how they came to this country from afar and worked. Think of them, sacrificing themselves for you. What have you done? What is it that you've done with your life? For you're not young, are you? You're not even young any more, are you? What have you got to show for it, your youth? What can you show for the chances you've had?

Isn't it time to do something with your life? Because there's no way of justifying it, is there, your life? You can't justify it to yourself, can you, your life? Is that why you work? Is that why you turn away from the world to work? You're turning away from yourself, aren't you, and your own shame? You're turning away from your shame, the shame that should fill everything you do, aren't you? Because you know it's a lie, don't you? You know your own imposture, don't you?

You turned your back to the world, and from what needs your attention in the world. You turned your back on the world and ignored the storms of the world. You know it. You know what you might have done. You know what you could have done. And it fills you with shame, doesn't it? It fills you with shame to think what others might have done in your place, and with the opportunities you had, doesn't it? It fills you with shame to think of the ancestors, that they came to this country with nothing and made a world for themselves with nothing?

What a childhood you had! You wanted for nothing! They had nothing, your ancestors, and what did you have - everything? It fills you with shame, doesn't it, which is why you call out for peace and turn yourself to the wall? It makes you ashamed, doesn't it, which is why you draw the curtains and turn to your corner? Everyone did what they could for you and what do you do? Nothing.

But you're getting old, there's no question of that. Old, and you're cultivating tics, aren't you? Old - and you've tics and quirks, haven't you? Your eyes and dulling and your hair is greying. It's going wrong, you can't deny that. Old, old, and what have you done? Old, too many years passed, and what are you doing?

You took the easy path, didn't you? You took the way of indolence and idleness, didn't you? You took the way of laziness and slackness, didn't you? The storms are raging, and what are you doing? The world's tearing itself apart and what have you done?

Quirks and tics - that's your future, isn't it? You're becoming an eccentric, aren't you? Life's giving you up, isn't it? Life's giving up on you, isn't it? Tics and quirks, and soon they'll have to make excuses for you, your friends and family, won't they? Quirks and tics, and they'll have to excuse you, won't they? Because you've turned away from them, haven't you? You've turned away from everything and everyone, haven't you? And soon the process will be complete. Soon, it will be done. You'll tell yourself, I failed, but I tried. You'll say to yourself, I failed, but I tried - but that is a lie. Because in the end, you took the easiest of routes, didn't you?

What have you done? What have you achieved? Nothing. But that's not new. You knew that, didn't you? You knew it had to be that way, didn't you? But what's worse - what's so much worse is that you never tried, did you? Worst of all is that you did not try, did you? You're getting old, you can't ignore that, though you try to. You're getting old, and you're too old to lie to yourself, aren't you?

All around you the storms are raging. All around you - the raging storm. And you turned from the storms. You turned away. You turned - and what is worst is you knew you were turning. You turned - you knew, by the shame in you, you knew. In shame, you knew - knew from what you were turning, just as you still know it. And isn't that the worst thing about you? Isn't that the worst, that you know what you've done and what you're doing?

1,000,000 Words

Anabasis

I want by writing to move the day forward, I know that. Want, that is, something to be achieved by writing and simply by writing that moves the day forward. And when it goes wrong? When the post is malformed - when it is published too early and I do not see that until the next day? The event I thought happened did not happen; I am in lieu of a day - I still owe that day something if I am to put it behind me. But what do I owe?

Right now, I am writing in the space of yesterday's second post. The second post went wrong; it was all wrong, I saw it this morning. I am writing in place of the second post because of what I owe to the day. Unless I overwrite it, unless something else is saved in its place, the day will not turn, and today will be yesterday, that's what I tell myself.

But what went wrong? I blame the scripts I was reading yesterday afternoon. I blame my reading of yesterday afternoon. Chris Marker. It was his scripts I was reading, and I thought: I'd like to write in short paragraphs. Would like to write without continuity, in short paragraphs, where each paragraph rests in itself like an island. An archipelago-text of islands, each paragraph closed upon itself.

Why did I fail? Overuse of phrases like 'once' and 'I remember'. Undeveloped scenes; it was all wrong, it had all gone wrong. This morning, two cups of coffee and back to the blog. This time, it's not pleasurable, I do not have a sense of the morning ahead of me, and last night's cider still inside me. No pleasure: writing as duty. Writing as a discharge of debt. I owe something to the day; I am deficient. I am snagged by the failure of yesterday. Which means I have to write today, and that's my first priority. Without writing, today will not be today. If I do not write, the day will not turn.

Failure. It was the wrong thing to read, Chris Marker. How many years I spent reading the wrong things. Wonderful texts, very beautiful, but the wrong thing, the wrong thing for me to read. St.-John Perse, Char, Claudel - all wrong. Even Char was wrong. And Marker's beautiful texts remind me of Anabasis. Anabasis! Book of books! I did not read the literature of apes. Did not read the words apes wrote, who knew they would never write Anabasis! Did not write as an ape, but only apishly, by imitation. Just like yesterday, by imitation!

Sentinels

How far things have fallen! How far they've fallen when there is nothing left of skill and talent! How far in a writing - mine - devoid of skill and talent! You are an ape, I should have told myself, and should not write apishly. Write as an ape, I should have told myself, and not apishly. Drive skillessness and talentlessness as far as you can, I should have told myself. Drive the prose on, paragraph to paragraph, sentence to sentence, my the force of an ape who is unashamed to be an ape, unashamed to write when he should not be writing - when he, above all, should not write. Let the prose drive itself on without talent, without skill, I should have told myself. Read nothing exquisite. Read nothing that is written with grace and poise. Because that's what you most lack, grace and poise.

In truth, you are a creature of your age, I should have told myself. Of this age, when anything goes, when even someone like you can get on. In an earlier age, I should have told myself, it would never have been allowed, you would never have been let near a pen, let alone paper. At another time, you would have been kept from pens and paper, from writing materials and desks, and rightly so.

They would have stood before you, calmly and intractably, barring your way. You do not belong there, their folded arms would say. It is not for you to write, it will only make you unhappy to do what you cannot do, that's what their height and broadness would say. We are made for different things, they would say, and you are not made for writing, that's what the muscles of their forearms would say. Just as they stood there simply to bar my way and bar the way of others like me, I should find that place where I could discharge what I was made for.

As it is, I know only what I am not made for. As it is, I know what I cannot do and have failed to do. Apishness. How is it, then, that I've been permitted to do what I should not do? I thought I'd deceived everyone, thought I'd found my way in by animal cunning. I thought: it is by my cunning that I've written books and written essays, that I was able to sneak in, an ape among humans. But in truth, everyone could see exactly what I was; it was obvious to them straightaway. In truth, I was clearly an ape - it was as clear as daylight, and they let me in knowing I was an ape.

I had fooled no one; I had no animal cunning. Fooled no one - they all knew, it was clear to them, but they were indifferent; they did not stand there as they would in the past, tall and strong and with folded arms. I had got past them; but this was no struggle. Anything goes. Anything goes because nothing matters. No skill, no talent, no learning, no scholarship: it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. No one cares, and this above all. No one cares and none of it matters. Your bad books do not matter. Your bad articles do not matter. None of it matters. What you write at the blog does not matter. None of it matters. You can write as much as you like, but it will disappear and it does not matter.

They do not care. They did not bar my way, but nor did they welcome me in. I got in - how was that? I was in - but by their indifference. I arrived after the collapse. That I arrived was a sign of the collapse, it's truest sign. That they would take me in was the clearest possible sign of the collapse, its clearest evidence. If only I'd come sooner, when they were standards: I could not think that. If only I'd been pushed, if only there were others around me to force me on: I could not think that.

Because I could not have arrived any earlier than I arrived. Could not have come a day sooner. That I arrived already betokened the collapse. It was finished, it was over, and I was an ape playing in the ruins. It was already over, and I was the ape who fooled himself into thinking what he did mattered. What did they expect from me? Nothing. What was expected of me? Nothing at all. So why did I expect anything of myself? In truth, it had already collapsed. In truth, it was finished, it was already finished, and what chance did I have.

Did they laugh at me, those who let me in? Did they laugh at my apish exploits, the ones who had left me pass? Not even that, for it didn't interest them. Not even that, because they had already turned away and I was allowed to do whatever I liked. It was my stupidity to think they were still watching. It was my idiocy to think they were watching me, despite everything. I thought: I've failed, without understanding there was nothing to gauge my failure and no one who cared whether I failed or not.

What little I might have achieved, I will not achieve now. What little I could have done, I will never do now. When did I turn from trying to publish to writing here? When did I turn from the effort to publish, to write publishable work, to writing here? Was it when I finally realised that it did not matter what I published? Was it the moment when I saw it was immaterial what I published and did not publish? Was it the moment when I knew the complete indifference of everyone around me?

For there are no sentinels and no one watching. No one is watching and no one cares. After years of trying to get in, I was in, and no one cared. After years of trying to get in, I, who never should have been let in, was in. I was in - I who should never have been let in. Who let me in? In truth, no one let me in. That I was in was proof that being in did not matter anymore, that it had collapsed, the distinction between inside and outside.

Inside, not outside. Writing and publishing, inside. Publishers coming to my door and asking for my manuscript - what could it mean? That I'd got in because of my skill and because of my talent? That someone had seen promise in me? That I had pulled an elaborate confidence trick? None of these things: I was in, because nothing mattered anymore, the sentinels did not care, anyone could publish anything, anywhere, anyone could write whatever they liked and get published somewhere. Nothing mattered - and that first of all.

What little I might have achieved in the old system is impossible now. What little I might have done, what work might have been coaxed from me, is now without chance, and rightly so. It's finished, and it was finished from the first. I run up and down the halls, an ape in his freedom, without knowing that there is only indifference, and no freedom. Up and down the halls, making my apish hoots and calls and none of it matters.

And when it finally dawned on me? When it finally became clear that I could do whatever I like? I stopped writing. I stopped trying to publish. And wrote here, instead. And blogged here, instead. What have I achieved over two years of blogging? What has been done, in the two years of Spurious? Two years, 900 posts, 25,000 words a month. Two years, 600,000 words in total, more than the 400,000 words I've published. 1,000,000 words in the public domain, 400,000 published and 600,000 vanity published, that is, blogged. And what's been achieved? What's happened as a result of my 1,000,000 words?

I run up and down the halls, hooting and hollering. But no one is listening and no one can hear me. I run up and down, hollering, standards have collapsed! it's all finished!, but no one cares, because they already know it's finished, and that I, an ape, can run up and down the corridors is already a sign of the collapse. 1,000,000 words: the first 400,000 is the cry of the ape to be noticed and the second 600,000 is the whining of the ape who knows he will never be noticed.

Gifts

1. Before he became ill, he would play cricket for the company in the playing field on the other side of the canal from our house. I remember him very smart and handsome in his cricket whites. As a child, you want your father to be a champion. When we played rounders on our picnics, he could be counted upon to hit the tennis ball in a great, high arc with his bat.

2. Once, when I went to meet him from work on my bike, he raced me the half mile to our house, running all the way in his suit with a briefcase in his hand. And I remember, too, the time we tried to make a kite from balsa wood and brown wrapping paper. It didn't fly; the wind didn't take it as it did, years later, the bought kite that sailed what seemed a mile into the sky until there was no twine left on our spool. Then there was the paper plane he used to make us, much better with its complexly folded nose than our simple darts, in command of its movement, moving dignifiedly through the air.

3. When he came home from business trips overseas, he would bring us gifts, and we would wait as he ate and changed his clothes to be given these gifts, although the rule was we were never to be greedy, and never to show our impatience.

What had he brought us? For mum, perfume from duty free and fabrics, and for us, the children? Black market tapes: a cassette of David Bowie songs called Golden Years, Ultravox's Vienna, a compilation of songs by the Beatles, but never Roxy Music, which I always asked for. Never Roxy Music, whose name I liked. He brought us Thriller, and the pirates had added creepy sound effects between the tracks, and Wham's Fantastic!, with a whole other band playing Wham-like tracks on the B side.   

After one trip, he brought us a soft toy. We felt a mixture of appreciation and disappointment. He'd gone to the trouble of finding a soft toy for us; we appreciated the effort. But the toy itself? A mother goose with a bonnet, suitable only to be hung in a pram. A mother goose - but we were children, and we wanted our toys, too, to be children. True, we had a family of sausage dogs, knitted by my grandmother, with a mummy and a daddy, with an older brother and a rapscallion uncle, but its centrepiece was always the 'youngest' dog, or at least the smallest one. But a mother goose? At that moment, I felt sorry for him, because he hadn't understood why this toy was the wrong toy.  Sorry for him, and even tender, for a man who didn't know what toy to buy, although he wanted to buy us a toy. Was I older than him, who was older than me? Was I wiser than he was in the way of toys? In that moment I was older than my father: yes, that was why I felt tender.

4. Soon, it would happen that the company for which he worked lost their bids, and he no longer went on those foreign trips. They took him from his office and put in him in the new open plan office. We knew from our visits that he had an office of his own, with a secretary just down the hall. He ate in the second of the three canteens - the first was for technicians and secretaries, the next one for engineers and salesmen, and the third for managers. One of his colleagues would reach out to shake hands with us and place a wrapped sweet in our hands - what a treat! But now, our dad had been moved from his own office, with its high ceiling and wide, white walls, into an open-plan office, his desk facing a filing cabinet.

5. On Fridays, he would come home with beer on his breath. He'd been to the office club, and was now jolly, despite the long drive home through traffic. A pint, two pints - he was jolly, and when he came home in the summer, we said to each other, he looks like a film star, with his aviator shades and his shirtsleeves, and his blazer over his shoulder. I would go to open the door for him, the film star who had come home to us.

6. Your face is spicy, my sister would say of his stubble. He rubs his jaw and cheek. Do you think I should grow a beard? And we both say: no!

7. Every year, the Christmas party at the club. One night, as we were coming home down a hill, he let go of my pushchair. I felt something of the same panic when, twenty years later, I was learning to drive, and he wanted me to reverse into the busiest of roads. Curious, this desire for risk, for risking himself and risking others. He would drive too fast, and mum would protest. But he liked to go fast and he liked risk, and I think he liked letting go of that pushchair, even as I, picking up my mum's worry, panicked as I felt it gather speed.

8. He had a way of smiling at mishaps. When something bad happened - nothing really terrible - he would smile, as if to say, how could it have been any different? what did you expect? I've caught it from him, that smile. When my friend fell off his bike, I smiled in that way. It made my friend angry. But by that smile that day I knew I was like my father.

9. Once, on a picnic, when a group of us children were allowed to run around as we pleased, I hurt myself and separated myself from the others, crying. I was away from the playground, and there he was, on the path. We walked together, he holding my hand. How old was I then? 9? 10? Too old to cry at such a light injury, no doubt. But we went along the path, and this time he didn't smile at my mishap. I appreciated his quietness. Why was he walking alone, away from the other adults? Why did he know what to do, that day, as a father? But he knew.

A few weeks ago, before he died, I read Sarraute's Childhood, and wrote a few notes on memories I would like to write about one day. Holland Park, I wrote, and underlined those words. Yes, Holland Park - that's where it had taken place, that's where I had cried and we had walked, he and I. We came across Holland Park while walking in London, R.M. and I: the Commonweath Institute, the adventure playground; it was as it had been, 25 years before.

How is that time passes? How is it that it passes, time, when everything, all these events seem held simultaneously in my memory? That's what I thought as we walked, R.M. and I. She was disappointed - you call this a park?, she said in her American accent. She was particularly unimpressed by the Japanese garden: is this it? Is this all there is?

I wondered which was the palimpsest: the day of the picnic, or our new day, with its fresh autumnal air. I wondered at the events which overlay one another in that same space. Today, in deep winter, it is already night at four o'clock, and I have lost hold on time. Who will remember these things when I am gone? But I'm not sure I'm remembering anything. The events seem to remember themselves.