I open a book I bought R.M. I read the second section, not the first, the second one, where the narrator begins to write of himself in the third person. Almost immediately, the desire to write something. No internet connection at the flat, so coat on, out the door, along the street - but I've forgotten my phone. Back again, open the door, close the door, back out on the street, back to the internet cafe.
How many times have I been here today? This is the third time. The first, early on, was to check my email. The second time, slightly later, was to write about what I'd found on my walk (but I wrote nothing about walking). And this, the third time? This morning, through the streets. This afternoon, through the streets. Then, at last, to the flat, where I got out the red hardback, opened it to the first page, and then to the second section, where the narrator moves from the 'I' to the 'he'.
I close the book, and put my coat on to go out. It's clouding over. The flat is cool. Out and then back for the phone, then out again. The feeling of urgency is subsiding. What would I have written, had I got to the cafe in time? What did I want to write? I wanted only that writing keep its appointment with the desire to write, to mark that desire. But why? Sometimes I tell myself that what I write here is in ascesis. Purge yourself. Pare yourself down. But to find what? And in the name of - what?
Peter Handke wanders out with a pencil and a notepad. For a long time, he relied on a typewriter: he thought he had to be inside to write. But a notepad's no good for me. A pencil's no good. I could have stayed in the flat and written. I have a stub of a pencil and my reporter's notebook: why didn't I stay in to write? Why didn't I write there, in the cool flat?
Out. It was necessary to travel - to walk. I needed to walk, just as I walked this morning and this afternoon. Earlier, I was remembering the last of the stories Gene Wolfe tells or retells in Peace. Tells or retells: this phrase came to me as I walked. I thought: that's important, remember that. The last story: I've told it before. When I think to myself, the last story in Peace, I do not need to retell it to myself. I know it too well. But, strangely, that knowing is also a kind of forgetting. As though it is the book itself that keeps the story for me - and not, now the real book, with its yellow pages, my second copy, I think, or my third, in the office back up North. The book in my memory - the book that is sealed in my memory.
Do I need to tell the story? It's a sentimental story. Remembering it - or remembering the way it is archived within me, that it is sealed in itself like the holy of holies, that it is as though forgotten as well as remembered and to remember it is also to bring forgetting to the edge of memory - I also remember the friend to whom I lent the first copy of the book. She knew what it meant, the story - but what did it mean? I thought of her as I read it, and then I lent it to her, and she told me she thought of me, and of us. But what does it matter? That was many years ago.
Later, I remembered the book of Tarkovsky's polaroids I received last week. In the last pages, black and white pictures of his mother sitting on a fence looking out and his father in an army uniform. Then a picture of the well. How well I know these photographs, though I have not seen them before. I remember them through Mirror; it is as though I remember them with Tarkovsky through Mirror. Peace and Mirror: both, I think, are stories of dead men. Or both are stories of men sentenced to die. And wasn't the patient in bed in Mirror played by Tarkovsky himself? And wasn't the bird perched on his hand a premonition of that bird which would visit him every day when he was dying of cancer in Paris?
On the street, as I made my way to the cafe for the third time, a phonecall from my sister. I thought it was - them (I can't say who, not yet); I thought: they're calling me, at last, and will they give me news? I've rehearsed it again and again: we're sorry, or, I'm really sorry, that's how I think it will begin. And what will I say? My sister had phoned to ask whether I'd heard yet. I said I'd heard nothing, and speculated with her as to what might be going on.
Just now, I thought: what if they ring me as I write this post? What then? Will I lose the thread? Once, when I lived in Manchester, burglars broke in the house as I was typing a letter to a friend. Was I writing of Peace? Of Mirror? And was it because I was in the middle of something that I barricaded myself in my room and saved the day by my shouting. I was thinking of my letter: I was thinking, I want to finish. I want at least that, I who asked for little from the day, who requires very little.
Peace, Mirror: nothing to conclude, here; nothing to round off. The post does not complete itself. I am not writing to her, anyway - the friend who read Peace and to whom I was writing that day more than ten years ago. To whom, then? As a way of keeping memory for myself? Of recording, as in a diary, the events of my life? I remember I once had that ambition: to write, to record. Only later did I realise I remembered nothing by writing; that it was by writing I was freed from memory, or, better, freed memory from itself.
Strange this past year releasing memories into forgetting, setting the past free, givingit back to itself. Back to itself: yes, that's what I've done: the past has been given back to itself, and I've received the past anew, not, now, as it happened, nor even as it might have happened (this has nothing to do with possibility, with the measure of the possible). The past: what is given in the same way as speech is given to the stutterer who is cured right at the opening of Mirror. Do you remember what he said, straight to camera? Do you remember what the boy (the son) hears him say in a steady, determined voice: I can speak now. Yes: I can speak now.
But I cannot speak. Or rather, I speak along the edge of forgetting. If I want writing and the desire to write to coincide it is, I think, to let the other speak, the 'he'. I want him to speak - or, better, to become him, the narrator who can refers to himself as 'he'. He: like Coeztee's narrator who works in Bracknell. He: to move from the first person to the third: wasn't that what Kafka celebrated as the great movement of literature?
I am in the cafe for the third time. I feel alert, awake, but I don't know why. The caffeine died down in my bloodstream hours ago. R.M. will be back at the flat in an hour. Why now? The clouds have parted; sun on the pavement. I am in the cafe, here again, for the third time. The cafe: where, last year, I remember writing of Handke's Across. And hadn't I promised myself, some time ago, to write a post with the title, Across Time?
In truth, the questions I ask myself in these paragraphs, the questions that are asked here, are Handkean questions. They come from Handke; I found them first in the longest of his books, the ones he wrote outside, pencil on notepad. Across - that was earlier, wasn't it? Strange book that is all climax. Strange book that is like the endless coda to a novel, rather than a novel. And wasn't it in here, in this cafe, that I found Across had a code, that there were a few more pages of that novel to read. Unexpected gift!
I've heard nothing as I've been typing. But today is the second day after -. Shouldn't I have heard by now? Won't it be tonight? To have heard - what will change, after that? What will have been changed? In the meantime - waiting. Across time, waiting. Or is it that waiting attenuates time in time, that it seems to pull each event apart without breaking it. Nothing is happening - there is waiting. Nothing happens, but time voids itself of time; time lives outside of itself.
Today, I thought again of those long afternoons, years ago, when my future was more uncertain that it is now. I remember them, those afternoons, in which to write was to hold up a great sail into the air. How was I to catch a wind? I was becalmed then, and perhaps it is the same now. What is to happen? Suspense: wasn't that her word, for those times we met when there was no wind. There was never any wind, she said. Suspense: through the field, and over the railway bridge to that last patch of countryside. From that same bridge, now, you can see the new Tescos, which presses up against the fields. Yes, that's what I'd see, if I went there.
Five o'clock. Is it time to stop? Should I stop writing? Or should I continue until I hear, should I write all the way until I hear? Enough. Without rounding it off, without making sure every motif has been taken up and transformed, I'm going to pay and go back down the street.