Spurious

The Third Time

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.

Bad Cava

A few days away, and I've already forgotten how to blog. Forgotten, that is, what it might have been to mark anything other than the act of writing. An act? Long Tuesday, half the day waiting, just like yesterday. I even came back here, to the flat, in the daytime which I never do. Here: for the afternoon, which never happens. But I needed something to distract me; I cleared up, washed the floor in the bathroom, polished the floor in the living room. Waiting - and still waiting tonight, receiving the message: a couple more days. A couple more? But I'm in London tomorrow. I thought it would be decided tonight. I'm not going to say what, though. Still secret.

About 5PM, to the pub for a pint. Time slowed down. Cigarette smoke around me. Much better. I unwrapped my CDs and read the booklets. Grey skies outside. Hoped to reach my hands out and part them to see the blue sky again. All my friends away, so I was on my own. On my own, but London tomorrow. 8PM, back at the flat, listening to American Music Club and waiting. Everything cleared up here, everything ready. Wait, says the tidiness. Wait, says the whole flat. I've opened a bottle of bad Tescos Cava. In honour of what? Celebrating what? Distract yourself, I tell myself. London tomorrow, I tell myself.

London: R.M. lives there. We were in Yorkshire over the weekend, near Stokesley. Walked up and down the hills. Ate fresh farm eggs and just-killed turkey. Slept in a room with a staircase to a room above it: two rooms, our bedroom and an attic. Outside the drafty window, the brown hills. I told R.M. as we walked that it suited her complexion, that brown. This was once Abbey land, she tells me. This valley was Catholic, she tells me. There's a Shetland pony called Twix where we were staying. They're easily spoilt, Shetland ponies, said R.M. on the phone today. Better surfing the net for Shetland pony information than working, she tells me. Why am I never on the blog anymore?, she asks me. Why haven't I got my own category?

R.M.'s waiting with me. Everyone's waiting. Champagne on ice in other parts of the country. But I have my bad Tescos Cava, with which I am waiting. Bad Cava: everyone's away, and I'm here on my own. The flat smells of the fabric conditioner in the drying clothes. Two Regimes of Madness face down on my bed. Mercury, which I didn't buy, but exchanged, is turning out well. But the Cava is bad - harsh and acidic. Bad Cava. You won't get to tomorrow, says the room. No more past and no more future, says the room. The present's broken, it says. The broken present: is that what it is? Broken, the order of days? Broken: the succession of one day after another?

Day by day. It used to be that time moved forward; the days were similar, it is true, but there was a forward momentum. I would have said: I have the whole of Easter, and then the whole of Summer. Time for work, time for writing. And didn't I promise myself a whole year of writing whatever I pleased, here at the blog? Isn't that what I promised myself, crossing the Byker roundabout? But there was the new book, the third book. Another book - as if I hadn't done enough damage! A third book - as if the first and the second weren't bad enough! And somehow or another, that third book led me to the present impasse.

R.M. phones. She's in the office working for her exams. Her friend, the taxidermist Q.C. has written to her of his pathological loathing for velvet. Why then, he wonders, does he stroke the feathers of the stuffed bird in his office? He's not sure. This amuses R.M.; she phones to share it with me. I tell her I'm writing about her, at last. And about Twix. And Yorkshire. She begins to read. 'Bad Cava'. 'Is that the stuff you get me?', she asks. No, that's from the Co-op. Co-op Cava is a step up from Tesco's Cava; Marks and Spencers' Cava, which comes in two grades, is a step up from the Co-op. Anyway, she's glad I'm relaxing. There's nothing else to do, I said. I wish I never began that third book!, I tell her.

But R.M.'s encouraging. She sends supportive emails. Everything's going well, she says. It'll all come good, she says. And phones me to share the Q.C.'s turns of phrase.

Assemblage

The Fall before they became The Fall; Warsaw before Joy Division, the Devoto-fronted Buzzcocks: why is it I'm interested in those transitional moments before a band is able to harden itself into the style for which they would become famous? Because they are part of a collective ferment, the trembling of a whole city? Manchester 1976, 1977. Manchester of the first and second Sex Pistols gigs, reviewed at the time as receiving an ecstatic welcome.

Why? The crowd were 'sussed', said a contemporary reviewer, yet they were wild. The band were an out of tune heavy metal band doing an Alice Cooper imitation. But the singer! Johnny Rotten was everything. And Buzzcocks, supporting? Mark E. Smith, 16 years old, thought he could do better. And wasn't that what saw The Fall make their way to the first gig, at the musicians collective? And didn't Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner recruit Ian Curtis and then, later, the metronomic Stephen Morris after seeing Johnny Rotten sing?

Hadn't punk already reached Manchester? But it reached it again; it happened again. Event that happens the second time - Lenin after Marx, Paul after Jesus: postpunk was punk - punk was out of synch with itself; North Mancunions, said Mark E. Smith, thought The Velvet Underground already passe. Was it truckers' songs he was listening to instead? Can and Krautrock? Stockhausen? Devoto would revert, with Magazine, to his Eno-like ambitions, said Mark E. Smith. Pete Shelley took Buzzcocks towards the charts. And The Fall? Masterpieces, one after another - just like Joy Division.

But more interesting to me was the simmering over of the pot of Manchester that happened just as punk broke. Manchester - and Leeds - and Sheffield. Simon Reynolds covers each 'scene' admirably. Scenes - no, these were assemblages. Marvellous comings-together, crystallising along lines of flight. Marvellous flashings of bands for whom the city withdrew itself just enough to - what? To make, to create - what? Psychogeographic city. Phantasmagoric Manchester. Ballard's crystal world along Deansgate.

In the Wake

Represent the past: it began with this, with X; it all started there. But where did it begin? Retake the past: it began now, today. Today - as the past gave itself again. As the old music becomes weird. As the new music is enweirded by the past. Retake it - receive what has never been received before as the past. Not the past received anew, but the new as the past, as the retaking that gives first of all what happened.

That's what I hear on Time: the Revelator and the early Palace albums: the past, yes, but also the future - do not reduce either to their influences, for that is only to represent what happened as though it sprang from a set of causes, and ultimately a singular and determinable Origin. There is a music which scatters the Origin and scatters representation - by awakening, from the past, those series of singularities that were never before thus assembled.

But what are they, those singularities, those micro-events and part-happenings? The open-throated Pentecostalist, the leaning-together of bluegrass voices; the ballad-voice which confirms blank fate and blind destiny; the non-regular rhythms of Blind Willie Johnson; fragments of Anglo-Celtic folk: all this; and doesn't Will Oldham protest that he was as much a listener to Dinosaur Jr. as to Jimmie Rogers?

In truth, it is not a question of Dinosaur Jr. nor Jimmie Rogers, if both would name a body of work, or even the musicking that work would ossify. Not Dinosaur Jr., but a sound that reached the ears of Will Oldham. And not Will Oldham, either - he is not even himself, but the one reinvented by the past. Reinvented - no, because there was no first time; this past did not exist.

Invention, and that from the first; retaking, and that at the beginning: what returns at the past had never arrived. What comes are those singularities arranged in new singularities, and according to new rules of grouping. Rules? Not even that - locally, provisionally, once and then not again, the past arrived from the future. For the first time - for the last time, the past claimed you from the future. I listened - what did I hear? 'The Ohio River Boat Song', taped from the radio in 1993. My past come again.

And with Gillian Welch? I had Revival, it is true; I already knew Hell Among the Yearlings. But Time: the Revelator? From the very beginning, I knew - but with what kind of knowledge? - that what had come by way of the first song, its opening, was the langour of the no-time, that was before and after life. After it - wise with a wisdom that sees all from death, that stares back and sings like the narrator of Sunset Blvd., but from before life, too - before the world came together.

There was no God, then; the skies and waters were undivided, and the stars had not been set in the sky. Nothing - and not even that; a rustling, a murmuring: the unbeginning without determination. From that past - scarcely the past; from the future - scarcely the future. From - and the present was turned aside from itself. From - and the flood came; I was not where I was; the river was where I could not step once.

Streaming - that in place of me, and revealing place to have been the usurpation - not, now, of anyone in particular, but of the no one who -sists when there is no one to be there. Wound, recording surface, what wrote itself in you was the past. That's who I was - but who was I?

Absolute music! Or music that dissolved the terms of all relation! Can I call it immediate? Only if it names an event that reached me in the unknown past. Only if that past was the way the future arrived - or that the future arrived from the past. No Origin - and there is not even Gillian Welch, and not even Will Oldham. Non-Origin: by what courage was Time recorded with just guitars and vocals? By what immense courage was it set down in RCA's Studio B?

And by what courage was Palace Brothers recorded in a kitchen on a cassette recorder? Days in the Wake - that's what the latter album came to be called. In the wake - of the future that moves through the past. Of the past which comes from the future, just as surely, as lightly, as the wind which passes through the barley in the field when the Doctor turns from the dacha at the beginning of Mirror.

Superwolf

Are you writing of yourself? Barely that. Of music? Barely that.

If I call them the oldest songs, the obscurest songs, it is to set them into a past that did not occur. Songs out of phase with time, songs that seem to repeat in their lyrics, in their old-time sound, what was never recorded, not even in Harry Smith's anthology. And even that phrase: old time music seems to miss them.

Old time, the wearing out of time - the past, now, is not an archive with an origin, with delimitable boundaries. There are no genres, and not even singers - only parts of song and half-remembered performances, only unrecorded records and the forgetting that wiped out memory in advance.

Will Oldham, how is it that you were older than time? How is it that you wiped time out? Perhaps because it was the name Will Oldham you wanted to wipe out, as surely as Bill Callahan wanted the word Smog whispered when he placed parentheses around it. Namelessness: it's the songs that matter, says Will Oldham, not Will Oldham. Hence his changing names. How to call yourself nothing at all? How to drive away the name from music?

Old time: what returns with Will Oldham is what never occurred. How did he dream up his old wierd America? How did that America dream itself in him? The oldest songs, the obscurest songs: how is it you weren't recorded until now? Because they are older than time, and older than memory. Was it forgetting that dreamt of you, Will Oldham? Was it oblivion that gave itself your name?

Around the grit that finds itself by chance in an oyster's shell can form the pearl that is made of the inside of that shell. Alien particle, outside inside, how did you find you way into the heart of Will Oldham? Because what grew there was a pearl; what was dreamed there were songs too old for memory. Remember, heart, that splinter around which you came to yourself.

But that remembering is too strong for one man, and Will Oldham is a horde, not a man. Half-beast, animal half changed into man, how can you sing of what was always forgotten. Animal-songs, songs of wolf and lepoard, Will Oldham is a crowd, not a man. He falls asleep; the animals wake up. And when they sleep, he wakes up. Another America is waking with him. Old America, oldest America, archive of parts of beasts and parts of songs, how is it you stir yourself in him, Will Oldham? Because he is made of the old, wierd America; it is what turned itself out to make him. And will it turn itself inside out again? Will it leave him, Will Oldham? Will it strand him and strand us on the beach of the present?

Do not place your faith in names.  The songs, not the singer. Unrecorded recordings, unmade, unmakeable albums: how is it that your best work has never been heard? Because it is what unworks itself in your recordings, what turns them aside from every ear. Refusal: the songs retreat; they hide themselves in the past. Somewhere, far away, they are becoming animals again. Somewhere they are howling and running in the forests of the night.

The Revelator

Time: the Revelator, but what does it reveal? The oldest folk ballad, born with the world and enduring with it, which knows the destiny of all things, the long fall into oblivion. Wisdom: Gillian Welch's voice is sung against oblivion, but not in the manner of the young Oedipus, who is headstrong and defiant. She sings, but hers is a voice like the blinded Oedipus, who, led by Antigone, looks only for a place to die.

To die, to rest: this, in the oldest ballads, is enough of a task. To find peace among things. And her voice as though comes from that afterplace - resigned, knowing death has come for her as it will come for all of us. But a voice, nevertheless, that is sung against death, which sets death back, if for a moment. It is coming; night will fall, and everything will be forgotten - that is the work of time, but meanwhile, revealed, is time's work unworked.

Time attenuated, voided time: how is that these songs seem to drift without moving forward, which well, half-numbed from their own posthumousness? Songs not of death but of surviving death. Survival songs, but sung from death, out of it, in a voice stripped of personhood. Who are you, singer? No one at all. Who are you? No one in particular. Numbed: because they have already been stunned by death.

Does it matter that you appear or disappear? Does it matter who you are? But it is because it does not matter that it matters: revelator, what you show is one indifferent to showing. This indifference is everything. No desire to please. No ingratiation. Time says: I am the sky that opens indifferently above the world. Eye that sees without judgement, eye that has seen all, which has run up to the end of time and back. Blind eye for whom every day is the apocalypse, every day the end.

Revelator: It's finished; it's already finished. We will not find purchase on time. Where Gillian Welch's voice leans, we lean too, drawn by its indifference. Fate says with her voice, you are dead. Fate says in her calm voice: you are already dead.

The Face of God

Who are you, God, of the songs of Will Oldham? I can't even remember them, those songs. I can't remember - but I remember God, who, in these songs, has slipped from Himself. Is the name, God, for what unnames all names. Of whom does he sing, Will Oldham, when he sings of you, God? Of no one, I know that. No one: who am I, listening? No one yet. No one, even. Changed in my place by what will not lest me rest in my place.

Non-resting, streaming: God says: you are no one at all. Will Oldham's God says: you are no one; nothing at all. And what does he say to him, Will Oldham: I am no one, as you, too are no one. Mask upon mask; and if his music, Will Oldham's, belongs to the past, it is one which has never been present. Mask upon mask: it was never there, it never began, there was no Origin; the music rests upon nothing - or it is music, mask, all the way down?

And what of God? Who are you, Will Oldham's God? For I share Him with him. Shared: mask of no one. Noh mask, blank mask, to whom do you belong? To drive away the face of God - yes. And when God's face is the driving away of God's face? When it is that face without face: the void, the mask of stars?

Long Sunday

Work - there's nothing to distract you. Work: but there's the whole weekend to distract me, hours in which nothing need happen; I've no appointments, but for all that time is too full, too present with itself. How is it that I seem to have fallen beneath its passing, that time, now, is only concerned with itself? Unwritten book, unwritten articles - now that unwriting has become active; it is the very work of time as it passes without me.

What's happened? What's happening? The new book is unwriting itself; my new chapters are coming apart and the pages are turning backwards as line after line is erased. Who am I to hold on to what it was, this book? Who am I to resist its unravelling? Once upon a time, I wrote; once, there was writing. A long time ago. All of time ago. And now? The unwriting of the book streams above me. It is there, like the clouds that disappear as they ascend, and I am here. But where am I?

In the flat. In the quiet flat. The office is for later; now, the flat. I pass from one room to the other, there, on the other side of the bevelled glass, to the bedroom, and then back here, to the desk that is up against the window, and at the level of most of the yard, which raises itself to the backstreet on the other side of the wall. I should be writing, that's true enough. Clear and well-structured prose, that's what's wanted. And instead?

Work: there's nothing to distract you. Work - but nothing happens but distraction. All of time moves forward, but not here. Long sunday without monday. Day that cannot complete itself.

Great Monday

What was it you were supposed to do? What was it you had time to do? Where was it going, this weekend? Where was it directed? Unto what Great Monday was it pointed like an arrow? Laughter: your hardbacked notebook is open on the pillow in the other room. Laughter: a word document is open in another window. Not a line written. Nothing done. And you have all the time in the world - all the opportunity. All of time, which is to say, too much. All - but already too much; time's already turned from itself. Laughter: time says: every day is Sunday. Time says: every day is like Sunday.

Tiredness

'Extreme tiredness.' - 'Extreme, how extreme - you can write can't you?' - 'Only because tiredness has gathered itself up; only because it's folded itself into one who can write of tiredness. Of tiredness? No: tiredness writes. Tiredness speaks of itself, of its coming to itself.' - 'But you're still writing.' - 'As the avatar of tiredness. As its proxy, one born in the instant to be unravelled in the instant. Born to write and then to fade. I will not last - do you think I will last?'