Nearly three years of the blog, the three years of my mid 30s, recording how I gradually fell away from academic work, from writing papers and books, and to my current fallen state, writing nothing in particular, doing nothing in particular, barely reading anymore. How do the days pass? Administration? Bureaucracy? Not even that.
Was it this time last year I enjoyed writing autobiographically? I remember writing a great deal; I haven't reread those long posts, written as summer became autumn, and finishing (I think) as winter came. Then the time after I returned from India, my jet lag waking me very early in the morning, long before dawn. And then, another phase - the drama of job applications earlier this year, intense work on papers, stress of every kind.
And then, the long phase which brings me to the present - the pretentious phase, as I like to think of it, which I seemed to arrive at through a kind of ascesis. Other forms of writing fell away; I deleted many older posts. What is going on here now? I don't think that question is easy to answer.
Sometimes, especially early in the morning, after a coffee, I feel a great certainty about what is perhaps ridiculous to regard as a 'project' (a project of what kind?) I need nothing else, I am carried along, from one post to another. But then, there come quite suddenly, great waves of tiredness, when writing is impossible. Tiredness, especially, in the late afternoon, as everything seems to be for nothing, as though I had already lived a whole life.
I admit I'm still surprised that I have not been able to turn out a book a year. I lost interest. Perhaps, as my job became more secure, I discovered a sense of shame. No more books, I thought. And no papers. Read; work in private. And so I did - two years ago, Marx, Deleuze ... - for a whole summer. X. was here; we played tennis in the evening, and crossed the cowfield home. Was that a happy time? Either way, the reading didn't continue. How intensely I used to work! Night and day! This morning, finishing something like an article, I thought: you've already peaked. I thought: that was it, your peak. How laughable!
How strange to move into a new life, without work! Without the great struggle to find a job, and then to keep it. After the struggle - what? 'What are you working on?' - 'Nothing, nothing.' Last summer was the great summer of going out. Every night, and until late; the Ouseburn Valley. A sundowner at The Free Trade, then to The Cumberland to sit outside in the evening.
Every night! I'd never lived like that! It was marvellous. This summer was its echo; so many nights out, but then the sadness, too, of the long breakup with X. And then to find myself alone, and in the middle of life. We drank Cava and cassis in the evenings; we ate together - again, the happiness of life, its substance. I said to Blah-feme to write about food, but I should have done so myself.
Yes, that was the summer, which ended as the workmen came to transform the flat, at last, at last. A new ceiling, a new bathroom; the central heating fixed, the electricity made to work again, the damp driven away, the drains cleared ... of course it came back, the damp, and worse than ever. And then we found it, the swearing plumber and I, a great leak from upstairs.
An insurance job. Phone the insurers, then. And phone B & Q to pick up the dishwasher they misdelivered. And write a letter of complaint to the dampproofers for ruining the floor. And to Comet for not the delivering the fridge until all the food had rotted. Banal, bourgeois dramas, of which I feel ashamed to write. I always remember, rather stupidly, that line from Thoreau: 'I went to the woods to live deliberately ...'
And all the time, the blog. Ceaselessly, blogging. To escape life? But it is not that simple. To work? No - it is not that, either. The explanation lies in the posts themselves, which I have to reread to remember. Why does it seem that I'm a ghost of the certainty I feel as I write, early in the morning?
A curiosity: I cannot help linking the posts I write to particular places. That bridge by Plymouth station which reminds me of 'The Arm of the Sun.' The roundabout by Morrisons, which recalls the long piece I never finished, on Kafka and the everyday. As I walk round town, I will suddenly remember a post.
'To live deliberately ...': but what can that mean? I only give Dogma papers now, and almost always collabaratively. Nothing to publish. I've written about love, friendship, my favourite music, my favourite book. But I could barely finish the last paper, the one to which only one person came. I had the whole of August, but for half the month, I was exhausted, and for the other half, I lost myself writing here, I think only because I'd been so tired before, because I'd fallen away even from writing about falling, that old stalwart ...
Richard Wollheim's Germs lies on the floor by the bed. I should read it, I though, to reawaken memories. To give myself, as I did last year, the vastness of the past. Because in truth, my present is narrow; the nights are very long. For a long time, earlier this month, I went to bed as soon as I came in from work, and watch episodes of The Simpsons, the whole lot, from series 18 back to series 1.
Exhaustion. Was it the change of seasons? Something else? This weekend, I stayed in, rather than going out to the countyside as I had intended. In, passing from room to room, eating tinned fish then bowls of plain yoghurt and jam. A coffee first thing, and half a green tea, later. Tuna and brinjal pickel. Hard boiled eggs with pepper. Ikea crispbread with good olive oil.
Passing from room to room, my new neighbours quiet, and all the while thinking, what should I write? How to live deliberately? A pile of books arrived this morning. The Marx I don't already know. And another pile of books to arrive soon, by or on Lacan, to help my with a long review I'm writing. Piles of books, but I have to force myself to read.
How to live deliberately? There are many friends from whom I don't take phonecalls. Write, I tell them, I don't want to talk. It's true I am out most evenings. To talk - no, that's no good. But to write instead ...
In the summer, I got a new mobile phone and a new phone with caller ID. I got broadband at last, and I was given a mini ipod and a laptop. Everything was to work, I told myself. Everything, at last had to function; and so it did. Next, a new television, one that takes freeview and a scart plug to play DVDs. All to clear the space for a deliberate life ...
It is a kind of indifferent speech that has come to obsess me. An indifferent speech, an indifferent writing - without know what is meant by either phrase. As though I could smooth down writing. Or as though, by writing, I could reach an absolute smoothness, the ice on which nothing can live.
To write: what might it mean to achieve that: the bare infinitive. To write ... Do I think I'll find my way to it tonight, that to write without forethought, to ramble, is a way to surprise writing writing? Laughter: I've caught writing out in me. Writing wants to write, to say nothing in particular. And I should be glad it will keep me up - it's nine o'clock, nine bells, and I must not give in to sleep.
Papa M playing in the other room. Succeeding John Fahey, one album after another on the computer. Live from a Shark Cage. You can still hear Slint in his playing. I have so much music now. All the music I want. But how to live deliberately?
Some posts I wrote were very popular. I do not write in those styles now. Pare it down - less styles, always less. No more Bernhard-isms. And shouldn't I drop Blanchot, the last companion? And what about these kinds of questions, stolen from Handke to enliven a line of prose, to awaken it?
There's no doubt: I was much more careless when I began. I hadn't written in this way for a number of years, not since all my correspondences finally fell away. It was a struggle to begin, and even to find my way to a beginning. I remember I made datelines of the activities of this or that member of the Rue Saint-Benoit group.
Yes, that's how it began. And then, very slowly, completely alone in the days after Christmas here in the city, I began to write of the narrative voice in Blanchot, and found my way to quote Kafka on the 'merciful surplus of strength'. That was the beginning, the barest beginning, and these are still my concerns, although I am not alone in the city anymore. And still I ask myself, how can I live deliberately?
And I've lived in the city for nearly five years. Five years, up and down the passage that runs to the back entrance to the office. It is a peaceful city, a benevolent place. Will I be here forever? Moving around is no good. To begin again, to start over again - it's no good. But didn't I come close, this year, to getting a job in X.? And mightn't I chance, soon enough, on a job in Y.?
I'm keeping myself awake. By writing, I'm awake; I'm even thinking of the future, of that little place I might hollow for myself in these hours before sleep, like a kind of snow burrow. Freezing to death is like sleeping, I'm told. You'll be given the choice: sleep and die, or keep awake. And to sleep is to fall sweetly into death.
I read an interview over the weekend with Terrence Davies and felt great anger. The interviewer wrote of X.'s campness, of his upset as though he was a specimen under a microscope. I like X.'s films very much. It means a great deal to me that he is British, as I am.
I remember his three early shorts, the last part of which showed the death of the man we had met as a boy in the first short, and as a young man in the second. Now he was dying, and it was not a pretty death - sputtering, coughing. A black and white film.
And I remembered, long ago, at university, watching a South Bank Show on him in the television room in student halls. The others were laughing at him. He was so camp! The director spoke of recreating a street from his childhood. There it was, the street. The Long Day Closes: was that it?
I think again of the interviewer and sudder. I feel a great rage - Davies is to be admired first of all, and unconditionally. For what was the interviewer fit for, who would separate himself from Davies as a scientist does from a specimen? Typical Guardian rubbish, I told myself.
And then another memory: the wordless refrain at the beginning of Vaughan Williams's third symphony, and a shot of black water. Everyone sang in those Davies films! Always singing. And another scene: fists through glass, yes that was beautiful. Like the arms of the prisoners in Genet's film, that reach one another through the bars.
Genet. Say that name and you are protected. He sought to live deliberately. He lived deliberately, exemplarily. Five novels, a few plays - he knew when to stop. And then Prisoner of Love, the coda. And then death. A beautiful life.
And now I know what I want tonight. To write a post that would resemble one of the songs John Cale and Lou Reed wrote for their tribute to Andy Warhol, Songs for Drella. The song is called 'A Dream', and Cale narrates it. 'It was a very crisp, clear Fall night ...': its supposed to resemble a diary entry by Warhol. Who knows, it might have been one of those entries! It is desperately moving, because Warhol is already dead, and I fancy I can hear something of him in his words, spoken in Cale's Welsh accent. Warhol who is another figure close to me, someone else who lived deliberately. Now I know what I want to write.
Sometimes, readers write to me. Emails, making connection - a flurry at first, and then nothing, and then, perhaps, another flurry. Most of it forgotten straightaway. I have an enemy, who likes to write to berate me. I have allies, who want to tell me they appreciate me. I reply to them simply. I think in addition to writing, these readers should start blogs of their own. Everyone should start blogs of their own, that's what I tell myself, in what I imagine is Warhol's voice.
I used to have a copy of his Diaries, Warhol. But like so many books, it couldn't come with me from place to place. You can't keep all the books you buy, nor all the photographs you take. The Diaries were too big, anyway - and too inconsequential. But I admit it was the inconsequential that drew me to them. Nothing was said, never anything in particular.
Warhol would ring his friends every morning and speak, just speak. I like this, too. Cixous used to ring Derrida and just speak. He would keep quietly. Sometimes, Derrida would ring Blanchot. And Blanchot wrote to Monique Antelme that she should call him whenever something good happened to her, or something bad.
Letters! Do you remember when they used to arrive? Do you remember the last letter you ever sent? I used to wait for letters every day. Letters from ... yes, every day, for years on end. And then - how many years ago? 5? 6? that desire came to an end. It stopped, simply.
Was I free? I gave myself to academic writing. Several hundred thousand words - it kept me busy. Nothing I wrote was very good. Did I learn about writing? What I learnt, I forgot; I can barely put together a paper.
The last letter. An interval; academic writing, and then - the first posts on a blog. And then, a few months later, my own blog, now that I was free from waiting for letters, or desiring to send them.
Isn't this where it was all coming, to the blog? Wasn't it all leading here? As though a gathering wave had finally met a shore to break against. It broke and spread - so much writing! Not necessarily good, nor bad, but - there could be writing!
Laughter, incredulous voice: and you are proud of this? With all that's going on in the world, you are proud of - this? W.'s apocalypticism. He made me listen to Godspeed's Dead Flag Blues in silence. 'These are truly the last days.' The last days: 'we're finished,' says W., 'it's over. We're fucked. We - are - fucked.'
Papa M.'s cover of 'Turn! Turn! Turn!': play until the tape ends, he decided. Write until your hour's up, I tell myself; and it almost is. I'll finish when he finishes. I'll finish - now.
('This is an idiotic voice. It's inane.' - 'But I like it's inanity. I like it's idiocy.')