Ill at home for a fifth day, and a pale, seemingly sourceless light is everywhere. I recognise it; it has come to find me: white, indifferent light. White light like maggots writhing when you roll away the bin, alive in itself somehow. Trying to live in its own way, but such light lives only across kitchen work tops and empty baths. Such light, known to the ill, the unemployed is the great neutral medium of the everyday, interposing itself so that only it can be seen, passing like river fog across the clean surfaces of our houses.
Who has seen it? I saw it all the time once. A seeing that needs a great training, months of preparation. Until: there it is: the thickness of the everyday, the day as what neither begins nor ends, but flows across the work tops and the silver taps. I think to enter it fully would be to forget. But I'm not yet ready. Somewhere, I am sure, there are great sages of the everyday, great voyagers, who travel everywhere in the white light, unafraid. I imagine they are drinking. I imagine they drink constantly, night and day, but that that is how they hold themselves into the light.
You can never see it face on, I tell himself. Never directly. It must come towards you, like a shy animal. You have to be still enough, marooned enough, that it might drift towards you. And where your mouth was open, it will be filled with gossamer. And where your eyes were open, cotton wool wads. And your ears sealed by buds of light.
You should drink, I tell myself. Drink sweet, stale beer open in cans on your floor. Stale lager, cheap - an obscure brand from the German supermarket: others, you know it, in Old Europe are drinking this. Others, elsewhere, voyagers in white light are drinking the same cheap Aldi lager - in Hungary, say, or in Albania. They would understand you there. They'd understand it was Old Europe you were reaching, the same white light over rust belts and radioactive zones.
Or you should eat. The discount Greggs, selling stale goods from the region. 7 stale teacakes in a bag. 7 Gingerbread men, or 7 Lardy cakes. Lardy cakes open the way. Wrappers and crumbs on the sofa open it up. Lie down in the afternoon, full of sweet stale cakes and sweet stale beer. The day is passing, but your day is going nowhere. The day passes - but is it really passing? How to reach up and stir the sky with a stick to find out? The clouds have the thickness, you imagine of mashed potato.
And everywhere, white light and not a chance. White light, bland and shadowless - the great noon of life as it turns in itself. The great noon, nobody's climax, when the day climbs to the plateau of the afternoon that you will cross with the aid of 4 cans of sweet beer and 7 stale cakes. Isn't that what white light brings to me, and today? Isn't that of what it reminds me?
Listen to Felt in the afternoon. Keep the TV turned on, with the volume down, and listen to this Felt album or that, it makes no difference. Felt in the afternoon: perfect. You are stranded - the day has stranded you, and so are Felt, who are with you. You and Felt. You and the TV on and Felt and half finished cans of sweet, stale beer and cake crumbs on the sofa. Is your life over? Did it ever begin?
Sometimes, in the day, you have had to keep the house clean. That was your duty: hoover the floor, and cream cleanse the sink after you've done the washing up. Scrub the silver hob back to silver. Let the silver taps shine silver again: do you remember what the son was charged to do in Hal Hartley's Trust? Do you remember how he failed in his tasks, and how he was punished?
But they don't understand, the workers, the able bodied. They don't understand - how can they, who lack your perspective upon the day, who do not know the white light? What can they know, who drive from here to there, who work? Time has not given itself to them. Time has not opened itself as wide as the sky. Time does not allow them the vistas it has given you, as over a salt marsh: the whole, white sky.
7 stale Chelsea buns. 7 squashed eclairs, with yellow cream. In truth, they go the quickest, almost as soon as the shop is open. There's always a queue, very long. A queue, and you'll be lucky if there are gingerbread men left. Sometimes, you make do with white, stale baps, but they don't fill you, and they're not sweet. Or seven unsweet finger rolls. Or a single loaf of brown bread that is hard when you tap it. Toc toc.
It's only on your own that the white light will reach you. On your own, but if that means alone enough to be no one, no one in particular. The day, like an office, has its functionaries. The alcoholics on the corner are as interchangable as bureaucrats. They have equivalent dreams, equivalent nightmares; they are all exactly the same, closer or farther to the heart of white light.
And you, who are you, alone, but with no secrets to share, with nothing to recount? White light flows through you. Light passes through your permeable body. When you cough you cough clouds of day. When you walk along the street, it is the day that walks, having hardened itself into a body, a life. Having lain itself into the course of your life like a glacier in its valley.
Like a Bela Tarr film, the narrative of your life is so attenuated, so given to stretches of nothingness, ghost landscapes, you can gather nothing together. What happened? You remember an atmosphere, a climate. It was always light. There was light everywhere. But that is a screen memory. Light does not happen, it is the way things happen. Light is what retreats from things, for the most part. It is the withdrawal of light that lets us see, and speak, and listen.
But sometimes it comes over you to blank things out. Now nothing happens, least of all your life. Nothing whatsoever: can you imagine that? It drifts through you, eventless. Drifts, and without knowing itself, seeks itself. Seeks, by forgetting it has sought and every other memory it might have had. There can be no plans. No anticipation. The absence of hope, and of all relation to the future.
Indifference, that's what's required. Perfect indifference to itself. A kind of sphere turning in its indifference. Can you imagine wanting nothing at all? Being lost from all orbits? Wandering out and out, lost comet? But there's no need to imagine it, since you are part of it. I think it is you who I can scarcely imagine. You. But the light's brought you back to me. Or it's taking me back, all the way. Fifteen years ... longer. Sweet beer on the sofa. Sweet stale beer, and crumbs from 7 sweet, stale cakes.