Rather tired, rather bored, I decide to invite the murk of Manhattan Tuesday, The Afternoon of Insensitivity to descend over me. I want to stay with a mood, to follow its course. To stay with it as it deepens itself into a gorge, following itself blindly. And all the way up to where it spills out, as I know this album does, to meet some greater whole. A kind of return to life. Orpheus coming out of the underworld.
And this over two discs, the first of which is beginning to play now, and the second in its jewel case on my washing machine, which is still stranded with all my kitchen furniture beside me in the living room. And with its beautiful cover, this album, that is already a promise. I am soothed by seeing it, and Glasgow Monday, The Cell, which I keep close to it. Soothed because it promises the consistency of a mood, so I will not scattered in all directions, as I am today. Scattered, and wanting to be gathered together, to follow a course, the gorge. To descend as the walls of the world rise up around me. Descending as though to uncover a truth I could not reach elsewhere.
Hadn't I promised myself to write about persistence? How I admire so the simple act of continuing. Keep Going - it is a title of a Steven Duffy album and a Jandek song. Keep going - and I think the singer of The Afternoon sings of his own drivenness. 'Have I always been this driven?' But that is at the end of the suite. I'll have to wait another hour to hear it. I'd like to open a bottle of wine, I really would. But it's too early. And perhaps I shouldn't drink at all. Perhaps I should wait it out, this unpleasant time that is not yet evening. If it was dark, I could close the curtains against it. Close them and enclosed this room, which is exposed, now to the outside. The white day, everywhere. The whiteness of the day that looks for me everywhere.
Tiredness, vague illness. I woke - when? at 5.00? at 6.00? - intending to - what? To work, I think. Or to write something on the way to work, that was aimed at it. A writing that has work in its cross hairs, that would let itself be cut and pasted into a finished essay. That would offer itself up like an organ donor willingly for a Frankenstein-essay to come. But I was tired. Tiredness found me and lay me out. I went to the office and ended up on the floor, reading, or trying to read. Having failed to begin. Or knowing that what should have begun had begun without me, and that I'd missed my appointment and all appointment, and the day was only a dead sea to cross.
I think I looked at my bookshelves. Thought: of what am I capable of reading today. Something short, I thought. Something I can open at any page and put it down again quickly. Something where a page or two is enough, that would say: at least you have read me today. At least you read. And then I thought: perhaps I should listen instead, really listen. Perhaps on the floor I should listen to White Box Requiem on the computer speakers, remembering that this was the album on which Jandek was no longer collaborative, when it was once again a voice, and a guitar. But that, too, fell away from me. I lacked focus. My listening fell thick carpet of the office floor. And that was where my reading fell, there in the light; there as light reached me through the filth encrusted windows.
Home again in the afternoon. I thought, am I worthy of The Cell? And thought: no, it's The Afternoon I should pull over me like a duvet. Thought: perhaps it's out of that murk that I took will emerge, even as the music lifts, even as the bass runs towards the end climb upwards to the sky. To be carried along, hesitantly at first, and then gathering as the current of the music gathers. As it is given to a kind of fate, discovering itself. As the music is pushed so that it seems to find itself and explore itself like a god just born. And what should I explore as I listen? How might I let myself be found, and led, like a cow with a ring through its nose? To be led out to pasture. To where the fields open beyond the houses, and the day spreads wide like palms opening in welcome.
There are days to get through, rather than live. Days that never catch fire, and whose hours are like the drawled syllables from Jandek. Pulled ahead of themselves, attenuated, so they never end, not really. So that one failed hour slops greyly into another, so the day pushes dross ahead of itself like a glacier a moraine. The trick is to wait, to force nothing. To wait as hour gives unto hour, pushing the dross ahead, for something to settle, and a beginning to open. To begin - isn't that why I come here to write? Just that: to begin, to have followed the gorge as it opens. To plunge down to where it is dark like evening, and like a blinkered horse, you can fix your gaze only on what matters.