Spurious

The Afternoon

The author of a new book on Tarkovsky perceptively writes of the folds in time that unfold and refold on screen: an eight minute shot with a still camera and Gorchakov first sitting, then lying down lasts for the whole night. It is dawn that is lightening the last minute, and the Alsation who wandered into the shot and disappeared must have come from his dreams or his memories. It was space we saw, but also time. Time made visible; the pressure of time made real. A night passed; eight minutes passed. The room darkened, then lightened. A dog came and went: time, a secret pleat of time. More: a pleat that opened inside to outside. That exposed, shared, Gorchakov's dreams or memories. We see them; we are privy to them. We are there at the crossroads of the night, where the soul is lost. What happened? What is happening? Gorchakov's outside himself and where are we who see him?

I have never liked afternoons, and have always sought to brace myself against them. The afternoon! Make it the busiest part of the day, schedule things to do - meetings, administrative work - but it's still out there, out of the window. Out there - dissipation, that vague fraying that seems to undo tasks from within. What's the point of this, or that? What's it all for? Those are the questions the afternoon asks in you. Asks and answers them as it melts you into the air. You're out there, too: outside, even as you sit inside your office. A pleat of the afternoon has opened to claim you. Or the darkness closed inside you is also of the afternoon. It was there already. It waited for you, knew you. Perhaps only the afternoon knows your name.

It was always afternoon that I knocked on your door. The afteroon ... it drew me there, that's what I thought. You were ill, unemployed - and what was I? Unemployed, ill - and for how long? It didn't matter. A week was a month, a month a lifetime. Weren't we entirely too light for the world? Light, our lives lightened, the afternoon burning us away like night mists on a lake.

You had a black and white TV, I remember that. Who else had such a TV, black and white? It was 1998 - was that the year? Or '99? A black and white TV: it was almost defiant. You didn't care for television, you said. You disapproved, it was never on. But it was on, I knew that. Couldn't I hear voices through the door as I knocked? Didn't I always know you were there?

I used to knock at the door. Afternoon - on what day? Any day. Every day. How could you tell them apart? I knocked - where were you? I could hear voices, quiet voices. And then there you were. There - and there I was, solidified from the day, born for you like a crystal. 'Fancy a walk?' or 'Do you want to go for a walk?' or 'I'm going to the meadows - do you want to come?'

You at the door, narrow eyed. You from your dark house to the door, to the brightness of the day: you were never ready for it. Never awake enough. 'Yeah, okay' or 'All right then' or 'Go on': said with your eyes narrowed. Said with your hand over your eyes to shield them. The day, what was it asking for from you? What did the afternoon want?

I never knew what you did inside, not really. You'd inherited your house. That was before I met you, long ago, a lifetime ago. You were going to work on it, you said. Have some work done. There was a lot to do, you sighed. Your mother had died there, and then your father. And whose turn was it now? But no one was going to die, not now. How could the afternoon ever be brought to a close? A writer faces eternity or the lack of it every day, said Hemmingway, but what does the non-writer see? Eternity or its absence. Eternity or the afternoon, the endless afternoon.

You were ill, unemployed. Your unemployment benefit became sick benefit. You were ill now, just as I was. Ill, both ill with malaise as vague and undefinable as the day. Ill - but what with? With too many afternoons. With the wideness of the sky. We'd been left behind, somehow. Soldiers forgotten at an outpost. Undercover agents without handlers. Who were we now? Who were we supposed to be?

You were part of some writer's workshop, I knew that. You were busy with a few things, you said. You'd like to write, you said, but you weren't sure what. And I thought, nothing you write will ever answer to what you've become. You'll never be able to find it, your lightness, in writing I thought, and nor will I. What were we to write, either of us? Every line was a lie. Every sentence. Unless you let it trail off, unfinished. Unless you began by not writing, by not even beginning. Writing and non-writing would cancel one another out. The Word and the non-Word. In the beginning, there was ... but what was there? The afternoon, the non-eternity of the afternoon.

'I'd like to write something' - but what? What would you write, in the afternoon when all stories fall apart? 'I'd like to write' - but we were too weak for stories, both of us. No story would come to find us, we should have known that. How could a page written by our hand lift itself into eternity? Or a single complete sentence? There were no plans that could withstand the afternoon.

You watched television in the half-darkness of your house. I knocked on the door, and you came to answer it, eyes half closed against the light. 'Want to come to the meadows?' You said, okay, you'd come. You said, I'll be there in a sec. You said, hang on a minute. The half-darkness inside. Voices. Daytime TV. And a notebook. Was there a notebook open somewhere? A notebook open in the air, the afternoon air, a breeze ruffling its pages?

Let the light write, I thought. Let the afternoon brown the pages gently. That would be evidence enough, I thought. Not that you'd been there, that you'd begun a story or written a shopping list. But that no one had been there, that no one wrote or read. The afternoon: was it there on the page? The afternoon: had it left its mark on the page?

I remember what we talked about, I have a good memory. I turn memories over all the time in my head. I remember too much, I tell myself, and only I remember it. What's left of this time for you? 'I took some time off', you could say. 'My dad died and I took some personal time', you could say. 'I took a couple of years off' ... I think you went back to work. I think you found your way back.

Do you think of me now, who used to knock on your door? I was never part of your social circle, was I? Never one of your regular friends. An occasional caller. I knocked on your door every now and again. I wasn't part of your group - your workshop, that's what it was called. Your writer's workshop - you kept it to yourself, really. It wasn't something you spoke about much. 'I'd like to write something', you said, and left it at that. Something, and one day. And meanwhile?

You got a job, that's what I heard. That was the rumour, anyway. I hardly knew anyone who knew you. Someone who knew someone, who knew someone ... Anyway, you weren't to be found inside in the day anymore. And hadn't I found something to do? Hadn't time unslackened itself and begun to move forward? Immune, that's the word I want to use of you. You were immune to those afternoons, to those years without work. How do you remember them? What place do they have in your memory? Does the afternoon return to unsettle you? Does its non-eternity unfold in your minutes and hours?

I have your journal, I imagine. I have it, the notebook in which you began to write and broke off. I have it, whose pages are almost all empty, where what writing there is hardly seems to mark it. You wrote in pencil - why is that? And you handwriting is so small - why is that? Because what you wrote could fade. Because it could be forgotten, what you wrote and everything you would want to write. I remember your lightness. I remember our conversations were inconsequential. Without consequence, without importance, talking of this, then that ... that was the marvel. Nothing was said to disturb the day. Nothing that raised itself higher than the afternoon.

I have your journal, I imagine, and all your thoughts. I turn the pages. A few notes, in pencil, in tiny handwriting, and then? Nothing, nothing, nothing. Blank pages. Pages I imagine that turned by themselves in the wind. Pages that answered by their blankness the blankness of the sky. Obscure correlate. An answer without resolution. How had you brought the afternoon to your notebook? How had you made it lie down there, in your notebook?

We used to walk out along the river, quite far, almost all the way to Didsbury. Along it, the river, to Didsbury and the Botanical Gardens. In what year? When was it that we walked out past the meadows and along the river? Talking of nothing in particular. Of music, of current affairs, but filling our topics with lightness, lightening them. Loosing them into the afternoon like balloons. What were we except for a way in which the afternoon could know itself? What except a way for the afternoon to speak and to lighten itself by speaking?

Your notebook, with its blank pages, its silence. Your notebook - was it yours - where the afternoon curled up and slept like a cat. I have a good memory, I think. I remember too much, but the afternoon remembers more. I can see its arches now, reaching far above me. The afternoon, an immense, impersonal archive. The afternoon that shimmers within everything that has happened. Everything that happened will happen here. And everything will be forgotten here, including everything I've remembered, including the fact that I lived and you lived, and that there ever was a meadow and a path and a river and Didsbury and the Botanical Gardens.

Eternity, the lack of it. And I imagine that the afternoon is insinuated into non-writing, and the writing that remembers what it is not. How to join the Word and the non-Word? How to begin writing of what does not begin? I would like to place a fold in these words and these sentences. Would like for writing to unfold in another direction, blooming into itself. As though it was the afternoon had fallen asleep here. As though it was writing and it was dreaming, and that both you and I were dreamt by the afternoon, its fantasy. I would like to live, said the afternoon, and we were born. I would like to speak, said the afternoon, and we spoke. And I would like to write, said the afternoon, and you wrote.

Saint Charles Crumb

My nightmares, when I have them, are of unemployment, empty time and the endless, endless suburbs. Miles from anywhere, unable to drive, rent and house prices wildly high, there's no room for life. How can you live? What will you live on? No chance. You've got no chance.

A new category: Saints, short for saints of the everyday. Those who never moved out of the family home, who got lost in their own rooms and never left them again. Lost - in inner space. Lost in the ruin of the life they might have had: what horror! What glory, too - and I imagine a Genet whose prison is the suburbs, and whose heroes (heroines) worthy of beatification are the ones who hide themselves amid the other men and women. Shakespeare was like every other man and woman, says Borges, except that he was like every man and woman. So too with the Saint (the everyday Saint), who is like what we are, or rather what we are when we are not quite ourselves.

The first saint: Charles Crumb, of Zwigoff's great documentary. He never moved out. In the end, he barely left his room. He read; piles of books everywhere. He hadn't read Hegel and Kant, he says in the film, but he might do. Meanwhile he's rereading books he read twenty years ago. He is around fifty years old; he has a year before his suicide. Gentle and withdrawn, bullies tormented him at school. Hutch - that was the name of one of them. That was his name. Hutch and his cronies. Hutch would beat him in the school hall until he fell to the ground. There he was, Hutch, the cronies and everyone looking at him on the ground.

And when he got home, Charles had his father to contend with. A big, bullying man, who thought his sons failures. Hadn't he written a book on managing people: How to Manage People, with his strong American mug on the inside cover. How to Manage People - and here he is with three worthless sons. Charles goes out to work. How long does he last? A few years. He never moves out of home. His father dies. Charles leaves his job. He lives with his mother, whom he calls 'mother'. Sometimes his famous brother visits - once or so a year. He loses his teeth, and never wears his false set. What would be the use of that? He never goes out. He doesn't see anyone. Why should he wear his false teeth? He wasn't even going to be in the film, for godssakes.

On screen, he chews a toothpick. He's sardonic. He's wry. But crumpled somehow. Withdrawn - and into himself, and so far he's not there anymore. Withdrawn - having found some vast dimension of inner space, greater than the world, where he is lost. His face has crumbled. He's chubby. His speech is marked with a lisp because he doesn't wear his dentures. He laughs, but it is a sardonic laugh. Who is laughing, and at whom? There's no one there. No one left.

Years have passed. He's fifty - how did that happen? Fifty, and surrounded by piles and piles of books. When he was young, Robert Crumb remembers, it was his brother who got him into comics, into drawing. And it is brother whose approval he still wants somewhere when he finishes a strip. His brother! Charles gave up writing and drawing years ago. We see his last illustrations, where the speech bubbles become fuller and fuller. Soon he no longer illustrates his strips at all. Writing, just that, very neat, all in a line, covering the notebook. Lines and lines. And then the writing turns into marks, just marks, saying nothing, only looking like writing. For pages and pages. He's compelled. Pages and pages and whole notebooks. Charles, what happened to you? What went wrong? What were you looking for across all the pages and the books?

He's been on anti-depressants and tranquilisers for twenty years. But he'd given up writing and drawing long before that. Charles is calm now, much calmer than before. It's age, he thinks. When he was young, all he thought about was sex. Sex and comics, and drawing, and writing. And now? Fifty, he has no sexual desire any more. Probably a good thing. Fifty and surrounded by books, which he plans to reread. What else is there to do? He kills himself a year after the onscreen interviews. The film isn't out yet. Charles hasn't been discovered as an outsider artist. Would it have mattered for him? Would it have made any difference? Maybe everything was too late for Charles. Maybe he was beyond anything that could happen.

He is a saint. Solitude - but a solitude that has turned him aside (there's no one there to be solitary) - burns in his place. His mother calls up to him. 'Charles, are you okay up there?' He reassures her. He's okay. Soon the filmcrew will leave him back in his room on his own. His room - is it his room? Who inhabits it? Who's there? Kant and Hegel, he'd like to read them. He hasn't yet, though he's read a lot. Books in piles around him. He read them all twenty years ago and now it's time to read them again. What else has he to do?

Robert Crumb remembers how Charles told him he was in love with the boy from the film of Long John Silver. The boy! Robert wonders. How hard it must have been for Charles! In love with this boy, drawing him over and over again. Was that why he wrote and drew? Was it the boy for whom he was looking, by way of writing and drawing? Writing, drawing were a kind of ceremony. He was conjuring someone up: a boy, the boy from the film. He loved him, the boy. It must have been hard for Charles, muses his brother. He never had sex. The girls at school weren't interested in him, says Robert, or in Charles. They were interested in Hutch, though. Hutch and his cronies - all the mean, big boys. But Charles was more gentle, Robert muses.

You get the sense Robert is speaking of himself, too. He was too gentle. But it is Charles who is the Saint, not Robert. Charles, who has his own small page on Wikipedia. Someone should send me Charles' notebooks, I think to myself, because only I would want them. Someone should send me what only I deserve, I think to myself. From one afternoon to another, I think to myself. From his afternoon, Charles', thirty years ago (he gave up drawing and writing thirty years ago now) to mine, where I write (I do not draw, though I would to illustrate every post in my new category, Saints), or I try to write (lately it's been hard - no time, no time ...). But this is the effect Charles has on you: he makes you think he's singled you out. That something special in you has been called forward by Charles. Only I understand, I think to myself. Only I can really understand.

Day Companion

In the Meantime

Frost the window with your breath. That is our everyday, breath on glass, the becoming-opaque of what was once transparent.

First, only one cafe, rather scruffy, but then others appeared - a handful, each more pristine, then a dozen in one small town and cafe life was born in the North. Where did they come from, the cafe regulars? From where did they materialise? That's where I met you. That's where we began to speak one afternoon. We spoke; we sat at the same table and four o'clock became our kingdom, and we met there to see out the afternoon, to celebrate another crossing of the day.

You will never understand, you who have not known yourself stranded and becalmed, you who found employment and success, you whom the day helped to ignore its blankness. You will never understand, you whose sky is not scratched out, whose roads bear your cars and the pavements your three-wheeled prams, you for whom the street is a bridge between one place and another and not the desert you will never be able to pass! 

What do you know of the afternoon? What do you know of the day which for you is just rest, a day off from work? And what of that friendship between those who inhabit the day? What of its unsteadiness, between those who share first of all that day? You will not know it, you couples who meet other couples for breakfast in the sun. Then I turn to the other 'you'; I reserve the word 'you' for my daytime friend, the companion the day gives me.

I cross the day; the afternoon is open, the sky is blind, what can I do? I knock on your door, day companion, and sometimes you answer. I knock on your door and sometimes you come to the door. Yes, I knock and I wait and sometimes you open your door and sometimes you step out with me and walk to the meadows. Sometimes we go out, out into the day, along the path and into the meadows, you and I, speaking of the life we do not lead, speaking of life before and after us, but not here, not today.

Your father died; he left you a house - this was your fortune. Your father died, you were left a house - this was your misfortune. Now you will never you need to work. Unemployment benefit, then sickness benefit will see you through the months and years. Why work? Your house was an enclave in the day; you were curled up with your cat and your tabs and your TV. For a time, you had tenants, but then, when they left, you enjoyed the peace of your house, enjoyed the pace of a day which asked nothing. You did not fear it; years passed, it is true, but you never lost faith in a life which had not yet begun. This was your interregnum, your long afternoon; soon you would live again, but now, today, in the meantime ...

Day Companion

You who work will know nothing of this. Only you, day-companion, friend of lost hours, will understand. But where are you now? How could we keep in contact? What of us was left to keep contact? For the day spins you to nothing - we were frayed by empty time until there was nothing of us left. How could we keep in contact? Sometimes I knocked on your door, sometimes you answered, sometimes we stepped out into the kingdom that was ours.

Everyday: kingdom that is ours because nothing is ours, because we have no purchase on the world. Everyday without foothold, unbreakable glass, we see what others look through; we hear what sounds in the air through which sound is supposed to travel. But what is mediated for you is immediate for us; what you cross we cannot cross, do you understand we lack the strength that is so masterfully yours?

Today, but what day is it?, there are two of us, and for a time we gather at four o'clock. Weak joy of companionship! Happiness of weakness shared! At five, the cafe becomes a restaurant, and it is time for us to leave. What right have we to sit among the workers? We leave and part in the night; you go this way and I that; you pass into the crowds and I too disappear. Who were you, friend? What happened in that hour we just passed together?

Fragile friendship. Who turned from the other? True, you rarely visited; you rang me often, it is true, but I would always make the journey to your door. Perhaps the strength which allowed my journeying was that which brought me again to work. I broke through the glass. And you, what happened to you? I stopped knocking at your door; how could I knock at night, when I'd known you only by day? I know you stayed in and smoked, that every evening passed for you that way. I knew, and though I saw the lights, I did not knock.

The Judgement

Fear of Time

Why turn back? Why remember, after these years, those tracts of unemployment, those wounds no one suffered, for I was hardly there to suffer them? Because I would turn there to discover the secret of the same everyday I see through my window; I would smash the glass. Why look back and not forward? Why back and not through this window before you? Because I am employed, busy, even when I try and write on the everyday. I have betrayed it; the everyday escapes; it flees into what I take to be my past.

Why does it flee thus? It cannot be otherwise; if unemployment allows me to witness the everyday, it does not permit me to seize it. The word, trauma echoes feebly in a direction it cannot reach, for I am writing not of a wound or a wounding, nor even of a suffering, unless it is possible to invoke a suffering suffered by no one, a suffering with no one at its core, but which returns, ghost of what cannot complete itself and cannot come to term.

Suffering, then: name of that pathein which attunes, that mood which will henceforward sustain your life, that vagueness which returns and which you fear. Vagueness, suffering without subject, cosmic boredom: there is no name for what amounts to a fear of time. Agoraphobia is already misnamed, for where is our agora, our common space, such that it could be feared? There is no shared life; no life lived in common, and perhaps this is already a clue as to why the everyday flees even as we look for it. At the exhibition of the everyday life of the Phoenicians at the British Museum, I thought, only we today, we moderns experience the truth of the everyday; only for us is it presented and hidden, both at once. We have lost what we think we have found in another civilisation, but in truth we've found nothing, not even ourselves.

The fear of time: I am not sure what to call this new condition and I know I have mistaken it for what is so poorly named agoraphobia, for that dislike of open spaces, of the square in front of the town hall or the development by the quayside, but above all, for me, those roads on which I used to cycle when I was young, roads exposed, roads which exposed me mercilessly to the sky, as if delivered unto a celestial judgement.

The Judgement

And what was decided with respect to my case? What judgement was handed down? Ah, but there was no judgement and no one to hand down a judgement, I knew myself, cycling, to be seen, by the sky, by the white light as it saw me and was indifferent to me.

I was not a child. Perhaps that was the point; perhaps that was the first experience of the fact of the world that would not indulge me. Was that the judgement delivered to me: you are not a child, you are no longer young, what you are is what you will be? Was that the judgement: you are what you have become, there are no potentialities left to unfold? Nothing will happen that has not happened; the pattern is fixed, your future known: that's what the day said to me. A child is everything and I was nothing. A child has potential and I had exhausted my potential. My time was up; what could I become that I was not already?

Was that the content of the judgement? I wonder. Because it was also the case that the one I was, the cyclist, was already dispersed. Who was I? I cycled across the Thames Valley, going nowhere in particular; I cycled, going nowhere, for where was there to go? And so was I dispersed in that cycling, so was my attention claimed by nothing and everything - claimed, but so that attention emptied itself out, so its gaze surveyed all but saw the same in all, the same, but behind the same, hidden by it, as it can only be hidden, what I will call the 'there is' of the everyday.

There is the Everyday

There is, il y a, es gibt - the German is best because it speaks of what was given, of the 'there is' that is also a giving. But a giving that abandoned me to what was given thus, which said: this is fate. Not, this time, my fate, measured in terms of what I could or could not do; not the fate allotted to me, but to a time, to my time, to the epoch of the everyday, the great noon when the everyday came to itself and knew itself in the bland white indifference of the sky.

A judgement was delivered; I received it; I bore it. A judgement was delivered; I wrote to transmit its lesson. The book called The Judgement wrote itself. 160,000 words; 500 pages. Unpublishable, of course, unreadable, of course, and gradually, over the months cut down, distilled until there were only 5,000 words left; and then I saw that those words, too, were no good and would have to go. The Judgement: a blank page. Blank, ruled page of the W.H. Smiths diaries in which I used to write. Blank page on which nothing was written, but which bore, so it seemed to me, something like the judgement of the blind sky on what lay beneath it. I was judged; we were judged; the Thames Valley was judged, and by the Thames Valley the world as it in turn would be transformed into the Thames Valley.

I had seen enough; I had seen everything. What use was cycling now? I had seen enough; my education was complete, but in a sense I had learnt nothing, or rather, my education had only begun. For I was not there to suffer what I suffered, I was not there, which is not to say it did not happen. Oh it happened, it was ever-present; I experienced it as I watched Neighbours, as I rose at ten-thirty, but it happened such that it was never completed and determined as an object of my experience. I was haunted, not by the ghost of Hamlet's father who would spur him to vengeance, to action (but Hamlet vacillates; he does not act), but by vacillation itself (redoubled in my vacillation, in my non-action). Only indecision attested to the coming and going of the judgement.

Indecision

I studied; I learnt a great deal and forgot a great deal; I thought I had come up against the roof of my intelligence; I gave up studying and sold my books. I was back on the dole, back where I was at the start. But returning to me, despite everything I had forgotten, was a memory I am not sure I can call mine. Returning, then, out of the depths of a forgetting that was in no way the opposite of remembering, I knew the same judgement; it was passed again, over and again. How could I but misunderstand it, despite my learning, or, perhaps, because of it? I hadn't the tools; I hadn't the ability to speak of what could not be spoken not because it was ineffable, but because it carried speech away.

Years pass and I find myself here, this Sunday morning, surrounded by the debris of last night's entertainment - sucked lime quarters, Corona bottles and empty cans of Guinness - find myself tired and hungover. Tired, hungover, but with a great deal of work before me - papers to write up, books to read - but I am fit only to write here at the blog. What do I write? Suddenly I remember the phrase from the poem, 'in the end is my beginning' - perhaps I should begin with that, I say to myself, and see where that takes me. I begin; I open the 'compose new post' screen; I write without deciding what to write.

But in that indecision lies the truth. In that indecision I turn, I am turned; by indecision does the judgement return to me and I remember, even though it fled from memory. What had I seen? What had I been given to see? I am Lot's wife, turned into a pillar of salt, for what have I seen? What I did not see, the seeing of the sky, the day's gaze, the everyday as it saw me then in blindness and knew me in its blindness - yes, only now does it turn to me, that same blindness, only now does it return, the experience that, when it occurred, immediately set itself so far back into my memory that it became something like its condition. The condition of memory, but also its content, as though it were a priori and a posteriori at one and the same time.

The Threshold

Why turn back? Why remember, after these years, those tracts of unemployment, those open wounds of time? I am frightened of time, that is true; there is too much time, not too little, and it is not my death that encircles my awareness, distant horizon, but infinite time, the infinite threshold between one moment and another. Today, what is today? Today, who am I today? I remember that scene in Mirror where the boy who, we learn, lost his parents in the siege of Leningrad, is questioned by his drill-sergeant. What is he asked? Specific questions which need specific answers. How does he reply? Without specificity, at once vaguely and determinedly; he speaks with firmness of what has no firmness. So too does the everyday ask to be remembered here. To be remembered, which is to say, to remember itself by way of my memories. By way of them, but not contained by them, the everyday having judged them and become their condition.

Boredom, Hatred and Disgust

1.

True life is elsewhere, but we are in the everyday. But what if the everyday gives onto true life? What if it was there, close to you, all along?

Lately, every morning, there was the O.C. to watch. Now, after what must have been the cliffhanger of one series or another, it's not being shown. What's happened to my morning? There's Friends, of course, but it lacks the forward momentum of the O.C.; besides, I've seen it all before.

I want to be carried along by events; I want a plot and storyline, even if it is endlessly frustrating that as soon as a couple gets together they are rent apart. Something must happen: thus the soap opera. Thus the drama of a genre that, with Neighbours, which I watched daily for many years, stretches itself from day to day, one day after another, from now until eternity.

2.

I've said it before - too many times, no doubt, but that same eternity, that mathematical sublime must be understood against the eternullity of the everyday. That the latter, as it gives itself to be experienced only by those who have no hope in the everyday - the long-term unemployed, the sick, the early retired, the addicted and the depressed -, is a condition without reprieve.

A kind of reduction occurs for anyone who waits, in those friendless or lonely who are exiled to the streets of those towns in the no-man's-land of the suburbs - in those whose capacities fail them and they meet thereby the everyday at its level. If you have not experienced it, you will not know it. If you have not been elected, you will not understand.

I despise those who tell me they've never been bored. For boredom, as I know it, is everything and discloses everything. Just as hatred, that disgusted, tired-out hatred likewise discloses everything. Just as disgust, turned on yourself, can push every atom from which you are made apart from every other.

Dispersed, thus, you meet the everyday that is also turned inside out, which becomes the black hole that gives unto an infinite attenuation. And when you enter it? Or rather, when the everyday carries you across its event horizon? Time is slowed until there is no time and this 'there are no events' happens as the purging of time in time.

What happens? Nothing happens. This 'nothing happens' is the black hole of the everyday as its horizon is broken to encompass all that was and will be. Reveals itself - but to whom? Without time, without that reflexivity which would allow an experience to become mine, the self does not survive.

3.

This is where boredom and hatred and disgust carry you. No one is there, but the everyday is given nonetheless. It reveals itself thereafter according to the wound it left. The wound that is that stretched and attenuated 'no one', that non-self which knows through itself, in every dispersed atom, that nothing happens and nothing will happen, that this is all there is now and forever.

A knowledge more terrible than that of any tragic hero, who still comes up against a limit against which he is broken. Freedom no longer clashes with necessity; nothing happens because there is no limit. What tension can there be, what drama? There is no one there to fight or struggle. But that 'no one' was there from the first, waiting in closed space for the exposure of space and patient in closed time for the exposure of time.

My heart does not lie at the centre of a closed and secure interiority. It is only a fold of the measureless void of the outside. The outside that gives itself to be experienced in the articulation of the heart, in that hinge between the everyday and itself. And that gives itself to be enfolded into an interiority even as it is primary and comes before all closed things.

What is real? What is there? Only that play of forces which are folded and unfolded in various ways. The true drama - and this reaches far beyond human beings - is one of implication and explication, of those prevoluntary openings and closings that are like the respiration of the cosmos. Its freedom.

Then boredom, hatred and disgust are not simply negative, or at least they do not issue simply in negativity. They are the doors that open upon what is real - on that secret streaming witnessed only in attenuation, which is to say, that spreads itself across the open wound you are. You will know it by its effects, by those little boredoms, hatreds and disgusts which unloosen you.

4.

There are no heroes in the everyday. The everyday identity of the superhero is his truth. Peter Parker is Spiderman just as you are no one. Michael Keaton was the best Batman because he looked lost as Bruce Wayne, lost wanderer, heir to a fortune he can only squander and to a life he can only half-live. Just as your secret non-identity is the lost one you also are, passer-between-the-shores who affirms the world as passage.

But how to know the experience of the everyday as beatitude? This may seem the retreat of what is called Buddhism in the work of Zizek and others: an apolitical withdrawal from the world, the renunciation of struggle. But what if beatitude lay in the fact that what reveals itself as the everyday is the usurpation upon which all identity is based - that the form of interiority favoured in our time, that of the worker, driver of the company car, occupier of the house in the suburbs is only imposture and play-acting? What if from boredom, hatred and disgust there arose a great laughter at that imposture and the joyful wisdom that this form of interiorisation is contingent and not necessary?

A laughter, then, which opens upon the dream of a great politics of the outside, of that movement in which each is given to that streaming they have usurped and greets the other as another who knows herself as usurper. A laughter in which the flames of boredom, hatred and disgust have purified themselves of all and any objects. The world is burning in that laughter. You are burning in that laughter.

True life is the everyday.

Bohemia

My musicologist friends tell me what they have to unlearn in order to write, to speak about music. What would it mean to unlearn philosophy in order to write and speak about what calls for thought? Foolish reflection which could only be conducted here, at the blog and in the idle abandon of blogging. Foolishness of a reflection that laughs at those who pay me for my time - a waste of resources of those taxpayers who fund the academic edifice.

But this is my own time - it's early, although already hot. The potted plants in the yard are dry; even the weed-plants which  sprout with great vigour from the concrete are dried out. My own time, and mine to waste. For an hour or two, I will allow myself to be turned from paper-writing and essay-reading to a more obscure object of attention. Hardly here, though it is everywhere. Hardly anywhere, but everpresent. It is not God of which I write, but the everyday. The everyday alongside which this blog lingers. With which I would like to enwrap words written here in haste and in idleness as ivy around its great limbs.

Have I read the section of the Phenomenology of Spirit called 'The Spiritual Animal Kingdom and Deceit, or the 'Matter in Hand' Itself' properly? Unlikely, but here goes: It is a certain kind of work which produces the individual, according to Hegel. It is conditional on the appearance of a class of skilled albourers, whose work is in an important sense an expression of their individuality. A class whose work is valued for exactly that reason.

Yet the world of such specialised creatures ('animals', Hegel calls them, finding them deficient in what would make them whole human beings) is not yet a world. Each is separate; each paces separately around their own cage taking himself for an individual real in and for himself even as each is only a fragment. A fragment, though, busily occupied with the 'task at hand': that labour in which she disinterestedly relinquishes selfish gain from her task. His accomplishments are now measurable by public approval; his talents and skills are recognised by others and by society at large.

Hegel reserves the merchant class for special ire because they have busily translated all value to a monetary measure. 'Currency must be honoured, but family, welfare, life etc., may all perish'. The problem, for Hegel, lies in the fact that the merchant does not embody a universal class; they seek to serve only themselves. The true universal class would work for the Good of society as a whole; compare the civil servant who would aim at Justice in general, or the scholar who aims at Truth.

But what happens when the bourgeois animal fails to receive this recognition? What happens when the conceit of one's self-worth is mismatched in the work produced? When the book you have written seems to fall short of the talents and skills you are sure you harbor? Begin again; start over again - write more books. Strange cousin of hedonism where what compels you is not the sense of success but of failure. 'Next time I'll get it right' ...

Tangent: does this provide insight into blogging? Activity of those who feel the mismatch between the inner and the outer so strongly as to create, with blogging, another kind of work? Activity which seeks another kind of recognition even as it divides itself very quickly into something close to an official discourse, an alternative academia and to something more interesting - the initiative at Long Sunday, for example, where a kind of drift is allowed to seize writing.

Back to the spiritual animal kingdom. The difficulty, Hegel shows, lies in the way worth is placed on a performance, on something realised by an individual which nevertheless falls short of the full expression of the skills and talents of that individual. The novelist writes what he takes to be an imperfect novel, that is, one inadequate to his talents. He begins again. The poet may write what she takes to be a perfect work, but that perfection lies behind her as soon as it is realised and she must begin again. The diremption between the inner and the outer leads to an ongoing, if productive, dissatisfaction.

Short step from here to the Bohemian image of the French romantics of the 1830s where it is not the work produced by the artist that matters so much as the attitude of the artist. Short step to an inversion of what Hegel would mean by the 'whole' human being where the wholeness of the artist, his defragmentation is the result not of work but of worklessness (idleness, abandon). Now the artistic attitude is what matters and life the ultimate medium of the artist.

Once again, the paradox of the spiritual animal kingdom lies in a diremption between the inner and the outer. You depend for your worth on a product, on something you make. For Hegel, at least, this is not yet all of society; the spiritual animal kingdom is a kingdom of the bourgeoisie where each is lost in the 'task at hand', in specialised labour. Perhaps, moving away from Hegel's analyses, the figure of the artist would be of one unlost from this task, the one unspecialised.

1926. Breton wanders the streets with a volume of Trotsky under his arm. The workers he passes, he thinks, are not yet ready for the revolution; they are chained to the assembly line. How to unchain them? He doesn't know. Then, all of a sudden, he sees a fascinating young woman who sees him in turn. They meet; talk. This is Nadja who will give her name to the book he writes in part to document their encounter as it is lived; feverish diary that records the extraordinary events which occur around her and the paths which open to them both through the Paris they cross as waking dreamers.

Surrealism aims at the overcoming of art and at the revolution of everyday life. The creativity specific to artist existence must cross over to life; one must live as artists created their works. Your life is your work as it is bound to others who have likewise given up bourgeois existence. In this way, the Surrealist is on the side of the revolution, of that great transformation of the most banal aspects of existence. So it is that Bohemia will spread everywhere, only this is a responsible Bohemianism, one allied to the proletariat of the world, one to awaken the multitude from the slumber of capitalism.

Breton dreams of the great unchaining. He has unchained himself; he writes, he wanders. But it is Nadja who is really lost. She wanders into the everyday, Breton writes, which is to say, she is lost there.  Herewith, Breton anticipates what was to come in Lefebvre (but also in Heidegger, in Lukacs ...): the great topic of the everyday.

The everyday: a topic I discovered - or was reminded of again - through writing in abandon at the blog. And isn't this the chance blogging affords - to discover a writing which reveals much more immediately than a writing scholarly and indifferent, the particularities of an existence - of an individual life? This is not autobiography but the quest for a kind of reduction, an epoche that would discover in a life a leap into thinking. Writing unspellchecked and ungrammarchecked as drift and embarking ... but this sounds too complacent ...

Where is it taking you, you who by writing have lost hold on yourself and on work - upon that externalisation which would afford you the chance of societal approval? Hegel's study of the animal spiritual kingdom opens the way to Marx's notion of alienation. There is another discourse of alienation in Lukacs and Lefebvre's studies of the everyday. But there is a welcome alienation where it is not the inner and the outer that exist in diremption; where the worker cannot recognise himself in his work and does not seek recognition; where work and worker reveal themselves as the fold of a more expansive economy. Is alienation the right word? Is it a question of defragmentation or of another experience of fragmentation? How is this experience bound to what the Surrealists or what the Situationists would understand as revolution?

This question instead: How to discover the everyday? It finds you. Oblivious, work devours the hours of your day. All time is worktime and space is that abstract distance which must be overcome. Boredom, unemployment, illness, retirement maroon you in the everyday. Time and space unchained from work become oppressive. Dust motes drift in the air. Your dwelling place spreads to include all time and all space; your boxroom encompasses the whole universe. Of course there are many modalities in which the everyday allows itself to be discovered. 2nd May 1989: let out of the warehouse early, I caught a glimpse of it, of the modern One-All, as it spread indifferently across the hi tech industrial estate. I saw it reflected on the lenses of the glasses of a girl at the railway station; I thought: remember that, for flashing there is the nothing into which the One-All loses itself; it is what there is only as there is nothing.

Breton's book is a voyage into the everyday. Much of it is in diary form because he is afraid he will be lost there. Like the comedy sketch that shows rock climbers mounting an assault on a pavement tilted from the horizontal plane to a vertical one - mock-struggling climbers with crampons and rope whom pedestrians pass in amusement - there is something laughable about the idea of such a voyage. The everyday is here and it is everywhere. Ah, but it is has to be discovered and according to the familiar Heideggerian move, it is only when it breaks down that it might reveal itself in its truth. What does Nadja's breakdown, her dispersal into the everyday reveal? She is lost, dissolved into the empty air. And what does Breton's book Nadja reveal as it deterritorialises the novel, the memoir, the theoretical treatise?

Foolish dream of a proletariat of the everyday. Bored, dissolute, dispersed but who assemble in the Great Refusal. Cripples and lepers: St Lawrence brough them to the emperor who asked him to produce the treasures of the church. Treasures of capital: the early-retired, the unemployed and the sent-mad, the ones who do not work; the proletariat as the class of the critique of work.

The Everyday

The everyday: you can’t fight it, not if you’re unemployed or half-employed. Music of the everyday: Half Man Half Biscuit (first two albums: Back at the DHSS and Back at the DHSS Again), I Ludicrous, Felt. Music made by people like you. The skint, the invisible. Disappearing in and out of obscurity.

Compare The Fall: Mark E Smith does not inhabit the everyday. It doesn’t touch him. He doesn’t experience its corrosive force. He is too intransigent; this is admirable, I have always admired it. Andre Breton, too – and Bataille: these figures are too strong for the everyday. They barely need to struggle against it.

I have absolute awe for those writers and artists who endure the everyday. Imagine Giacometti, up all night, working, working, making sculptures and destroying them. And Bacon, hungover, but up every morning, painting, destroying paintings he didn’t like (I was amazed to see a poor Bacon at a gallery in Edinburgh over the summer, it was terrible, a picture of a hat, some gloves hanging in a stairwell from the 1950s ... almost as bad as those execrable portraits of Mick Jagger …)

Duras, however, she is different. I would like to write of her alcoholism, but sometimes I set myself this rule: quote only from memory, and if necessary, inaccurately. But I think of Duras as a woman who drank because of the too vast presence of the world. It was unbearable for her, and drink was a way of bearing it. Drink was another way of coping with the vastness of the everyday.

(Forgive these vague notes. I'll come back to this another day.)

The Last Judgement

Imagine this: the everyday, the great expanse of life, the unlimited but also stagnant without-end whose slow corriolis force undoes everything, grew aware of itself in one of the temporary workers who serviced the companies which spread themselves across the Thames Valley. In this worker, this temp who found work here and then there, who was driven (he couldn't drive (he still can't)) to this company and then to that, working for a week or two days or a month before disappearing back into the everyday, to unemployment, there was a great awareness of the everyday itself. As though he bore in himself the secret that could blow the everyday apart. Was he the saviour of the everyday? Was he its destroyer? Or was he its agent?

He told himself: the everyday wants to destroy because I have caught it out, I know what it is up to. It doesn’t want to know that I know. Because it barely knows itself. Because I am a part of the everyday that has turned against the everyday. Like a cancerous cell, the tumour which will spread the great disease by multiplying itself across the everyday’s expanse. Is this salvific? Death-dealing? Am I delivering the Last Judgement?

Bataille thinks history is over ‘except for the denouement’. It is 1937. He writes to Kojeve that he is the man of unemployed negativity. That his life is an open wound, an abortion of the System. Kojeve’s reply as I imagine it: this is your problem, Bataille. History doesn’t care about you.

A recurring dream: the infinite wise child, the child who knows everything like the mysterious androgyne Ismael in Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. Who knows everything in advance. Isaac says: I am mad because the everyday cannot bear my sanity. Madness is the reward of the one who knows. To know is to plunge into madness. Bataille again: when Hegel completed the Phenomenology of Spirit he fell ill with depression. Madness touched him; knowledge plunged into non-knowledge, an abyss opened at his feet.

Think of Toru in Mishima’s The Decay of the Angel. He knew he was like the negative in a camera. He was the absolute opposite of the world. How old was he when Honda met him, this decaying angel? Sixteen, seventeen? Toru, the angel, decays; Mishima is merciless. In the end, Toru does not die but is blinded; he could not find his way to death and then to rebirth (the Sea of Fertility, of which this is the fourth volume, is about a series of reincarnations). Toru cannot die. Mishima took his life the day The Decay of the Angel was delivered to the publishers (the 25th of November 1970). But Toru is still alive.

Once you wrote a book called The Judgement. The judgement which came from the day itself, from the everyday, from the indifference of the world to you, from the vast servo-mechanisms of Capital, from temping agencies and telemarketing companies. The judgement which said: you are a bad machine. Then the judgement you delivered in turn: the day has gone on too long. Now it is time to call up the recruitment agencies and middle managers. To judge each and visit upon them an impersonal wrath. You are the good machine. Of course this is ludicrous: the same sleight of hand in those children’s books where the most ordinary child becomes the most extraordinary one (Cat in Charmed Life who appears to be without magic is really an Enchanter, Gair the giftless in The Power of Three has the greatest gift of all …)

Genet writes: ‘I wandered through that part of myself I called Spain’. I wandered through the everyday. Was it a part of me or I a part of it? Zhuang Zi: am I a butterfly who dreams of being Zhuang Zi? Now Zizek: ‘In the symbolic reality he was Zhuang Zi, but in the real of his desire he was a butterfly. Being a butterfly was the whole consistency of his positive being outside the symbolic network'. Are you a 'real' person dreaming of becoming a capitalist? Or a capitalist dreaming of becoming a real person?

Life is Elsewhere

Peculiar cosmology: not the world born out of the great darkness, the separation of the elements, the face of the sky above the waters, but your emergence from the everyday. You’ve come in from the cold, gathered yourself together. Who are you now? A worker; you work; no need to fear the everyday, you have your place …

Your opposite, your nemesis – you see them from the windows of the bus or the train: the ones who inhabit the bright daylight; who pulse like the sea-anemones in the great currents which traverse the day. Who are open to the back and forth of everyday communication: to the television show, the radio that speaks only to itself until they are nothing but the necessity of this back and forth: relays in the great circuit of impersonal loquacity, the babble of gardening and makeover programmes, the movement of chatter about property prices and school league tables.

The everyday: what changes? In one sense, nothing at all; it is still, as Philip K Dick argued, AD 51: it was always the same, the circulation of rumour, the flux and reflux of a kind of indecision. No one is sure what they think; or if they are sure today, they will not be sure tomorrow. This is what fascinates the politicians, and makes them send out focus groups into the great unknown as they would scouts into an alien territory.

The step into a lifestyle politics – the division of the populace into groups (pools and patios, etc) is one response to the everyday, as are the new technologies in manufacturing which allow shops like Zara to recirculate their stock every couple of weeks. The ‘short run’ of products is supposed to be infinitely responsive to changes in the market; the turnover of stock is more rapid than ever. Everything turns over in the shops that line the everyday, everything is new. Novelty is the novelty of products. True, there is also the novelty of the news, the turnover of events, but these events happen elsewhere, life is elsewhere; meanwhile there is only the everyday, eternal and consoling in its eternullity.

Global warming doesn’t happen here; this is just an unusually warm summer or a wet spring; terrorism won’t touch us so long as a war is being fought on our behalf in the dusty countries of the Middle East; what matters is that asylum seekers are housed any place but here and certainly there is misery, you saw them on the television the other night: kids in the third world sewing footballs together, this is lamentable …: this is the voice of the everyday, a voice without subject, a kind of murmuring which is relayed from speaker to speaker. A drifting voice, which inhabits this person and then that. A voice which is never certain of itself, whose back and forth in its lightness is subject to sudden change. Once it was acceptable to say x, now it is no longer acceptable; times are changing, tastes are transformed – and it is this transformation which is the object of the new sciences of the everyday (the sciences of the marketer which transforms politics into a kind of marketing): but the mobility of the everyday change nothing of its form. It is the white hole of common sense the philosophers fear and despise because it draws everything into its indifferent light.

There are times, it is true, where everyday life becomes public, when every individual falls under the suspicion of the Law. Such was the French Revolution, which suspected everyone. And wasn’t it the attempt of the state-machines of the former Eastern bloc to survey every corner? Private life disappeared in Czechoslovakia, writes Kundera; this is why he swears he will never fictionalise his life or transform his friends into characters in his books: it would only complete that monstrous rendering-public which dominated that time. Some speculate that advances in communications technology, a certain density of the telephone network, defeat such state apparatuses: never again will it be possible to expose every secret to publicity. Perhaps; perhaps not.

Are we seeing something the perfection of the everyday in our time? Lefebvre is always equivocal: on the one hand, it is true, the everyday is the repository of old alienations and a dried up metaphysics; on the other, it is a utopia and an idea. At once it is amorphous and inexhaustible, painful and irrecusable, stagnant and rebellious, refusing the domination of the bureaucracy and political parties. Here is the hope: the everyday bears an immense potential even if it can never be marshalled in the name of a particular cause. For it sometimes allows itself to be discovered in the streets; men and women come onto the street, march, protest, and disappear again.

What is feared by the marketer and the politician (the politician as marketer) alike is the crowd in its impersonal multiplicity, the indefiniteness which sweeps each along and dissolves them in its flight. Dream of it: the crowd ruled by dispersal, disarrangement, which reduces to insignificance every organised power. It belongs to the middle, to the space between, the crowd moves too quickly, it multiplies itself and then disappears, awakening at another point. It is elsewhere. Beautiful, a beautiful dream, Lefebvre’s, and not only a dream. What will happen today? Will anything happen? In the slums and the shanty towns? In Bracknell? And if nothing happens (if it is perpetually AD 51)?

The everyday is a movement, a flux and a reflux. At one and the same time – in the instant which passes and at the same time stretches itself into an empty perpetuity, an unceasing disquiet – we are each engulfed and deprived of the everyday. This is its movement, its opening-withdrawal. Heidegger’s mistake: to assume the everyday could give birth to the authentically existing human being, that the ‘who’ of this or that person could become resolute Dasein. But if this is a mistake, then the everyday remains mysterious, perhaps the source of the revolution, perhaps nothing at all.

A Bracknell of the Mind

The fear: nothing is going to happen. Recall Philip K. Dick’s last trilogy and his idea that this is the still the age of the Roman Empire. It is still AD 51. Still the age in which Christians are persecuted. Everything that has happened since is illusion. My fear: there has only ever been the time of Bracknell, that ghastly new town close to where I grew up (Note: a new town is one of the purpose built concrete monstrosities from the 1960s).

There will only ever be the time of Bracknell, spreading to every corner of the world. And everyone will live everyone else’s life, and nothing will have happened. Bracknell: perpetually still eye of the hurricane which is spread across the globe: still centre of that great movement of suburbanisation, the takeover of countryside and village, of city and public space, the spread of the out-of-town retail park and the global firm, for they are all there: Microsoft, Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, great frightening names like those of Roman Emperors whom Philip K. Dick says will rule us from now until the end of time.

Recall Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man where your surname is given to you by the corporation for which you work. But even the time of the great corporation is ending, for they are broken up into spin-off companies and subcontractors. Even these companies will be destroyed by the corrosive force of the everyday, the great call to dispersal. Who do you work for? A subsiduary of X, a subcontractor of Y. Who do you work for? I don't know. Who are you? I don't know.

It is not the time of The Roman Empire, but a kind of Dark Ages – a time of the breakup, the dispersal. Only this is the age of Light – a half-bright, evenly dispersed light, which shines upon the workers driving to work and the trains carrying children to school. An invisible light, a light which dissimulates itself so that everything else can appear.

Who is aware of it, this light? Only the part-time worker, the contractor who goes home early at three o’clock or, who, because she has no friends among her colleagues, looks out of the vast windows across to the field out of which a new retail village has begun to appear. Or to the unemployed, only a few of them now, catching the infrequent buses to town. Or to that great army of 50- and 60 year olds laid off too young. But I dream, too, of the crises of company men and women, of those nervous breakdowns and depressions which snatch from the working world. Now they are exposed to the same even light, to the menace of an everyday anonymity which reduces everything to itself. What will they do all day? They take their medication and then ... a vast expanse of hours. It comforts me, the idea that the everyday, like fate, awaits us all. That we will all be reduced to uniformity below the bland white sky.

Picture me at 19, denizen of Bracknell, still hopeful, still capable of hope. Bracknell was spreading. I bought a map of the town and its surroundings, and cycled to every green patch I could find on the map. I passed through golf-courses and school playfields, through obscure parks and plantations of pine trees. I came to the edge of a firing range. What did I discover? There was only Bracknell, and Bracknell was everywhere.

But I was still capable of meeting the indeterminateness of the day with the indeterminateness of my future. I had the bravery of youth, I cycled through the open fields, empty spaces held no fear for me because I did not know yet what I was. The everyday said: you are as strong as I am. And then it said: but I am waiting for you.

More than ten years later, at the end of my contract at one university or another, I found myself in the same spaces, on the same bicycle. I fought the everyday as it rained great blows upon me. I gave myself a task: write the book, and a habit: follow a strict working day. But the everyday was waiting for me when I dropped below the level of my work. When tired, bored or melancholy I felt its laughter inside me. Until its laughter was the form of my pain.

It was then I knew for certain that there is only Bracknell, and Bracknell is the whole world. In the end, Bracknell is everywhere, it makes everywhere nowhere. Utopia: place without place; not this or that place but everyplace. And Bracknell, too, is everywhen. Who now can have a sense of what it was like to live in another age? Think of Guy Debord’s Baroque, which he invokes here and there in his most famous books. By what strength was he capable of punching a hole through our consensus reality? How did he leap out of our time? Futile effort. Besides, what can it mean to us who read him? The Baroque? It is as far away as the moon. Only the moon will become another suburb and so too will the Baroque. Everyplace and everytime: Bracknell is all there is and first of all there was Bracknell.