Category Archives: Writing

There is an idea in Finland that it is good to sit in silence as the light goes, to observe nightfall as a time of contemplation – ‘pitaa hamaraa’, ‘keeping the twilight’.

– Peter Davidson, The Idea of North (via here)

Monks of certain orders are said to have slept in their coffins. Some sadhus are known to have allowed themselves to be buried alive for up to forty days. St James’ forehead and knees were hard as camel’s hoofs from praying. Origen castrated himself. John of the Cross prayed to ‘suffer and be despised’. St Rose of Lima disfigured her beautiful face with pepper and lye. You get drunk and watch sitcoms.

When you were young and jobless, you’d leave your flat and walk the streets like a ghost: it was their world, you were just passing through. You’d walk from pub to pub having a drink in each, you’d walk yourself into the ground so you could sleep. Back home, you’d stand at your window while you waited for the shower to warm up. The window gave on a slant of the river that wound through the town. You often stood watching it carry its grimy load seaward. Sometimes a kind of mental mist would steal over you. As evening fell, your reflection would appear in the window, slowly replacing the river. The more you examined it – those empty unblinking eyes, those straight lips – the harder it was to feel it was yours. It was a thing among things, untenanted, like a face watching you from the other bank.

The everyday is not exact, it is a cliché; realism requires vertiginous originality. But how can one be exact about what is truly unspeakable? One can only write knowing that one approaches and approximates, and that language fails you the while; you run after exactness, but the world gets away and your words fail. Beckett taught us about this failure because he knew failure and writing were synonymous.

— ReadySteadyBook

Wasn’t that your first lesson in anonymity, there in that room with nothing to do, with the endless hours stretching ahead of you? Wasn’t that when the other ‘you’ was first born, the you I’ve written so often about in the past? The you with the capital Y, I could call it, the You beyond us both. The Anonymous itself.

What happened when you got to your room? Wasn’t I being born then, like some deformed twin? Or were you being born as my deformed twin? A corridor flanked by rectangular dormitories, yours the last, the one facing the artificial lake. That uncanny Scandinavian silence you could never get used to, broken by sudden sounds and voices. The odd quick body stomping by, the women with their heels were the worst. Avoid the eyes. Get into the room, lock the door, make it safe. There are voices in the hall. I think I heard footsteps after mine. Did they see me? Are they talking about me? I can hear them. They’re laughing at me. You can still see each detail of that room, can’t you? The cupboard, the cot, the desk, the window. Hear the echoing voices in the hall, the noises echoing off the tiles in the shared bathrooms.

It all happened too quickly, didn’t it, when you shook hands with your father and walked down the concrete path between the thistles to your new room – in those moments when I was meant to emerge from within you, with you. But I couldn’t do the work of a whole childhood in a few moments. I turned up too late and too suddenly. Sometimes all it takes for everything to go wrong is a single moment. A strange command made us face each other.

It was funny how anxiety crept up on you just as I turned up, wasn’t it? From the most primitive fears – I can’t leave my room, not while there are still voices in the hall – to the feeling of your bones turning cold for no reason, while walking to class or to the forest.

What we couldn’t have achieved if we hadn’t been hindered by each other, if we’d slid into each other without noticing, if we’d grown into one! We’d have slid right into the world, with all its worldly pains and joys. What did you ever want but to feel those pains and joys? Didn’t they seem like child’s play compared to having me around?

It’s as if a thread of our potential life were always running under our life. A life that I would have overseen if things hadn’t gone so wrong. A proper life, in which you hadn’t dragged me down, in which we could have cooperated and merged into someone real, someone with continuity, solidity, influence. But we have a real life, we can document it, we’ve got bank statements and tax records.