Category Archives: Writing

Sleepy pubs in the afternoon. The world seems soft, like when you wake up from a good sleep. Unusual – a day to be quietly celebrated. Drafts through front and back doors, across bars and pool tables. Sunlight in the leaves outside, through the stained-glass windows, across the scarred tables. You sit among the regulars, the old-timers, the odd nutter. You seep out of yourself, float into the warm air. Workers in splattered overalls filter in, laughing. Soon the suits will arrive and it’ll be time to leave. But there comes a point, after a few pubs, when you can gather yourself in and sit still, in your skin, where you happen to be. And now you can sit for what seems like hours, in the slanting light, hardly moving, hardly thinking, against a background of muffled chatter, until I start to berate you.

The year it went wrong, the year I turned up, turned your life upside down… You wandered in beech forests, rolling the fine silky leaves between your fingers. Sat by ponds, by the sea, drinking the beer you always carried around in your rucksack. Beer tasted better there, didn’t it, tasted like it’s supposed to. CDs and graphic novels in the local libraries… you’d like to find and thank the person in charge of acquiring the music for the libraries in those days, wouldn’t you, and tell them about the debt you owe them… Coastal walks, surrounded by that special pale blue-grey light, the chill wind from the Sound. You sat on the beach by Elsinore castle, level with the cannons, staring out at the coast opposite: at another country, another language. Who were you, what were you in this your foreign home country? Someone sitting on the beach… The year you ceased to belong to yourself… To whom then? Me? But even I was barely there. We were stretched out, the two of us, like the clouds stretching out over the water, across the two coasts, blowing away, dispersing… You’d forgotten most of the language of this old new place, you spoke like a Kaspar Hauser, you were afraid to speak, you still thought and dreamed in the other language, the one that was to become ours. A private language, was that what we were forming, what was forming itself in us? Hardly, our words hardly belonged to us. Yet wasn’t that the year you first began to know language, to inhabit it even as it resisted you? Resisted you on the one hand and pulled you deep into yourself on the other, as you stuttered your way through one language and dreamed yourself away in another?

A white screen. Shut it down, open it. Start from the bottom, then, where you are. Start with what you see. (Why this need to type anyway, to start again?) Rescue what you can, or let it return to life. From nowhere. But you aren’t nowhere, you’re here. A desk under a white lamp… Runny nose, slight fever, things a little surreal. A pot of white tea… And your surroundings? Endless rain. No run today then? It’s been a week, hasn’t it? A week of illness and drunkenness, of lying in sweaty sheets. You miss the park, your beloved Victorian park, flanked by tennis courts and the pitch-and put, with the anachronistic concert pagoda in the centre. The reflecting pool where they race model speedboats. Lawn bowling, croquet, mini railway tracks. The putting green, the bush that smells of hops, the skate ramps always, in dry weather, full of kids with their boards and bikes. Dogs begging for balls to be thrown… No run for a week… Again the wish to get straight, to get right with your body, with the world, with God. To get the drink and drugs out of your system once and for all and never need them again. A massive detox: healthy at last. To have done and dealt with everything: to allow peace to grow from the inside out… Or to start over and over until all has been said that needs to be said and your life is once more a white screen and the need to blacken it has ceased. To be free of me at last.

The job is infinite, the job is never-ending. When was it you gave up, fell away and became lazy? When did you realise it was too much for you? Not for others, perhaps, but for you, and therefore for us? When did you realise you didn’t even know what the job was?

Today art can only be made from the starting point of that which, as far as Empire is concerned, doesn’t exist. Through its abstraction, art renders this inexistence visible. This is what governs the formal principle of every art: the effort to render visible to everyone that which for Empire (and so by extension for everyone, though from a different point of view), doesn’t exist.

— Badiou

We sit beside each other, like two uncomfortable men on a couch. It’s the end of the day, dusk is settling. We can’t talk like women can, there’s an empty space between us, all around us. It’s up to us. What’s up to us? To make contact, to make life bearable, to give the evening, as they say, some semblance of meaning. You start. No, you start. But what is there to say?

Don’t you have anything to say? Shall I say it for you? You’ve had plenty to say recently, haven’t you, in conversations with the people you’ve sought out, the friends you’ve had to make, the people you gratefully meet to make it sane though another evening, to escape from me, from yourself… Conversations tinged with the sense of an ending, with the sense that everything is coming to an end… Increasingly drunken conversations full of sarcasm, laughter… Conversations full of goodwill and confusion and fragile hope… Helplessness… Conversations overshadowed by the sense of a coming catastrophe, by the catastrophe that’s already happening… Stoned conversations in which you say too much, in which you go on about the End, about the necessity of the End, losing yourself in your words even as you shame yourself… Mad monologues in different voices in which you free yourself of me and the others free themselves of whomever they carry on their backs, free at last, in the end of time, the end of conversation, the end of sense… An endless confused monologue resembling the End, enacting the End as you get beyond me, beyond yourself, and everyone yawns and makes a move, goes to bed, bikes home, just as you’re getting started, just as the End is finally coming…

I made you cryptic, didn’t I? The truth is we grew into each other not like lovers or happy families do, but like tendrils and thistles. Where else could I have gone, after I fell into you like some bumbling guardian angel? You hid, and I hid with you, what choice did I have? So we both had to wait, and so our lives – our life – became a waiting game. It was as if our story had ended the moment it began, the moment we found each other on that concrete path between the thistles, like some Kaspar Hauser with his failed teacher.

Follow me, all you whom humiliation in love or neglect in friendship confines to your apartments, far from the pettiness and treachery of your fellow men. Let all the wretched, the sick, and the bored follow men—let all the lazy people of the world rise en masse;—and you, whose brain is aboil with sinister plans of reform; you, who in your boudoir are contemplating renouncing the world in order to live; gentle anchorites of an evening […] be so good as to accompany me on my voyage, we shall travel by short stages, laughing all along the way at travelers who have seen Rome and Paris.—Nothing shall stop us; and abandoning ourselves gaily to our fancy, we shall follow it wherever it wishes to take us.

— Xavier de Mastre, Voyage around My Room (via here)

When did you begin to fall? Wasn’t it when I was born in you? You still sometimes think of yourself as my fallen angel, don’t you? Wasn’t I the one who pushed you out of life as you sat in that dark train station, trying to ignore the piss of drunken Swedes, sitting in the fumes of piss, waiting to be taken back to your room in that boarding school, back to that concrete path between the green thistle bushes, back to nothing? I fell as far as you on those nights, in your anxiety: how else could I have pushed you out? But now I’ve returned, now I’m here to tell you you can only return through me. Or that we can only return through each other. I need you as you need me. We reach for each other but are we falling or rising? Or is reaching the thing?