Category Archives: Writing

Looking back over his life, X tells me, he’s horrified. All this time he’s been secretly thinking how clever he was without realising how stupid he really is. It’s amazing how little he knows about himself, he says. Even now I might be thinking how clever I am for realising how stupid I am without knowing it, he says. Tomorrow I might look back on this moment with horror, he says. In fact I already do. I think I’m being humble when I’m just laying the ground for more humiliation. No one should think, he says, we should just take on the colours of the world and disappear against the backdrop like chameleons. Thinking is a curse, he says. But maybe he just needs to get laid, he says.

Looking over his life, X is embarrassed, he tells me, and sorry for everything he’s said, done and felt. He now realises he’s basically stupid. He’s in one of those moods, he says, when his whole life seems shameful, as if he’s an absurd interloper who has no place here, wherever that is, he says). And of course this thought is shameful in itself, he says, it’s shameful that he should have to feel this way, yet it’s right and proper, because he’s a scandal, a scandal against nature.

X has proved nothing in all this time, he tells me, nothing but his own inability to know and speak. Others may well be able to know and speak, he doesn’t know. At least they seem convinced that they are. All that seems left for him at the moment, he says, is to erase himself in the distance between himself and conviction, to drift, go into mourning for what he loved, and greet any reemergence of what was renounced with the peace of the graveyard, the temptation being to think he’s special for doing so or that it shows any kind of wisdom. Or maybe he just needs to get laid, he says.

X tells me he sees his life as a number, perhaps an infinite number, of circles within circles. He’s somewhere inside the inner circle, he says, and reality is somewhere inside the outer circle. The intermediate circles, perhaps an infinite number of them, buffer him, distance him or keep him on the brink of reality, perhaps all at the same time, since the spaces between them may be vanishingly small or infinitely large, he doesn’t know. All his words and movements have to pass through these circles, he says, so that by the time they reach the outer circle there’s been a kind of lapse, a reverberation, the way the sound of a shout is buffeted across a windy street or the way an echo travels. That’s why when he moves his hand out to shake someone else’s he sometimes feels dizzy; he finds himself shaking hands and isn’t sure how long it’s been since he first started reaching out; it’s why he walks around in a kind of haze, he says, why people think he’s slow: he’s on a listing boat while others seem to walk on land.

X tells me he doesn’t like to imagine other people’s lives, the minds of others. He can’t even think about it for too long. The very idea’s like a threat, he mutters. He can only relate to people who think exactly like him, he says, and of course no one does, there’s always a remainder, something that doesn’t quite fit, that threatens his peace of mind. The idea that other minds exist unsettles him, he says, horrifies him. He’s learned not to trust the similarities between himself and others, he says. So he puts a buffer between himself and others, he says. What else can he do? he asks. Even an empty fortress is better than the alternative, he says, the awful strangeness of another mind.

How to this day as they say I wake up with your face in my hands and your scent all around me. How our youth stays with us in these humiliations by desire, in floods of more or less clichéd phrases we must finally disown (or stage as another’s ordeal or transform into affirmations of absence): outbursts of fullness and tenderness, the extreme solitude of unequal love, you left a hole I can’t fill, etc. Dream my sleep, ache my ache for this now unreal almost meaningless ‘you’ turned inwards. These fragments poor substitutes having arisen as substitutes; these night refrains all leading back to ‘you’, repeated over and over like tributes or penances.

Rudely born and raised among mute empty things that passed him by with or without him as later words would pass him by sink into him and pass by let him see them till it seemed he was like them then passed by let him see them yet not see them as if he were another mute word yet something other too something quite different a space full of words surrounded by the still patient things of which he was one yet not one and it was in this time having been so rudely born and improperly raised lowered and levelled taken in and thrust out by things and words that he began to walk into a kind of death in life or life in death with wide eyes and a little hoard of hard-won wordless watchwords the hoard he had in spite or because of it all hoarded it is now that he walks at last wide-eyed into the night which is day the dark which is light which is waiting become living perhaps problem become its own solution.

I dreamed I was on a trip I’d never taken, spellbound by a desert landscape I’d only read about, when the sand wiped away my tracks and made me look around in panic. But what does panic mean in a dream, I tried to reason. So let me be wind and sand, I asked, let me be sand in wind.

1
In the past I thought of myself as living into the future, as a creature of continuity moving through the present, through a succession of presents. The future was a condition of possibility that was separate from me in time, that I could imagine and bring about. It gave me space to master myself.

2
And now, in the present? This moment calls to me like an abyss in time. A hesitation before birth. An anxiety.

3
But there’s a pure joy in this, somewhere. I sit myself at my desk, dispersed, waiting for it to lend itself to me.

‘”I” is this epiphany of absence‘. When I glanced up and saw the slanted old window in the condemned building. The space inside that seemed to recede as I looked into it. The alley itself was sunny and filled with windborne seeds. No one was around, including me. ‘I’ was thankful echoes of my surroundings.