Category Archives: Writing

‘I’m not myself today.’ Pregnant phrase. Who then?

What was your real work? You asked the question so often without answers that the question itself became a form of work. You found yourself tunnelling through a mountain of words. Then out of the tunnel you came smuggling your dubious hoard, over the barriers and across the fields, and looked around, halfway between your destination and everything you left unfinished.

There were moments in those days when he experienced a concentration of body and mind in which he almost felt he could do anything, be anything. There were moments when he felt he was neither woman nor man, neither mind nor matter nor all of these things at once but somehow free of the differences themselves. He was ears that saw and eyes that heard. He let his thoughts and feelings pass through him like a train, or trail blissfully out of him like smoke: they were no longer his exactly.

I cheated them, he said, I cheated them all. No you didn’t, I said. What do you mean, he said. We all saw you, all the time, I said. Hiding your head in the sand.

Clean days. Odd to look anew at streets and faces that had become grey and beaten down. To see like an animal, without God or meaning. New sensations. Silver winds blow through me, morning’s come to town.

Those early days with him were like riding an empty train to an unknown destination. There was an obscure logic about it. She felt caught up in something she had no instruments to measure. As always, part of her stood on a hill watching, resentful at this being ‘carried away’ down the tracks into who knew what.

Today I thought about that Something between our lips that we both agreed was real but couldn’t define: some infinitely gentle thing that turned into a brutal truth. It had our number all along, didn’t it? Then the newness and strangeness of mutual absence. Untidy destinies, punctuated by images like rocks jutting out of the ocean. My memory’s like a camera — I don’t even remember your name anymore, just soft silent pictures, sequences, movements. I’ll delete them as soon as I can; I like to think it’s up to me.

After some time I got wary of words. They were a joy to use and organise, like pieces in some rarefied game whose most important rules were obscure — but how far could they be trusted? It was easy to feel you were in control when you manipulated these strange tools to make them say what you wanted, but lately I found I’d manoeuvre myself, or be manoeuvred, into a corner from which I couldn’t see my way out. There was a danger in words. They wrote me as I wrote them and led me down paths I didn’t always intend to go; but wasn’t it the words themselves that showed me those paths? I fought with the swarm, tried to cut it down to sense. What was insight and what was random remembered phrases? A writer I knew at the time who’d written with great facility all his life dried up mysteriously, then awoke one morning and saw he’d taken the flow of words for granted, yet had only used a tiny corner of them. Now they were showing him they’d used him, not the other way around. Because he’d surrendered to them, they’d given him his thoughts and feelings. But that morning he felt that he had nothing more to offer them, and that they were moving on to someone else, but he didn’t feel free, on the contrary. It’s like those painters in the past who, looking over their work in a lucid moment, suddenly found they’d painted themselves into a corner and that the forms that once opened everything up for them now seemed banal and opportunistic. Were there ways out?

I was standing in a kind of abstract space. My thoughts were unpeopled. Each time I tried to step out of this space, there was a loud bang as if from a giant clapperboard, and I felt an electric buzz in the centre of my body. The further out I tried to move, the louder the bang and the more violent the buzz. After a while I became more wary, and less resistant, until I could no longer move and had to stay in my original space, which from then on became the centre of the universe.

He decided to do the right thing, did the wrong thing and retreated. He stopped listening until he turned deaf and stopped talking until he turned mute. It was true that silence was often the best answer, but not this kind of silence, in which you pass through your own life like a ghost.