Category Archives: Writing

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.

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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.

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

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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.

‘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.