Category Archives: Writing

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.

It’s your own and some other’s, you and not you, babbling on day and night in a lunatic monologue. A man muttering in a room, a man and his skull, a man in his skull, a man carrying around his skull, babbling on. Repeat, cease, start, forget, remember, circle, abandon, stop, continue. Prodded into speech, prodded and prodder. Sometimes it seems it could go on without you, a babble with a voice of its own, warring with its own words.

There was no such thing as consistency, life would always end up holding your ideas up to ridicule. That’s what life did, ridiculed your ideas and forced you to look at yourself until nothing remained. Eventually he had nothing left to hunt, nothing to grasp for or look down on. It was beautiful, it couldn’t get any worse! A voice told him to own up and start again in an empty place, then start over again.

When we first moved there, she loved it: the silence and solitude. She liked it when I didn’t speak much, so I spoke less and less. I felt marvellous in that peacefulness, though I sometimes missed my family. She did her work and sold some of it, enough for us to get by. She still didn’t sleep well, but she never complained; she just got up sometimes and went to the kitchen to fix a drink.
I laughed when she wanted to draw me. It was embarrassing, I felt like a model. She said if she drew me once a week she might be allowed to have me.
Thinking back it was a strange thing to say but I suppose drawing was her way of feeling connected to things, or to herself. I don’t know.
Once when she returned from an excursion and I went to kiss her she avoided me, then turned back, looked me deeply in the eyes, and said nothing for the rest of the evening. The next day she showed me the sketches she’d been doing: fearful things, like the gargoyles on cathedrals.
She started only sleeping during the day. She said the dark made everything seem too still and sinister to sleep, that the things in our house were conspiring against her.
One evening she said: ‘Say something. Please.’
I thought and said: ‘Isn’t it strange how two people who’ve lived together for years come to resemble each other? In their thoughts and faces. I want us to grow old like two trees that grow together, you’ve seen the ones in the forest, with all their cracks and wrinkles, even like the old couple at the store, you’ve seen the way they move, or that old man and his dog.’
She said, almost to herself: ‘It’s like God making Adam in one piece. Whole thoughts. Whole feelings. Then Eve with her sinister curiosity.’
She said nothing the rest of the evening.
She started selling fewer paintings and our savings dried up. I had to cook every meal and food isn’t easy to come by in those parts.
One day while she was painting I found her diary.
She’d written:

The fact is that life itself, everyday life with its people, chatter, money, dramas, ingesting and excreting, is nothing to me, has always been nothing: a paltry illusion. I don’t want it to be so but it is so. Landscape and portrait painters are ridiculous to me. Everything is ridiculous but what points away from, out of this life.

Talking to other people, socialising, falls so short of what it ought to be, of reflecting our real selves, that it disgusts me.

There was nothing about me, my name wasn’t mentioned once.
She asked me to stay up with her. She said she was afraid of her mind. She wanted me to ride out the silence with her.
After a week it started frightening me too. Some nights it seemed it would never end. She comforted me and told me she knew exactly how I felt.
It was the first time she’d caressed me for months.
She looked almost happy.
It was that touch that made her absence palpable to me. That was the moment I knew I had to leave.

(Based on Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf.)

The words stopped coming. He enjoyed the respite at first, later less. Much less. He cleared away ripped pages, unwritten books. Sometimes they appeared when he was drunk. Then through a haze of phrases he came stalking meaning, like some Kasper Hauser trying to make sense out of a childhood murk. Was it him or the words? He listened to them and they spoke him; there was no getting behind them. But it was exquisite when they dropped into the right places. But fleeting. There were turns and fading paths, but there were vantage points too. Or rather walks that got you lost then brought you back as someone new. The words woke him at night, phrases in his head like worms in a box.

In the doorway where I stood, where I was and was not. Can’t seem to get out of the way. So it’s like that today. Now I see only my reflection in the window — there for anyone to see through. Berating myself, I panic to whatever obscurity —