Notes from a Room

It’s this feeling of not knowing anything, X tells me, that’s what makes him afraid. Is it so much to ask, he says, I’m not exactly trying to build the Tower of Babel. He’d like to really understand something for once, he says. Nothing ambitious, just to grasp his own little corner of the world without confusion. Then he could put it to use, or hold a hand of peace over it, or trace its origins and effects, and from there move on to investigate other things, build up whole fields of knowledge! You see how I get ahead of myself, he says, that’s what makes me afraid. Because it turns on me, he says, the Unknowable, it corners me. If I could turn it around the way it turns me around and be done with it… turn my back on it… or learn to accept, like the mystics, learn to know what I don’t know, what a joy that would be… but no, X says, there are no mystics anymore, and besides, he’s too grasping, too childish, too exposed… exposed to what? he asks, what’s he talking about?… his worst fear, he says, to be known by what he can’t know… he feels disarmed, deciphered without being able to decipher, that’s the problem, he says… it’s cornered him, he says, cornered him like an animal! Maybe he just needs to get laid, he says.

His feelings, says X, can he trust them? Of course not! he shouts. There he goes again, he says, the minute he starts talking there’s no stopping them, they tear at him, tear him with them. Maybe these repressed English folk have a point, he says. Then again, he asks, what do they gain by nipping themselves in the bud? Do they really save themselves from their own feelings? X tells me he wants to be saved from his own feelings. How would he go about repressing them? he asks.

X can never reach out and fix on an opinion again, he tells me. No more truths, he says. He’s been picked apart from the inside by truths as if by a virus and his trust is gone, especially his trust in himself, he says. He’s horrified by himself, by his infinite capacity to prove himself wrong. He’s in one of those moods, he tells me, making quote fingers. Maybe he just needs to get laid, he says.

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.