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Friday, 28 April 2006
Battles.
There is so much to do. Yet my closed signs will always be inferior to your immediacy, the potency of your movements, the way you load each turn of your head with a reason. There can be nothing to prepare us.
Time straightens itself out in the end, the kinks stretching away into the distance. There is little more disheartening than the site of you, sitting in the street on a kerb, feet in a drain, staring away into the wilderness. They have taken that image, those impossibles; they broke lights with it.
Here's the remark: try not to listen, but hear. Assuage and engage those with radical minds. Those that are taut and terse in everyday life (seeing the day as something of a antagon) are dull and tired in the theatre. Those that rage and speculate upon stage, display moderation and gentle wisdom throughout their twenty-four hour existences.
People are looking and turning and looking.
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Tuesday, 25 April 2006
Overcast failed me.
So this is how I waste the hours till noon, waking early(ish) but then strolling with a towel round my waist, picking up letters and junk-mail from the hallway. Ease into the kitchen, make a slow carbohydrate breakfast, have a sit down. Return to the bedroom, attempt a languorous effort at tidying up, sit down again. Browse internet whilst reading sports journalism and voting in online art competitions. Check all four email accounts - nothing - think about what I should be doing, remain seated.
It became overcast the moment I woke. The sprites from my dream fell away, but the energy, the incision of my timekeeping seeped back under the bedclothes. I no longer wanted the day, I lay in wait for the evening. That evening, things were to happen, socialities and victories, any excuse to visit a friend. Meanwhile, I find excuses to make what I'm doing more valid, appropriate and understood than it actually is. Where is my activity? Today feels like a day for nothing, grey nothing.
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Sunday, 23 April 2006
Macho incision.
The couple were happy when I visited them. I turned up in the sunshine, unexpecting, and they invited me in. I sat for half an hour, an hour perhaps and ate Spanish cheese and oatcakes. There was an apple on the side of the plate.
Since then, great freedoms have become obsolete. The grand narratives and inclusive, macho explanations of purpose and direction have fallen limp by the roadside.
Instead, I saunter about the house and yard, lukewarm light drilling into the brickwork at intervals, spaced out amongst the pots and planters, the first temptations of green beginning to rise from the soil. Just one sentence, that is all it took to describe something.
And of course, inevitably, consequently, and with fate at my side, I went to work. We all do, some just enjoy it more than others, some get paid more than others, some are blinded by free, motivational flights to New York. I trundle across town on public transport, the wheezing of the bus doors letting in tiny rivers of dust, and then arrive to hoardes and logjams of people, thirsty and hungry.
Upstairs, the glass shattered when I reached down and touched it. The tiny raise of heat contained in my fingertips was enough to break the glass in on itself and the tense clutch of my hand merely grabbed scissors and spears of the glass and – moments later – trickles of blood.
The minute, deep incision was bound.
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Friday, 21 April 2006
Unfulfilled.
How can we not give up on writing? How can we not renege on contracts unfulfilled? What does it bring us? Food? Laughter? A topic of conversation?
Dressing up dolls of culture and periphery, better start making this good because someone is looking. There is a real urgency needed, six weeks until I am needed again. Turn to the page, turn the page.
Eyeing up the specifics having laid down blunt, unshining concepts. Now to sustaining them, to hitting their notes perfect so each paragraph resonates and hums like china. Each block of text in place, each knock at the door ignored, each glass of water sunk without trace.
They are beginning to worry.
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Sunday, 16 April 2006
Blear.
A distanced, balancing purity rested upon the endeavors of last night, and the travails of this. Woke to uncomfortable silences, a lack of region or adaptation; my suitability for the task in hand is seriously questioned by these flurries of forgetting.
Staring into the sun leaves ellipses of plum and cherry stamped into my vision, slowly turning colour, bruising and fading. Looking up from the darkened wood of the desk (and pages of inane biro scribble, naturally) and into the bright, clean street scene is temporarily disabling.
The noise? A stranger in the flat, joking loudly and standing, legs apart, in the kitchen door frame. The sun enters here as well, through another window, illuminating sharp triangles of dust and the way things settle.
Today is a bold retraction, a movement away since you came too close. A vulnerability exposed, you have seen too much, you have said too much, you have been too many places. Hesitantly, there is nothing left to lose.
And yet the lines are the same length, the paragraphs the same construction. Tiny ideas, inked and hemmed in upon lined paper, no room for drawing or even joining the dots. I remember nothing, I create nothing.
A return to form, then.
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Friday, 14 April 2006
Diary burst.
Feeling lost on things, the prescience that accompanies doubt is fading. Instead, bloated on ideas of idolatry, redefinitions of refuge and amalgams of the postmodern, I just give up. Rose early - late though, as always - and hurtled into town for reclamation of promised breakfast. Pushed pens around diaries, sauntered in the sun, drank twelve cups of takeaway coffee trying to get warm.
Then to the Nun St and to tattoo parlour, inf(l)ections and ink spatters. All sharp haircuts and tight trousers (girls and boys); my role was documentation and greeting. I am writing a press release and the master of ceremonies is a devil with a needle, apparently, but upon meeting him my mind was changed. Elusive, captivating, spiritual and coherent - he recited a poem from memory to an awed audience. Fingerless gloves and a hop down the stairs later and we were back onto the street, visiting closed post-offices, dead libraries and queued bus stops. Curse the bank holiday.
Thinking of last night, in the ten sided concert hall I exhausted myself. There can be no one else left to love. I saw Bonny 'Prince' Billy.
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Wednesday, 12 April 2006
Away and back again.
When there is nothing written here for hours, days and weeks, where do I go? Have I other, more pressing, commitments? Does time tempt me away, am I constructing, converting, conversing?
Perhaps I have been making train journeys through moorland, around stream and vale, chasing refracted sprays of light above the reservoir.
Perhaps there have been deaths in the family; short, thrifty ends of lifelines causing unrest and consternation within those left to tie the bureaucracy.
Perhaps work is taking its toll, the struggle for a wage tempered against the balance of voice and fiction.
Perhaps the list of books on the wall, the shelters of hardback are hour destropyers, swallowing days as I they throw indecipherable type into the mind.
Perhaps I smoked too much. All quality is gone.
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Monday, 03 April 2006
Halting rememory.
A Sunday perfect with rest, laying-about in covers with occasional stirring for water or air. Then, across town in downpour, to the supermarket for cash and then downhill, into the valley, ignore and stepover the gulleys and streams tumbling down the steps.
Into the converted warehouse, with air-conditioner expanses gleaming and fresh Sunday faces, beaming and drunk. Tired still - have been exhausted now for a week and more despite adequate sleep - we plotted our ways to seats and then tables and ate our way through the menu and drunk our way through the glasses. Silently we undertook observation of communication.
Then, as the rain cleared, we strode out into the faltering light and ambitiously rose up through hills and for a while along the tiny, flooded river. We fell down into a church, clutches of daffodils and sunken headstones, the big river swollen and steady below.
Moving down onto the quayside, we pitched ideas over the tide's surface, spoke of surge and return, all the while looking at the great steel spans and thinking of dates. Visiting art-gallery, an even non-committal look at pieces, managing to enjoy the Freudian as such, as presented.
Finally, under low-skies with fatigue ebbing at leg and limb, we climbed listening to kittiwake call and the gentle stir of traffic before -
I've had enough.
Descriptive passages are nonsense, these bogus clipped ideals and images slid in all upon each other like the template of a day, pledging rescue, claiming a renewal of things forgotten. This is no retrieval, this is no memory. A carefully duressed construction owes nothing to the reader or to the writer. We become exercises, reasons to write.
This is a punishment for being lazy yesterday.
14:36 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Amazing grace.
Amazing Grace! how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me;
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I’m not blind.
14:23 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this