Monthly Archives: October 2011

When you were young and jobless, you’d leave your flat and walk the streets like a ghost: it was their world, you were just passing through. You’d walk from pub to pub having a drink in each, you’d walk yourself into the ground so you could sleep. Back home, you’d stand at your window while you waited for the shower to warm up. The window gave on a slant of the river that wound through the town. You often stood watching it carry its grimy load seaward. Sometimes a kind of mental mist would steal over you. As evening fell, your reflection would appear in the window, slowly replacing the river. The more you examined it – those empty unblinking eyes, those straight lips – the harder it was to feel it was yours. It was a thing among things, untenanted, like a face watching you from the other bank.

What do you know of meditation, of discipline? You might have got close once, when you knew God was the only answer and you could almost act on this answer, this possibility or injunction – in that time, a year or so, when time was real, a living oasis in the desert of time. You still know it, in a manner of speaking, that God is the only answer, the only means by which you might relate to the world, to others, by which the mist can lift and you can act in a world become clear and real, as you almost used to in simpler days when you were almost happy, or at least could pretend you were. What do you know of meditation, of discipline, now? You can’t even withdraw let alone act: there’s nothing to withdraw from and nothing to act on. What have you done? The worst, the very worst. You’ve killed God, you’ve made your life proof of his absence. You brought him into being and then you killed him. You harboured a hope that it was the other way around, that God was killing you, was bringing himself into being in you and that if you were given the strength for meditation, for discipline, something might grow from your failure. But your days are as tawdry as ever. The desert spreads out from you, on all sides, nothing grows and it almost seems to you that so long as you’re alive nothing will grow, this waste of time will spread, past and future oases will dry out and there’ll be nothing left even to grieve for.

The everyday is not exact, it is a cliché; realism requires vertiginous originality. But how can one be exact about what is truly unspeakable? One can only write knowing that one approaches and approximates, and that language fails you the while; you run after exactness, but the world gets away and your words fail. Beckett taught us about this failure because he knew failure and writing were synonymous.

– ReadySteadyBook