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And just like that, it’s almost 7 a.m. I knew this would happen. The workshop. All day long, the workshop. It was satisfying; my students are excellent. But it tires me out, it tires me out and then afterwards I don’t want to go to sleep for hours and hours. At least I wasn’t messing around with games; I was working intensively on a macro – or Macro – in this very program, Word, considerably improving on what I did the other day, with the aim of putting together a master document for this diary. I also, before that, printed out everything I’d written until yesterday, which must mean I’ve made up my mind to read it. I haven’t read it yet. I’m curious. I want to know if there’s anything interesting here, anything that might be interesting to a reader other than myself. Why? It’s not that I want to pull the wool over the Guggenheim Foundation’s eyes and present them with this diary instead of the project; what’s more, the Foundation have expressly stated that they don’t want me to present them with anything. They just want to know what I’ve spent their money on when it comes to the end of the year. And what’s even more, I want to finish the project; it’s just that I haven’t yet reached that point, and I still have a long way to go, I think, before I do; but when I get there, and get there I shall, I’ll do the work quickly and well. I believe in myself. I just have to stop putting off the act of confronting and overcoming the vague anxiety, overcoming it and reaching my life of leisure; it’s all as simple as that. As simple and as painful. Dear reader: never dream of mixing your writing and your life. Or rather, do; you’ll have your fair share of suffering, but you’ll give something of yourself, which is ultimately the only thing that matters. I’m not interested in novelists who grind out their four-hundred-page doorstoppers with the help of index cards and a disciplined imagination; the only information they transmit is empty, sad, depressing. And deceitful, since it comes disguised as naturalism. Like the famous Flaubert. Pah.
Back to the difficult subject … My relapse into searching for pornography last year, I mean. I’ll need to go back to some earlier events. Towards the end of May ’98, I met Chl, and then, around the middle of July, our romantic relationship began. This made the atmosphere in the house where I was living unbearable, because the woman who at the time was my wife didn’t look kindly on this new relationship, even though by that point she and I were merely living under the same roof and our relationship had ended around two years before. Little by little a kind of war was gathering force, becoming more and more terrible, erupting into torturous everyday scenes, and in the end there was nothing for it but to move in with some friends who knew about the situation and had invited me to stay. I planned to be in that house for ten days; I didn’t leave for six months.
I’ve skimmed over what I called that ‘kind of war’ because it affects the privacy of another person, my ex-wife, with whom these days I have a very good friendship. It took me a lot of work to get to this stage, but I think it was worth it, because despite the various ways she’s incompatible with me when it comes to life as a couple, she’s a wonderful woman. I don’t want to go into my own suffering in those months, either, which was made bearable only by the magic of Chl; I’ll simply say that one fine day I realised my ex-wife was right to be hurt, and I put a stop to all our arguments and waited for time to soothe her pain and heal the wound. This realisation came to me by means of a dream, which I can’t remember very well right now.
oh my god
The will needs obstacles in order to exercise its power; when it is never thwarted, when no effort is needed to achieve one’s desires, because one has placed one’s desires only in the things that can be obtained by stretching out one’s hand, the will grows impotent. If you walk on a level all the time the muscles you need to climb a mountain will atrophy. These reflections are trite, but there they are.
from The Lotus Eater in The Mixture as Before
[...] while I was engrossed in the task of washing the cutlery and then the plastic containers and then the plates, I made my discovery: namely that this, and nothing else, was the leisure I needed. I realised that leisure doesn’t have to mean sitting in an armchair and waiting tensely for the vague anxiety to come. That the vague anxiety will come of its own accord, when it has to, if it has to. I’d been trying to impose a particular state of mind on myself, and that’s where I was going wrong. It’s fine to sit in one armchair to rest or in another armchair to read, when you feel like it, when it’s necessary. But if you do it out of duty, in order to begin a project like the one covered by this grant, it’s not leisure. It’s not even the pursuit of leisure. Rather, the pursuit of leisure turns into work, or indeed business, and business is the very opposite of leisure. Many years ago, a friend pointed out that the word ‘business’ is actually referring to being busy, to busy-ness. Leisure, i.e. not being busy, isn’t what I thought it was – to be honest, I didn’t think much about what it was, I just went on behaving in that misguided way. What I mean is that leisure doesn’t have its own substance, it’s not an end in itself. It’s nothing: leisure is an attitude of the soul, and it can accompany any kind of activity. It’s not the contemplation of the void, let alone the void itself; you could say it’s a way of being. Sitting in an armchair doing nothing isn’t necessarily leisure, and washing the dishes can be leisure, if you have the right attitude. The right attitude, when it comes to washing the dishes, is washing the dishes as if it were the most important thing in the world. Not as if it were; it is the most important thing, like anything else I might have been doing at that moment, and it’s leisure insofar as what I’m doing leaves my mind clear and unattached, unattached to anything other than my contemplation of the thing I’m doing. And that thing shouldn’t be done for the purpose of any kind of business, because that ruins everything. I wash the dishes without wanting to be doing anything else, taking my time. And after washing the dishes I get the little yoghurt jars ready and plug in the yoghurt-maker. It’s the kind of thing I always do, only at that moment I was being leisurely about it, because my mind wasn’t on any kind of business, because I didn’t want to be doing anything else instead, because I was having fun doing what I was doing. That’s leisure, or at least it’s the leisure I need. My workshops aren’t leisure because their purpose relates to business, however enjoyable they might be and however much they move my spirit. They’re an activity with a timetable and a purpose. They’re not leisure, and they always upset my nerves. Last night, however, washing the dishes brought peace to my spirit and showed me the path to follow. And I’ll try to follow it.
I was saying, then, a while ago, almost at the beginning of this diary, that I moved into the house of some friends for ten days and stayed there for six months. During that time I tried to look for an apartment, but it wasn’t easy. I flicked through the paper that listed apartments for rent and felt terribly depressed; I couldn’t read it, I didn’t have the strength. When Chl came along I’d been living with the woman who was then my wife for ten years, and although the last few had been very, very hard and we were no longer strictly a couple, just living together, and although at first the separation felt like a relief, like being set free, I still went through a kind of prolonged mourning period. I couldn’t deal with the situation; I couldn’t set myself in motion. I had some savings in the bank and I could see them disappearing by the day; this made me panic, and the panic paralysed me even more. [...]
:(
[...] I felt like I was suspended in mid-air, without my things, without my books, with almost nothing of my own, and I’ve always been very dependent on my habitat. My bedroom was tiny, and the bed inside it was tiny; I had to learn to sleep with my head resting on one arm, because there weren’t enough pillows and I got gastric reflux. Eventually I realised I was going to end up staying there much longer than planned, and my friends and I agreed that I’d pay a bit of rent and they’d give me a room where I could put my computer. Until then I’d been using their computer, but I didn’t have access to my programs or files – my memory, in other words. It took a long time to get the room ready. There were also maids in the house, sometimes one and sometimes two, which meant I had almost nowhere to go during the day other than into the computer; first my friends’, and then mine once it was set up. That’s when I first became addicted to playing card games, and I began staying awake until the early hours, far later than any normal person would. As if I only felt at home during the night. Though I still wasn’t at home. Sometimes I was left by myself and had to look after the house. If my friends were going away for a few days and I was in the house alone, on those days I wouldn’t go to sleep until eight in the morning. I couldn’t; I was on the alert all night, keeping watch. These altered sleeping hours of mine made apartment-hunting more and more difficult; my ex-wife helped, and sometimes Chl helped as well. All the ones I managed to go and see were terrible; some thoroughly miserable apartments. It looked like I’d have to consider paying more rent; to do that I’d have to start working intensively, and I knew I’d be able to, but it would take time, some months of being settled in my new place, before I could start. Then the summer came around, and for me every summer is like death. I realised I wouldn’t be able to rent anywhere until the autumn, and I would have been too weak to deal with moving anyway. In summer, my thoughts become muddled and I spend the whole time trying to escape my body. It’s because of the heat, but it’s more than that as well; there’s something really deadly about the summer, something that makes me feel hopeless and depressed, that wrings out my nerves, constantly, one by one.
Twice a week, on average, I took a taxi and went to see Chl. Back then, we still used to make love. Sometimes she’d come and see me at my friends’ house and we’d go for a walk. Even in summer, her presence was a tonic; she gave me strength, life, energy. Thinking about her was all that got me through that terrible period.
Then I felt curious about the message from my doctor. To be honest, I didn’t want to listen to any messages or hear anything about the world, but something told me this was no ordinary message. I played it. It mentioned the medication, but it also talked about the pansies she’d left me. A chill ran down my spine. I went to the door, looked outside, and there it was: a white nylon bag containing yes sir yes sir three pots full of plants and flowers. Cursing, I put them outside on the balcony, where they’ll wither and die. I hate the way living, sentient beings are treated like this. I ought to give my doctor a dozen monkeys as a gift and see how she likes looking after them. Chl was due to arrive at any moment, and I was going to have to explain the presence of those flowers. She’s jealous of my doctor, especially because my doctor, besides being my doctor, is also my ex-wife. Chl doesn’t like it at all that I’m still friends with her and still see her. I think there’s a secret, silent war between the two of them, and I’m caught in the middle of it. Yesterday Chl left her tights, with the ends of them wet from the rain, hanging over a chair in the middle of the living room, in full view of anyone who came to visit me. I have to spend all my time looking out for these things. Luckily, when Chl came, if she noticed the pots of pansies on the balcony she didn’t mention it. I don’t think she saw them, but she’ll see them eventually. Women. Even a goddess like Chl has that rotten side they all have, where jealousy festers.
lol
I’m still cutting my reading of Doña Rosa Chacel; now with Beckett, and a book about Beckett, an essay that includes some biographical notes. I found it very interesting, even though essays normally annoy me. But then, I was extremely curious about Beckett, and this book shed light on a few things. I’d already read a really hilarious short story of his called ‘First Love’, and now I’m reading some other stories. Beckett can always make me roar with laughter. I know, of course, that his work isn’t only about humour, and in fact one of my disagreements with the author of the book relates to that. The author doesn’t like it when people look for particular philosophical meanings in Beckett and interpret his work in those terms; I’m entirely with him there. I too think that Art, in general, shouldn’t be judged on its content. But the author, a German, goes a bit far in claiming that the meaning isn’t important at all. He’s guided in part by what Beckett himself says, but everyone knows that authors never tell the whole truth about their work, often because they don’t know it. What I’m trying to say about my disagreement with the German is this: OK, Beckett doesn’t build his work around any meaning or message or ideology, and that’s how Art should be. Great. But my disagreement lies in the fact that having a character called Godot is not the same as having a character called something else. This Godot has a meaning, which evidently relates to God. I agree that this doesn’t explain the work, and nor does it give the work its power or justify its existence; but let’s not deny that there are also meanings in the work. What’s important about literature doesn’t derive from its meanings, but that’s not to say the meanings don’t exist or don’t matter. I’ve often said and written: ‘If I wanted to convey an ideological message, I’d write a pamphlet,’ or something to that effect. But that doesn’t mean my writing doesn’t express ideas, or that those ideas aren’t worth mentioning.
This Saturday ritual is very satisfying; I found three books by Maugham I didn’t know about and one by Len Deighton I hadn’t read, and which I’ve now started, cutting my reading of poor old Rosa Chacel once again. If you ask me, Deighton’s better than le Carré when it comes to spy novels. They have some things in common (the bureaucracy of espionage, for example), but Deighton is much more entertaining. Then a delicious croissant and a delicious coffee in our usual boliche. And, most importantly, spending time with Chl, who’s passing through what looks like the best phase of her life, though she doesn’t seem to realise it; that time in a woman’s life when she’s at her most beautiful and seductive, still very young but with a hint of maturity. In the boliche we talked almost exclusively about Wittgenstein’s nephew and Thomas Bernhard, whom she admires perhaps a little too fervently. I share her admiration to an extent, but I’m not as fanatical. At one point I had to say, ‘I hope that after I die, somewhere in the world two people like us sit in a boliche and talk about me like this.’ That way of living on through art. It was as if Bernhard were there, sitting at the table with us; it was even a bit alarming, because we agreed he must have been an insufferable man (more insufferable than Rosa Chacel), and perhaps even frightening.
sweet
I turned the computer off some time ago; I don’t know where I found the strength. I wavered for a few minutes before I made up my mind, thinking about all the things I could do on it, such as writing this diary and sending some long-overdue replies to emails; many people will be wondering what’s become of me. But I held firm and turned it off. Now I just hope the tiny monster that lives somewhere in my head, or my gut, doesn’t make me turn it back on.
I know, I know; I shouldn’t divide myself in two like this, trying to find someone to blame (‘The cat broke the vase, Mum’); I need to accept that the person who decides to play games and stay up until dawn is me and no one else. But I find it hard to believe my brain could be so obtuse; there must be some unconscious formation controlling my life. Of course, if there is, it would mean the unconscious formation has grown stronger at the expense of my own self, and even somehow with its tacit permission (or rather – so as not to go on dissociating myself from myself and multiplying my fragments – with my tacit permission).