Self remembering

This afternoon I moved all the armchairs but one, the TV, the sofa and a sideboard out into the kitchen or Barry’s garage-bedroom. He seemed quite satisfied with the TV down there. Lindsey got home from the Admiral late this evening and we talked about nihilism and thoughtlessness and she said she isn’t keen on the idea of staying here another year, especially after Susie leaves for Germany in the summer.

I warmed to the idea of my stay here over the afternoon, especially after I’d got my things sorted out and some degree of order imposed on the chaos of half-unpacked boxes and suitcases. But doubts remain, and I foresee difficulties in carving out a track for myself in this environment. The physical separation from the Grey House is mirrored in the mental sphere, in forgetfulness and self-doubt.

Jason called in briefly at quarter past nine and stayed half-an-hour or so. It’s 1.20 a.m. and Barry and Stu are still up, listening to music—The Doors at this moment, “Not To Touch The Earth,” is loud from the garage beneath.

I’m drawing to the end of another untidy journal and my thoughts naturally look beyond. My dissatisfaction with this form is a fairly constant and ever-growing preoccupation at the moment, and this is something that will get worse, not better, as time progresses. Progress—a word to be conjured with, implicit in which is the idea of evolution and steady improvement. All I see is the same endless limping from one month to the next, one year to the next . . . Words dissemble, words not quick, words lie on the page to taunt with their stark inaccuracy and brute second-handedness, life itself glimpsed and experienced but gone, gone, never to be captured in all its glitter and crackle and drear on the white angularities of a two-dimensional page—not by a biro-driven chronological narrative anyway, not in its present form.

Perhaps if I expanded this account to record my days in all their minute eternities from dawn to dusk, each tiny sensation and flow of idea mirrored and translated into a fluid flow of words. The hissing breath of time rushing by.

“Purple Haze” pounds through the floor now and it is 1.31 a.m. Monday morning and I write write write for the sheer pleasure of writing and wish it could always be so. Too often of late I’ve found my mind in the dread grip of torpor and lethargy, unable or unwilling to pierce the dreary fog of lazy thinking and the crudity of reality-approximating words. I finish each entry for the day or week with the dead weight of frustration and uninspired fatigue inside. I find it genuinely difficult to write about each day as it comes, especially if the day is routine.

I find it hard to separate out the surface fabric of my did-so-and-so-at-such-and-such-a-time life from the richer inner patternings and textures which mark me out as distinct and separate from friends and other people. I half-plan to continue on the typewriter, which I think would be a good idea and would give me a clean start. Read between the lines and see what is there, pierce the surface drudge of descriptive language and finite vocabularies to see what the words mean, see how they fit the intuitions, events, places, and moods I attached them to.

This text must change, must expand, must grow to fit all the things I want it to be, to realise the potential of Words and Mind moving together, so I can become a writer in the truest sense. This requires selfishness, self-motivation, self-remembering, and above all observation. I must look, see and learn at all times, until it becomes a habit, and see in new ways too, not the cobwebbed ways of the past.

Pry open the hidden texts, images, sounds.