On Thursday I dropped M_____ off at the airport to go home with her mother who had been over for a few days. Her mother’s visit was not entirely successful. On her first full day here we held a barbecue and though M____ had invited her Czech friends a month in advance for her mother to have someone to talk to, they let her down. I had had little time to myself and was finding it difficult to be around people - I find that I am much more gregarious in Prague than on home turf - and on a trip to London I was positively reticent, broody and irritable, in part from the food I had eaten, two packs of sandwiches there and oats in the morning, in part from being among people all day, and in part from the crowds and the rush of it all. Besides, after a few weeks of practically not drinking at all, and months of drinking very little, I got wasted on vodka and that set me back for a few days of her short visit!
Since Thursday evening, then, I have been writing, reading, doing some exercise, cooking, and doing everything I would rather spend all my time doing. No doubt people will expect that after these few days, I will be satisfied for a while, but it’s making me think seriously about my life and whether it is natural for me at all to be in such a relationship with M____ as I purport to be. It is so natural for me to be on my own, and so unnatural to be with people.
Since living on our own I have been forced to cook more often and have been able to experiment and try a few more things out. Before, even when I tried to buy things for certain recipes, I would go on a big shop, get more or less everything I need (there are always one or two things that are not stocked) and then Mum would offer to cook and I would accept in order to have more time for writing and the like. Then I would make one big meal from one of the recipes and make enoughy for several days, and so then I would not attempt a further recipe and most often everything would go off, riling my parents.
It was going fairly well, though I had one or two slips which I documented because I finally saw a dietician on the 6th. Finally getting used to the diet I was on, I will be on an exclusion diet with no onions, no potatoes, no corn, and so on and so forth. Still, I hope that being monitored will help me to be more consistent in following my diet, even though I am less and less inclined to believe that diet alone will be a solution to my problems. Even now, with so much time to myself, and time to get a diet more or less right, I find I am losing a great deal of time to faltering concentration, reveries, restlessness.
A couple of days back I was trying again to keep a note of my reveries, thinking again of something like The Unforgiving Minutes, that is, a project I started in Prague to try and document my life and everything that gets in the way of writing, everything that frustrates me so much and which would document to the minutes of my reveries, that is, notes of the conversations I have in my mind and the situations and scenarios that arise again and again and form so great a part of my consciousness. I found once again that it is impossible.
Nonetheless I had one such this morning, the kind of reverie, or rather, what I have lately come to tag a palimpsest, that …
[I’m not concentrating now this morning. I’ve slipped into tangents several times already now, but one I have just intercepted began as thinking about how to solve my dilemma of needing to be on my own. It moved to thinking over seeing my doctor, to making demands of my incompetent shrink, to being placed on stimulant medication and addressing the morning meeting at work explaining that the reason I seem different is because I have finally been diagnosed and medicated, and that if people want to use it against me they can, and similarly, if they want to see me as somebody who has to a degree conquered his difficulties they also can.]
…the kind of reverie that forms itself into a donnee, a story idea, a conception, an artistic zygote.
I made a concerted effort last night to read some stories. I started with Chekhov on MP3. I hadn’t listened for a while, despite having had them for months and months. I used to have a habit of walking late at night with a bag on my back full of books listening to these stories, and to language instruction, sometimes while smoking cigars. And then I fell out of the habit. But I listened, my thinking being that I had been unable to concentrate, and so I might be able to listen better than read, since listening, the pace is set by the recording and not by eyes which may tend to wander. I listened and I drew, sketching in pencil some of the naked models and semi-clothed girls I had compiled into a folder on my G4 Mac and set up as a screensaver which for the first few days here I was watching as I sat at my desk writing Checkmate on a ringbound notebook. The first, of a pretty girl with dark hair turned sandy blonde by the sun tied up yet hanging loose, her face in profile, her shoulders bare and her full breasts distinct beneath a white silk nightdress, wasn’t too bad, I thought, despite some difficult shading.
Chekhov, understandably, was intimidating. I was doing everything wrong. I would have to practice, practice, practice, setting myself tasks and exercises to complete and being patient enough to do them in what little time I had! The stories I listened to were pitch perfect, of course, constructed of bravura performances of conversation which set a mood and provided the kind of rare first impressions of a character which could be relied upon to give a precise handle on a life: a louche jewess who was the acme of allure and chutzpah, a dyspepsic husband and father, a medical student. Descriptions were rare and sparse. My stories in comparison were loose, lazy, far too inclusive and meandering. I then turned to The Collected Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. His being well travelled and his familiarity with so many evocative settings made me feel again the parochialism of my life, especially back here in the black country. It is something I have been feeling again recently. I want to move on. I am feeling claustrophobic in my relationship, in my life here, restricted in my job, earning so little money with so little time to travel. I have such a need to move on.
His stories were taut, as deceptively leisurely as Chekhov’s but, certainly these early ones are far more confected, not nearly so natural. The first one I read runs like this:
A man who waits on the dining carriage of a train and who long passed has lost his wife having had to flee Russia plans to kill himself. That very night his wife is on the train speaking about him with a stranger. As she moves to the dining carriage an uncouth stranger accosts her and, unnerved, she repairs to her compartment having lost her appetite. Later, she realises she has lost her wedding ring: she must have left it in the dining carriage. She returns but the carriage has been decoupled. The waiter, who has a cokaine habit, has glimpsed her, but cannot place where he knows her from. His colleague spies a ring andm, checking nobody can see him, picks it up and secretes it into a pocket. The lost emigre walks out of the carriage, crunching into the cinder of the neighbouring railway track as a train comes through.
No doubt the story says more about fate than I was at first prepared to grant it - I dislike confection in literature and was looking for something, anything with which to find fault in these great authors, or something that could make it all seem achievable to me sat at my writing desk distracted by old books about zen I was given as presents which it would be a disservice to a loyal and generous and understanding friend to leave further to gather dust, tempted by books about solitude, by French Spanish and Russian, by exercise and food. Probably it says more about an age in which these geographical dislocations were tragically common and in which divine providence and fate were experienced as ineffable forces than a more naturalistic work could possibly do. Certainly, in the cold light of day it is as intimidating as the Chekhov and it might pay for me to read some of those ‘finger exercises’ authors like to pass off as short stories once in a while - Joseph Heller was right when he commented that many prospective authors read only classics, and they think the only kind of books that exist are classics. Still, if our grasp does not exceed our grasp, then what is heaven for?
This morning I woke again unable to concentrate. I’ve just come back from an hour’s exertion riding my bike round the canal. I perhaps hadn’t slept well. Perhaps due to ginseng tea which I had yesterday and the day before. In any case I don‘t usually remember my dreams and over the last couple of days recalled at least something. First several robin red breasts flying onto a window above my bed, and then flying into the room. And second being in a group of people, possibly from work though I don’t recall trying to catch a bird, I think, a pigeon. Finally, after several attempts with it flying right by me, I succeeded.
I took to reading another story. Another Russian abroad, in France, in a hotel, I think (I am not sure, and this is why I term these reveries palimpsests), and then in a Russian restaurant. My mind drifted, and I thought of how I could set a story in a louche hotel or bed and breakfast. Soon enough I had thought up a man who had gone into hiding having convinced himself he had been the perpetrator of a prominant murder, and I began to think how this would sit with my other fiction such as Collateral Damage, a story about a student going out to paint grafiti on an abandoned building beside a railway line where she falls through the roof and breaks her leg and pelvis stuck then when a paranoid schizophrenic returns sure that she is plotting against him, and Lithium Elysium about another student, an artist who has been put on Lithium Carbonate following a number of manic episodes involving hypersexuality, who rings around former amours trying to find somebody who understands who it feels to suddenly be numb to everything.
There was something about the idea I didn’t like. I moved on. Developed it. Fused it with an old idea I had over a decade ago now about gangs carrying out shootings of rich individuals with cryonics bangles designed to inform medical personnel to preserve the bodies in a particular way at the point of death before their collection for cryonic preservation. It became an idea for a science fiction novel. A dystopian future. Alongside those signed up for cryonic freezing there were a number of children born to genetic selection who were raised in a kind of kibbutzim and taught from infancy to play and perform, to speak numerous languages (each was assigned to a living area in which three languages were spoken), to argue and think logically, and so on and so forth. They were, of course, intended to be an elite. Only, once these children grew and some were taught about method acting, some, who had come to resent their upbringing (there was one in particular who was charismatic, and, from reading J S Mill and his autobiography saw faults in the argument regarding Socrates and a pig satisfied - Witgenstein was satisfied, but Mill was not, he had not experienced the animal pleasures, that much was clear, and so had no ground to dismiss them as their carers did in agonised paranoia that they might become dissolute and careless, like fin de siecle aristocrats; he rejected Mill’s hothousing and so, his own), thought of a way to exact their revenge. Once they had left the bounds of their education and kibbutzim, they went out to act. Some become drug addicts. Some acted out mental illness - one such going out and going on the run having convinced herself she had committed a horrific murder Others humiliated themselves in like manner. Some took overdoses and died. At first, they got together and acted as themselves. Later, they were sure they were being bugged and followed everwhere and could no longer do so. Some committed suicide.
Later, once it was discovered, there was a whole damage limitation exercise. They were hailed posthumously as genii who were prepared, many of them, to die for their art. Their ‘work’ was interpreted by highly-regarded academics.
The novel would be set in Prague in a future where the Czech Republic either remains as a lesser-valued member of the EU with less stringent regulations on genetic selection and the like, or has left the union.
This led to further reveries about how the novel could be written in Czech, my bad czech being corrected by M_____ and finally sent off to R, Mrs Pigeon’s husband, the writer and PR exec, to submit it somewhere or other so that we could begin our life together in the city - these, reveries borrowed from my Christmas reveries on To Je Bomba, a Czech-language farce I thought up while I was over there drinking with M____ and her brother, unable to concentrate with the lager and the fact that he speaks so quickly.
