I got back a little while back and as usual I have searched for something to do, picking up my guitar to practise for a while the 12 bar blues I learnt last Wednesday. Of course, each day has gone past since then with me finding no time to practise. Almost a week and I’ve spent a total of an hour practising what I learnt. I spoke a little with M____ in the car, and congratulated myself on it, but it was scarcely a few minutes. We barely live together at all.
A girl at work, one of the students, has been talking to me the last couple of days about my girlfriend. Apparently the lads talk about how she is younger than me. Perhaps that made me feel good. And I can’t imagine meeting a girl, getting myself a girl, if M____ left, but then I don’t want this to just play out until she gets very hurt.
I also brought back an old diary from last year. No! Two years ago in fact! I wanted to find a story idea I wrote up. The beginnings of the au pair section of FF. It’s a nice faux leather bound diary somebody gave me last year. An uncle, I think. For a good while it was my obsession. It was to structure my life and my writing. In it I am talking about frustration at being with M____. In Merry Hill. This really isn’t a relationship.
So many themes repeat themselves. We wanted to go climbing but we ended up going shopping! I can imagine how depressed and frustrated that made me for the rest of the day. In the diary I try to write about achievements of the day, how much reading and writing I’ve done. Sometimes frustration creeps in. “Reading: 0, reason: M____” And indeed I speak of my frustration. Just the same as when I was going out with my two exes I am forcing myself to be sociable because I feel I should, that it is right to be sociable. it is a duty.
She asked me what I was reading about. What I am reading about her. You are reading about M____, aren’t you, and how you can’t do anything because of her. I changed the subject.
She has caught glimpses of this blog once or twice when I didn’t want to be too obvious by minimising the screen when she comes in, and she has seen her name, “M_____”. She must be very aware of that. I don’t talk about anything. How much a part of my life is this blog, and yet I have mentioned it only once or twice, hoping still that it would pass under her radar.
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But I wanted to write about something different. I wanted to write that I do believe. Believe that I will write, and that it will be good. Believe, in short, that I am in such a fix right now in so many ways, but that it will, it can, it must resolve itself.
I was never sure about fate. Never as sure as some people seem to be that talent will out. I got angry at that idea sometimes. I held back. I never completely accepted the (possibly logical) notion that a genius writer could be held back by trends, or by not fitting the right profile for the times or just not being picked up on. Never believed this even when I saw so many books I had no time for at all, all this Life of Pi kind of crap, and adults reading kids books about wizards, even though I knew that its Tristrams who get jobs in publishing houses because their Mummies and Daddies live in London and know people who can get them the most sought for internships. Tristrams who are judging the books and stacking up the slushpiles.
One time it broke. I was in Prague. I picture myself by the Kyvadlo, the metronome, on Letna (because God could I get restless back then, and I remember having to get out) reading Czeslav Milosz’s The Captive Mind. In it he discusses how publishing in the West is different and yes, some people with talent would get left behind. The realty of that hit home and I felt depressed. You could work so hard, have talent, and still be left to rot. Because that’s how it felt.
But I don’t know. I thought just now. This will out. This must out. I have talent that cannot be overlooked for long. I thought of another book I’ve began to read several times, a science book. And I’m angry at myself because for science is one thing I enjoy reading. I’ve always loved science, but for years now I have neglected it. The other day I bought my brother the collected lectures of Richard Feynman and I think I became depressed that I knew so little about physics, about science as a whole. I should know more. yes, yes, I should know more about everything, that’s how my mind works, but it’s true that I had a real flair for science and before I had a breakdown it was science I would have done at university. That was what always made sense, wasn’t it?
In any case, in this book it discusses how information is energy. It was an argument, a concept I didn’t understand then. How a machine could be powered by information. I remember a description of a machine - perhaps it was figurative - with ticker tape. In any case, I thought of this book, drawing on this fifth of the book that I had read as I do, and thought, yes, these ideas in my head have an energy, have a life of their own and will out.
I emerged from my depression after my breakdown slowly, but one phase of that emergence, when I was writing myself out of my depression, as I saw it then, walking round then with a lobotomy of two books, Daisy Chain Letters/Daisy Chain Mail and Love Letter Bombs [links] as I now walk round with a lobotomy of FF. I was sweeping the forecourt of the petrol station I worked at (I worked at the car park round the back) and thinking to myself as I always did.
‘I can’t imagine myself having a life after death,’ I thought, ‘but my stories I can.’ And I didn’t mean this in the sense of posterity, but in the sense of my stories as some kind of embodiment of a soul I could otherwise not believe in. Perhaps I was incapable of projecting into the future enough that I would have the stories written. Back then I could still see no future. That was over ten years ago! Suicide was still avowedly on my mind.
What could not have been done with early intervention!
But it can’t now be as easy as that.
The spiral continues. I getting better. So slowly. I’m moving towards something, and perhaps sometime soon I could take up my Dad’s offer.
But M____’s in bed. She had wanted me to go up to bed with her! For months I don’t think I’ve done that once!