Write something, anything

JANUARY 19 07

I keep telling myself I should write something here, anything. It's six in the morning, I've shaken off my hangover, stopped coughing, and have a steaming hot cup of tea by my side. I should be going to bed, but instead I'm thinking I should write something, anything. In December I finished off the novel I've been writing. I'll probably do some more work on it later after I've heard from the three people I've given a copy to to read. I met a woman, that's still fun. January so far has mostly been spent thinking about what I want to write next, what kind of thing I want to write next. This is always tough for me, since a lot of the time I wonder whether I even want to write at all. But then I think, what else would I do. It would be excavating a huge hole in my life to stop writing, and I'd just be left staring into it. Though I do question the worth of the endeavour, especially when I see the crap that is published these days. But then, it's always possible to come across great books, great writers. Like Fernando Pessoa or B S Johnson. I've just ordered the first two novels of Ann Quin, Berg and Three. It'll take up to six weeks before they arrive. She killed herself the same year as B S Johnson. People for whom writing was something of importance, not merely a means of making money. Thank Heaven there are still books worth reading.

I'm lucky to be able to spend an entire month just lounging around in the hope that I might have an idea. The frustration phase is passing, I sense that, and thoughts are beginning to order themselves. I've started remembering my dreams again and the dream notebook beside my bed is slowly filling up with fragments of this other life I live. I'm scouring secondhand bookshops for books I can actually read. I read a lot when I can't write. Read Embers by Sàndor Màrai the other day. Amazing how a writer as talented as him just disappears off the radar and then someone discovers him again, but what a farce translating his book into English not from the original Hungarian but from the German translation. Still, it reads well.

I've been eating a lot of avocados. Catching up on Green Wing on DVD. Drunken nights and a woman whose company I enjoy, yet still plenty of solitude. Good solitude.

Sometimes, it hits me, I don't have a care in the world. Yet much of my writing is dark and despairing. I claim not to be an occultist anymore, but no-one believes me. Sometimes I look at the areas I have passed through and don't feel I have really achieved much, but then it strikes me I have climbed mountains and put them behind me. It surprises me sometimes the lightness I can summon in my being, the demons I am no longer afraid of, have befriended, actually. I think sometimes I look at the world from a great height, or as if I were invisible, or a chameleon. I feel connected to everything. When the wind blows it blows through me as if I am not there. There is no resistance in me. Illusions are no longer the sluggish giant tortoises that used to move through my life. If I look you in the eye, it's likely I'll know you better than you know yourself. And now, I sense people realise this about me. They're coming round. All of my greatest aspirations don't need me any more. It's just clockwork I wound up a long time ago. I'm just filling in for the great magician I used to be. I'm coasting on magick that cost me dearly, at the time. Why so long to realise I don't have to do a fucking thing?

Copyright © 2007 Biroco