1. Nowtbooks (1)

nowtbooks (1)

When I was younger I thought writing should be the struggle with what you are. Now I think it’s the struggle to find out who you were.

There are people who learn to dissociate early—to orbit whatever is happening to them without taking part. By late adolescence, we’re rarely losing height, let alone touching down. Memory never quite works for us. Our distance from events is already too great. I soon discovered that writing things down helps less to close that distance than you’d think. But notes make good source material, and when you keep notebooks they eventually begin to suggest something. About what, is not clear. But something, about something.

I liked a notebook spiral-bound: it was easier to police. I couldn’t bear hasty scribble, interlinears, strike-through, muddle. If I thought of a better sentence, I was compelled to tear out the whole page and begin again. I wanted the notes to be notes: I also wanted them to be pristine, finished, absolutely articulate little gems. Soon I was keeping two sets of accounts, the rough and the smooth, the instant and the perfected. Some notes didn’t seem worth the effort of polishing. These I labelled “nowts,” experiencing a vague resentment if ever I caught sight of them again. In the mid 1980s they would be transferred laboriously into their own computer files: dumped. Years after you have abandoned it, a note like that takes on a new, often uneasy semblance of life. The file is as warm to the touch as the radioactive container at the end of Robert Aldrich’s 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly: lift the lid and you could swear you hear, in a voice composed of both a whisper and a roar, the continuous repetition of a word.

Obviously there’s the fear of failing to remember, the fear of the loss of this or that detail, the fear that you’ll forget what you were shopping for. All of that is exactly what you’d expect. But the additional—the real—fear behind notebooking, the fear these fears disguise, is the fear of not having seen in the first place; and in that sense, keeping a notebook quickly becomes the act of seeing in itself. A note, or it never happened. A note, or you didn’t look. So write this down before it goes: a stag’s antlers imagined at the end of the garden, at the end of the day, among the browning leaves of last year’s iris! Write this: sand. Write this: a lacquer box. Write this: “Bought, contents unseen.” And this: “Some birds viewed from a distance.” Write that their wings are as flat as planks when they turn against the sky. Write that Friday approaches and recedes but it’s never where you are. Warm air, sunshine, rowan blossom like a confectioner’s shop, and further off, the junkman’s wonky bugle call.

Write a note, or this sunshine never fell through this window on to this minor, unnoticed, unreviewed event. A note, in a notebook, has this exact air of desperation to it. It invites yet refutes the act of reclamation.

Today I thought I might describe every single step of the staircase, every crack, flaw and grain in the oak as if it were a landscape. But if I can’t describe what’s outside the window—the way the winter sunshine falls on houses half a mile away while the High Street lies in shadow—how can I attempt something that much more complex? Close up, as far as language is concerned, the stairs exist off the edge of resolution, they are both the largest & the smallest structure in the universe.

I continue to be an observer who was never much good at observation, stuck with a means of communication which can’t carry enough information. Hence the constant retreat to metaphor. The attempt to push through into something else is always a failed attempt to be in the real. Metaphor is giving up too soon. There is also the question of what the superposition at the heart of any metaphor actually offers the reader. Push an analogy hard enough & it will break down; but metaphors just continue to point at something which never really claimed to be there, or be definable, in the first place. I love metaphor, and I wouldn’t be without it; it’s only that, every so often, a fifteen-year-old self of mine sits in a room in Warwickshire in 1960 and regrets it cannot use words to photograph & pass on to the reader the exact way the smoke rises from a cigarette.

Bear with me. I’m exploring some territory here. I’m looking for a password. My life built itself around guesses, moments of capture and hypnosis, things that never happen. To start with, these moments had a curious similarity in tone. They were equally distanced and unthreatening, as if it wasn’t actually me who was experiencing them. In a way, it wasn’t. The person who experienced them came later. My mistake was to think of him as me, as the identity I had constructed by living my life, by writing notes and then by writing notes about notes. By then I had an identity all right. But that’s another story. All anxieties contain their own mirrors, and you’re always looking for some space to inhabit between the two.