A Day Without Writing Is a Day

Another day over and no writing has been done. A few more pages left to finish Bonjour Tristesse. I used to be able to write like her - that kind of intensity, that lyricism, that sense of wonder. Now I'm not sure who I want to write like, who I write like. I think of Enrique Vila-Matas' Bartleby and Co. I want something as fragmented and as coherent as that. What I need is a thread going through the story, like the narrator's grief, a reason why he is researching and writing about these dead painters. His motivation still feels unknown to me, though. The real reason is that I want something to do while not writing - to have a subject to write about while I'm not writing. It's like I've said all I want to say. I've done the writer thing. I don't want more, and yet I have no idea what I do want. Do I have to write in order to find out what I want to write about? That's a rhetorical question, by the way. What's stopping me from going back to writing the book? It's big, it's broad, it's probably going to be quite good. And that scares me. It's scope and it's demands, and it's invitation to jump right in and be engulfed.

Tristesse and Two Train Journeys

Even this is hard to do, to sit down and write when I want to close my eyes and go to sleep, a mid-morning nap after not enough hours in bed. I got back from Cardiff yesterday. After a weekend with my new man, I need time to get back into my life here, which is not a life that I particularly feel pleased about. Being away was a reminder of what I like most - writing, reading, being in nature. We cycled the 6 or so miles to Castle Coch, a beautiful route along the river Taff, the two of us mainly singing - old Carpenters songs, some Nat King Cole, songs that are triggered by a word in our conversation - talking every now and again about childhood memories, trying to find things in common, to excite each other with stories.

A few hours later. Couldn't resist taking a nap - a deep sleep that kept me until about 2pm. I just want to lounge in bed, let me mind wander in and out of dreams, allow for connections to be made. I like that time; it's when stories shoot up out of the soil, their first contact with the light. The train journeys to and from Cardiff were a bit like that, the carriages quite empty, and the inspiration of knowing someone will meet me at the other side. I wrote well both ways. On the way back started reading John Berger's And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. Just the right book for my book. He talks about painting as being about making continually present what is soon to be absent. I think that's what excites me the most about still life paintings, the deep knowing that these oranges, these walnuts, this membrillo, no longer exists. The apples have been eaten or they're vrot or they've decomposed into nothing. The same with people. It's more exciting than a photo for being about choice, less about randomness or chance. I'm not a great fan of landscapes.

Now I'm hungry.

In Cardiff, my man and I read to each other from Bonjour Tristesse. Her prose is so beautiful, and I can see how Christopher Coe might have been influenced from her - I can hear her in the opening page or two of Such Times. Lying on the bed together, reading alternate pages, we soothed each other into sleep - or at least that was the plan. I was restless and feeling confined and I had a deep ache to be fucked. That soothed me into sleep. Sometimes it is the only way to let go - fucking and sleeping - to not be in control or think you have to be. To not have to be concerned about other peoples' needs and pleasure.

Morning Dilemmas

Today I'm working from home. I like saying that; it sounds as if on other days I work in more interesting places, ones where I have to deal with interpersonal dynamics and sit in a park to have my sandwich at lunch time. I just want to say that I'm constantly looking over my shoulder; it's like there's this voice in my head editing every word that I put down, trying to undermine me, telling me that what I'm saying is not genuine, is not the truth, and it's all just to impress others, or make others think certain things about me. What would my writing look like if I just said whatever came into my head. The fear is that there isn't enough in my head to create a story. I've spent most of my writing life writing semi-autobiographical narratives - and I've either grown tired of that, or I'm too scared to really delve down into the quagmire of my imagination to see what's there. The strange thing is that I know there is a lot of joy there, too - things have happened to me over the past five years that have made me happy (god, I hate that word) - the things that have made me happy are: falling in love with D., walking around naked in a public place for the first time in almost twenty years (then it was the nudist beach; now it's the sauna), meeting C., although sometimes I wonder if we're going to keep being friends; we seem to be drifting apart, caught up in mistrust, misunderstandings and blaming. Another thing that has made me happy is moving to a new flat about 6 months ago having lived in what became a shithole. By the time I left that old place I had grown to hate everything about it and everything to do with it: the neighbours, the neighbourhood, the shops cafes and restaurants in the area, the park, the streets, you name it I hated it (yes, it's Stoke Newington). And I believed that once I was out of there I would be able to write. I believed that this new place would give me the space and the quiet to create. Well, in the past six months I've written fuck-all.

Okay, so, I've completed some stories, I've typed up from my notebooks things I've written for Book #3, but that doesn't feel meaningful. It feels like a job and it doesn't make me feel bigger or worthier or whatever. I suppose what I've come to expect is some big emotional thing that will carry me, inspire me, be my muse. Every time I meet a new man I want to fall in love so that I can write. I want him to provide me with the security and the adventure and the torment that I need to write; I want continuity. The continuity and the reliability of emotional upheaval. Having lived in a warzone for almost twenty years, I've become addicted to drama. And that addiction to heightened states of alertness is accompanied by a desire for tranquility, for stillness, for moments (days, months) of unthreatened existence in its purest form. I don't know what to write about. Not this morning I don't.

I have 50,000 words sitting in the other room on my laptop waiting to be played with. I have 4 notebooks here on my desk with words that need to be typed up. I'm not sure what's keeping me from doing this, from just sitting down day after day and writing the fucking thing. Later today I'm going to Wales to visit my new - what do I call him? - boyfriend. I'm going to visit G., the man I'm going out with. Strange phrase: going out with. The person the world sees you walking hand in hand with. We spend most of our time indoors, though - fucking. I like the idea of travelling to Wales to see a lover.

My book is about 3 painters who grew up in the same neighbourhood at the same time, and later went to the same art college. It's so much easier to say what the book is about when it's not about me. I feel grown-up when asked what I'm writing about and I can say: I'm writing a book about G, B, and R; they're painters who grew up together at the turn of the last century. It sounds grand. It's like being asked are you happy and being able to say oh, yes, I'm very happy; never been happier; things are going my way. To myself I think: This is not interesting to me. Talking about happiness or about the subject/s of my book is not interesting to me. I suppose it should be. I'm not sure what I do want to talk about or write about. Maybe I just have to moan and whine. Couldn't I write a book that has a lot of complaining and miserabless in it?

I made the dough for oatmeal cookies yesterday. Now I must bake a few batches to take with me to Wales.

Write Write or Die

I'm trying to finish my next book and I'm not sure what I want to say. I've been working on it for the past two years and it feels like I've been avoiding saying what I really should be saying. I'm not sure what that is, though. That's a lie. I should be writing about grief and depression and what it means to be stumbling through whatever this is - trying to make sense, trying to keep my head above water, trying not to turn my whole life into one long mourning-fest. My father died five years ago and for the past five years I have felt like I have no muse, no audience, no reason to write. Soon after he died I fell in love. The combination of his death and this great love changed me. Sometimes I think the change was for the better; I can bear myself more than I ever have been able to in my life. My sense of self-loathing very rarely reaches the nadirs that it used to. In the past five years I have grown in size. I am taking up more room in the world. Inside, though, I either see myself as a huge fat slob, or as a really tall and skinny firm model type of guy.

I tell people that I write in the mornings. Days go by and I write fuck-all. Today I wrote fuck-all. I read three mediocre stories and I saw a horrendous piece of theatre called What We Did to Weinstein at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Every fucking cliche about Jewish life in London and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was used in the most unimaginative and predictable way. I'm discovering that I enjoy being indignant, I enjoy being angry when crap writing is put out into the world. I think about the fucking torture it is to create one fucking decent sentence, the amount of energy it takes me to actually sit down and write - and the amount of energy that goes into resisting writing - and I think: How dare you put facile prose out into the world.

I did, however, enjoy going to the theatre with a friend of mine, and we enjoyed rustling our sweet wrappers.

Maybe I need to turn this into a testimony of bitterness and hate.