Apophenia

Set it down, set it down. Here's the trouble: I can't sleep. There's a story about it. I went to London a few weeks ago, had lunch with a friend. What did we eat? I can't remember. It was hotter than I was expecting and I walked after coffee from Kings Cross through Bloomsbury to the British Museum, regretting all sorts of articles of clothing, though the only one I can recall with any certainty is my socks.

The museum didn't have what I wanted, and it was full of parties of tourists and stolen gold. The medieval display was too small and too broad, and I thought I shall stick to local museums in future. I came out, swerved back under the sun, and went on to Farringdon, down Gray's Inn Road. I stopped - but was this before or after the museum? - at the LRB bookshop, and pulled a copy of Coasting off the shelf and then had to leave because I thought I would faint. I drank water and went on through the sweltering streets, the plane trees dropping stray nuggets of shade and keeping greenness for themselves.

The train was full. I hadn't thought of the time, I hadn't thought my journey through at all. It was rush hour, and I stood in a bloom of people and at London Bridge I thought again I will faint and got off and waited for the next train, which was the stopping service and ground into Brighton just before 7.

It was cooler then, and I was glad to be home. I talked on the phone for a while, trailing the cord behind me as I roamed from room to room. And then, just after I had hung up, I saw that the window in my bedroom was open. The window that does not open in my bedroom was open. The window that had been painted shut. I have heaved at that window and it has not shifted, it has not budged. Often I can't open jars; once, to the great amusement of my friends, I failed to depress the spray on a bottle of perfume. I hadn't opened the window, it was not me, but someone else.

There is the window. It lets in air, blue air, a leaking breeze. There is the open space, where narrative breaks down. It will haunt you, that window. It is the gap where words can't be put.

That night, oh well, that night was terrible. I woke at 4. My neighbour was screaming in the flat beneath me. He wept, he retched, he cursed, he paced the room, he came again and again to the threshold of his door. I didn't move. Petrified is a useful word. I barely breathed and my heart beat irregularly.

After a while it stopped. After a while the sky opened out, not with light but with the diminishing dusk that precedes the day. After a while I slept for an hour or two and then went through the rounds of phoning locksmiths and the police. There is a new lock on my door. It fits imperfectly but it will do. The window has been dusted for fingerprints; I can still see the powder where it was not quite rubbed clean.

The neighbour moved out. Perhaps he had eaten a poisoned fish, or been left by his girlfriend. Perhaps his father had died. I said I would tell you one story but I have told you two. They may not be related. I offer them to you because this is what we do when we are faced with random data, we braid it together and make a plait.

What happened in my flat? Some small items in my bathroom were rearranged: a brush hung where I do not put it; a towel a little damper than it had been. Is that true? Am I sure? I can't find a t-shirt, a mauve Vanessa Bruno t-shirt that I wore til it had worn through in two or three places, though it is possible I left it somewhere or forgot where I had squirreled it away. And a bra, a lace bra the colour of boiled cream, that's gone too, though again I am sometimes careless with my things. But my laptop, or the roll of notes on the counter? No, they are here, they stayed. The bra was trimmed with black lace. I liked it. It fitted well. I wonder where it is.

So, I do not sleep. I wake and wake and wake again. I would like to be bound in a nutshell, for I might sleep well without walls or windows. In the night I hear footsteps or a car gunning its engine, some small, urban sound, and I wake and then I cannot sleep again. I think of what could have happened, of what might be about to happen; I make up narratives to make up for this one terrible gap in the narrative, this inexplicable thing that terrifies me because I do not understand its motive.

In the days before the open window, I was tormented by a case I had read about in the paper, about two brothers who harmed two other boys, who were also related in some complicated way. I won't describe it. I found the details impossible to relinquish and I regretted reading it. But. I have felt throughout my life that I live in a good universe, where effort is rewarded and the just, the kind are saved. But I am coming to wonder if the world is not as the Manichæans saw it: corrupt, a hell that will not be repeated. The fact that this has not generally been true for me does not make it false. I look at pictures of the migrant camps in Calais, I read about these two small boys who broke two others, and I think it is all very well, this world, but some of us are breathing helium and some are breathing lead.

I want it to be better than it is but it isn't, and I don't know what to make of that. The depths are terrible. Conrad saw them, and you know what he said.

Before a swim

It's almost lunchtime and I'm still deep in the morning, fumbling coffee cups and hunting down quotes. I need to read The Waves and can't find my copy; books are silting up my desk and spilling over the sofa. That lovely description at the beginning of Rings of Saturn, about the office in which papers have drifted across the floor in layers dense as snow, folding as they reach walls and desks and chairs so that all the edges are lost. And this in turn reminds me of Annie Dillard talking in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek about the illusion by which snow seems lighter than the sky it has fallen from, though by placing a mirror on the ground one can see instantly that it is not.

A fly has come into the room. The sun is shining after days of rain, the sycamores are shedding leaves steadily, they also dress the floor. I cannot find my copy of the Sebald, though I have tracked down Moby Dick and also Villette. And I have recovered something, the private marine element of thought, perhaps. I do not know that I want this to be read, just yet, but I am glad to return to writing.

Baby, it's cold outside

It's raining. I'm tucked up on the sofa listening to Dory Previn and drinking early grey in lieu of lunch. Autumn's in; the elms are yellow and so's the copper beech. I've missed writing here. And I made y'all a tape. Except, ahem, they don't call them tapes anymore...

http://8tracks.com/olivialanguage/baby-it-s-cold-outside