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28 October 2002 (Day 352)

Waiting room. Waiting room. Waiting room.

27 October 2002 (Day 351)

My body feels incredibly weak, despite my days of convalescence from Thursday through to Saturday. This cold feels like it is building, not subsiding, which is unfortunate because of the deadline that looms at work tomorrow. Having lost all of yesterday I spend most of the day and some of the night working, reluctantly.

26 October 2002 (Day 350)

I've been off work, ill for the past two days. Today, I need to pick up some files from the office to work on over the weekend. Storms have been forecast that will last through until Monday morning and when I set out for the station there is something inauspicious about every gentle breeze that blows, something menacing about every wet slab that passes underfoot. I wait an hour for the train. When it arrives it is virtually full – three people manage to squeeze on at each set of carriage doors. I feel too weak and sorry for myself to try and muscle my way into one of the coaches. The next train is not for an hour, so I return home. I phone to get the time of the first departure after 15:00. It is the 15:02. I walk back down to the station and arrive with four or five minutes to spare, only to learn that the train has been cancelled. I return home for the second time. Most of the day is now lost. A friend kindly offers to drive me into Bath. I accept and retrieve from the office what it is I need to work at home, but by now the time is 19:00 and I'm angry that the day has gone, that it has fractured like this without warning me; that it has crushed what I had in store for it; that it did not take pity on how tired and unwell I feel.

25 October 2002 (Day 349)

Most people are afflicted by an inability to say what they see or think. They say there's nothing more difficult than to define a spiral in words; they claim it's necessary to use the unliterary hand, twirling it in a steadily upward direction, so that human eyes will perceive the abstract figure immanent in a wire spring and a certain type of staircase. But if we remember that to say is to renew, we will have no trouble defining a spiral: it's a circle that rises without ever closing. I realize that most people would never dare define it in this way, for they suppose that defining is to say what others want us to say rather than what's required for the definition. I'll say it more accurately: a spiral is a potential circle that winds round as it rises, without ever completeing itself. But no, the definition is still abstract. I'll resort to the concrete, and all will become clear: a spiral is a snake without a snake, vertically wound around nothing.

[...]

Once I heard a child, who wished to say that he was on the verge of tears, say not 'I feel like crying', which is what an adult, i.e. an idiot, would say, but rather 'I feel like tears.' And this phrase – so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it – decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. 'I feel like tears'! That small child aptly defined his spiral.

The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

24 October 2002 (Day 348)

A man walks past another man, who is seated. As he transfers his weight on to his leading foot, his leg buckles and he falls backwards, slightly, and forces his body into the back of the seated man's chair. Each man meet's the gaze of the other. The teeth and beard of the standing man shape and suggest a smile of apology. A second or two later he adds 'sorry', in the most uncertain tone. He rocks himself back into step by pushing off from the upright of the chair with his right arm.

23 October 2002 (Day 347)

A vertical blind splices my view of the world into forty or fifty different sections of life outside of the office.

22 October 2002 (Day 346)

'Those who reproached her for publishing too much were perhaps missing the point: her project was one of imperfection, or imperfectibility even, as if the perfect – like the good, about which she meditated so deeply – was fundamentally beyond human achievement. If for her every novel was a fresh attempt to attain her ideal, she found that each time her ideal had moved on.'

John Burnside's obituary piece following the death of Iris Murdoch

21 October 2002 (Day 345)

Sometimes, I think that I am aiming towards just a single lucid sentence or paragraph. There's a vulgarity about the way in which I waste my time writing these thousands of words, when all that I want is this singular piece of truth.

20 October 2002 (Day 344)

Gravity lures the dead leaf to the earth. Its playful swing through the air momentarily suggests a hint of life and a defiance of the ground's summons. Dead it lands, as it was when it fell. Winds visit and and move this dead body from resting ground to resting ground. After death there is the further ignominy of decay, there among its brothers, each wearing death in varying hues of brown and black and yellow.

19 October 2002 (Day 343)

I lost September, as I did August. I made notes during this time, but felt the force of other things bearing on me with too much weight. I was stifled and could not write, not properly. These are the notes that I made on September 11th:

So much of today was not about rememberance.

The pixelated blur of cameras filming television monitors broadcasting images of planes exploding into buildings in slow-motion repeat: the suggestion of distance, remoteness. Removal to outside an event in order to look back in and analyse. In order to regurgitate. Tragedy was condensed, distilled into three- and four-minute synopses. Soundtracks were scored, and buildings fell to elegiac orchestral swirls. Black smoke segued scene into sephulcral scene. The disbelief and trauma that etched itself into the faces of the people of that day narrated our anniversary programmes. In the news bulletins of the day these same faces bewildered and confounded and were not coherent or synchronistic with our understanding of events.

The BBC documentary, 9/11, in places, avoided sentimentalism and glamorisation, and in other places it failed. Where it worked, though, it shocked and it terrified and made real the horror of that day once more. There was unseen footage that revealed new details and helped to seam others together. There was the audible thud of bodies crashing to the ground, one of the most chilling sounds imaginable, but one which I previously hadn't heard. And then there was the sheer length of the film: about three hours of footage that forced you to endure it all at length once more. Part of me wanted to fall asleep to the same mental images of falling bodies that haunted me for days last year. Then it was real. Today, I fear that we watch our television replays with a little too much reassurance. Today, we turn to poets to curl and flower their words in memory of those dead; we pay politicians to formulate a rhetoric of revenge. Today, three thousand rose petals fall symbolically, hollowly, from the roof of Westminster Abbey. Somewhere in this messy, memorial helix it seems that we have already begun to forget the true significance of what happened. Bureaucrats and diplomats plot war against Iraq. Afghanistan has been invaded, 'liberated' and forgotten. All other international news is eclipsed today, because today we are still busy ameliorating the awful truth of last year's events.

I found myself, quite unintentionally, wrapped within a minute's silence, whilst waiting for my train, at 46 minutes past the hour. I noticed the info-monitor above where I sat had changed from the tabled text and numbers of train operators and arrival times to just a blue screen that counted seconds from one to sixty. As I watched the slow duotoned count, I heard a bottle crash to the bottom of the recycling bin from across the other side of the tracks. Another fell, then another, and as splinters and shards settled and the echoing bin quietened, I looked back to the monitor to read 58, 59, 1.00.

18 October 2002 (Day 342)

Friday is here again, so quickly that one could accuse it of having murdered the other days of the week. I was not among those that were praying for it to arrive and rush me to the weekend. I can still feel the warmth of Thursday, even Wednesday and I don't yet want to admit that I have lost them to the past. I didn't wish for my week to pass like this.

17 October 2002 (Day 341)

The bag on the table, its handle prostrate and hanging off the edge. A plastic fastening hooks around a plastic handle, fastened by a stitched heavy-duty fabric which is threaded firmly to the synthetic stomach of the bag. The plastic taps ever so gently against the table's edge as the train shakes.

16 October 2002 (Day 340)

Some four or five minutes must have passed – since I'd alighted from the train and began my walk home – before it occurred to me that I couldn't recall the details of what had just gone by; as though I had been transported from the train to the place where I now found myself, unaware of how that process had manifested itself, how that time had been filled. I walked this route daily, but the specifics of tonight's journey escaped me. I could not remember having passed the taxi rank, nor the car showroom, nor crossing at the top of the roundabout, setting foot onto the paved island in the centre of the road where the halogen-lit white, blue and yellow plastic box stands... yet I know that I must have done so. I was concerned that this chunk of life had fleeted from my memory, had been leeched away despite irrefutably belonging to the very recent past. I struggled to pull it from some darkened recess of my mind, but could not find anything onto which I could clutch and draw. I imagined my reflected image in one of the windows back there, pausing at the road with headlights gushing over my islanded form, but could not jog some similar account out into the open from tonight's past.

Even now, as I write several hours later, I cannot fill this void... I have lost my four or five minutes.

15 October 2002 (Day 339)

The 1835 Portsmouth Harbour train is delayed by 25 minutes, so I have time to kill before the 1853 Castle Cary train arrives, and I spend it sat on the platform's most remote bench, alone with a thought. What is it about the tenderness of solitary moments like this that always carries me towards writing? At such moments I feel in love and in depair with the world; susceptible to tears if I see a pigeon chased away from a discarded bread crust after alighting on the opposite platform specifically to feed; deliriously happy by the exultant smile of a shy, overweight man who has been approached by and assisted a pretty woman who is confused by the conflicting train information that dances in tiny orange-yellow squares on the overhead tele-board. Why must these tender moments spur me towards writing? Why, when I write, am I overcome by the beauty of the form that these words take? I wish to be read, but I'm not sure if I want people to judge my work artistically (in the way that, say, a painter frames and hangs a painting for his audience to look at) or whether I simply want them to recognise the tenderness that I feel towards the things of this world. That is, the ache brought about by the prosaic whirl of the world, the simple things, the tarnished surface of life. Moments of tenderness transform these moments, reveal their beauty.

14 October 2002 (Day 338)

I try on Charlotte's spectacles. The world blurs before me and I'm reassured to find that my eyes cannot adjust to seeing in this new fashion. They strain my eyes and head after only sixty seconds. I remove and return them to the warm yellow square of newsprint that the window has lit, on the table.

13 October 2002 (Day 337)

Went back to yesterday's entry and wondered over the power of those two words. How easily the grammatical marks could be changed or removed to make them more emphatic... solitarily emphatic. I wish that I could write two thousand words, or twenty-two thousand words that would convey something approaching the sheer brute force of those two words. How beautiful and manifest with power those words would be. I write these two words every day, again and again, only most of the time I disguise, stretch and dilute them. I camouflage them and I pull and bite at them, but I never lose sight of those two words. When I write, 'A man spits phlegm onto the pavement' I'm actually writing 'Still, nothing', that is, I'm aiming to convey nothing different than the struggle, the stalemate, the vacuity, the perpetuity that those first two words brought to mind. If I were to eliminate all bar one sentence from this journal, it would most likely be those two words that I would spare.

12 October 2002 (Day 336)

Still, nothing.

11 October 2002 (Day 335)

The words that I put into this place are created for me alone. It is only when I re-read them that I want someone else to share in the banality of what I see, what I do, what I think and what I write. Share, love, disdain this life.

10 October 2002 (Day 333)

There's a man stood to my left reading a chemistry paper with molecular diagrams spread across the page. There's a woman to my right who has just taken off her spectacles to reveal two thin semi-circular troughs that sit under her eyes and gash the bridge of her nose, as though her glasses had been punch-pressed into her face before removal. Opposite, a man spits phlegm onto the pavement to the obvious disdain of his female companion. She seems distressed by much more than this expectorated mucoid glob, though; by more than her embarrasment of his dishevelled hair and dirty overcoat; by something far more deeply rooted than this man's surface that I too am able to observe as closely as she. Sat on the bench to this woman's right is a young man reading a new paperback edition of a book by Albert Camus, with a picture of a leather football on the front cover.

9 October 2002 (Day 331)

Tired and empty.

8 October 2002 (Day 330)

The only tragedy is not being able to conceive of ourselves as tragic. I've always clearly seen that I coexist with the world. I've never clearly felt that I needed to coexist with it. That's why I've never been normal.

The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

7 October 2002 (Day 329)

A waiting room. A room for waiting. A room designed specifcially for waiting.

Here I sit in an empty room, about ten foot square, with dull walls that have as much grey as they do yellow about them. There are three picture frames that weakly account for the decoration of the room. The floor is covered with blue linoleum. The most impressive aspects of the room are the three solid benches which stretch across three sides of the space. I am sat on one of them, and there is an identical bench to my right. The door out to the platform is to my left. Opposite me there is a much larger bench. It has sturdy arms and central supporting stanchions at the front and back. It measures a good foot or so more in length and is painted in a dark brown gloss paint that has slightly been dulled by the dust and dirt of weathering time. I pray that no one else enters and diminishes the scale of my waiting room.

6 October 2002 (Day 328)

Subterfuge.

5 October 2002 (Day 327)

We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work that we never do. A work that's finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who's crippled. The plant is her happiness, and sometimes it's even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That's enough for me, or it isn't enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.

The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

4 October 2002 (Day 326)

A man with a peak mounted to a strap that velcro-fastens around his head enters the post office and walks past the queue to the vacant cashier window, where he pulls the pen that is chained to the counter by a string of metallic beads, towards him and over the top of a book that he has placed onto the counter. He precisions his grip around the pen and scrawls into the bottom corner of one of the pages of his book. He stands upright and stares towards us, silently bumping into all of our stares.

Two people stand ahead of me in the queue. A blind man walks forward to the cashier's window, pulls an envelope from his coat pocket and asks for a second-class stamp. He feeds the envelope underneath the small window and guides it carefully to the cashier's side, finding the bottom ledge of the window at the end of an action that culminates with his palm and fingers flattened reassuringly with the steel counter surface. The man between the blind man and myself edges forward into the space in front of him and tosses a long cardboard tube merely an inch or so into the air in order to catch and refine his grip around it.

Having paid for his stamp, the blind man and his guide dog turn to leave. Before the man with the tube can advance towards the now vacant window, the man with the velcro-fastened peak steps in front of him and asks, 'Doya mine if I jus nick in an cash this mate?'
'Yes, actually, I do. And I think that these other people probably do too.'
I was careful to avoid both their stares. I didn't mind, but neither did I care to support either's cause, so I remained silent.

Now a bad air hung over us all. A circular tube was being decorated with four brightly coloured stamps, watched over by its red-faced owner. The man with the velcro-fastened peak had retreated to the back of the queue and was noisily slapping his book into the palm of his hand. Outside the skies sneered icy-blue and leaves screamed in the gutter.

3 October 2002 (Day 325)

Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. I note the slightest facial movements of the person I'm talking with, I record the subtlest inflections of his utterances; but I hear without listening, I'm thinking of something else, and what I least catch in the conversation is the sense of what was said, by me or by him.

The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

2 October 2002 (Day 324)

Here begins the day, so much like yesterday, so very much like yesterday. The walk to the train station. The train journey and the walk thereafter onto the office. All the while, witnessing other people repeating their yesterdays.

1 October 2002 (Day 323)

Whatever I feel is felt (against my will) so that I can write that I felt it. Whatever I think is promptly put into words, mixed with images that undo it, cast into rhythms that are something else altogether. From so much self-revising, I've destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I'm now my thoughts and not I.

I started reading Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, and by the end of the night, had completed only the translator's (lengthy) introduction. Yet I'm already in awe of the things that Pessoa seems capable of putting into words; with such economy and such clarity. The translator claims that 'no-one ever achieved such a direct transference of self to paper.' This is, he continues 'the world's strangest photograph, made out of words, the only material capable of capturing the recesses of the soul it exposes.'

12 September 2002 (Day 322)

Ater flailing beneath the surface, drowning in some imagined frantic wonder, I find that I can no longer stay immersed and am resigned to return above water, back to bobbing along, along the fluid tedium of life with my splintered memory of something more beautiful.

4 August 2002 (Day 321)

This book that I write notes into is made of brown paper. I write in black ink. There are perforations at the top of each page. There is a slab of card at the back and a strip of gum paper that sits like a saddle across the top.

When I write something for these pages, I'm aware that there are a multiplicity of present tenses. The present tense that I'm engaged in; the present as I write and describe it on this brown paper and the present tense of keying in these notes that I commit to this tract that I have named Per Diem. A version as I think it, one as I write and one as I rewrite and refine. All of them now seem so irrevocably part of the past.

I bought the book for 99p and I use the pages sparingly, writing in a small hand. Flicking through, I see that this book now accounts for details from the last three-and-a-half months of my life.

I re-read my notes from this month and from previous months and I dwell on the amount of words that I have stored: waiting to be copied or refined; or waiting to be forgotten. Even the words that I dislike re-reading I'm attached to, as if by some stupid sentimental piece of twine. There are many inferior passages in the book into which I write. If I were to fall under the wheels of a bus tomorrow, someone might recover this book, and these poor, unpolished words would have an audience who might believe in what they so inaccurately say. If only I could leave them with the words that truly reflect what I see and think.

This passage that I'm writing is a mess of scribbles (which serve to erase words which I do not wish to read again) and asterisks that are expanded upon in notes that sit at the side or bottom of each page. For instance, beneath where I just wrote the word 'erase' is the original verb 'delete', with a web of black ink almost making it unreadable. What is it that possesses me to replace one with the other? The writing on this page is large and poorly laid out, certainly not straight and parallel across the paper. This happens when I try to write quickly, often when I'm misguidedly thinking about the loftiness or significance of what I'm engaged in. Now, when I try to write about what it is that these words aspire towards (since that is the theme that occupied me when I began this entry) I fall flat and I find myself before a wall over which I cannot climb and around which I cannot pass. I'm convinced that I can achieve something beautiful and overwhelming in the effort of a few hundred words. For now, though, I cannot elucidate.

31 July 2002 (Day 320)

It's a strange and difficult task – writing – at times. To commit daily is yet more difficult, but necessary. This is a record of a life. When I look back, how alike one another all the days appear. How it touches me to recognise myself within them. Sometimes I write about observing a woman taking a brush out from her bag and I recognise it as the most significant moment of that week, as though my eyes had been shut for the hours and days prior to those few seconds. Writing teaches me that it is almost impossible to measure life. Only for an instant do we come close to frauduently being able to do so.

30 July 2002 (Day 319)

A wheelchair on the train. It rolled, back and forth, jogged unevenly, mocking the tugs and judders of the carriage. On the seat of the chair there lay a cushion, its shape all squashed, its colour stained; flattened against the sag of the leather. Besides the sight of the chair, other than the pull and sway of the carriage, there was a smell. The smell came in the manner of something weak and feeble and then hung like something leaden and all around. My gaze found the cushion time and again. It was the smell of fabric sodden with urine.

She stared at the chair too. So too her. So too him. My gaze associated me with the chair and I suddenly felt responsible for all of this. My fault the stench, my fault the shake; so I forced my eyes to find something else. In the lugagge rack they came to rest on the thin, clear film that stretched over what appeared to be a transparent plastic cube.

I don't know what happened but when I next became aware of my eyes seeing, I found them fixed once more on the wheelchair, in an area where one of the tassles that gripped equidistantly at each corner of the cushion lay spread like a fan across the wrinkled black skin of the leather seat, and my earlier anxiety was gone.

The train journey lasted sixteen minutes. When I alighted, the sky filmed night defeating day.

29 July 2002 (Day 318)

I brushed against someone, indeed, hit them hard, and carried on without apology, without a glance, because something else seemed important.

28 July 2002 (Day 317)

I changed my route into work today.

27 July 2002 (Day 316)

My memory is poor. I fear, also, that I am not nearly intelligent enough. Enough for what? To write, certainly. To write well, at least. Sometimes, not intelligent enough to survive and support myself. In my dreams I'm incompetent, and terrified by the thought of drifting through life. Inferiority is a regular feature of my life and dreams. Today, I had to look up the definition of a simple adjective, because each time I spoke it, its meaning seemed to contort towards something which seemed false.

26 July 2002 (Day 315)

Listening to the beautiful Martin Grech track, 'Open Heart Zoo'.

25 July 2002 (Day 314)

From the train station my route into work each day takes me past the back of McDonalds. Two huge, red wheely-bins sit to the side of the rear entrance, pushed up against the sandstone wall of the building, occupying some two to three square metres of pavement. I'm about thirty or forty seconds shy of this area when the smell first hits me. It bobs on the wind; coming strong and then failing, and then coming again. I know the sight of this area well. I can describe it here, and in my mind I have described it for each morning of every day that I have passed by this way. I know how stains scuff and muddy the red plastic. I know how pools of black yellow lie over the dried pools of last week's black yellow. Pool upon pool, which show their age like a cross-section through the rings of a tree. So when the foul smell hits me each morning, I'm already imagining rings of black and yellow, and traces of gleaming plastic scratched into rotting red cubes, because all this has taken on the sensation of the familiar. I baulk. I hold my breath. I walk past.

Tomorrow, I repeat.

24 July 2002 (Day 313)

My foot came over the top of the discarded cigarette. Before, I had sat there, simply waiting for someone to come, simply doing anything but just sitting there, and I watched the cigarette turn in the air and hit the ground with a smack of red and grey, as ash and lit tobacco reacted violently with the stone floor. Burning itself to extinction, I thought, and when the sole of my shoe came down and brought about its premature demise it felt like the most merciful of kisses.

23 July 2002 (Day 312)

Very often, the things that we do daily–

I found eight words jotted down on to the back of a compliments slip that I had brought home from the office. I had obviously intended to write more and I can't remember what it was that had taken me away, mid-sentence, from my writing. I'm fond of these few words as they are, though. I enjoy that they lead towards nowhere conclusive. Writers often polish and construct ten or twenty lucid sentences together, only to take you to this same inconclusive place; only to tell you nothing. I liked the significance that I had bestowed upon these words of insignificance.

22 July 2002 (Day 311)

The broken pieces of a car mirror lie in the gutter, reflecting a distraught image of the sky, with the branches of a tree caught in the corner.

21 July 2002 (Day 310)

For many years I thought that I was crying in the wilderness, later that I was speaking only to a very small number, but you have proved to me today that I was right to believe in the virtue of the small number and that sooner or later it would prevail.

From the 1947 Nobel-Prize-winning speech by André Gide.

20 July 2002 (Day 309)

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things.

From the 1949 Nobel-Prize-winning speech by William Faulkner.