Do you know what you look like in that beard?

It's come as a real surprise to me how differently I feel about writing here now that it's inaccessible to anybody but myself. I feel differently about it and the pragmatic questions are also very different. My intention remains that I will return the blog to free and open access again, but meanwhile I leave it closed and see what happens. I would like something to happen. Just to find out what. In all the years of keeping this blog it has never not been done under the assumption that as soon as I click Publish, somebody turns up and reads what I've written. 'Somebody' being a readership of indeterminable size constituted of a mix of people I know and people I don't, people who talk freely to me about the writing and people who never acknowledge its existence, people now and people who'll appear in the future. I think there is still more to be understood about the consequences of that situation for the form that the writing takes. There are ontological consequences and epistemological ones, or are those the same thing? Things to do with voice and how it structures writerly relationships, but also practical matters. How much contextualising I need to do in order to frame the thing I've set out to address. I don't think it's a bad for writing to explain itself in that manner - to show the work - I'm just interested in what might come out differently if I set aside the assumption that I have to kit out the reader with all the tools required to determine what it is that I take for granted. When I began to think seriously about how to write better about my life, one thing I did resolve on was to not tediously unpack all the implications of things. I'd seen ample evidence that the readers I did have were very much able to do this themselves. I enjoyed the feeling of generosity and amplitude which was sometimes produced in the doing of writing like this, when it went well. It felt like the giving of an invitation to share in a pleasure. But I wonder if there is a further, or perhaps just a different, kind of freedom and pleasure maybe available in writing where I'm talking more immediately to myself.

A room of one's own. Well, that's where I am now. Alone. It's very quiet in here but the road outside is noisy. The idea of riding somewhere, by night in the intimate interior of a car, lit by the dashboard instrument panel and scored by a private soundtrack, still has a flavour of adventure in my mind. The game of imagining what it's like to take up for a moment someone else's position in the world becomes very strenuous when they're rushing past in fast cars, surging in and out of the range of the imagination. Now I can hear a plane, coming down toward Tullamarine. It's been much too long since I flew by night. Looking out across the traceries of city lights, I always felt a tug to know those places (even when it was only Melbourne down below.)  Now I would like to be sitting in one of those window seats. It's super gross inside aeroplanes, I know, but still, I'd like to be in one.

This year I've listened carefully to advice I've been given. Don't want it so much, then it won't matter if you don't make it. Who knew, advice actually can change everything? If you're not sure, then you should do it anyway. Do you think, this might be about something else altogether? I can't always act on these insights. I'm very tired, and I feel like I've climbed onto the top of a ridge, and now at last I can see where I am, but what I see is rough terrain, a ragged and dry wilderness without paths, and it stretches away on all sides.

Car noise on the road isn't that different sonically than the sound of surf, but I've had enough of listening to the cars. I've put some music on and it's brought me back inside this room. It's James Blake's 'The Wilhelm Scream'; the aural leitmotif of a familiar psychological state - a state that is also a leifmotif - I'm alone, deep in an introspection that feels reckless. The more alone I am, in a place or inside an experience, the more I feel myself unfurling outwards, bleeding emotion like lines of dye curling through water. It's a sensation that has the structure of seeking connection, but I think it's a pattern of feeling which has been my technique for so long that it's outlived the time when I needed it.

 The original practical reason for closing the blog has gone, although perhaps it would be more accurate to say it went away but came back in a very surprising altered form. More about that later.

It's been a long time since I read Lucky Jim - probably not long enough to consider re-reading it - the best thing would be to live long enough to forget swathes of it so I could have the joy (and hopefully not too much sexism-induced sadness) of discovering it again. As things stand I don't have to go find my copy to remember Jim, near the end of the book, having got his act together, giving voice to his new-found sense of autonomy and freedom by saying to Bertrand, Do you know what you look like in that beard?

Today on the way home as I stopped at the lights across College Crescent, another cyclist pulled up beside and just in front of me. I was out of her line of vision and so I felt very able to stare at her. I thought Perhaps this is what I look like; and then I considered the elements of her, one by one, humming inwardly with uncertainty about whether I really did resemble her or not (to myself, or to other people? I don't know) and whether or not it would be a good thing if I did. Adam Phillips, bless him and his certainties, says the purpose of psychoanalysis is to free you from yourself so that you can be absorbed in being interested in other people. If this is what I am supposed to be working for then the nature of my immense and lifelong task is to learn how to be sure about what the difference is between me and other people. I couldn't really see her face, and I couldn't quite guess her age; her hair was about the same length as mine and much the same colour but for different reasons. She was built similar to me, maybe a bit smaller in the waist and shorter from there up to the shoulders. She was much more stylishly dressed than I was but in a way that I entirely understood. I kept looking at her right hand as she rested it on the handlebars. Incredulously I looked at it, and at my own. They did look the same. This was my perception, but I doubted. Some of the resemblance was surely only because these were both white woman hands, which are not in any way special. The lights changed and she rode off first, and I fell back to thinking about the rain falling lightly onto the faces and shoulders and hands of her and me.