I can't spend the rest of my life buried in the sand

'Procrastination' is a blunt instrument of a word for a behaviour which is more nuanced than just the dull foot-dragging putting off of things. Commencing a rich engagement with the peak human activity of disciplined creative work, work precious in its freedom from external compulsion or the promise of reward, sometimes doesn't happen right when you think it's time to begin. There can be a lag. The lag doesn't fit with what you (think you) know about the rightness of the time; it's forced in from somewhere else. The muses were summoned with incantations and offerings of oils and herbs and wordless watchfulness, but they came blowing in at their own time and on their own terms. There might be a silent unnamed muse of procrastination who makes people wait till past the time when they think they have something to say. What then gets said is never what those people thought they were going to say, and that is the making of writing that is truthful and real.

What you just read is very probably the longest stretch of words ever written on this blog without drifting (or plunging) into the first person. I can pretty confidently promise it's not a performance I'm likely to repeat. I didn't breathe freely as I wrote it. I don't know whether or not I find anything plausible in what I've written, and it doesn't seem particularly important to think about.

For some time I've known I should be blogging now, but it was (interestingly?) hard to get started, mainly because I missed the beginning of the pandemic, d'oh! but also for reasons which needed to be thought about for a while without necessarily being solved or managed away.

1) I stopped blogging in August last year because I recognised that long-form life writing had become for me a practice undertaken in a mood of deep unhappiness, the vapour trail of crisis really, done alone in my bedroom at night after beating a daily retreat from an intolerable household situation and not only did it not make any sense to keep writing in that mode when I was starting a completely new life, the habitual structures and tropes didn't even fit with whatever there was to be said. Last year I temporarily archived about two-thirds of the posts I published between 2017 and 2019, the thought of anyone reading them was just a little too much. They're still there. I read a couple this morning. The most interesting thing to me about them is how plainly the writing is emotional work. It's not really writing as communication.

2) More recently I've wondered what writing during a pandemic is like. I reread Camus' The Plague, a book that touched me very deeply and, it must be said, somewhat unhealthily when I found it somewhere round 1987-9. I quite understood when I read it then that it's about an actual outbreak of plague, an allegory of the German occupation of France, and more broadly a book about enduring the arrival and duration of the waking nightmare of invasion, living with a permanent intruder, with loss of bodily sovereignty, the truth of vulnerability, about doing without the enabling illusions of a knowable future, and about resistance, an unassuming and talismanic word of unmatched power to open up important questions now about what's being resisted. Camus is among a small group of writers I feel regrettably little interest in, despite recognising their artistry,  because of the way they've been put onto pedestals by a barely literate readership uninterested in the ways other writers (women, often) approached the same material through different but equally useful ways of working. But The Plague knocked my socks off all over again in 2020, reading it as the reader I now am, remote from and somehow in control of my adolescent trauma and existential crisis.

Like everyone else right now I've read and read and read the burgeoning literature of the 2020 plague - sure, it's journalism mostly but journalism is as fine a vehicle for thought and feeling as any other medium - and I have not seen any writing that even begins to skim the surface of approaching the truth of what's happening to us now. So here is a reason to write. It's kind of funny to me. You think you understand something, right - modernism, let's say - you might even have put in some serious miles holding learnedly forth to peers and acolytes (and, in truth, to the void, feeding into it heartfelt but unread and obscure scholarship) about what it was that happened to people's lives in the early 20th century which made the old forms no longer adequate to shaping and containing their ideas. You might think you know (and maybe, in some sense, you're not wrong to think that) but when the grand rupture actually ruptures on to you, then you know something different about it. You know what it feels like to not know how to talk about what's happening.

The morning sun when it comes into my flat is so beautiful always; it brought tears this morning, never far away at the moment, but also the sensory experience of watching the warm soft gleaming black fur of my two cats as they lay on the rug and breathed and looked around them.

I remembered Memoirs of a Survivor, which I have written about before on this blog, and while I've believed for some time that Lessing's novel is the most important book of my life I made a decision not to re-read it for the nth time in this era but instead to try a new way of using it, i.e. to write out of the experience of knowing it. As a way of setting a seal on that decision here's one page. It's acknowledgement.

I recently moved my nascent Mk II record collection into this position, and a great deal of thought and foolish myopic anxiety went into choosing a good place in my flat for it to live. As it turns out the sunlight falls onto the spines of the records' sleeves and I'm going to have to do something about that. As I said to my friend D last night (on the phone, obvs) here's a thing I could do "in iso": I could put these records into chronological order, play them "in iso" in chronological order, and write 700 words about Here's what happened when I did that, and The Guardian would publish this. I could even write the thing without doing any of those steps. (I already put my books into spectrum order, could produce a similar piece of surface-skating nonsense out of that exercise, although it'd be less plausible, possibly, but maybe I'm underestimating how much people want to believe obvious fictions or at least, don't care about them). So I could do the hot take, get a Guardian byline, have some fun and maybe get paid 25c. Could I write in this genre and really find something out, I wonder?

I was going to leave it there for today (more tomorrow and every day for at least a week), but the doorbell rang and I went down to greet the Australia Post mail delivery worker, who said that as of yesterday he now brings packages as well as letters (so few letters, so many packages.) I went down in my pyjamas, which are handmade and so extremely lovely - ivory silk trimmed with 1930s Swiss cotton lace - that I only wear them on 'special occasions' but are pyjamas just the same. I received my parcel and went back to the lift, which disgorged people from the floor above mine, also wearing their pyjamas and bound for the front door on the same mission. My parcel is a Super Mario Kart windcheater I ordered three weeks ago, from a shop (that is now closed to the public) twenty minutes bike ride away, for Lenny's birthday which is in six days' time. He doesn't read this blog. I was very glad to receive it at last. See you tomorrow.