How to break a silence

How to break a silence?
Shatter it like glass?
Crunch it underfoot like a snail trodden on by mistake?
Pretend it didn’t exist, like a cat sidling back after a week (months?) spent tomming about the neighbourhood?

The last is tempting, but doesn’t seem quite right. So.
Silence? Yes.
Meaningful silence? No.
Sometimes things acquire their own momentum.
I didn’t mean to be away this long.

La belle dame dropped by for a few months. That’s not such a big deal, but it is among the reasons I’ve not been around much except in an very occasional ‘Hi. I’m still alive.” kind of way. She started packing her bags back around the end of October, and I think she may be finally out the door again for now.

Hard to tell. That’s what I thought a while ago, but she ended up staying a while longer. She’s a tedious houseguest and I don’t much enjoy her company.

Outwaiting her requires three things: memory, indifference and distraction.

Memory is the hardest. When she has her hooks in you, it can be difficult to recollect that she has loosed her hold before and may do so again. Memory and a touchingly irrational faith in induction.

Indifference is by far the easiest, though there’s little to be said about it. Or rather, there’s too much to be said about it and sometimes less is more.

Distraction is the most interesting. Absorbing, anyway. Some decent work gets done when la belle dame comes by, but little of it involves writing. Language, or at least producing language, becomes something best avoided. Reading is safe enough. That’s a kind of burying oneself in other people’s thoughts and lives, but writing is different.

When I was a musician, I used to spend lots of time practicing and doing technical exercises when she came by. Spatial things also work. Complex and addictive games which (though trivial in themselves) require concentration and attention to detail and possess their own internal logic that bears little resemblance to the external. Immersing oneself in datasets (or in voluminous masses of qualitative data, for that matter) – also works and is quite a good guilt-free alternative. Anything that involves obsessively looking for patterns in a massy morass of information that is messy, complicated and enough to absorb all of one’s attention.

(It is a little disconcerting just how much of my life – even when la belle dame is not about – is organised around having such things readily to hand, just in case. Other, more well-adjusted individuals have security blankets or teddy bears.)

How to describe that wordless world? It’s not like much of anything. One does not inhabit it as a person, but rather as a kind of machine. Cartesian dualism is out of fashion (for good reasons even), but it does accord so very neatly with experience. For there are no experiences to be had there. That world does not lend itself to discrete memories or to emotion. It is not a place where life happens, though sometimes it is a place where certain kinds of knowledge are produced.

If it reminds me of anything, it is of swimming in the ocean on a choppy day, in the wind and rain. When one swims underwater, the chop, the rain, the wind are all happening somewhere up there, but not to you. Not while you’re immersed, though, certainly there are consequences to remaining beneath the surface forever. Seachanges and whatnot.

Anyway. Enough. Tedious topics for troubled times.

I haven’t been writing, but I have been – well lurking and reading both. In latter days the former has been providing moments of unintended comedy (well, bitter farce, anyway - I never was too good at telling the difference), and moments (hours even!!) of déjà vu. And sympathy for those who have been dragged around this particular merry-go-round once more.

The latter means that I am in the fortunate position of having read some really good books, though I’m only going to mention two here.

Go read The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. In terms of form, it’s the most elegant thing I’ve seen since Black Orchid . Sheer brilliance. Parables of the Cold War played out in a down-at-heel seamy post-Soviet Moscow. Sparse, austere and terse. Go. Read.

At least over here, The Day Watch is now out as well.

Bonnie Honig has a book out (and has had for a while) called Democracy and the Foreigner . It’s a clever book which suggests that relations between democracy and foreignness can be read as gothic romance. Definitely worth a look – it’s an intriguing book and she’s a fine writer.

I miss DTF a great deal. At first I had thought he might just be on hiatus, but it’s a while ago now since I stopped thinking that. Which should really be a whole post of its own. And will be. Except.