Start the day: write

I rise at 6 am.  It is cold and dark, and the only sound is of the wind and the rain outside.  Normally I enjoy this darkness and silence only when I am about to set off on a long journey, and need to start early; which is perhaps what I am doing.  The hour also puts me in mind of dawn walks I have taken through foreign cities, my body clock out of kilter, or simply ignored for the sake of experience – Venice, New York, Torino, San Francisco – where initially I met no one, and then later encounter the reluctant first workers of the day, the ones we rarely see – the cleaners, the security guards, the milk train drivers.  I feel a kinship with them.

I sit at my desk, drinking coffee, my word-processor dark, but my mind beginning to fire.  Ideas bubble up, fall back, sometimes link with others, coalesce.  I try not to be too conscious of the process.  After all, how do we wake up in the first place?  Our minds are – what? Somewhere else? Switched off? Silently and blindly processing?  I try to lean into the quickening flow of ideas as a swimmer leans into the water: lazily and languorously, without effort or anxiety.

Then, washed and dressed, I turn on the word-processor.  As it whirrs and flickers into action, the first shot of adrenaline hits my system.  The enormity of what I am about to attempt clutches at my accelerating heart.  I replace the word-processor disc with one nearly empty, holding a few of my previous essays.  A blank screen comes up and I am faced once more with the apparently impossible task of creating something from nothing, of building a bridge across a huge yawning chasm without the use of scaffolding.

I know from experience that the only way to proceed is to emulate those cartoon characters who run out blindly beyond the precipice: they keep running in a straight line as long as they remain oblivious of the fact that there is nothing beneath them.  Reflection is fatal: as soon as they perceive the untenability of their aerial situation, they plummet instantly like a stone, as if to make up for their tardy plunge.  So now I too simply charge in, the opening line clear in my head as if written in neon, but the rest is darkness.  I know – I hope – that once started the momentum will carry me forward until I attain the haven of the page’s end.

I do.  Then I am confronted by what I have perpetrated.  Those words are mine, and no one else’s; I bear full responsibility.  Like someone who has inexplicably committed some terrible crime, I go back over everything, searching the tiniest details, trying to make it better, trying to make it right.  Sometimes I find comfort in replacing one gawky phrase with another less angular.  But it is a crumb cast to a starveling.

However, there is one real consolation which is independent of what I have produced: it is that I have produced.  Already I have won from the day some tiny attempt at order; whatever else happens to me, I have added a grain of sand to the sandcastle.  As I leave home for my other work, it is with a spring in my step, and with smug self-satisfaction in my heart.  I know that I almost redeemed this day of my life, and justified my existence, however poorly and feebly, by starting aright.

(21.10.89)

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