Outside, through the curious, pollarded limes
wild wind driving rain,
And you, driving out my fear
relentlessly,
stroking the hairs on my arm
in the half-light.
I see my self
again,
and the hope takes the breath from my body
to yours.
*
Three months later you have your crisis. Then we have ours. Given how rapidly and how deeply our love has grown I’m bewildered at the lack of resilience now. You return to Spain. I return to my writing. It’s over.
*
We all carry within ourselves a world made up of all that we have seen and loved. And it is to this world that we return incessantly.2
And now, two years on, I’m back in the little cottage by the sea, where we had my birthday weekend. I’m sleeping again in that creaking bed, remembering the way you had to cover my mouth when you fucked me, because of my friends sleeping in the next room. And the charged eroticism of your strong hand across my face, preventing my gasps from spilling into the air. The return to places of greatest happiness. Now pregnant with pain. The working of memory. The ghost of voices, laughter, celebrations. Now winter, solitude, an empty window. All saying – this is how life is. Get used to it. Why do you ever think that such states can continue? The childish absurdity of believing that happiness can be a permanent condition. By its very nature it can never be. Even the urge towards it is suspect.
But, in a similar way, the impulse towards wanting to separate ourselves from the past is also absurd: ‘The past is another country’, ‘Don’t look back’, ‘Don’t dwell on the past’. The number of clichés grows in direct proportion to the falsity of the ‘common sense’ that is propagated. In reality, the past is in us continually. Past and present are entirely conjoined, inseparable. I think Dennis Potter once said something about this – how the past is like a horse running alongside us all the time. Yes, absolutely. Past and present in a single tense.
I have loved.
You have felt.
She has lost.
We have hoped.
You have suffered.
They have survived.
Pascal understood this perhaps more than most. He wanted to live with his past so much that he actually sewed it into the clothes that he wore. For him the moment of greatest joy in his life came in the form of an overwhelming spiritual epiphany which lasted for two hours on 23 November 1654. He wanted this experience to live with him ever after, and so he stitched this moment into the lining of his jacket, that way it would always be part of him. Words that became ‘The Memorial’:
The year of grace 1654
Monday, 23 November, feast of St Clement, Pope and Martyr, and of others in
the Martyrology.
Eve of St Chrysogonus, Martyr and others.
From about half past ten in the evening until half past midnight,
Fire.
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,
not of philosophers and scholars.
Certainty. Certainty. Heartfelt. Joy. Peace.
God of Jesus Christ…
My God and your God.
Your God will be my God.
The world forgotten, and everything except God …
Greatness of the human soul …
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy …
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
I have cut myself off from him, shunned him, denied him, crucified him.
Let me never be cut off from him! …
Sweet and total renunciation.
Total submission to Jesus Christ and my director.
Everlasting joy in return for one day’s effort on earth.
I will not forget thy word.
Amen.
And, as Pascal with his epiphany, so all of us, with all that we carry. Memories that burn themselves into the present, stitched into our neural pathways. Experiences can never be taken from us. And, in this way, any time of love is in us always. Any experience of truth is never lost.
*
To record or to live? Or to try to do both simultaneously? Writing and living at the same time is not a very easy combination. Since the age of twenty-one I’ve kept a journal. I wouldn’t like to use the word ‘obsessively’ with its pejorative connotations, but seriously, yes, I take it seriously. These journals are the same A4, hard-cover, blank-page Chartwell books (each 180 pages); I’m currently on number 134, which at approximately 90,000 words a journal comes to a little over 12 million words so far. For the last twenty-five years, they have been receivers of anything and everything – ideas for writing, psychological reflections on people in my life, overheard conversations on buses, occasional newspaper articles, snatches of dreams, records of work meetings, maps of walks completed, drawings, notes from books read, things that have outraged me or inspired me or made me laugh, and, inevitably, a lot of extremely personal reflections. In some ways it’s like leading two lives – the one you live and the one you then reflect on – and the record. As the writer Eduardo Galeano has defined it – ‘Recordar: To remember; from the Latin recordis, to pass back through the heart’.
I don’t write the journal every day but usually once a week or once a fortnight I’ll sit down for a couple of hours and try and catch up with myself. In extremely busy periods this can stretch to only once a month or two, which can become quite disturbing because I then feel disconnected from myself, and almost unable to live any more life, until I’ve caught up with where I am. And then you can get the self-defeating situation of having to devote whole days to catching up. This does not feel good, and of course makes a mockery of any talk of living in the present. I have no doubt that a therapist would have a field day with this, but it’s one way of getting through life. Whatever gets you through the night, as somebody once sang. And, in very difficult times, writing has, together with love and friendship, been my way of surviving.
So the six-month gap in my journals represents a significant challenge for me. And the irony that one of the happiest times in my life has almost no words to accompany it – this is not easy for me to accept. Though I do have photographs, scraps of thoughts, and, rather strangely, every single text message we ever exchanged. In fact, towards the end of our relationship, in an act of digital archaeology, I actually transcribed all the texts sent and received between us, as if by doing this I could recapture those moments, live them again. Despite this lack of writing I am surprised I am now able to recall, extremely vividly, so much of what happened in those months. Perhaps because of the sequence of events that stays in the mind, perhaps because the relationship itself seemed to have such a clear narrative arc. Or maybe because these experiences have lived with me since – as I said, they are still present for me.
Only once in the last twenty-five years have I lost a journal, but that once was traumatic enough. It was in a bag of mine, along with my wallet, stolen from a car parked in a service station on the M4 on the way back from Wales. From time to time I still dream of recovering that journal. It had notes on Gitta Sereny’s book on Albert Speer – forty to forty-five page of reflections, as I recall. It also had a draft of a lecture I was about to give in Dortmund, and the beginning of a short story. Even to this day I cannot travel on the M4 past Delamere Services without shuddering. I was later told by the police that somebody had tried to use my bank cards in Newport, so I’m afraid that town in south Wales has always been under a cloud since then. I didn’t mind about the wallet or the cards, but couldn’t they have left the journal?