Home, 21.15

Reading Paul Auster

Home after a long day: park, beach, a dead dog fish delighting the children, tiny tiny shark, they screamed on first seeing it, and Estella thinking I said dolphin not dog fish, and disappointed too in a dolphin being so tiny and not understanding why I laughed so much in the way we don’t understand adult laughter at the age of 6 and a full half, when thinking ourselves at least more than fully half grown. After the dog fish, Quentin Blake at the Hastings Contemporary and Alexander resolutely unimpressed, having expected a full catalogue of Roald Dahl illustrations and not these later life works, some fanciful, others fully menacing. Then all of us too tired, hungry, grumpy, to walk home without stopping for lunch first, then me, off and out to an opening.

First time out in a new town. Terrified in advance of moving here that there would be nothing to do. Spoilt by the choice of London, and made sniffy too by it. But down the steps into a disused Turkish baths, white tiled walls bordered with blue, studio space of a one time neo-naturist. Hanging on the cold walls, huge paintings in azure, almost Yves Klein level of blue. And I do not agree with Maggie Nelson when she says of IKB79 there is such a thing as too much blue, although these paintings have a startling, insistent quality. Uncertain now that the eyes did not follow me around the room. A film from the year after I was born, and recently banned by a gallery after being enhanced by the BFI archive, playing on one wall. After, a conversation about frames of reference. In the film a woman’s body lies in leaves, but the woman, very much alive and alive to the fact she chose to put herself there. Thinking on the walk home as the fog swallows the road of Lynch and Twin Peaks and specifically Greil Marcus’s Picturing America, the uncanny, the unhomely, the domestic as the site of the greatest horror. I wrote a horror novel like this, by mistake. As if an instinctive deep knowing. As if I had not spent my childhood knowing this. Not that I will reference the mistake when I talk about it later. Think too of Vladimar Johannsson’s Lamb, and how startled I was by the dead child being called Ada as the dead child in Ava Anna Ada is also Ada. These names, cropping up all over the place.

Home and tired; too tired almost to think, certainly to write well, that loose and loosening feeling after so much air, and the air here is fresh in ways I am unused to. The children, also unused to it, sleep later than before. I can barely remember my dreams, the nightly insomnia I didn’t see as a London problem, recedes. Pick up Auster’s Baumgartner and try to concentrate. A little book. Strange book. The first thirty pages making me forgive what comes later, which is difficult and meandering and at times laborious but also endearing, in much the same way old men and their stories are and in this way Baumgartner comes to life, is living and breathing as he tells me about his dead wife Anna. And I have an Anna too, who used to come to me when I played Nick Cave in my headphones late late late at night, incanting all the grief I’d ever known to write her. The darkness bringing my worst fears alive. I can not listen to those songs now. There are two pages of the book I can barely stand to read. Sometimes, I am asked at events or in interviews or more often, when teaching, about the difference between writing fact and fiction. I reply there’s little difference between the two. One is true, the other is not. Which is more true than the other, no one has asked yet. Please, nobody ask.

Too tired to concentrate, flick back to page 24 of Baumgartner …until they were married five years later and his true life began, his one and only life that lasted until… and this sense of a few years ago walking down steps into another basement and leaving that night knowing that something else had begun, that in walking down those stairs that night I’d walked, accidentally but certainly, into a different life, a strange thing to feel and even stranger thing to admit outside of a story, especially after a lifetime of struggling with faith, to finally put faith in happenstance or kismet, or just pure bad luck perhaps, depending what way you look at it - no, Baumgartner says to himself, you mustn’t go there now, you sorry bag of shit, suck it up and turn your eyes away…or I’ll strangle you to death with my own two hands.