On repair and repair as ongoing

alternatively - I am very tired

At the end of The Last Days, I used this quote from Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark; ‘but it is for us to distinguish, to see the difference between wrong done to us and equal wrong done by us’. This idea of wrongs balancing themselves out is something that’s stayed with me in the two years since I first read it, recently, I have often thought about it in relation to harm; is the harm that an action caused balanced by the good it might do? It seems to me that to live with that kind of balance is at least a worthwhile aim.

But balance is not my strong point. When I do something, I do it hard; I am bad at pace and keeling things in the their right place, I cannot multitask or remember anything else, the thing I am doing preoccupies me until it occupies me so fully, I can’t think of much else. For the last four years, I have worked on The Last Days. First writing it, then editing, then promoting. For nearly eighteen months, I’ve been promoting it, first behind the scenes and then in public. The balance has gone.

The other night, I saw a photograph of the inside of convention of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Innocuous on its own, but caught off guard, I was suddenly back there, my heart accelerated, my eyes blurred, I vomited. I felt exactly the same as I did when I wrote the book, when I had daily panic attacks, would vomit after working, struggled to sleep at night and to stay asleep, waking from vivid nightmares night after night. I wrote the book, and as I wrote it, these side effects seemed to lessen until I got to the point where I felt nothing at all about the events in the book. I could get on stage and read the worst parts of it, talk about the hardest parts of my life, day in and day out. I thought this meant I’d unpicked the past. I thought this meant I was fixed. I did not realise this total detachment was a warning sign. In my private life, I also felt detached, numbed to reality. At first, I kind of liked it; feeling can be a lot sometimes; but last December, I realised this was not a good sign.

In undoing the past, I had untethered myself. Loss does this any way, but I think I also had somehow disentangled myself from the present. Earlier this year when a friend wrote to me, a line jumped out, lately, I have lost the thread of something larger, they said, and I knew that was how I felt. I had lost the thread of something much larger. It was imperative I found it again. Around the same time, I had also begun to think of the body as material, as something that can be bound, stitched, cut, repaired. I was not in my body, but instead inhabiting many former versions of my body, walking in rooms long gone, communing with the dead and it took its toll; how great, I didn’t realise until Saturday night, when I saw the photograph of the convention.

For a while now, I have had the feeling art is a snake in the grass. It is a thing I am compelled to make, but also a thing that carries within it its own poison. I found a notebook the other day, in it I listed everything I wanted to happen when The Last Days was published. I can tick everything off that list. But they’re right when they say be careful what you wish for. Every success is balanced by equal and opposite failures and sacrifices. In working as hard as I have for the last four years, I have taken myself back into the past so effectively I have often forgotten where I am, what room I am waking in, what decade I will walk out into. The harm it has done to me, I felt at first, was balanced by the good The Last Days did to and for readers, until I realised, it’s a book. It’s a portable thing. It exists outside of me. It will exist for as long as it’s in print. I do not need to keep hurting myself by talking about the events in it to create some good for other people.

There is now, the idea of rentrayage, which is an act of repair and mending, drawing severed threads back together. This art was practised by Louise Bourgeois when she was a child. Something broken made whole again. Not to be as it was, not to create a pastiche or a facsimile, not to obscure or to lie, but to make something from what was. I have been reading Bourgeois’ diaries, through reading them I have learnt more than I otherwise would have. I think now it is time to practice my own idea of rentrayage. It is time to mend the past to the present, and not to be destroyed by it. I need to occupy myself with something new, something that doesn’t cause me harm from the outset. For a while, I am going to focus on this, and let The Last Days do what books do, make their way to people without the author standing in for them. Before that, I am going to go camping, feel dirt on my hands, my face, cold water on my body, these things are also acts of repair. There is more to life, I am beginning to think, than only books.