St Paul's, 22.04

Do You Believe in the Absence of Evidence?

Through each gap in the buildings, there it is, St Paul’s. Dominates this whole area. Even at night, lit from below, still startling white. Much bigger than you think it’ll be. For a while, two summers ago, I had to keep visiting it. Lose your faith once and you’ll discover how hard it is after to put your faith in anything at all. I didn’t know this to be true until that summer, when I was rewriting and rewriting and rewriting The Last Days. Eva Hesse, in her diary speaks of the compulsive need to return, suggesting we do it in the hope of a different outcome. I wanted, still want, to have been able to write a different ending. I returned to St Paul’s all that summer, some comfort in its continued existence, in the capacity for belief to create something that solid. Men, stone, faith. It would be a nice neat circle to say it restored my faith in something. It didn’t. Faith is deferral, delay; is future tense, and I like the present tense too much. A day so long my feet hurts, my head too full of every, and there were many, conversation. A showcase at my publisher and so many new books and all of them so varied, a lot to take in especially after lunch with an old friend and the kind of conversations you can only have when you’re firmly at ease and each of you throwing reading recommendations at each other across the table, and then sitting listening to all these forthcoming titles, evidence of faith in action at some point - see, maybe I do have it, or at least the temporary capacity for it, sometimes, just enough - and all evening through the window just to the right of where I’m sitting, St Paul’s, and sometimes I like to pin the overwhelming strange desire I had for it all that strange summer on what happened afterwards, which is to implicate it in more than a building can be blamed for. More conversations afterwards and then out into a November evening that’s not nearly as cold as it should be and more goodbyes and then, there, St Paul’s from the top deck of the number 4 bus and London so full of light pollution I find I suddenly miss the stars after less than two weeks of having them back, but past old haunts. Who’s haunted, who haunts, not clear cut. David Holmes still playing in my headphones, recall an author saying on stage earlier, it’s been proven you can only have a thought unless it’s prompted by a memory. Confirming what I’ve wondered for a long time, that the mind’s eye is limited by what the mind’s eye has already seen, and what we like to think of as the boundless nature of the imagination is in many ways bound by what we already know. Frames of reference again. I was so bored when I wrote a memoir or at least by the time I’d written it 12 times. So sick of I. So sick of my own past. So sick of my self. The spacing here is deliberate. All my thoughts during that time prompted by specific and limiting memories. Even my dreams looped and repeated. Bored me to tears. Trauma they called it. Which is maybe why post memoir, new memories seemed essential if I was to think new things, new memories were only made possible by new experiences, new experiences to make new thoughts to make things from, which is a more pleasing circularly than St Paul’s restoring my faith although the real story is, see, definitely, against all evidence, somewhere, I must still have it.