Touch the text each day
A piece of advice mentioned by an acquaintance, who received it from a writing teacher. It’s the only resolution for me this year. It certainly means ‘touching’ poetry each day, and it certainly means writing each day, and not in the manner in which I’ve filled my journal, bumping along the bottom of existence, registering like an amoeba internal and external stimuluses, barely engaging, but thinking about how to phrase and how to express the things in our lives.
On the bald streets breaks the blank day
This verse from Tennyson occurred to me as I walked to the supermarket last week. The low clouds, and cold, damp, iron-like air created a day with nothing in it, encased with bars. Nothing to take into it, nothing to take out of it. A day to live in only. It made me nostalgic, though I’m not sure that carries any particular valence in this case, certainly not a positive valence other than the memory of things felt in one’s own life.
The nearest memory I attached to it was that of cycling up to the NHS Trust from Hurst Street in Oxford, in Winter. A blank unproductive activity, it reminds me somewhat of the work in Roadside Picnic; a quotidian set of activities in a world where nothing can come of what you do, you are merely shoring up against the ruin, the energy you put in is returned to you as bare survival. Transacting, but in an animal fashion.
The feeling of liberation I felt somewhere in that cell-like day (neither ‘oppressive’ or ‘claustrophobic’ seem to do the job, being redolent of humid summer days where you can’t breath - breathing here was expansive, but the outcome of it all, of life, was dull - perhaps there is an element of Arno Schmidt here as well.) … the feeling of liberation (typo: the felling of liberation), as I say, was perhaps to do with the complete quenching of the value of striving. Striving for what is perhaps the pertinent question for 2025.