Dea Ex Machina

I hate slow news weeks!

I cannot think of what to write about so I will have to resort to an oblique strategy - or carry on with something else.

Single American Person's Cliché

I have an image of a dark room in some high apartment in a North American City. The light comes through wooden blinds and throws shadows on the wall opposite. There is almost no sound from outside for we are too high to hear the traffic on the streets below. Occasionally a siren will waft up and fade out. This is a clean room - no Quentin Crisp dirt haven here. I cannot tell if there is anyone in the room yet. There is no movement other than a slight change in the shadows as some neon sign far below flicks on and off. The room is small and may be part of a larger apartment. It is furnished in a way that suggests more than the US equivalent of bed-sit land. There is a bed up against one wall, half way to a double bed but then again isn't that normal nowadays. There is a picture on the wall above the bed. In the dark I cannot tell exactly what it is though it seems to be a painting rather than a photograph. The light, which has established the positions of everything in the room, has also rendered this picture as a set of greys. There may be a person in the picture but I could not be sure. The bed is made I think.

There is a chair by the bed, a small hard-backed chair, with a jacket stretched across the back. Under then window, which is opposite the bed, there is a small dresser. On it there is a confusion of bottles and what I think are a few photographs in frames. Going closer to this dresser, I can smell feminine perfumes though there is a slight waft of male scent in the whole picture somewhere. The whole collection makes for a comforting reminder of forgotten securities. I see at once in my mind, my own mother's dresser with the green pots she inherited from an aged friend we used to visit, the tangle of miscellaneous things which meant nothing to a small boy. But this is not England. We are gathering pictures of places we can never have been to make stories out of nothing. How can you write like this? I cannot know what will happen here next.

There is no ending to this image because that is all it is. All our lives are not procession of events that happen in novels. Our speech is not the defined sentences of Novels, but the mad collection of hesitations and uncompleted thoughts which we voice. At once the door opens and into this exercise walks the occupant. The corridor from which she comes is brightly lit and changes the room immediately. The picture is first to come to me because in the dark it is completely unknown and now I see it as a painting of some hill probably in Europe but then again America is a big place. I take in this picture instantly for despite knowing that I am in control of the image I feel like a trespasser and that the occupant of this room/apartment may see me. But of course she does not. She walks in, takes the jacket off the chair and leaves. I hear the slide of the material, as she puts on the jacket while walking, unseen along the corridor. She leaves the apartment for I hear the satisfying clunk of a main door closing. She has left the corridor light on and the door to this room open. I go out into the hallway. It is well lit though in a way which suggests intimacy and happiness. This is a happy apartment most of the time. I sense that not from the walls or the light or the smell but because it is all in my head. If it is so happy then either this is just an image designed to stimulate some writing or it is the start of a story where something bad is about to happen.

I go through my life with this dread that the repetitive normality and contentedness is always on the brink of ending due to some disaster. They do not seem to happen. I like to think that I have had all the disasters in my life. There is only one really but it was a biggie. Why is this woman part of the tale? Maybe she is not anything to do with it. That is the truth. The apartment, this spot in space is the reason for being here. I cannot hear any speech in my head. My life is just images - one after another, bang, bang, into the brain. Why do I speak? I do not listen. I want a novel with no speech like George Perec's La Disparation without the letter e, a lipogram, an omission. The world is 99% in our heads. Do we speak to ourselves? How does thought manifest in our brains? Think about thinking and see how difficult it is to describe it. I think of what I think about while writing this and it flies away, turns into itself or generally becomes impossible to track. Those hypnagogic dreams are always images and yet always convey the information you usually only get with speech. One simple single second picture in the almost sleeping mind can tell you things which would take a book to describe.

I am sitting on the chair by the bed. I had to move a small photograph frame to sit down. I hold it up to the light and it is a person. I cannot tell if it is a man or a woman or if they are smiling. I could switch the light on. I suppose I could write the light on as all this is me anyway but that would be wrong. I would become God in my own world and that would make anything that follows meaningless. I have to step back and allow only what is allowed in your world. But then again, would I be unseen in this world. Already I have broken the rules of the real world. I cannot define my whole story within the rules of the real world. I should describe this place in terms of what I see and hear which means that I have to become not only the narrator but the protagonist as well. That normally means that you survive at least until the end of the story but that is not certain. Remember Sunset Boulevard? Narrated by a dead man in a swimming pool. Not Ariel.

I play with time. The sun comes up. The apartment is still; the lights blaze and all is silent. I could go to the Kitchen, make myself a sandwich but the people here would know. They could not see me before, so they cannot be aware of me at all. Anything I do must be undone. When I stood up, I did not have to put the photograph back exactly where it was. It will be returned by some universal snap-to routine in this program. I cannot delete things; I cannot add things. I have a static world and I can only describe it. Somewhere in the world of this writing, people I know exist. What is more confusing is that I would like to think that somewhere else, you can find me sitting at this desk, typing these words. I could leave this place high up in the city and use some novelistic transport to reach myself. Think of the feedback. I am writing myself into the story. I have not written that I do this but suggested that it is possible. In this world there is no difference between the two ideas. The concept of both is the same. I am describing myself here and there at the same time.

Hands up all those who hate complexity and obfuscation. I love that word. It is definitely a Will Self word. I like to think that 'miasma' is also a Will Self word. Can Will Self be part of this story? Somewhere he is waking up, taking a drag on his first cigarette of the day and generally being clever. That sounds like I don't like him. I do! A brave man who knows his own mind. I ought to read something by him someday. The library should be good - if they have not banned him for ever. I bet he uses long words, sort of Martin Amis with longer words. A Single Person's Cliché of America! I have taken the back off the world and am poking a long screwdriver around inside it. Sooner or later I will get my fingers caught or electrocute myself. We are away from the point here. See how it works but do not take it apart.