I am reading another French so-called new novel, this time from 1956, entitled ‘L’Emploi du Temps’ (The timetable/The Usage of Time), by Michel Butor. It is about a Frenchman who comes to work in a Northern industrial city called Bleeston possibly based on Manchester. There are passages concerning what he gets to eat as he goes around this town (this is the 1950s).
‘Il y avait un peu de soupe, un peu de poisson frit, quelques pommes de terre dures, la bouteille de sauce rouge sur la table our assaisoner, un petit pain rond de la taille d’une balle de tennis, une tasse de the, et our finir une patisserie justement nommee eponge, couverte de cette immanquable creme couleur de jonquille fanee, qui laisse dans la bouche un gout de colle.’
(There was a bit of soup, a bit of fried fish, some hard-boiled potatoes, a bottle of red sauce on the table by way of seasoning, a round little bread roll the size of a tennis ball, a cup of tea, and to round it all off a dessert with the name sponge, which is always covered in that cream that has the colour of a faded daffodil and always leaves the taste of glue in your mouth.)
No matter how unappetising this description, it manages nevertheless to give rise within me to a desire to eat sponge cake (the French translation of ‘eponge’, which is really just the word for the substance we mostly see in the bathroom, conveys the Frenchman’s bemusement as to the nature of this mysterious grey pudding}. Still, it is enough to do the trick for me. At the first opportunity I am at Greggs looking for the nearest equivalent for ‘eponge’. Nowadays it comes in the form of ‘Tottenham cake’. It is the same grey cake but given a gaudy pink icing top. This I have been programmed to like. I buy. I consume. Am satisfied.

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I finally finished reading the Alain Robbe-Grillet novel ‘Les Gommes’ (The Rubbers or Erasers) last night. It had taken me many weeks. ‘Les Gommes’ is a French nouveau roman or new novel, a school of writing from the fifties and sixties which delights in painstakingly technical descriptions (at the time they were referred to as ‘chosiste’ or ‘thingist’, so much did they engage in the description of inanimate objects). This was a pretty good read but rather difficult for me when I would mostly rather snooze. It tells the story of a detective sent to investigate the murder of a man who is not in fact dead. The detective ends up killing the man, so becoming the murderer of the man whose murder he was investigating. What’s more, the man turns out to be his long-lost father, so making the novel an Oedipal story.
I am rather proud that I persisted in the reading of ‘Les Gommes’. These days I tend to drop texts that do not rapidly seduce me with their charm. And these days this is often depicted as a sign of high competence in itself. I was recently sent a book on how to talk about books I have never read by my friend Eileen, who has certainly got my number on this. It is as if being able to convince an interlocutor that one has actually read something when one has not is a preferable skill to actually having read the book itself. It may well be so. We live in a social world where convincing others is more important than convincing oneself. To be honest, when I am reading, half the time my mind is wandering anyway, so I am not picking up on the details. And yet, even when you are doing this there is a kind of backwash of words that will orientate your mind-wandering. It is like when you listen to a piece of symphonic music, where is your mind supposed to go? There is no meaning manifesting itself. It is just a colour-filter for your mind. The same old thoughts but in a new shade of green or purple. Maybe that way you make more sense of them, or, at least, another sense.

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I got ants in a cupboard. People were surprised when I told them. It normally happens in Summer, they said. It must have been the top shelf with all the recent cake-making ingredients: various types of sugar (caster; icing; golden); flours (self-raising or idle); syrup and treacle; chocolate bits. Anyway, there were little detachments of ants making their way vertically down the cupboard unit. Intrepid scouts out in search of new territories invading various surfaces. They had even made the giant leaps across the grand canyon floor onto the table top on the other side of the kitchen.
I was told about ant bait. You set it down. They taste of it and find it good and so bring it back to their colony where the queen herself and her drones taste of the nectar. It kills them in their own home decimating the colony. The next day after application of the bait there was not an ant to be seen. They had all gone home to the back of the wall to die. I imagine their civilisation wrecked. Where there was life now was only death and decay. The pillars and topless towers fallen on one side. Boundless and bare the lone and level sand stretching far away. So was it for the ancient Sumerians. So will it be for us.
You wonder how the superior beings will destroy our humanoid colonies. What treasure would we bring back to our hearth and home only for it to destroy us where we feel we are most at ease? What technology concocted to bring joy into our hearts? Information? Communication? These twin nectars? Boundless Info-cation. The fruit of the tree of knowledge withheld from us from day one, or, rather, day eight. I always saw God the father’s interdiction as a terrible autocratic edict of enslavement. Now I am starting to get the idea.

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We had an English teacher when I was about twelve. He didn’t last long. I don’t know why. He had a beard. We were reading something in class, probably Huck Finn or something, and the word lichen came up. He lookesd inquisitively into the class, screwed his face up and said ‘what is this stuff? Lichen (pronouncing it like-in) or lichen (pronouncing it lich-in)? I think we were astounded because teachers didn’t often avow their ignorance. Some boys put him right.
When the word lichin comes up today, my memory is only of that moment. The moment resonated so much that I don’t ever really know how to pronounce it and have to rehearse both pronouncitaions on my tongue. And when I am reassured as to its correct pronounciation I think of a way to remember. I say lichen like the word like, and I I say ‘I like lichen’ . That way, I’ll remember. But then I think I could be saying ‘I like lichen’ (lich -in), as if there were a fun verb ‘to lich’. That could just ss easily be the thing I remember. When you have a ludic turn of mind there is no most logical way to remember something. You might just as well remember the most illogical or nonsensical phrase as the one that most thrills. And once you start trilling the word lichen (lich-in) round in your head it starts to feel the natural way to pronounce the word. So one is destined to find progress in the correct pronounciation of words halting. I wonder if this extrapolates into life and moral choices somehow. You may go the way that is least equipped to empower you or make you wealthy or happy for strange ludic reasons. Contrariness.

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I am a big daydreamer. When I am sitting on the tube or on the bus and look round at my co-travellers they are not daydreaming; they are on candycrush moving little icons around a grid or they are looking at facebook, seeing what preoccupations are reigning this day; some are reading, on kindle, a newspaper, on their mobiles more and more (what good eyes they must have), even old-fashioned books. I seem to be the only one looking round, scanning faces (is this allowed these days? you tell me), looking out of the bus window at the world going by, lost in my thoughts. Yes, I’m a daydreamer and I need it. I think I need a minimum number of empty hours every day to function well in my channelled hours. Even in the gym I am practucally the only one who does not take the mobile in but leaves it in the locker. As well as being the only one who is not listening to music through headphones. Again, I am searching out nooks and crannies, those places in the gym where nothing is happening. I want to be alone with my daydreams. And I am not necessarily thinking of anything in particular. The thoughts are just pinging around, colliding with each other, transforming into weird things, bending. Without these transformations I don’t think I could relax and I don’t think I could understand the admittedly limited experiences I am subjected to. Maybe people need more daydreaming. Most people have more complicated lives than I do. That would mean more daydreaming.

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When I go to the Tesco and look at the pears I cannot stop myself from saying aloud to all the fellow-shoppers examining fruit these pears are like bullets. They are all like bullets. Nobody answers me or looks at me. It is as if I am a maniac. The maniacs are Tesco. I have not tasted a pear in decades. The closest I get to the taste of a pear is in a pear chew or a pear drop boiled sweet. Actual pears, like actual apples, all come under the title of generic crispy fruit now. There is also generic softer fruit like plums, peaches, nectarines and apricots, none of which give out distinctive tastes. You are living in George Orwell’s 1984. 1984 is such a long time ago. The power that we once worried about putting into the hands of the state has gone to the huge private corporations and, more worryingly, to the individual. In a generation or two individuals can be invisibly bled of all their reaction, all their rebellion, all their critique. They can even forget what pears once tasted like.

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I ordered ‘Heine:the tragic satirist’, a study of the poetry of Heinrich Heine by Siegbert Prawer which I have a fond recollection of. What came in its place was the autobiography of Lance Armstrong from the year 2000, before the revelation of his drug cheating. This edition was in German and entitled ‘wie ich den Krebs besiegte und die Tour de France gewann’ (How I beat cancer and won the tour de France). How this mix-up happened is unclear, but the upshot was me having a look at the Armstrong autobiography. What it brought home to me is the degree to which poor writing reveals most about the person who writes it. You only need to read a few lines to get the flavour of the man: a braggard; a control-freak; a man obsessed (for whatever reason, cynically or not) with the myth of America and Texas, with the sanctifying connotations of family and fatherhood. He is right out of a cheap Hollywood picture aimed at the middlest of middle America. The writing reeks of it from page one on. Sometimes, as a reader, you want to eschew the human. You want prose that is terse and monochrome, that does not reach for the standard, easily communicated junk myths. I am in that mood at the monent and I find myself reading the French new novel, notoriously flat, what was called at the time ‘chosism’ (thingism or objectism) because of its interest in complex descriptions of objects and mechanisms and rejection of facile human interest. There is a Cezanne retrospective on in London at the moment. He, too, in his portraits, was accused of avoiding the human, of painting people as if they were ‘still lifes’ (it was said he told his models ‘Be an apple. Be an apple’). And when you look at the portraits the figures in them give nothing away, they are inscrutable. It is ‘chosism’ applied to people. Is this anti-human? I don’t know. But sometimes you just want it. You want things to be uninterpretable, unsymbolic, unemblematic, just there. You do not want the equivalent of the self-obsessed Lance Armstrong autobiography, where every sentence is screaming hysterically its needs and desires and intenions. Too much meaning.

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At midnight on New Year’s Eve there are fireworks on the telly. People switch on to see the coloured lights on their screen. Even people who live round the corner from the actual fireworks and can hear the World War 2 detonations going on all around them switch the telly on to get the authentic experience of the New Year celebrations red hot from off the telly. It is another variation on buying a ticket to go out into the cold and stand and be jostled, sometimes crushed, by a load of atrangers in a confined space where you cannot get to the toilet. It reminds me of my one experience of the Notting Hill Carnival where you have the added pleasure of thousands of people blowing whistles into your ear. Finding a toilet again becomes the main aim of the festivities. Maybe festivities should be broken down into two types: those where the main aim is to find a toilet and the others where a toilet is available with no challenges to the act of relieving your bladder. Of course, New Year is no fun for anyone. You see groups of young men hunting in packs looking for the right party. There are plenty of wrong parties with the host looking forlornly out of an upstairs window with a flashing disco light behind his ear as illumination. It makes for a lovely cinematic tableau. Those in parties will be singing ‘Wonderwall’ together at the top of their voices or (something I heard last night from the neighbours over the way) ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Boyfriends have to give their girlfriends a good new year and girlfriends have to look better than Sharon or Tracey in their contending sparkly Topshop dresses. It’s goose-pimpled legs in a miniskirt eat goose-pimpled legs in a miniskirt out there. I had heard the phrase ‘drink a toast’ at some stage in the evening and so my tyrannical and moronically literal imagination forced me to bring in the New Year with three rounds of toast with apricot jam on. Only when the crumbs were wiped from my lips was 2017 finally seen out the door. Then we could get back to reading our books on the settee.

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Say what you want about Scrooge, he certainly had a nice way with words. Christmas day. A fine excuse to pick a man’s pocket every 25th December… Die? They had better do so and so reduce the surplus population… And so my affections have always gone out to him. Especially in this time of rife profligacy when the benefits of frugality are being reassessed. They call it saving the planet, but they will only do it when it is couched in those terms. I noted a worrying instinct in myself the other day. I was buying some trifle or other and it cost £3 and I paid for it without the slightest of winces. My instinctive reaction was: it’s ony three of those minor monetary units. Hardly anything at all. Do not let it register on my inner abacus. You can see this is the thin edge of a very dangerous wedge. The pound sterling as a negligeable unit. I remember when the French franc shifted into the Euro in the year 2000. People continued to talk and count in Francs for years. Some people still do. At the time of the Franc some people spoke in old francs from decades before. The day you transitioned from one currency to the other was the day your inner abacus ceased to work its checks and balances, the day its mechanism got unbalanced and couldn’t give you instinctive winces on key figures. A dangerous day. Relaxing about money is the renounciation of a key set of values about the world. If you do not wince if you are paying £3 for anything you are going wrong somewhere. Scrooge was right.

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I have always seen the dream as the wound left by the day. Greek: trauma = wound. German: traum = dream. Its shape is essentially backward-looking. Your day comes out through the mangle. Bit-part players cast as heroes. Inanimate objects get leading roles. Your free will, your agency, are all subjected to deep and constant sabotage. It’s like a lesson in life. Vladimir Nabokov had another take on dreams. He saw the dream as the one moment where the true nature of time is revealed. For him the dream casts backwards but also forwards. You can foresee events. In our waking lives we are unable to exist within this plastic multi-directional time but, instead, travel in a sorry apparatus leading us one way down a narrow gauge track, but in dream we are liberated, conveyed in a wondrous vehicle. Nabokov’s example, taken from Freud I think, is our experience of the following type of dream:
You are trying to save someone from the guillotine. This is a twisted version of revolutionary France. You are wearing a weirdly shaped Napoleonic-type hat. You are involved in a protracted conversation with a man who looks like, say, your brother-law, or a man you saw in a trailer for ‘Strictly Come Dancing’. All the while you are hurrying to try and save your friend, possibly a monkey, from the fall of the guillotine. You finally get out of the conversation. You see the podium on which the guillotine is set in the distance. You fight your way through crowds. You knock over someone’s Starbucks coffee and give the poor coffee-splashed man, who looks likea a famous weather forecaster, some coins as compensation. The coins look like nuts and as you give them the nuts turn to dust and stain the man’s hands. He is furious but you make a quick getaway, still focused on the guillotine. Your friend, the monkey, is mounting the dais and you are still fifty yards away. You push through the crowd. In any case, how are you going to save the monkey? Monkey is surrounded by guards, all armed to the teeth with muskets. You look in your pocket for a weapon. All you have is nuts. The dream accelerates. You are on the podium. You are struggling with the guillotine. The monkey is watching you from a safe distance, laughing. What are you doing? Oh no. The guillotine is falling. It is hitting you on the shoulder.
You wake up. Your bedside lamp has fallen and has hit you on the shoulder. How do you explain this dream? Could it be that the entire picaresque narrative telescoped into one instant when the lamp hit your shoulder? That lamp fall had been prepared through countless threads of narrative from the very outset of the dream when the guillotine had been revealed. Whatever the explanation, time being squidged into a pin-prick instant or set backwards in motion, time in dreams is flexible, supple, gymnastic in a way our geriatric waking-world cannot manage.
The big identifying feature of my own dreams is the lighting. My dreams are spare; in black and white, or, rather, charcoal grey. But above the characters are thick viscous clouds of dark colour, lumpy bubbles, like speech bubbles in cartoons, that may or may not be creatures in their own right. We, the characters in the dreams, do what we can, but there is a feeling that the sinister, dark bubble shapes are really in charge.

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