In the past couple of weeks, I’ve felt like I’ve been in a topsy-turvy world, where time has warped, like I’m in several time-zones at once. Sudden jolts of memory; abrupt, clarifying insights; dreams that seemed to narrate, weirdly succinctly, long arcs of time; waking up in the small hours gripped by something decades-old. And I’ve been writing! Thank God, I’ve been writing.
I framed a photo of my friend Claire the other day, and put it up in the hallway, the hallway I walk up and down incessantly. It’s a photo of another photo, a framed photo, from when she was about nineteen I think. I took the photo of the photo in Claire’s parents’ house, the day of her funeral in 2016, in a quiet moment when I stood in the corridor between two rooms, looking at her lovely face. We’d been friends since 1984, since we were eight. She struggled immensely, and it often became too much. This time, it worked, and she is gone forever.
Her death opened a kind of chasm in me. I’ve spent quite a lot of time wondering, over the years, what I lost in her – Freud writes in Mourning and Melancholia that the mourner may know ‘whom he has lost but not what he has lost in’ the dead. Claire was an important element in the chain linking our French-speaking childhoods elsewhere to our lives here, in this country that isn’t quite ever home. When she died, the form my suffering took uncannily repeated the suffering I experienced about fifteen years earlier, after a different kind of loss – which I think in turn sat on top of another loss – of home, of language – which, no doubt, sat on an earlier, more primary loss, a loss lost to my conscious mind. (Melanie Klein thought that losing someone revives all the earlier losses that one has experienced and attributed to one’s own destructive impulses. Loss or separation revives earlier anxieties about injured and damaged objects, objects we may have injured or damaged.)
The abortion I had in my early twenties was a loss I couldn’t register; a loss that couldn’t be acknowledged or marked, either individually or collectively – not least because it was a loss I myself chose to experience (though I hadn’t anticipated experiencing it as a loss). But this is how the identification worked: I’d died, I think, with the imagined baby, in the years afterwards. If, as Darian Leader argues in The New Black, the mourner has a choice between symbolically killing the dead and dying with the dead, I definitely chose the latter. Killing the dead is such a central part of many cultural forms, whether it’s burial rituals, or zombie narratives, because in order for the living to feel secure, the dead have to die twice; biological death is not the same as symbolic death, and yet both are needed for mourning to unfold. (One of the many reasons the horrors being meted out in Gaza are so crazy-making is the lack of symbolic registration of the deaths as deaths.) The melancholic, however, dies with the dead – which also means that the dead cannot be killed, and the mourning process is blocked. (Something I rarely say, but occasionally think: Unmastered was not just, or perhaps not even really, a book about sex. It was a book about death; it was, in part at least, my attempt to register a loss; it was my way of mourning.)
The melancholic is stuck, then, between two worlds, between the dead and the living. I don’t know that I’d diagnose myself as a melancholic, but recognising an aspect of oneself in the psychoanalytic literature is sometimes a painful, funny, jolting part of this work. Darian writes about the ‘morning agonies’ (the ‘mourning agonies’?) of the melancholic: ‘why is waking so difficult?’ Perhaps because it means, in the words of one of his patients, ‘passing from one world to another’ – the worlds of the dead and of the living. I underlined that question – why is waking so difficult? -- twice in my copy, and I laughed while doing it, thinking of Lytton Strachey who once wrote that ‘the horror of getting up is unparalleled; I am filled with amazement every morning when I find that I have done it.’ I may have identified with a dead baby, but I sure as hell identify with Strachey too. The agonies of morning!
But, look, I was going to write about writing, and then death came breaking in! * Recently I’d been bemoaning my lack of writing – I’m not writing, why am I not writing, what if I can’t write – but then, somehow, the dam broke, and now things are flowing again. I’m savouring the moments of absorption I’m experiencing in the writing, and savouring that delightful version of irritability, the kind when you’re itching to be back at it, when your mind flits away, in conversation, to the words, the shape, the thing.
I always laugh when people ask me about my ‘writing process’. Let me try to set it out here. Mainly, I read. I take notes, I jot down thoughts, usually in various disorganised places that I then struggle to consolidate and combine. I annotate books excessively, in pencil. A first round first, but if later, I return to a text (I often return if it feels important) I have a second round on it, inserting arrows pointing into the text to try to make salient the bit that, really, really, matters. Later, I might go back again, and it’s in the later iterations that I do something I find a bit shameful: I sometimes use a pen. These are ways of trying to make visible for myself the layers of my own thinking, my own interactions with the text. No, this is it! The important bit!
Then, sometimes, I find myself writing. In little bursts, messy chunks of thoughts that sometimes feel just like notes to self – an email I send myself, or a note that looks like an instruction about what to write about later when I’ll really be writing. But it’s often in these moments, the moments that don’t really feel like proper writing, that something good comes. It’s when it’s off-the-cuff, not too self-conscious, when I’m off-guard, when my super-ego has taken its eye off the ball. It’s rarely when I’m acting how my super-ego tells me a writer should – sitting up straight at a desk or in a library, concentrating, being methodical. It’s usually when I’m sitting cross-legged on the sofa, at night, listening to music, like I am now, no doubt storing up hip flexor pain for the next day.
At some stage in all this, I start thinking I need to start writing properly. I feel I have nothing, I am convinced I have nothing. I berate myself for not having anything, I feel like I’m starting from scratch, and I genuinely believe I am. All I am aware of is the lack of writing. I make myself sit down and try to start writing properly. But I get stuck, it feels wooden, everything feels heavy, and I become convinced that’s it, I can’t write this thing, I’ll never write another book again. I can’t write, I say, I can’t write.
Usually, though, at some point, the gears change, something moves, and writing starts to arrive. It usually happens after I’ve resigned myself to not writing, and after I’ve decided to just enjoy myself reading, and looking at art, taking things in, and not worrying too much about what I’m putting out. And that’s what happened a couple of weeks ago. I just stared to feel the pull, and it drew me closer, and now I’m writing, and I’ve been laughing at myself – look, there’s no need to panic! This is what happens! There are phases where you’re not writing overtly, where everything is happening under the surface, it’s OK! There’s not much writing, and then there is writing!
But the reason I get nervous when I’m not writing is that I have had phases of being really, deeply stuck. Years ago, I had a draft of a book that just wasn’t a book yet – but I wanted it to be, and I couldn’t see clearly that it wasn’t. I just got stuck. I still am not sure quite what happened, or what made me able to start again, differently, anew, and to write what turned into Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again. Some of it was circumstantial: MeToo certainly galvanised my thinking, clarified some of my preoccupations. And I don’t think writers have to be writing all the time; we are not machines. But I also look back now and think that I was stuck because I was unhappy, because I was realising I had made a mistake, that I had married the wrong person, that wrong life cannot be lived rightly, etc. I didn’t change my life – how I wish I had in moments! – but I funnelled all of that into a book that, actually, I am really proud of. Sometimes books substitute, in writing, for a problem that feels unsolvable in life.
Anyway, the point is, one has to constantly pass from one world to another, constantly move between the dead and the living. I hate it when I feel the melancholic tone emerge in me, but it’s probably no good to deny it. I sometimes feel it – the pull of the dead – like the drag at your body when you’re in the sea; you know, when the water is rushing, trying to push through you, almost, but has to divert itself around the obstacle that is you, and you can feel it wanting to pull you away with it. That pull appears in my dreams often: impossible seascapes, with paradoxical structures, water moving upwards, swimming upstream, shores that become seas that become shores again. These days, I stand in the shower every morning, after the morning agonies, turning the water up so hot it almost scalds, and then I turn it to cold, really cold, and I say to myself as I gasp in the shock: I can do it, I can do it! It makes me laugh, it seems silly, but it helps. Something in me wants not to write, but sometimes I think that part of me has to exist in order to create the friction against which the other part of me can scratch.
This weekend, I went to Leuven to give a keynote at a public philosophy festival, and on the way back to London, I spent a few hours in Brussels. I went to my favourite flea-market, where I used to spend most Sundays for years, picking through objects and vinyl before having lunch at one of the ramshackle cafes nearby. I fell in love, this time, with some plates, and as I contemplated the stack of them, wondering how much more difficult I’d be making my journey home if I bought them, I thought, fuck it, difficult is fine, and I lugged them back to the station, and now, because Claire was home, I think of her every time I use them, and I’m really fucking excited about this book.
* Virginia Woolf: ‘I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.’
a wonderful piece of writing, so clever and utterly true and it chimed with me in so many ways some of them too personal to go into but reading your words made me start thinking hard (a very helpful way to start my day) and keep on thinking ...! and i'm so sorry about your beautiful friend
Thank you for this beautiful piece. Oh this a hundred times over (including the hip flexor pain!) ‘But it’s often in these moments, the moments that don’t really feel like proper writing, that something good comes. It’s when it’s off-the-cuff, not too self-conscious, when I’m off-guard, when my super-ego has taken its eye off the ball. It’s rarely when I’m acting how my super-ego tells me a writer should – sitting up straight at a desk or in a library, concentrating, being methodical. It’s usually when I’m sitting cross-legged on the sofa, at night, listening to music, like I am now, no doubt storing up hip flexor pain for the next day.’