Always this double movement, at once too far inside and too far outside. But inside and outside what? As if one’s eyeballs turned inwards and outwards at the same time.
– Frenet
A waking, or half-awake dream. I lived in a room occupied by a man who had just died. I had the strength to look in the mirror. No, hardly strength. Did it crowd me or make room for me, the mirror? I made a hole in the door with a table leg through which they deigned to feed me. I had the cunning to grab their hands, to force them to touch my belly, my sex. Sometimes they enjoyed it. Sometimes I did. By listening I learned their methods and found my own. I learned to murmur back. I pressed my face against the mirror: my cheek, the back of my head, my hands.
– Frenet
Space
– To become yourself you must first be unmade.
– But I’m already unmade.
– That’s only half the battle.
– But I’m already defeated.
– There are different ways to be defeated.
– ?
– Maybe it’s a question of space.
– ?
– … of finding the space in which something may grow out of your unmaking like a plant that grows out of a broken shell.
– What space?
– There are spaces that free and spaces that cripple. You can be freed in the space inside yourself or in the space between you and another. You can be crippled in the space inside yourself or in the space between you and another.
– But I’m already crippled.
– Then find a better space.
– I have either too much or too little.
– Then find a space in between.
– Between what?
– Between yourself and others, or between you and yourself. A fertile space.
– Those spaces are only momentary.
– Then live in those moments.
– Time drags, one moment moves into the next and both are lost in the drag, like the spaces. All is one, all is confusion.
– You’re hopeless.
– It’s you yourself who’s made me hopeless, who’s unmade me.
– Frenet, Journal
Smoke
The aim of this journal is to end this journal. And if it was finished before it began, if it was dead before it was born? Then it should at least be aware of its stillborn state, of the life whose place it’s taken and to which it should give way. Let these words rise like smoke and the everyday speak in their place.
– Frenet, Journal
Between others
Love the other as yourself. What can it mean but that that you too are another, that love lives in the space between others? That love is a space that makes you by unmaking you.
– Frenet, Journal
The clearing of the everyday
I don’t escape into writing, I write to escape from writing. I am what writing’s made of me, what I’ve let it make of me. I want to put an end to it, to the whole paltry and humiliating enterprise.
*
I am looking for something. It looks for me too, through these words: it’s already here, calling me out of myself, out of writing. Meanwhile I write to ward it off, awaiting its arrival, biding my time in infinite detours.
– Frenet, Journal
Another
I often used to ask myself how people move from inside themselves into the world with such ease. From, say, reading a book to talking with people. How, say, writers walked onto a spotlit stage to speak about their work as if the back of the stage were part of the same space as the stage itself, as if they themselves bridged the two by walking from one to the other. All I remember from such events, which I now avoid, is what the rooms and faces looked like, who spoke, how hard or soft the chair was.
To go from your room to a place full of people, from yourself to others – as on a tightrope of unknown length, suspended above an unknown height… To hear your self come out of your mouth as if through the mouth of another, answered by yet another…
– Frenet, Journal
Kindness
I confess my debt to kindness. Without small acts of kindness, my own and those of other strangers, I’d be crippled, cowed, alone. Soup brought to someone’s sickbed, a word of encouragement, a listening ear. Kindness is the last miracle on earth, a miracle *of* the earth, stronger than the chimera of truth and the chimera of love.
– Frenet, Journal
The moment
One moment submerged in the moment, the next, empty. But the moments themselves drift into one. Does it need me, the moment, to come to itself? Is that why it calls these words forth? Maybe it’s outlived itself, just as I’ve outlived myself. Does it want to escape or become itself in these words? Maybe it can do neither, just as I can do neither.
– Frenet, Journal
I pass by
I don’t read, I skim. I’m not read, I’m skimmed. I pass by, am passed by.
– Frenet, Journal
Casting off
I learned their methods too easily: it took me years to cast them off. How easy to learn, how hard to unlearn!
– Frenet, Journal
Dusk dread
This old dusk dread, this fear of the no man’s land between day and night, will I ever be free of it? Will I ever surrender to it? The only thing that helps is to be with animals. I let the neighbour’s cat in through the window, let it purr on my lap, go and play with my friend’s excitable dogs. I walk down to the gypsies’ horses with apples. They roam free all year round on a littered field, the poor filthy beasts, they come trotting when they see me, we’re getting to know each other.
– Frenet, Journal
Nothing to say
I write to say the same thing over and over, as on a palimpsest. I write to confirm that I have nothing to say, or rather that all I have to say is nothing – that it’s nothing compared to the everyday. The everyday that this journal keeps me from and flirts with. The everyday that’s hidden in the ordinary, somewhere within or beyond ordinary life. Which trumps all. Which has no opinion of me.
– Frenet, Journal
To return to what is here
To return to what was here in the beginning, to what’s always been here, patient, indifferent, waiting. That’s what I seek in this journal. To end this journal, so I can begin to live. No: so that life can begin in me. But is this not living? No. This journal was a failure from the beginning, from before it began, it’s enmeshed in failure like a fish thrashing in a net. It should seek its own invisibility, its own never-having-been, as though it were being written in disappearing ink. To return to what was here, to what is here – impossible dream.
– Frenet, Journal
The last man on earth
Strange to see the contents of my head strewn about here, as if they’d been dropped from a pocket and lay unnoticed, like obsolete objects. As if I myself were obsolete… If I were the last man on earth, if no one were ever to see these notes, would I go on writing them? But that’s precisely how one should write, as if one were the last person on earth, as if one were obsolete. What makes a wolf howl? What makes him stretch his neck and send his cry through the freezing air? Would he still howl if he were the last wolf on earth?
– Frenet, Journal
Writing itself
The dream of writing without rewriting, of writing itself (of not thinking but being thought)… Years of treading water in language, far from any shore, have taught me better. But the dream remains, to be one with the words that flow through you, through which you flow…
– Frenet, Journal
Survival
False, false, false. False even to ask where our real faces are behind our masks… A sudden plunge of anxiety, of emptiness… My life! What have I done to it, how can I repair it?
But a voice says it’s good as it is, your very survival makes it so.
– Frenet, Journal
So I say
What I couldn’t have achieved if I hadn’t been hindered by this double who follows me around like a bad twin, who squints at me, smirks at me, leaps on my back, light as a ghost, so I can carry him through my life! I’d have slipped into the world, wouldn’t I? Straight from childhood into adulthood. I’d have been like those people who can talk and sleep in public. So I say, he says.
– Frenet, Journal
To confess!
To confess! To God — to the absence of God. To be absolved, absented from my past. To be emptied out and yet to live: what else do I seek with these words? To be given life. Words without me – or me without words.
– Frenet, Journal
Moments of undoing
Not stories, rather those moments of undoing when you’re stopped in your path and something lies before you like a challenge, demanding that you bear witness to it and let it do its work on you. I always admired people who can let themselves be absorbed in stories, let stories take them in from beginning to end, in the same way I admire people who can sleep in public. I’m always on the outside of every story, except when I’m pulled in by a passage that seems to step outside the story, revealing its meaning and thereby its meaninglessness; that at once illuminates and undoes the story to which it belongs. Often I’ve dreamed of writing a book consisting only of such passages. But I’ll never write a book.
– Frenet, Journal
Perhaps the only true thoughts
Perhaps the only true thoughts are those that have been obvious all along, that have been lying in wait for you only to show you how the way you shield yourself from them has prevented them from being revealed to you.
– Frenet, Journal
An invulnerable experiment
When I was young I daydreamed about sending a version of myself out into the world who could act without pain, follow his desires without fear, be caught up in life without being crushed by it: a self who could live in my stead as an invulnerable experiment.
– Frenet, Journal
Unhappiness
It’s been given to me to understand almost any form of unhappiness, that’s my talent. People come to me in their unhappiness because they sense I’ll share it. And when they move on, when they start their lives anew, I smile when I think of them, I want them to forget about me. I love them the only way I know. In another life I might have been a priest, a good man, instead of the bitter, remote person I’ve become.
– Frenet, Journal
The boundless moments
All my life, the feeling of life having taken a wrong turn. Youth: knowing nothing not yet having lived enough. Ageing: knowing nothing not having lived enough when young. It’s in the odd boundless moments of my life that I live, in the moments that detach themselves from the rest of my ragged history, that gather and lift me up. I do whatever it takes to summon them, and in between try to bridge my past and present, to create the link that would save me but never comes.
– Frenet, Journal
I give myself drift
I say ‘I’ to gather myself in, but as the word escapes my mouth I lose it, as I type it I give myself drift.
– Frenet, Journal
I type a few words
I type a few words, halfheartedly, delete half of them, smoke a cigarette, despair of my life, and if the right words come, if one right phrase comes, I’m found, or rather lost in a larger world, at least for a moment.
– Frenet, Journal
To lie
To write is to rewrite, which is to say to quibble, which is to say to lie. Thus to write is the work of the devil and to be written is the work of God. But to write is unavoidable and to write is also to be written.
– Frenet, Journal
Do I write or am I written?
Do I write or am I written? I write and I’m split in half – writing writes me and I’m one. Writing goes on and I’m lost.
– Frenet, Journal
This journal doesn’t exist
This journal doesn’t exist. It splits into a hundred pieces as soon as I start writing it.
– Frenet, Journal
An ordinary, artificial life
What an ordinary, artificial life I’ve led. And how ordinary and artificial it is to write about it, as if for ‘posterity’. What do I have to say? In an absolute sense, nothing. And that’s what I’m saying.
– Frenet, Journal
I read to say to myself
I read to encounter people who take life as seriously as I was meant to, whose very lives are at stake in their writing. But I hardly read, life gets in the way.
– Frenet, Journal
Life gets in the way
To encounter someone in the close distance or distant closeness that art creates is easy, but to stay with them in it is almost impossible. Life gets in the way.
– Frenet, Journal
Cave
Every word I utter to another is a call into a cave, and its echo is an ethical demand. It says: who are you that you can say this and mean it? It says: who are you that you think you can you help me?
Frenet, Journal
Impossible
This journal is impossible. To use writing, the very thing that distances us from life as a tool to bring life close, to get life back, is a ridiculous enterprise.
– Frenet, Journal
The struggle
The struggle is this: to allow all that’s said to enter into you as into a graveyard, to believe nothing, not even your disbelief, to seek no answer, accept no answer…
More and more the fragment, the fragment of the fragment, the swallowing and giving darkness.
– Frenet, Journal
Writing that writes itself
These notes my go-betweens to no one. In lieu of a line to God.
I send them out, offer them up, let them fall from my hands.
I dream of a form of writing that would write itself. Of writing without writing. Absolution.
– Frenet, Journal
All is confusion
There are strange lucid mornings when everything around me seems new and unfamiliar, like when you move into a new home. An uncanny silence descends on everything, like an interruption… I drink my tea, leave the flat and the world’s white noise returns, the town’s sounds and signs sweep over me, sweep me away, sweep away the silence which now seems an illusion. All is confusion.
– Frenet, Journal
Cocooned
Sometimes I sense a cocooned world of feeling inside me that would connect me to others for good if only I could release it: that would make the world come alive with meaning. But when others get too close, I want to float off into the world of words and images that continually passes through my head, into the void from which they arise, and never return: to subtract myself from the world until nothing is left and I’m free.
– Frenet, Journal
Walking in circles
A few months ago, out of a kind of desperation, I started walking. In the beginning I’d walk one or two hours a day, later whole afternoons, sweat running down my head. I walked all over the city, through parks, forests, industrial estates where lorries with advertisements on their sides rumbled by me. I walked myself into the ground, day after day. I’m slowly getting stronger, my pace grows lighter and faster. Our bodies are built to walk, I’ve discovered, built to find their natural rhythms in the steady pace of a long walk. I let my shoulders relax and my limbs move in loose counterpoint until I’m just a body moving through space. There’s always something missing, some goal out of reach, which is why I started walking in the first place. I’m walking in circles. Walk then, I tell myself, walk your circles.
– Frenet, Journal
Note towards a way of life: find your own grave and stay ready for resurrections.
– Frenet, Journal
It’s too late, I said to myself, it’s over, there’s nothing for it but to start to live. To wrench something into these sinkholes of time, these gaps between self and others, self and self.
But I’m too far away – or too close. The border between self and world either recedes out of sight or dissolves and lets the whole world in.
– Frenet, Journal
The young women in those tight denim shorts that are fashionable now, in their skirts, in their summer dresses. They own me, they make me small. Look at me, they say, look at me and… go on home.
– Frenet, Journal
Sleepy pubs in the afternoon. Soft drafts, light through the leaves, through the windows. Heat. I seep out of myself, float in the air.
I sit with the jobless and old-timers. Workers in splattered overalls filter in. Soon the suits will arrive and it’ll be time to leave.
But there comes a point, after a few pubs, when I can gather myself in and sit still, where I am, in my own skin.
And then I can sit for what seems like hours, in the slanting light, hardly moving, hardly thinking, half-listening to the muffled chatter in the background.
– Frenet, Journal
The old man whose acquaintance I once made in a pub, I who never talk to strangers, who am never spoken to. His lips moved as he sat on his own, a type I always ignore. The old man who became my drinking acquaintance during my heavy drinking days, in the days when I knew no one, spoke to no one, simply by virtue of us sitting in our customary seats some distance apart in the empty afternoons, who muttered soft banal words that I barely heard, and barely responded to, who was neither happy nor unhappy but just sat there day in day out, living out his time – a condition I aspired to in those days, which are not so far away, which in fact are always close behind me.
– Frenet, Journal
The concept of dignity has long since lost all meaning for me. I’m a desperate man. I live for the days of calm, between the black waves, when I can read and my soul expands.
– Frenet, Journal
Why this journal in the first place? I delete as I type, meanings disappear as the words appear on the screen.
A fat black fly buzzes back and forth between me and the computer. I wave it away and it returns. A perfect start.
– Frenet, Journal
Time to confess, I tell myself as I sit down at the computer. Time to tell the whole truth at last. But about what? The lack of truths to confess?
– Frenet, Journal
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