Tuesday 17th August 2004 - 11.27pm

Since we last spoke..

Well, one has to do something, even if it's just collating notes and sending them off into the cyberblue.

..the seductive solemnity of the half-life momentarily weakened, and I somehow found within myself enough spirit to move back to London, out of retreat, out of foetal posturing. Here I live, one day at a time, darting back and forth between tube platforms and bare rooms, quietly omnipotent jobs and alien horizons..

"And surely you realise that things will carry on starting and stopping, expanding and contracting, and that all you can hope to do is adapt until you can't adapt anymore?". "Maybe. But if things sometimes feel particularly meaningless, it must imply that there's occasionally at least a semblance of meaning darting across the days. I only want to catch it".

..wielding tiny epiphanies and wholehearted tremblings as I go. And how about you? I ask, looking away and continuing the monologue before you've a chance to draw breath. From my seat in the city I tried and failed for so many lifetimes to escape, I dreamed up fantasy futures and endless worst case scenarios. What if, I would ask the neighbours' cat - what if everything was the same as before? The unrelenting lows and the kamikaze finances..

Now and then during the day, I wonder whether my health might be in terminal decline. Now and then during the day, I'm less than troubled by the idea of hurrying it along a little.

An elderly man hanging onto a lamp post, in real difficulties, whilst a boy dashes across the street to ask for help; I walk past with no thought but for my own sufferings, and the need to avoid further troubles. If this is a sin - if I bear real guilt for my failings - then how dearly our bodies can cost us! And aren't those who suffer cursed from the off?

..or how about the progressive falling-out-of-love with the idea of making it from one week to the next? The body can only take so much. The soul even less. But here's the reality: none of it bears any relation to last time. The extremes are headier, the contrasts more disorientating. Life at the sharp edge. It's so difficult, and it's the only thing I want. I read about Italian saints and the transfiguration of Being into a struggle between flesh and spirit, a clearly marked warzone, and I catch myself nodding and making marginal notes..

Now, with the sharpest side of the illness in retreat, I find not only the pleasure of being, but the pleasure of being myself. I am more - much more - than my sufferings, more than the mannered affectations, more than the doubt. I am a delight. An angular, quiet-hearted delight.

..and even now, I'm unsure as to what kind of future there could possibly be, but I have work to be getting on with, and so many blank pages and empty tapes to keep me occupied. I should like to capture the point at which distant lines meet for a moment before diverging forever, that sense of inexplicable juxtaposition, the way you can feel context dropping away beneath you: stranger songs, the eternal Nowhere..

..who forgets so much and recalls only the insignificant and frivolous. How many phone messages niggle at my conscience? How many appointments have passed and been rescheduled and passed again? My behaviour is atrocious, yet dreamily so. Forgive me, I murmer, one foot in half of London's bad books. Forgive me, for I make mistakes. But I'm still young, and life is all so strange and new.

..and then, lost in clouded nostalgia, I print out old emails at work and read them in the park, willingly submitting to the enchanted air of days long gone. Raindrops bruise the page and I take shelter, leaning against the side of a church as I rediscover words used once and never again braved, lines written late in the evening when the world seemed wide open and willing, hopeless though I was..

And I've been chain-smoking these days - the only thing I can do - filling my lungs with air as dusty and dull as the blood sleepwalking around my veins. This is what you've lost, ..: the tiny instabilities and doubts, the eternal blanks, the deadest of times.

..and I find myself powerless to do anything but make my way back to the park gates as the storm builds, transported and a little stunned by the realisation that it was not always thus..

I did my best, I seem to whisper.

..however much the dualist blah blah had me by the collars, even then. For now, it's enough that I make it home each evening, that I have recordings of crooners rhapsodising sadness in an unknown language, that I can find sleep amidst the yelped exhibitionism of crack addicts and the sound of three or four horsemen (I can never be sure) approaching as bottles crash into bins at irregular hours in the street. For now..

Self-pity is a loaded term. It implies indulgence - which is accurate - but it also implies that the internal logic of the indulgence is flawed, which is not at all the case. Of course, a lack of perspective is implicit, but the notion that there is any kind of real choice at play is a nonsense. Who among us is capable of leaving a puzzle unfinished? Or leaving an equation wide open, the two sides loaded and unbalanced?

..

Later, clambering over the fence of Highgate cemetery and traipsing amongst the graves, peering at epitaphs and - does it matter, this lack of gravity? I can't believe it does. Life continues, for some of us: we live and laugh and make do as best we can.