In my end is my beginning

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Every year is getting shorter
Never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught
Or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation
Is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over
Thought I'd something more to say

I shall have to stop again: to put this blog into hibernation. If I do not stop here, I shall never start again elsewhere: there is writing that needs to be done, in the sense that I have a need to do it. To start it, to complete it, to see what happens to it subsequently: to see what happens to me subsequently and to find out who I am now. What I have to write, I think I know. Whether I have still the words to write it - I do not know. I think I do. One loses confidence in words, loses control of them, as one gets older, changes, becomes less certain of oneself.

I wrote a book ten years ago, expecting it to be followed by another and another: but no sooner was it published than the world exploded and I fell through the fissures that opened up beneath me. I fell and kept on falling: and became so used to the fall that I could never be sure that it had actually stopped. When one cannot be sure of reality, or of oneself, one cannot be sure of the meaning of words either: nor can one be confident how they will be received. Or whether they will be heard.

So, lacking belief in the existence of an end, it is hard, hard beyond explaining, to begin, since one finds oneself changing ideas and intentions, putting off time and again the moment when one starts, searching for exactly the right way or expressing something of which one is no longer exactly sure:

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.

I think I still have something that I want to say, or something that I am grasping towards saying. I think that I am disposed to say it, if I can find out what it is. I can start now or I can never start. I can write now or I can never know whether or not I would have written

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.

I shall say it again. I need to write. Or I need to find out if I can write.

It is done, it is enough. It will do.



[Note : I can occasionally still be found here.]