Sometimes I try to catch myself being myself. Or I range around in my head and the bits of my body I’m consciously in contact with, and see if I can find an identity there. If a student who has never met me catches sight of me at the Lido, they recognise me. (They send me an email asking if it was me, and saying if it wasn’t me then someone else is running round South London wearing my beard.) I know that a friend who knew me would be certain it was me if they just saw the way I touch the back of my neck with my left hand, or the angle of my body as I listen to someone taller than me who is boring. Both these things are my physical mechanisms; there are ways, even if I wished to or felt it, that I couldn’t move or pose. My skeleton wouldn’t let me. I can’t do the splits. Maybe Leigh would be able to tell it was me behind a soundproof wall. I have to have a presence. This isn’t what I’m after, when I’m self-curious. And neither is it myself in language, though that’s what I’m settling for and into now. A few sentences from this page, I hope, would leave a reader who’d read me before knowing they knew who it was – even if they had forgotten my name, because they didn’t hear or read it that often. It’s that one – that one, you know, who writes different every time. Bloody hell, this is really going to annoy me. ‘Style is a difficult thing to define in any way, and individual style is harder to define than common style…’ says Marjorie, with style. But in me in me in me – what’s in me that’s of me? I go for a quick trip inside. Get nowhere. What about exceptional circumstances? Does bad toothache distil me into it? Does zazen reveal what I knew all along, that all along there wasn’t an I to know naff all? Isn’t I what we can’t help but be, until we’re not? Could I be the shaking line we form completely in temporality, a trace of every location I’ve ever been to or returned to – a fudged and retrospective signature? Each self is a distinctive failure to be a distinctive self. Our only gesture, our sideways fall.
Missing Mouse.