What is your terry-torry – as a writer, as an ahrhrtist? I suppose (trying not to be dishonest) mine is people who have enough free time to think about themselves as people. You might say it’s identity, but it seems to me that anybody making any kind of art is concerned with identity. Better to say (at least recently, my last few novels) it’s consciousness and time – Boom, I said it. Being and Time. (34 weeks.) Sein und Zeit. Or that’s the way it goes when I’m concerned with it, rather than being pulled along by a story or formed by a form. This could be reduced to, ‘How people get through the day.’ Overall, it’s less about consciousness than the escape from consciousness, consciousness overcoming consciousness to become… I don’t like continuation dots. I don’t like how they look on the page. For me, it’s hard to read writers (Céline, Miller) who use a lot of them. And I particularly disliked those three dots just then. My territory is – like all writers – the page. I try to get readers from the top of one page to the top of the next page: with something happening in between – happening to the language, the characters, but also the reader. I called it ‘headfuck fiction’ once. (Wishing that wasn’t offputtingly sweary.) Under the headline EVERYTHING COULD BE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, and American sub-head, ‘Reader realizes, their consciousness is unique but not definitive.’ And the follow-up story, NOTHING IS INEVITABLE JUST BECAUSE IT EXISTS IN ITS CURRENT FORM. ‘You are not inevitable, neither are your clothes. Neither is your God, nor the way you see the colour green.’ If I wanted a description of what I have always wanted from books, it would be for them to help me to not be me. To be anything other than me, to be anywhere other than where I am. (The further the better – hence sci-fi and fantasy, Emily Brontë and Keats.) And that’s what I’ve tried to write. In that way, my territory is what is not my territory. I try to write what I shouldn’t have written, what I shouldn’t be able to write. Because the voice comes from away from me – away from the desk. Yet the desk is where it happens. ‘Morning,’ to Leigh as she goes downstairs – I got up early to write this before I was too conscious or self-conscious to write it. I slept badly, thinking thinky thoughts – tiny thoughts.
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