Monday. I was planning to write about David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, and then I went for a walk. The weather is mild and always as grey as a European winter sky. Rain on Monday certainly helps to start work, except that I hung on to my desk all weekend to page a report from a large company. So I hardly had any breaks even though I reserved the evenings for myself. Anyway, like on weekdays. I’m having trouble getting to work this morning.
I had many more dreams last night. My former publisher told me that he was going back to work because of my novel, which he absolutely wanted to publish. However, he gave me a text full of corrections. The book invoice was already decided. Something black, almost morbid. I announced the news to those around me who were showing only polite indifference.
I could have dreamed of Lindsay’s novel, written in 1922, which I had already read in 1982. I remember the date, because I was in philosophy at university, and I was hanging around pretty straight friend to whom I had lent this book, and who admitted to me that they had read it twice in a row because it had upset him so much.
Lindsay’s destiny surely appeals to me. He had no success with this novel, died shortly after suffering a nervous shock following the bombing of his house during the Second World War (he was in his bath ! But he died of a bad injunction to treat an abscess in a tooth. Little misery, you know).
Yet, this Voyage to Arcturus is considered a flagship novel of fantasy, philosophical and science fiction writing. Tolkien loved this novel very much.
It is this kind of writing, I think that I would like to infuse into my own texts. For the past ten years or so, I have had a subject on my mind, a kind of journey through twelve particular kingdoms. The idea may have grown unconsciously from reading this novel.
I don’t consider myself a great screenwriter, or even a great intellectual. I’ll never write next Ludlum or Follett. It seems to me that my life only takes care of itself, of its moods. I have excellent sensitivity for human things, and I am ready to see the wonderful in the mud. I am probably a child who is already too old to grow up.
Anyway, my walks make me more and more vague in my soul. My hours are complex swells, often magical, but often melancholic. I move from one idea to another, and sometimes, against all the odds, a song moves me to the point where my throat is tied.
I am currently at the surface of my skin and objects, people, burlesque or passing by, can be captured indiscriminately. I am no one. And waiting.
