Not Writing

or, moving crabwise

I haven’t written for months. After years of trying to ‘make it’ as a freelance journalist (with long stretches of full-time freelancing punctuated by brief spells of temporary or ‘casual’ employment), while also attempting to maintain some semblance of a ‘creative writing practice’, this year I have barely written a word. When people have asked why I haven’t been producing pieces at the same pace as I had been previously, I have usually deflected away from the act of writing itself and onto the business of journalism – the fractured industry generally regarded by its flunkeys to be ‘dying’. I’ve told friends and family that I have been trying to re-navigate my relationship to writing away from wage labour, in the hope that I would find it a source of pleasure again, or, failing that, find the essential practice less fraught by financial anxiety. At other times I have simply said I’ve been experiencing burn out. Yet neither of these explanations – true as they may be – fully grasp how ‘not writing’ has felt. Over the months I have been ‘not writing’, and, indeed, throughout the six months prior, I have increasingly sensed my resistance as stemming less from fatigue, than a faltering relationship to futurity; to time.

“That spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn’t see where to get to,” Deborah Levy writes at the beginning of Things I Don’t Want to Know, “I seemed to cry most on escalators and at train stations. Going down them was fine but there was something about standing still and being carried upwards that did it,” Levy continues. “From apparently nowhere tears poured out of me and by the time I got to the top and felt the wind rushing in, it took all my effort to keep from sobbing. It was as if the momentum of the escalator carrying me forwards and upwards was a physical expression of a conversation I was having with myself”. Like Levy, from last summer onwards, I often found myself crying at train stations and on public transport. This would happen seemingly without warning, a lump in my throat and a twitch in my eyelids appearing suddenly, as if from outside myself. If this was a recurring refrain however, my emotional mood music was stagnation, but of an anxious kind – a jittery, scrambling feeling of stasis; a sense of constantly trying to ‘keep up’, but also of being stuck, as if flailing in quicksand. As summer slipped into early autumn, I felt trapped in a conversation with myself similar to the one Levy gestures at – one I couldn’t articulate properly, but that was similarly physically expressed through, or triggered by, forward momentum. Sometimes I felt like I was lugging a rock around inside my ribcage, sometimes a flittering bird.

If this all sounds vague and confused, perhaps it would help to lay out some facts. So, the fits of tears, interspersed with bouts of manic restlessness, lasted for a few months, during which time I attempted to juggle deadlines and pitches and late shifts and late invoices. And then, in January I went through a break-up and moved out of the flat I’d shared with my partner. After that, for almost three months, I lived out of bags in a variety of friend’s houses, Airbnbs, and Travelodges. In February, the landlord of a flat I and a couple of friends had put down a deposit and a first month’s rent on pulled out of the agreement two days before we were due to move in. At the same time, the restaurant I had been working at closed, meaning I had to start a new job while also looking for new housing. I stashed bags of clothes in the staff room at work, sometimes not knowing as I started my shift where I would sleep that night. My friends and I sent increasingly desperate messages to We Can Properties, begging for our money back, and received no response for weeks at a time. The whole time I was “at war with my lot and simply couldn’t see where to get to”, and the whole time writing was both the first and last thing on my mind – the activity I wanted to do the most, that also felt like the most impossible.

“You can’t, it seems, take the slightest interest in the activity of writing unless you possess some feeling of futurity,” Denise Riley writes in Time Lived Without Its Flow, an essay that, through Riley’s journal entries, grapples with her grief after her son’s death. “The act of describing would involve some notion of the passage of time. Narrating would imply at least a hint of ‘and then’ and ‘after that’. Any written or spoken sentence would naturally lean forward towards its development and conclusion, unlike my own paralysed time.” I am loathe to liken my experience to Riley’s loss of her son. Indeed, in Time Lived Without Its Flow, Riley relates that her attempts to describe the temporal crisis grief plunged her into – this crisis of description and narration – are occasionally met with a false sort of solidarity: ‘You mean, like the feeling of disturbed time you get after a bad break-up, or if you lose your job – well surely that’s a common experience’, Riley quotes. Yet, without wanting to join the ranks of these “brisk commenters” downplaying Riley’s affect, I do identify with this “feeling of disturbed time,” and of “paralysed time”. The way I’ve laid things out above still doesn’t make sense to me. I’ve forced an “and then” and “after that” into a sort of forward-leaning timeline that, as Riley suggests, doesn’t fit with the lived experience of events. Truthfully, for months on end, I felt like I was suspended at the point of impact, or implosion. Something was bursting – endings and beginnings all happening at once; endings that were continual; beginnings that exploded outwards like shards of shattered glass, without coming to land. In my mind, what next what next what next took turns with what now what now what now.

“My mother left me a word in her dialect that she used to describe how she felt when she was racked by contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart.” Elena Ferrante writes. “She said that inside her she had a frantumaglia, a jumble of fragments”. Like Riley, Ferrante adopts this as a “way of describing the anguish of death, the fear that my capacity to express myself would get stuck”. Again, I was not experiencing the “anguish of death” in a literal sense, and yet, as my relationship, home and job splintered almost simultaneously I did feel a series of griefs; of little deaths tumbling together. I had a frantumaglia inside me, and my capacity to express myself was stuck, paralysed, arrested. “This ‘arrested time’ is also a question about what is describable; about the linguistic limit of what can be conveyed,” Riley writes. “It seems the possibilities of describing, and the kinds of temporality that you inhabit, may be intimately allied”.

Precarity is not only an economic condition but a temporal one. In his 2009 book Precarious Rhapsody, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi writes that "precarious is the person who is able to know nothing about one’s own future and therefore is hung by the present". Similarly, in Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant studies “the sense of the present” through the notion of the “impasse”. Noting that the term usually designates a time of dithering and an inability to move forward, she adapts this definition, suggesting: “the impasse is a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things, maintain one’s sea legs.” This feels keenly applicable to the unsteady lived experience of precarious labour and insecure housing. Like a duck’s legs underwater, frantic and constant effort is required simply to stay still. Indeed, Berlant even writes that “the holding pattern implied in ‘impasse’ suggests a temporary housing.” In her view, ‘precariousness’ emerges as a ceaseless attempt to “maintain footing, bearings, a way of being, and new means of composure, amid unravelling institutions and social relations of reciprocity”. Berlant is concerned with ‘keeping it together’ while possible relations “to the world, time, space” come apart. “The fantasies that are fraying,” Berlant suggests, include “upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy.” But, she asks “what happens when those fantasies start to fray – depression, dissociation, pragmatism, cynicism, optimism, activism, or an incoherent mash?” How to move forward? “In the impasse induced by crisis”, Berlant writes, “being treads water; mainly, it does not drown”.

Still, I feel I am conveying myself badly. Precarious labour, temporary housing, heartbreak, fraying fantasies, what does this have to do with writing? I can only approach it sideways. In Notes Made While Falling, a memoir and cultural study of trauma, sickness and creativity, Jenn Ashworth follows Denise Riley’s claim that “you can’t, it seems, take the slightest interest in the activity of writing unless you possess some feeling of futurity”. “For a few months now, I haven’t even been able to read much fiction,” Ashworth writes. “I’ve gone off it.” She articulates this loss of interest as a painful revelation, declaring “it feels like this: the trick is gone, the pavement is a brick wall instead of an open window; throwing myself at it hurts.” I’d gone off writing because the trick was gone. I couldn’t write because I couldn’t organise my fragments. I couldn’t put anything in order. I had a jumble, an incoherent mash, I had a now now now pressing on my temples. It wasn’t that I was blocked exactly, but that the future was a brick wall: an unknowable, immovable expanse I was flinging myself against, which hurt.

Ashworth pulls a line from Leslie Jamison’s essay Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain, in which she describes a wound as “the present tense of its aftermath’.” For Ashworth, “that phrase is perfect: the present tense of aftermath. (I don’t know where it began! I don’t know how to begin!)”. How to get to and then and after that when you’re hung by the present, stuck in the now now now?

“If writing is a way of collecting memories, even hoarding memories,” Kate Zambreno asks “what does it mean then, to also wish to disown?” Citing Louise Bourgeois, she suggests it might mean an attempt at “exorcism”. “To have really gone through an exorcism,” Bourgeois writes, “in order to liberate myself from the past, I have to reconstruct it, ponder about it, make a statue out of it and get rid of it through making sculpture.” Creative work is imagined as liberating, but the work of liberation is paradoxical. In this construction, to escape the past one must first be possessed by it. Bourgeois suggests the act of making some ‘thing’ is a way to “get rid of it”: “I’m able to forget about it afterward. I have paid my debt to the past and I’m liberated.” Zambreno thus suggests the “remembering and formulating” work of writing may be “a way not to remember but to forget. Or if not to forget, to attempt to leave behind.” In other words, to attempt to move forward.

But, is it the moving forward that matters, or the attempt? “I am inching along,” Riley writes. “But not forward, or in any other decipherable direction. If it’s crabwise, then it's without effective pincers”. It strikes me that the “wandering absorptive awareness” of Berlant’s “impasse” sounds like writing’s ideal condition. An awareness that can both grasp and roam. Could the wandering, hypervigilant “activity of living” created by “disturbed time” actually rescue the activity of writing from the pressure of and then and after that? “At the beginning I think of endings,” Zambreno notes in Heroines, and I think of how to write in the present tense of aftermath; in a holding pattern; writing from within the wound.

Perhaps this is the same thing as saying I want to re-navigate writing away from wage labour. To wander, to inch along, is to focus on process rather than product; attempt rather than outcome. And so, like Zambreno, “I string together fragments”. I dither, I tread water, I collect material that might help to clarify things. I move crabwise. “For myself,” Levy writes, “it is the story of this hesitation that is the point of writing”.