Watching from my window I see the rain falling on a large puddle in the road outside. Cars passing. The view partly obstructed (or enhanced) by a tall tree. It must be over 100 years old.
I googled video cameras. I love existence. I remember hearing a poem read on the radio by someone who had died. They no longer existed but their poem did, as did the moment when they wrote it, when they were so alive.
My parents bought me an 8mm camera, a Bolex B8, when I was in my early teens. I shot family stuff, but one day I went into the garden and shot as I was just moving around and between and within the trees and plants. It was what I saw, it was me, the person within my mind, (there’s a word for it on the tip of my tongue). It was my existence.
I picked up The Return this morning and only managed to read two sentence, the second of which was…
Friends would turn to him [my father] towards the end of one of those epic dinner parties my parents used to host at our Cairo flat.
Well good for you, Hisham Matar, and for your rich cultural capital, and your connections and expectations… and the inevitable success that you feel you have.
There were no dinner parties in my family home. My parents had no friends. My mother was socially anxious. My father was totally lacking in any social awareness. We, their children, grew up totally unsocialised. I remember when I was about 9 or 10, the Dennis girls (three of them lived a few doors away) laughed at me on some particular occasion. I don’t know what I was doing but, as my mother described many times afterwards, the shutters seemed to come down. I went inside my self. I became, like today, a cave man, looking out of the window.
Many years later, I thought of a film about someone who lived in a room, never going out, never looking out, only seeing cracks of light under the door or around the curtain, or hearing sounds of life, and then noticing that when people went by outside the rays of light on the wall moved, like in a camera obscura. It was then that I realised that I was an homunculus (that was the word) living within a camera obscura. I don’t know what solipsistic means, but maybe there are echos. I was so alive, yet so alone, so outside of what was inside. Yearning, aching to be with people.
Just after lunch today, I got a WhatsApp from an old friend, with a YouTube attached which was Tangled and Wild by Oh Susanna. 
It totally destroyed me. Within 30 seconds I went from bland everyday world to utter despair. I went to my bedroom and cried so much, like when Lenny my dog died, like when my mother died, like when… So intense. I didn’t know what to do. I sort of got myself together after five minutes or so, and then (yes) went back to the shed. Btw, my father didn’t cry at my mother’s funeral, and I didn’t cry at his.
So back to the sentence that got me slamming the book back on the night stand and bounding out of bed. Who are these people? Or is everyone like them and I’m not? Are they the intelligentsia, whatever that means? I don’t know. But they are certainly inside whilst I am definitely outside.
I have a routine. After I have read my book in bed, I walk round the house with a torch, take the half-drunk cup of tea back to the kitchen, and put the reading light on on my desk. This morning I thought for the first time that maybe now in the early hours I should write. I almost immediately gave in and started doing something else.. at least until that WhatsApp arrive, but even then I got back to it. But the curfew for hacking is 5pm and I always stop. Tonight, I felt calmer than usual. I had a drink, put on a record, and was looking out the window when I noticed it was raining.
Going to cook now. But reading this through, the big question is what was “like when …” that is so Tangled and Wild. (Cue. It’s happiness and joy that trigger my warded off emotions). But I prefer another version, which is more lyrical and reminds my of the 8mm film I shot in the garden. (Can’t find the link)
It’s the Lebanese lamb again, so it will take an hour to cook.
I had a friend once, a psychologist, who went on to work for the CAB. Whenever I would talk about stuff, she would immediately come up with a solution, some advice to deal with (and close down) the problem. I also remember being at some horrible psychiatric conference, and there was a workshop and I ended up being part of a group discussing a particular problem that someone had, and she suddenly turned on us and say “I’m not asking for a solution”.
Of course there are no solutions to anything, there are no complete answers to any emails, complete in the sense that every problem/email has an infinitive number of facets, of meanings or interpretations, like a poem. So I have no idea of what I am doing or why I am doing it, or writing it, or not. And it is a state of being that I am very comfortable with, in fact that I seek out. LOL. Having said that… Having said that, what? I suppose the point is about closing down rather than hanging around. The tidy or untidy desk. In fact I have two desks. A standing desk in my study for my left-brain neuroscience, and a very old worn and uneven table for my right-brain musings.
When I started at the NFTS in 2001, I thought that I thought visually, but I don’t. I think in words. Images are always lyrical, poetic, evocative. That doesn’t mean that I don’t like narrative film, it’s just that … When I left the NFTS two years later, broken, another flop, I believed that I had no stories inside me, I had nothing to say. Certainly I had failed to say anything in the film that I made, but in my notebooks there are so many ideas. After that I didn’t go to the cinema for 10 years, and my Eclair ACl 16mm camera now sits on a shelf, like my brother’s guitar hanging on the walk.
There are images that complement words. Sebald’s books are full of “snapshots” he took as he went along his way. If I had a simple SLR video camera, I would put 30 seconds of the rain alongside today’s blog. And a photo of my Christmas tree.
