the … (2)

meandering, endlessly avoiding putting words onto the screen, onto the paper, with the keyboard or the strange Taiwanese fountain pen that was given to you by your son, avoiding the writing of the poem… avoiding the writing of the story of Me-Ti, perhaps she shouldn’t have had a child? The Taiwanese fountain pen is broken, the plastic has broken, cracked and shattered with age… an expensive piece of fast tech, built to collapse and decay. They should have made it out of brass or aluminium. Things are falling through the cracks of space and time, vanishing, things to do with the empire of things, language and material(ism) tells us that all empires end… One day I felt an urgent need to go to the covered market at South Th… A covered market in N9, it was a place where the illicit medical operation took place decades ago after I was injured in a riot. For some reason I really wanted to return to the street, the market, the building, but not into the place where the anesthetic was administered and afterwards bandaged, being pumped full of antibiotics. It was because I was hoping that remembering the traumatic events, waiting for the police to arrive to arrest me, they never came, would cancel my my my present grief and sadness. I got out at the Angel, walked along the main street towards a square whose name had recently changed. What was it called before ? Upper Square? I went into a shop and asked the convenience store woman where the market was? She stepped outside and pointing along the road told me to walk down this side of the road and to walk down the passage north, It has a white and blue street sign, slightly faded. When i got there, i could see the polish church further down the road. Along the passage the walls were gleaming white. And there it was, the entrance. An unfamiliar list of people living in the building. The doctors and nurses had all vanished, I wondered where they went to. I stood opposite the entrance and thought about my leaving after the operation, the IV drip, the antibiotics; “I was here once” I thought. The difference between this and the things mentioned earlier, the feeling of disbelief that I had been here then. I am not the only person who has returned to the scene of after-the-crime. I wonder if the reason I am writing this auto-fiction is to remember the damaged people we left behind, perhaps others felt the same, did the same things, perhaps it was unusual for them. All they ever did was read about the events. Reading about it is not the same as having a fidelity to the event. Perhaps we shouldn’t have tried to make things better […] It is april now, i get up in the morning without thinking about her. Everyday life’s small pleasures have begun to happen again, people, cinema, galleries, new writers and books, drinking coffee. has become normal again. We live after passion, post passion, one foot in passion the other far away , somewhere else. Soon even the discontinuity will have ended He, she , it will say goodbye, the end, gone, vanished and about to be forgotten, I will try to maintain my fidelity to language, counter-memory and practice, and think of her waiting for the doorbell to ring and then joining her clients in the consulting room. It is decades since the illegal operation, the week in a dark hospital. Eventually leaving in a car. Where have you been? I was ill, I said. Why didn’t you tell us? I was ill. I said. My answer was unsatisfactory for them, they wanted something more redolent of desire, as if I had spent the week having sex with one of the nurses. I was ill I said, avoiding the wrong sort of trangression…

How to write the story of Me-TI? It has little or no meaning to the world we live in…