The Empty Quarter

Let me tell you a story,

about a girl I once knew.

Some said she'd be famous,

but I knew that weren't true.

Only thirty pages in, but decidedly underwhelmed (so far). The writing is flat, plain, almost soulless. A Hardwick or Ernaux would have brought a different sensibility to the unraveling. Let's see, though.

What's the appeal, I wonder? As with lots of things American, behind the myth, hype and bluster there's a lot of empty spaces. Behind the verbosity a chronic lack of self-belief. Or, sometimes alternating with that, a desperate, maniacal belief in oneself because there was absolutely nothing beyond the outer shell of one’s fragile personality. The big con was always on, except it was hardly ever clear who was fooling who.

Maybe stay at the surface level to keep the nerves intact. The social world around you a performance, the mind fraying at its edges; only the body can register the collapse.

But here's the dope. The essay is, it seems, worked on for ten years and a good seven years after the last recorded events (1971). So, it's not as if she was caught in the maelstrom of the chaotic, unfolding events. And if that's the case, the lack of comprehensibility is very odd. There's either not enough reflectiveness or not enough urgency in the writing.

How on earth did the west get to dominate the narrative?

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The U.S. is the greatest show on the road...Its most saleable commodity is self-love.
—Harold Pinter.

The stories we tell ourselves, to keep ourselves going, can end up in self-delusion. The good old days, the golden period, unsullied origins, mythical time, the chosen people, the first peoples, the central nation..history and destiny have picked us out from amongst all the others, the ‘wheat’ with their sullied consciousness, their unredeemable streak of blood-violence. Our hearts pure, true, as time will tell.

But not just the grand narratives in which we find ourselves. The small stories we tell that keep us from understanding ourselves; the deft strands delicately woven together by turns of phrases, gestures, fables, grandmothers’ make-believe, cliches, words that condensed and encapsulated a unique meaning, inherited metaphors, passed down from generation to generation like an heirloom; the fictional lives we lead enhanced by technologies of isolation and commercial dreamworlds, our "if" and "if-only" clauses, the miraculous break from causality. All the lives I could have lived, anyone but myself, but myself.

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The first word, the last sentence escapes me. There's so much I've forgotten…

The oldest of stories; how did it begin, again? Which movement of the heart, concentrated in a single gesture of my hand, got me here? The oldest of human stories; how did it begin, again? The hidden streets of our lives; now a name, now a cellar. The old brick railway bridge, black with grime. There is a single medieval street that survives amidst all that is strange and new, and it is something like an obsolete word in a dictionary, like the oldest human feeling in a stranger's heart, like nothing else...

It's near the central line, off Tottenham Court Road, shrouded in a mysterious silence. You can never find it if you look for it, but it’s there, I could swear it. So, you roam around the Empty Quarter like a London Bedouin in the designated hour before your departure. The old rituals, the heart’s delight in being lost and found, the one story that endures down the ages.

I've got nothing to say, and don't know how to say it.