Above this is a heading that refers to time (the date, the hour), but time has lost almost all meaning for me. I can say ‘some time ago’, but I’m not at all sure how much time the ‘some’ might cover: weeks, yes, but perhaps even months. Well, whatever it means, some time ago these words appeared in my head: ‘The never-ending small hours’, and I thought they should be the title of this book. It’s a bit of a pretentious title, and far too poetic; but that’s how the words came out, and those words seem very accurate, very true, very fitting and exact. A never-ending series of small hours is what my life is, and what it has been these past years – best not to ask how many.
Saying ‘the small hours’ isn’t the same as saying ‘night’; they look similar in the dark, but something about the small hours makes them ill-suited to life – perhaps the inexorable quality of the solitude of whoever is alone at that time. Especially if they’re awake.
(Technically, the way to refer to the hours I mean is one, two and three in the morning – but it seems absurd to talk about the morning when the sky is completely black.)
Many things happened in that difficult-to-measure time, and many things are still happening, and I feel too lazy to go into them all one by one. I realise I’m not in a comfortable writing position; my hands are in the wrong place in relation to the keyboard, the angle isn’t right; it’s tiring me out and I’m making lots of mistakes. At least I’ve noticed; it’s been happening all along, but I hadn’t noticed until now. Perhaps my chair should be higher, although this chair is already very high, or perhaps the keyboard should be slightly lower, or perhaps I should lower the armrests on the chair, but that’s impossible; they can go higher, but no lower than where they are now.
I just tried raising them a little, and in fact I think this is better, but I can’t say I’m positively comfortable. Perhaps this business with my arm position is why I’m feeling too lazy to write, though I’m sure there’s a whole host of other factors as well. Sometimes I think about writing and formulate things in my head, but I don’t write them down.
On 30 June, the year of the grant ended. Seven days later, as expected, the Foundation sent the request for a report on my activities and spending. I tried to be completely truthful, but someone advised me not to be, especially because they were asking for a short, concise report. In the end I explained that the original project had become much more complicated, and much bigger, and I was still a long way from finishing it. It’s true, but vague. Besides, they don’t care; they just need me to take responsibility for the grant I received, to show the donors that they haven’t thrown their money away. And I can assure them they haven’t. On the contrary, I think they’ve made a stupendous investment.
A strange object next to the dead pigeon, seen by the rare light from the sun on a rare afternoon when the sun was shining, and when I was awake to see it – this object, as I was saying, turned out to be the pigeon’s head; the skull, I mean. It makes sense, I suppose, but even so, I was amazed to see it was just a little round ball with a large beak-shaped protrusion, or indeed a beak. Without feathers or flesh, the head of a pigeon is almost all beak; the beak is enormous compared with the cranium. No wonder they’re so stupid.