This morning, I feel desperate again. Yesterday’s elation might as well have happened to an entirely different person. What depths of self-delusion could have made me believe that crazy old witch in Le Nautique?
I must get out of this hotel. Luxury is too superficial to touch the real causes of depression; it conjures up the mirage of consolation and adds the whiplash of betrayal to an already miserable situation. It may be that nomadic life is our natural condition and that possessions exhaust us. But reception desks exhaust us too. Of course I love hotels. They are a kind of alienated, postponed, provisional home that suits me perfectly. I hate them for the same reason. This hotel which charmed and liberated me for a few days now magnifies my agitation. A delivery truck has just made the windows of my bedroom shake. If the slow liquid of the glass is shaking, isn’t the quicker liquid of my blood shaking too?
I have now moved down to the bar to continue writing this note, but it’s impossible to concentrate with the muted music shimmering out of the speakers like pins and needles. Only an orchestra of terrified mice could scratch out a tune at this volume, and yet I wouldn’t want it any louder.
Should I move? Should I cultivate the nomad? It would be such a waste of time, even if I stayed on this coast. There are grand hotels all the way from Cannes to Italy, vanilla and strawberry palaces in their vastes parcs fleuris, sheltered by parasol pines and fountaining palm trees. What difference does it make which one I’m in?
The more fundamental problem is the sinister equation ‘time is money’. It held true when I was running out of both, but since I sold my house I have an abundance of money and with it an involuntary softening of my focus on the neck of the hourglass. I realize that the people who really belong in these hotels – not the honeymooners or the desperadoes like me, but people like that woman in the corner who has smoothed her lizard skin with surgery and the man next to her, his paunch guillotined by the expert cut of his double-breasted suit – are really buying the illusion of abundant time, meted out to them in canapés and logoed bath robes and the swirling sea scum of ‘Fingal’s Cave’ currently being disgorged by the mouse orchestra.
I must cut through this illusion; I must restore myself to a level of poverty commensurate with my medical condition. I must get back to the heart of the matter: nothing being other than it is, time utterly smooth, utterly innocent of any possible alteration. Down there, I couldn’t even choose the time of my death by committing suicide. It would just be another moment, utterly bald, innocent of all possible alteration. The horror of that and the bliss. The compacted contradictions. Meltdown.
The only way forward is to gamble. Tomorrow evening, when I’ve got the cash together, I will go to Monte Carlo with half my remaining funds, about 1.2 million francs, and throw them away on the roulette tables.
Now that I’ve made that decision, I have purchased enough calm to write. Even the strangled perkiness of this Mozart concerto cannot defeat me. I think I should put one more character on the train with Crystal and Patrick. I like to get my characters in one place at one time. The unities. I know it’s old-fashioned, but consciousness is complex enough without characters moving around all over the place, except of course in imagination and memory.
Jean-Paul had always been fanatically curious about the nature of his own mind. At his primary school he’d been punished for hanging upside down from the fire escape, but when he told the headmaster that he’d been testing the effects of more blood flowing to the brain Monsieur Jourdan had privately predicted that Jean-Paul would become a great savant. By the age of eleven, he was eating a plate of Roquefort before going to bed, in the hope of adding to the splendour of his dreams. He had a torch and notebook under his pillow and a chewed ballpoint tied to a string around his wrist. Jolting out of his rank and troubled sleep he would transcribe his dream images before they slipped beneath the horizon of consciousness. As he grew older, he plunged into philosophy and psychoanalysis and emerged from the usual succession of hautes French schools as an advocate of Lacan and the other giant intellos of his youth.
Meeting Crystal had returned him to experiment and disobedience. The loss of self engendered by the psychedelic voyage she had taken him on in Utah’s Canyonlands had been pivotal to his development. It destroyed his faith in the priority of linguistic structures. Of course generative grammar had a hard-wired, impersonal chic, it was the matrix for making sense, but it was neither what he experienced in consciousness nor did it seem to him the ground of being.
The egalitarian chaos of his psychedelic experience highlighted the roles of empathy and analogy. At first he tried to contain this chaos: surely there were choices behind these analogies, desires behind the choices, psychological structures behind the desires, and, underlying the psychology, the stainless steel of generative grammar. This analysis made him feel false, made him feel he was resisting an insight rather than having one. It was untrue to the quality of his experience, to the plasticity of his choices, the molten emergence and reabsorption of images. As he allowed the old order to be dismembered, a new erotic order arose in which there was an unceasing intercourse between sensation and conception, the mental blossoming of every sensation and the embodiment of every idea.
He concluded that only the tyranny of talk had made thought seem like an internal conversation. He was now reluctantly drawn into a pre-linguistic realm where sensations gave rise to images and images to empathy and empathy to analogy, with words attaching themselves quite late in the process, if at all, like advertising executives promising to promote a product. The images sometimes naively took them on. And even those late-coming words could turn into sensations as easily as any other idea. If he said ‘colombe’, for instance, he had a spherical sensation, like a marble rolling quietly round the groove on the rim of a solitaire board. The English word ‘crazy’, on the other hand, ripped through him like shrapnel.
I must suspend the writing of On the Train for a moment in order to go to Monte Carlo and throw away half my remaining capital in the Salles des Jeux. I expect to be able to accelerate my production once I’ve reduced my income to a more uncomfortable level. It was rather a business getting hold of all that cash but I now have it in a small suitcase. I have to admit that I find the whole situation rather enthralling.