HONEY

It’s hard to know why I found myself alone in a hotel bedroom in Cyprus, but it was uncomfortably hot. I was lying naked on the bed trying to work things out, what to do next, how to develop a schema for a story, but nothing was coming to me, other than the heat. Heat and language do not mix easily with me.

The things I am interested in are generally related to military matters, sex, art and memory. I know this might appear as a curious list, but all my stories have until now, revolved around these themes. Having indicated this, I must explain that I am mostly concerned with the surface of things, fleeting moments, and impressions. I do not really form overviews in the sense of being able to communicate a picture of the world, or anything like that. When I enter into a new location, I just walk around a lot, looking at things and people in order to get a feeling of place and mood. Usually I try to look like a tourist, displaying that look of feigned curiosity, as if all things might be worthy of attention. Personally I think that tourists always appear stupid, because when they return home, they promptly dispatch such a façade, and become absorbed back into the indifference of the days they live.

Recently I have been writing about two Cypriot artists, one Greek and the other Turkish. They talk about Cyprus in different ways. I wonder if I am here to understand that difference. The trouble with this is that I barely know them, which brings me back to my observations in regard to surfaces. I think that art is best viewed as a myriad of surfaces. I am not really interested in what makes an artist “tick,” because everyone “ticks” in one way or another. When I talk with someone, I listen, but more importantly I look at their face. I notice small things, nuances, but always everything finishes up appearing on this surface. I think that art is very much like a face, so if you stop paying attention to all these subtle details, you completely miss the point. I have read a lot about art, but that doesn’t help you pay attention to it because then you are just involved with principles. I must admit not really interested in principles, but I am interested in difference. So instead my writing is about small things, things that generally go unnoticed, as opposed to issues that derive from abstract entities.

I am waiting for Haris to arrive. I have had this waiting feeling since I started to write. Sometimes I think that I should add waiting to my list of themes, but I could never do this. I am going to be shown around Nicosia. Sometimes when you go to a new city, you feel that you want to move on the next day, or take the first plane out. I wonder what I might find here. Haris has made all the arrangements for me to come in return for the catalogue I wrote for her. Also she is starting a new magazine and thinks that I might be able to write something for the first issue. I am not sure about this, but we will discuss it. It’s easy to lose your way with writing. To be honest I want to start a new book, so I am trying to find out if this might be the place for me. I won’t tell Haris this in case she thinks I am using her in some way. I accept these small deceptions in myself because everyone has them. When I am waiting I start to feel lost. If I was honest I would really like to drift around and finish up in bars and perhaps strike up a relationship with a woman. I often like to start my stories with a mood of boredom that then shifts its way into an affair. Affairs in foreign places always have certain qualities, like a cocktail that always uses the same ingredients, but with special types of shaking. Dishonesty, boredom and heat are generally my ingredients. I always use these encounters in my books. They are a cipher for me to start paying attention, to how we pay attention, if you see my meaning.

I know that it might be difficult to imagine why a character such as myself might be interested in military matters. It really goes back to when I first thought about being a writer in my adolescent years. In a way that might appear to be embarrassing now I dreamt of being a spy writer who wrote about foreign places, lots of sex and occasional terror. I realize that this sounds like I had read too much James Bond, or other such things, but the imagination is a powerful engine, so when I say I do not really know why I am here, I should talk about the way my imagination had somehow compelled it to be so. I have learnt about the deadly accuracy of the imagination over the years, somehow everything begins and ends in the imagination. I remember someone probing one about how my sexual feelings had developed and so I started to talk about how my early exploration of masturbation had always been stimulated by these moments in spy books. I now wonder if anything changes, but I would hate to think that my writing had this type of masturbatory quality. Anyway I started to read books about wars and conflicts. My interest in art started latter, but seemed to happen in a less definite way as well. It must have seeped into me because I started to think that I needed a counterpoint to technological things. My theory about weapons is that they are both brutal and evasive at the same time because there is always something that is not revealed. Art seems to be the opposite as it appears explicitly as hidden or evasive, because, or as an outcome of not having a direct purpose. I used to think that I could organize my stories around a dialectic of soft and hard, technological and aesthetic, revealed and concealed, fragment and whole, remembering and forgetting, but I less sure this easy rhythm of thinking. There is something else to be thought, as if the relationship holds a secret beyond opposition. I like my characters to reveal paradoxes, despite of how they are or what they do. Generally though, art seeks to become visible in the world, whereas military technological is concerned with being hidden. Following from this my stories organize themselves around what is seen, what is hidden, secrets, defining moments, imprints, documents, signs, glances of the eye, preservation, presentation, images.

I start to feel Haris might not turn up. I must admit to hating hotel rooms. I could be anywhere. I switch on the TV and realize straightaway that I am in this hotel room in an anywhere kind of place. The room is indifferent to me. It simply contains me.

When Haris arrives I tell her that I would like to visit the Archaeological Museum. I can feel that she is not at all interested in this because she says that the last time she had visited was at school, that they had been given a really boring talk about Cypriot history, and that most of this was really about other people who attempted to do their thing on the island. When we arrived there we walked around quickly like tourists who needed to go to a place that in other ways bored them. In a way I had my composite picture of the layers of civilizations and it was this image I wanted because I knew that it would find its way into my book. Again you can see how I work with surfaces and impressions. I could stand in that Museum for days at an end and never really see anything at all, so I am satisfied with how rapidly I have distilled what I need. With my kind of writing you have to move quickly through things. My publisher always reminds me to get the pace right. He once told me that depth is also like a dark pit that can descend into its own infinity. He is funny when he says such things because he is really showing off his education. I have to listen to him because he signs the cheque. I know he is amazingly well read, but he has this basic approach to everything as well, and it appears that this has been translated into stock phrases with a tonal veneer of wisdom added. He always starts by saying “look here,” and then I start to nod, which is obviously takes as a sign of absorption. I always agree with him, and then I continue to do what I want to do, and hope that he doesn’t notice. One trick that I use in all of this is to appropriate one of sayings into my main character, at a really important juncture, and this flatters him every time. I must say that I resent the use that he has put to his superior education. Sometimes it appears to assume the smell of mold.

I have arranged to meet various people here but they haven’t started to appear. Zayed calls me in the hotel to tell me that he is held up in London for a few days. I tell him about some interesting Greek terracotta figures I saw in the Museum. He is interested in material that is unpublished and has a more provincial feeling because he can take photographs back to Pakistan, in order to get his workshop to fake them. The idea is to take them to a site somewhere, cover them in old mud and so on, bury them, and next time a dealer turns up, dig them up in front of then, whist building up the tension to do with not being discovered, and then in the excitement of discovery, make a deal for as much money as possible, get the money and arrange the illegal shipping. Of course when the things arrive, the tests prove that they are faked, but by then it is too late. The whole operation is a kind of theatre. I do not know why I maintain contact with him, but he helped me a lot with my story set in Pakistan, so we became codependent in a way. He travels constantly and feeds me endless stories whereas I feed him another type of opportunity. I do not think of myself as a crook in the way such undertakings might signify him as so I tell myself that it is just another kind of businesses and that I have to undertake business all the time in order to get by. He likes me because he thinks that all the things that I do add up to me being a spy constructing covers for myself. I feed this fantasy that he has whereas I know that he is the one he has all these contacts with military intelligence in Pakistan but for him all the cloak and dagger stuff is also just business. We always remind ourselves, when he get drunk together in some hotel room, that everything is just business. Underneath I feel superior, because he really believes this, whereas I feel that there is something more to life than that. I know that he feels superior to me, because he knows everything is bullshit in the end, and that we finish up just having to die, so what is all the excitement about. We are friends for now because we have symmetry of contempt.

I had planned to start writing immediately but the heat has broken my concentration. I appear to be spending my time looking at my face in the mirror observing drops of sweat forming on my brow. I want to try to describe the changes that sweat makes to a face.

I have spent a couple odd days with Haris walking around and I have started to get interested in the way that soldiers move around and hold their guns. Even though a gun is a type of tool, its purpose doesn’t come to the fore in the same way. If you pick up a brush it is in order sweep, a spade to dig, and so on. The majority of soldiers here will never be asked to use their guns according to the purpose of design, and yet they hold their guns all the time so there use is also in not be used in an obvious way. To be a soldier is to make your weapon part of what you are. Haris tells me about a recent incident in which two soldiers had poured petrol over a dog and set fire to it. They recorded the incident in order to show their friends and eventually the TV got hold of the footage and it became a scandal. Previously such an event might appear in the newspaper and the imagination is left to make the picture but now we become witness to the actual recording of the event. At times I would like to be like a tourist and let things wash over me, drifting without consequence in order too forget everything, but I am preoccupied with having to compose a picture out of all these fragments. I met a woman in London before coming and I asked her to come and stay with me, but it doesn’t feel like she is going to arrive either. I wouldn’t be surprised if she met Zayed, which would explain his delay. This is the kind of thoughts you have in such circumstances. I am finding Haris far too serious. This lonely feeling has started, but it is all too common when traveling.

Haris tells me about the books she has been reading and in between I tell her about the affairs that I have been having. She has been reading books by Maurice Blanchot, Helene Cixious and Jacques Derrida which makes me nervous, because although I know a little about Derrida and deconstruction, I have never heard of the other two. I also know that I should make more effort to understand theories about writing and literature, but I am afraid that it would mess me up in the end. “Stay with what you know”, this is what my publisher would always say to me. Difficult books are like foreign countries you never visit because of the dangers that lurk there. This is not to say that I am not interested in ideas because I am. For instance I always have references to philosophical thought in my books. I have passages like “he mused to himself that if the real was rational and the rational was real in the way Hegel had supposed then why had everything gone so badly wrong.” I think that such ways of writing are possible because they bring obscure thought into the light of the everyday world and through utterance make complexity available to a common reader. After all no-one reads someone like Hegel, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t use it in other ways. Its hard work to find all the right references or contexts for such things, but reviewers like them because it gives the writing an added level although at times I like to give this a twist and turn it into fake revelation. It’s the same with painting. There are always passages when my characters might lose themselves inside a painting. There is a term for this device, but I have forgotten it. Haris talked to me about a film maker who does this a lot. I have a reproduction of a Paul Klee painting in my hotel room of a strange angel figure. I would like to write a passage about this but I am not sure how one of my characters would enter and leave such a painting. Maybe Haris might have an angle. I just hope that no-one else has done it before me. I hate to sound pretentious and I think that theorizing too much leads one into the very heart of pretension.

I thinking about having my hair cut today. Whenever I travel to a new city I always go to the barbers because I like the stories they tell. I know that they are the same stories told a hundred times, but I love this stale quality. Each story is just like eating another peanut in sequence. Again I always sit my characters down for a haircut, or a fresh shave, because it is an opportunity to sink into a state of reverie, whilst being soaked in the tone of the barber’s voice. I think I will have my head shaved this time because it will be like starting again.

Again I find myself preoccupied by waiting. It might be a really good way of starting my book. I keep switching on the TV and either I can watch a programme I cannot understand or there is a choice of pay TV. The most popular channel in hotel bedrooms across the world is the porn channel. You are given something like 10-20 seconds free before the screen goes blank and informs you how to bill your hotel room. If I could get the channel free then I would leave it on all the time so I could just get momentary glances of the action, but the thought of making a decision to bill it to my room appalls me. This might sound contradictory, but the conscious act itself makes me feel cheap and paying would indicate cheapness to me. I have this theory that pornography is really like a form of technology. Usually when something involves the human agency in acting and showing we liken it to cinema, theatre or medium, but the thing about pornography is that it is about the systematic erasure of agency. Instead it appears to happen by itself, almost as though it were simply a form of efficiency. Technology is similar, everything stripped back in order to leave a pure state of efficiency. That why we find old technology quirky because we notice all the things that are not efficient. With efficiency there is no consequence, it just works. Everything is on display, but you can’t see anything at the same time, so your eyes glaze over as if nothing is happening outside the same repeated cycles of efficient completion. Like technology, pornography covers the earth, and in so doing, becomes ubiquitous, a strange infiltration seeping into us. Having said these things, I guess I have to work out why my own writing is nothing to do with the pornographic impulse. With my entire obsession about surfaces you might suppose my writing about sex to be superficial, but I see the issue being related to how sex is. I think that I love detail and close observation too much for a pornographic feeling to be apparent. I am not saying that I like to plunge my characters into revelations about the relationship of sex to anything and everything; on the contrary I hate this in writing, so sex just happens in my writing, because my only point might be, that sex is in and around us. In some ways I use sex scenes as a way of emptying out the narrative, or as a form of intensity that interrupts thinking or direction. If somebody is having sex their heart is pounding, their head is spinning, and their body trembling, until it all just becomes a spasm of sensation. Orgasm is just the loss of composition. People often examine their faces in a mirror afterwards, just to check on their appearance. I think that they feel that their face might have been transformed. As I am writing all of this, I start to think about M. I wish she would arrive, but I am sure that she is not coming now. Instead I am faced by this bland interior.

My friends think that I lead a colourful life, I guess that I am a marvelous story teller, but that should not be mistaken for a rich inner life. If I am really honest, my life is closer to this hotel room, basic, there for use, and forgettable. Perhaps I am on the run in some ways. I make a reasonable living from my writing, I get to travel a lot, and have various dubious sidelines connected to this. I tease people with the idea that I might be a kind of spook, which always adds a touch of mystery, but of course I can never really represent the hours spent in hotels or bars, or worse still in airports. My laptop is full of information and contacts, I know how to open doors, but I have to ask whether or not this is some kind of emptiness. If I was brave I would call this book “Opening the Doors of Emptiness” and my publisher would look at me in his weary kind of way and ask me to get real. I am not really sure about these bleak moments that I have but when they happen I experience a terrible feeling of being trapped.

Before coming here I watched a TV documentary on the painter Howard Hodgkin who is having a retrospective at the Tate. He had taken the presenter Alan Yentob on a trip around India. In a way it became a story about this journey, as if moments when paintings came into being might be in turn reenacted. Hodgkin pretended that he didn’t want to talk about his work because all the many layers that each painting contains cannot be touched by words, but I asked myself about why all these pseudo theatre. I thought that everything about the programme was fake, the distant views of landscapes, the asides within the commentary, the evocation of the art of memory, the culminating moment when Hodgkin made a real time brush mark. Rather than finding his paintings as receptacles that mix memory and desire, I think of them as pleasant, decorative, and somewhat mannered works, bereft of the expressive depths constantly hinted at. I hate the attempt to use art in a manipulative manner. I think that I am always suspicious about characters who complain about not being understood. Anyway he is an artist who has used his travels rather well. Somehow the relationship to travel opens out the possibility of mixing the boundary between fact and fiction. I have noticed what a consistent trait this is with artists in general who appear to constantly develop there public persona through the blurring of such boundaries. We need the artist myth more than we appear to need art itself; in fact artists appear as fictions that also run product design companies as a side line. We seek forms of essential difference from art but we are instead given the self-sameness of commodity culture spiced with the X-factor of unique personality. I know something about this because I am often called upon to help construct such fictions. The art world used to be small scale and secretive but now it is main stream and sharp getting away with things that would get regular areas of business a bad name. I am fascinated by this transformation because of the way it appears to be a setting for the relationship between fiction and technological infiltration.

I had told Haris that I was interested in visiting ruins, so she drove me to the North of the island, were we find ourselves on a road next to the sea and eventually we reach a huge desolate space that was once a vast processing plant built by the British to process all the different metallic deposits found on the island. It is now deserted, almost like a post-world, no plants, ruined buildings, and strangely coloured sand and earth. It was as if it was a setting for a film as it resembled a meeting point between ancient ruin and post civilization. Anyway a place in which the imagination could expand across time. In a way, it was like a ready-made Kiefer painting, all the same colours, transmutations of metallic entities, decaying railway tracks, broken concrete pillars, immense scale, sublimity and emptiness. Between this site and the sea stood a small night club which was full of girls from Eastern Europe. I wondered what they made of the relationship of the sea and this site. Perhaps they carried memories of broken industrial sites with them, but this did not stop the incongruous feeling that comes with such stark juxtapositions. There is a feeling of black money in circulation, money that simply wants a fast return, without the need to leave anything. As usual Haris has provided me with a different set of images than the ones I anticipated.

I was thinking that I would have been in Kabul if Rasoul had not been killed. We had been working of various plans together including a deal in Germany to buy a concrete factory at a knock down price in order to start a development company. Sometimes I smile when I hear the word development, because it usually entails a lot of concrete. Anyway Rasoul wanted to bring concrete to Kabul to speed up redevelopment, but blows to the skull put an end to this. I had already started to write a book after my first few visits but I am scared to go back in case I am part of unfinished business. It’s a mess, but I always felt intensity to life there. Cyprus feels more like a place you come to sleep. I must admit that I am sleeping a lot here. I think that this relates to the feeling of boredom that touches me from all sides. I plan to visit several cities as part of being here, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Alexandria, Beirut, and Damascus. I remember a line in the book Mao 11 which says our “only language is Beirut.” I wish I could understand how to follow the suggestion contained within this idea, but it is too abstract for me. I have a Japanese contact in London who wants me to follow various leads for him relating to the region. In the past Japan was more or less run by American Intelligence, but increasingly they are now running there own. I think that they know that there might be a time when they are not linked to the US. Rather than follow the deathly logic of language I am following leads.

One of the things that interested me about Cyprus as a setting for my book, is the number of times it has been occupied, and the sense that this wave after wave of occupation brings with it. On the one level people live their lives but on another level there is the sense of the various intersections and proximity of different kinds of military activity. There is a lot of action in the sky. It’s not so difficult to understand when you look at the map. In most of my stories things develop slowly, nothing much happens in the opening sections. Hotel rooms, bars, visits, journeys, conversations, observations and so on, just small touches that suggest an atmosphere. Everything is as it should be. I like to start to destabilize my readers gradually, take them into dead ends, lost connections, and then suddenly change direction with a series of shifts within characters and pace. It’s important though that things are never as they appear and that even the main characters are not truly in the picture. I think that I have learnt a few things from artists about not showing too much at any given time. In fact I make it a rule that artists generally appear on the edges of my books, usually as figures who might witness things without direct involvement. This might seem odd, but one of the serious things I am talking about is the relationship between art and technology because generally we might suppose that they are complete opposites. I am constantly looking for ways to put this relationship to the test because we might understand technology through what is most marginal to it, namely through art. Haris surprised me one day with a discussion of the ancient Greek word “techne” which we would assume as the simple origin of the word technology, yet it meant bringing things into presence and so this stood for the activity of arts and craft. This is one of the ways in which my writing involves issues of memory. I am interested in the way we forget things and then stop seeing them. Spy stories are really about seeing what is obvious but also why things become buried from view. When we attempt to understand the history of a place we often dig into the ground in order to discover all the various layers of fragments and ruins through which we might classify the past. In order to understand the present we might look up into the sky to see what is happening in the air space and beyond this the satellite space. If we really wish to understand our depth we might look at the distant stars, but that is not really my concern. Life for me is just what you pay attention to, so a spy is someone who is always alert. All my main characters are always looking and recording, alert, ever vigilant, calculating, adding everything up, and making rapid pictures out of things. They like art because there is meant to be a play with things that are hidden, they like women because of the tease of what might be hidden, military things because of the camouflage, and memory because of the way it is pressed against the hidden. So I am not really your usual kind of spy writer. I like to involve these other levels which are more abstract.

Yesterday Haris had taken me to a forested gorge in the mountains. We walked up the side of the mountain and when we reached the top and could see the distant sea she asked me if trees serve to draw the light into the depths of the earth or perhaps transmit the silence contained in the earth toward the sky. As soon as she asked me this, she took a photograph of me.

When I tell Haris about the new book that I am planning, she tells me that I am really constructing a paradox, because the central spy figure really sees nothing at all. In a way, he is in the process of being sucked more and more deeply into the world only to the same extent that he is in free fall from his own life. I think that Haris is disappointed that I do not grasp such a fundamental issue as this. I wish I could go along with what she is saying because it would make the writing richer in possibility, but then I also wonder in turn, if Haris has not been reading too many clever books. I know she has been reading Heidegger a lot recently because of the things she told me about techne, but when she goes on about Dasein I really start to lose it completely. Anyway can you imagine a Heideggarian spy story? I tell Haris that her head is too much in the clouds, that she should get her feet on the ground, and get real. She is upset when I say this, but someone has to say it, and that has fallen to me. She really needs to take one step at a time instead of all these leaps all over the place. At the same time I do like to listen to someone who knows about all these near useless things because I am sometimes able to incorporate them into my books. I start to tell Haris that I am somewhat unnerved by her because I am not used to women knowing about all these abstract things. When I say this, she smiles, as if she understands something that I don’t.

I drive with Haris across the Northern sector of Cyprus to find a location for the opening passage of the book. Eventually we found this remote Byzantine Basilica dating back to the 4th C. The location had served as a Roman natural harbor and was now a location for a tiny hotel overlooking the sea. The remoteness touched me, just sea, rock, sky and ruin, a perfect place of refuge and escape. When I returned to my hotel I immediately started to write. The theme was obvious, memory and solitude. A character is in the process of returning to himself and this is the location for this to occur. “Memory is like this ruin, fragmented, broken yet retaining all the information for the imagination to recompose a picture. Within the first glance of this ancient site, he not only thought about the function of memory, but also his own memory started to stir in what was to be an almost unending process of reconstruction. If this place evoked tranquility, this inner process was etched with turmoil but above all pain. He had yearned only for the empty expanse of the sea and sky so that he might yield to the lovely blue emptiness, but instead an almost vegetative process of growth had started to develop within the sanctum of his inner space. There followed moments when he found himself weeping softly without understanding how such events come about. The more this process continued the more he felt that this process of recomposition was the work of the elements, as opposed to an internal labour process. As usual though he had made a mistake and had elected to bring his mobile phone along. The day arrived when it rang. This call would start quite a different process in his life.” I wanted to start again in the first person though. “I had discovered this remote hotel at the Northern tip of the island. I say hotel but it was just a small number of rooms overlooking the sea. It was perfect for me. I needed to start dreaming again or at least start dreaming without being invaded by that which had pursued me to this place. This is what cities had become for me, places filled with threats. I felt that my sleep was no longer my own. I started to think of the nearby ruin of a 4th C Basilica as a womb. I needed to travel back in time and this ruin suggested to me how this might be possible. I started to sit in this space everyday. I thought of praying, but I had never really prayed in my life so there was an anxiety which came with this thought, but I did feel something that I have never felt before. Instead I stayed with the idea that it was a new kind of womb that you deliver me into a new texture of time. I remember saying to myself that this was my womb of deep time. I must admit to being in a broken state, but then wasn’t that what this time was all about, broken bodies and mentalities covered over by the smooth persuasion of information, kitsch and technology. I thought of the different ways the dead have been buried and the idea that we are burying humanity beneath concrete, signs, and mediums came to me. I then knew why I needed to be here, but my recovery might be beyond the silence that was offered to me here. Silence and emptiness was no longer enough. I had been invaded by unspeakable things. Torture should not be put to easily into language. I remember as a child eating soil when I felt ill. My mother would wash my mouth out. She kept saying “dirty, dirty,” but it wasn’t dirty at all. I felt like I needed to eat the earth again. I do not know what I had been eating all this time, but my stomach sick. Perhaps eating earth would settle me again. These things had started to come to me, especially things from my childhood. I think I need to cry more, but this did not really come to me in the same way as memories did. I would often bite my lip instead. I had this image of the whole island crying together, centuries of tears being released together, and knew if this could be so then I would also be able to cry. Perhaps there should be a day of tears once a year. This is not so hard to imagine. If I couldn’t cry then while not the whole island instead. I needed to surrender, to be covered over me, I needed a womb from which to be born again, and I needed a different kind of time. I started to realize that if someone had asked me about my mournful persona that I could never say that it was because I felt sadness. I was far removed from sadness. It is strange to say these kinds of things, but I felt that pity was not able to touch me.”

I am uneasy by what I have started to sketch out as a starting point. The character is far too removed from me, so I am feeling as if I am losing control. I had formed no plan yet, even though I was the type of author who liked to control things from the beginning. I think that life as containing a vast pool of information that is possible to shape or appropriate to the limit of the imagination. All I have had to do was dip into images, conversations, information, gossip, appearances, the shape of things and a book would emerge from this. I am a story teller, not a thinker. Despite this feeling uncertainty, I felt that I should continue.

So I start to have the opening for my main character. I liked the idea of writing about landscape in relationship to this person, because rock, sea, sky could be woven into his being from the beginning. I had always attempted something like this process in my other books, for instance when I was in Kabul it was the mountains, and the elemental scale of the place, that had served as my beginning. I had once started a book on the edge of the desert in Morocco and the main character had come across this man selling wild honey derived from cactus flowers. As soon as the honey melted into his tongue something happened inside o him that changed his life. Everything in that story revolved around this moment. The book was never published because his editor thought that I had lost my way, or plot as he put it. It was called “A Taste of Honey” as a means of playing off the title of another book which was gritty and realist. The point about my character was that he had started to lose his earthly characteristics assuming instead an other-worldly mantle. My publisher told me that I was trying to be too clever. “I can’t market you as a bloody Proustian spy writer, so it is not going to happen. I want you back to basics, or out of this door.” For an extremely educated man he had an abrupt use of language, but he did understand the business, so I just shrugged my shoulders and forgot about honey. “Remember spies are usually boring people, everything passes through them, even the occasional bullet. If they are too complicated they cannot perform, so instead there is something of the machine inside them. Machines can just repeat themselves with exactness. This is how spies have to be. They are precise people, to the point of being en esta web anal if you like. Everything is one step at a time, they leave it to others to make all the discoveries, or construct the wider picture.” These final remarks depressed me. I wished it was otherwise, but he had made a telling point. I had to resort to telling myself that despite everything, I was still able to make a good living, even though at times I started to believe that I was a mere “errand boy” without the dignity of being able to name the processes I was involved in. All my worldly rhetoric has an air of desperation in the end. Haris is half my age, and even though she wears an air of being completely lost, at least she knows how to cry properly.

I wish M would arrive right now. I want someone next to me. Hotel rooms are lonely and have a smell of the wrong kind of emptiness. I yearn for some pillow talk because of its rich deposits of half-formed insights, its soft tonalities, and sometimes mournful interludes. Somehow intellect is pushed aside and instead imagination is allowed to infiltrate into the porous fabric of the language. I would like to write a book that emerges out of pillow talk, a night-time book that is stripped of the vigilance of will that patrols the everyday world of purpose, but I guess that is closer to poetry.

This is an island composed around the relationship of remembering and forgetting as much as the way the sky and earth meet. I am trying to looking at things closely, but I also start to notice that I am sleeping a lot, and in so doing, I think that I am touching one of the main moods of the island. In fact there might be a lot of sleeping going on here. My Japanese contact wants me to build up a picture of Israeli influence here. Everyone knows about the fact that the Israelis have air space passage across the Turkish northern sector, but there must be also other things which are structurally less visible. I will also use some of this material as part of my book. In the end I tend to use everything. I have the feeling with the writing of Don DeLillo that they develop out of an assemblage of images that do not necessarily have immediate connection. If I had to make a statement about his writing I would say that it emerges out of the collision of narrative and image. Sometimes I can look at single sentences and wonder how they came into being. Language is a force that enables him to assemble difference and to create forms of discrimination. I think that he is always looking at ways of cutting out sentimentality, or over easy narrative continuity, that pushes his use of language to the outside edges of meaning. I aspire to this condition of writing, but always fall short. The “Honey” book was a true attempt, but instead of achieving a break through, I was humiliated instead. There is something horrible about being seen as steady middle-brow because you live with all the comfortable advantages of having things either side of you. I hate those reviews that might pitch me between Fleming and DeLillo; it would be much more honest to say that more books aspire toward a form of literature that is humiliated by its own inadequacy.

I tell Haris about my latest entry. She evades comment. She is not sleeping at the moment, so is reading a book by Heidegger called “Mindfulness.” I tell her that I appear to be sleeping too much. I think that she might enter my book because of this condition. Her eyebrows have an arresting quality to them. They make me think about owls. Once we captured an owl in our headlights in a country road and this image stuck with me. As I think of these things Haris is flicking through Heidegger for a passage that I might use in my book. She starts reading to me. “Only an other “world” in strife with the earth could still rescue the earth from exploitation. Or is the process of destroying the earth under the growing appearance of constructing the modern “world” unique and therefore unstoppable? If we do not merely calculate in terms of centuries and millennia, and if we do not abandon ourselves so ‘historically’ to the simple replacing of one state of being with another; if we think out of the slowness and rareness of the thrusts of be-ing-history, then the giganticness of the present and the giganticness of the still futural state of the world fall together with what is tiny in the ultimate abandonment of beings by being.” I am sure that my jaw started to drop as she read this passage to me. “What the hell can I do with that,” I exclaimed. “It is simply beyond translation.” Haris just stared at me. Then she talked to me in a very slow and measured way. “You think that you see things and have the measure of appearances, but you never really meditate on anything. If you think of something as being too difficult, you just want to think of it as a rock to walk around. Sometimes language can be heavy so you have to be ready to do some lifting. I think that there is something there for you but you are never really interested in anything, unless you can convert things into clever little turns. Everything is turned into props with you. The catalogue you wrote for me was alright in that it served a clear function, but to be truthful it just didn’t touch me. Don’t be too upset with this judgment, but you do need to let things touch you more. You are too content with being clever but you lack something when it comes to the way you use language. It’s not just an instrument for use. In the end your writing is a continuation of the world, whereas it should constitute an interruption. This is a minimal condition for me to be interested in writing.” I was stuck for words. This was much more hurtful than the rejection of my “Honey” book. I wondered if Haris was both trying to hurt me, and remove herself from me, at the same time. I could feel my book disappearing inside of me. The image of mountains in Afghanistan flashed before me. Gradually I found my words forming within this image. “Cyprus is a dangerous place you know. It has a vast history for such a small island, but its museum, which is a witness to this, appears empty. It is a humiliated island because it knows no way of becoming complete again. You should be able to sleep easily, but you can’t. Have you ever asked yourself how you are surrounded by sleep, but you have become your own island of sleeplessness within this? There is something you do not know about yourself and it seems like you are not at all close to finding out what it is. I could go on, but I don’t think that you will listen to me. You were going feature in my book, perhaps as a figure that represented better things, or a least a turn from the usual nonsense. I had worked out that all my female characters were formed out of pillow talk, whereas you stood in relationship to philosophical text. Everything was held in your long eye lashes and glances that you cast. I really liked the possibility of this character. You told me about “Aletheia” and ancient understanding of truth. I thought that we could really play with the whole dialectic of concealing and unconcealment. Somehow I feel that this possibility is in ruin now. You are not such an easy woman. I think that I flattered myself that you would represent a muse like figure. You have made your stand but I have also have to make my own stand. Wars are made like this. Just think about this we are going to war over the understanding and use of language. Most people would say this is crazy, even utter folly, but perhaps it also is an acknowledgement of the most precious thing that we have. The worst thing about this scenario is that I think that you might win. On one level you are isolated, you have no-one you can communicate with, whereas it feels like the opposite with me, but I suspect there might be a strange twist in the way this is finally configured. I ask you to start sleeping and you ask me to lift rocks. Deep down you think that I am not a proper man because I do not face myself in all the directions possible. Anyway I am leaving tomorrow because my characters are broken now and I am not like a patient archaeological restorer capable of restoring things. Also, my contacts haven’t turned up, and this is a sign for me. I guess Cyprus is the wrong place for me, and the worse part of this is that if I had any capacity for literature, it would be exactly the right place. This is a pretty painful realization. Before you say it I know you might say that such torment is the source for writing, but I don’t wish to live with the “shudder” you so often talk to me about. I know that art should be oblique, but I have never posed as an artist. I just need to be honest about this. Can we at least say goodbye in a proper way. I think that I deserve a little by way of grace in all of this. I also think that the heat has got to me and maybe I have started to lose my semblance of composition.”

Haris put her book in her bag and kissed me on both cheeks. I am sure her eyes had contained the semblance of a little more moisture than usual, but she simply smiled. “I might see you in London, or somewhere in the future, you never know.” She then slipped out of the room. I wanted to say something about the way that I thought that she had touched me in some way, but that it was too late for such a statement. Besides it would sound cheap, given the context. Instead nothing came out. That is how it was and that is how it ended. I had arrived at a nowhere region in my life and all that was left was to catch a plane.