Interestingly, or at least interestingly to me......

A few days ago I posted on Facebook that I had a sudden strong desire to re-read “ The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa. This urge came out of nowhere as I sat at my computer in work, and I reflected on my ex-colleague and gym buddy James Couling, how we were supposed to be reading the unexpurgated edition together at one point several years ago and how, in the gym he had the big shiny silver Penguin edition. Well this sudden surge of affect, desire, what have you was strong enough for me, uncharacteristically, to want to record it, record and display it, inscribe it  however minimally, however fleetingly, into the surface of things.

Then this morning, waiting for my coffee in The Waiting Room in Deptford and instinctively glancing along their rack of  book-exchange paperbacks, there it was. The Book of Disquiet, Penguin edition. I took it, now I have to take something in to replace it.

Three scenarios present themselves: the romantic/paranoid hypothesis. Someone I know on Facebook read my post, knows I infrequently pop into the Waiting Room on my way to work and left it there for me. Perhaps it was you, you’re secretly in love with me, perhaps a dangerous obsessive. I should be careful. Perhaps it was James himself, he left work a few years ago and appears to have cut off contact with his ex work mates, though he does still see a couple who live in Deptford and who frequent that cafe: perhaps it’s his, perhaps he’s reaching out in some way, trying to resume contact.....

Or, it’s just a coincidence.....

Or, more likely, I went in to the Waiting Room on the self-same day I posted the above, was tired, preoccupied (which I was last week, bouncing from long MA essay, to Lesson Observation and on into final (final) novel deadline, so I can’t even remember when I did last go in there) scanned the shelf of books, the rack of videos, the gig posters as I always do, saw the book but didn't see it consciously. After all the brain is constantly filtering and carving out manageable boxes of perception and packets of stimuli from what would otherwise be an overwhelming sensory assault, vast amounts of visual information is registered unconsciously and so on: you don’t know what you have seen, perhaps, if it’s not vital, or the perceptual systems under stress you only register it later, and so on. Now, if I hadn’t gone in today (or someone had already taken the book) I would have attributed this sudden Pessoa epiphany to some element within classical psychology, something looming up from the depths, the unconscious assaulting me with a sudden, seemingly causeless pang symbolizing some deeper anxiety (guilt, loss)  but really it was the outside trying to get in, and getting delayed, so the news when it arrives, seems to come from nowhere, therefore -within-. There’s also the fact that I have shit eyesight and this may be an additional factor in the delay, it took a certain length of time for my tired brain to tabulate the blurry, barely (consciously) legible visual information I did receive into the realisation that I’d seen the book. Perhaps it was only today, several days later that my brain had processed the information enough to guide me back into the cafe to go and claim the book I unconsciously always knew was there and whose presence struck me initially as mysterious and magical.  Maybe a lot of what’s attributed to the ID is just this, the slow working through of the unconsciously observed, a time-displaced set of recognitions and revelations that float in lost, decontextualized, and sit enigmatically around in your head for varying lengths of time.

Or...... it wasn’t there last week, or I never went in ( did I? so distracted all the time...memory, memory....) and it was a presentiment, a precognition, some other, grander filter flickering out and loosing power for an instant, the screens used to discreetly  arrange time into present, past, future and that grow more threadbare as you get older anyway.

I will now ask Ayako Nikawadori to open the book at random and  read out the first line she  sees:

It’s this.....

“Day after day in my ignoble and profound soul I registered impressions that form the external substance of my self awareness. “ (p341)