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Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread. There they have their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd tightly together and press hard upon one another without any pause. This has its importance for any narrative, of which continuity and successiveness are the soul. Yet what is to be done with events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided and allotted; events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air, homeless and errant.
I order my copy of A Memoir of the Future on a Tuesday night last February, having been asked to write something by September. Knowing little about it, I vow, with true superego severity, not to read too much of Bion's other writings, not to dig into secondary texts or the more directly autobiographical memoirs, but rather to approach the text as one does a patient - without memory or desire. I wonder, is it even possible to forgo the comfort of theory?
«Beckett-y» friend Jamieson tells me. 1000 pages. Expensive. Even on at Ebay, over 100 dollars. I buy it used from someone in the States, not wanting to wait for Karnac to ship from England. To my astonishment, it arrives by the next afternoon, left in a plain brown wrapper, like pornography, in my vestibule.