Waiting. Philip Salom

school: Jasmin sided with a good teacher against her for-many years best friend when her friend implicated the teacher in a taintedly sexual accusation she knew was untrue. She was cut loose by the friend, shocked by her and by her own principle, and humiliated at a result. She had betrayed her friend with the rightness of… what? doing the right thing ethically, for… what?

      Then she saw it. Saw manipulation everywhere, she began to see its signs, she knew then how she had been inculcated into unthinking ‘rightness’. She learnt ambiguity. She studied this as her own right over cultural rightness.

      She realised to her great embarrassment that she had thought, and spoken, but hadn’t seen. If anything, her seeing now is its own problem – too much of. Unavoidable. Now she sees in order to think. Then to speak. Then to write… Now she has to let go and feel more or she’ll live long and layered but miss out on the langorous.

      Now waiting for this book is hurting her work profile where it matters: her Uni publication credits. Her first book of essays wasn’t quite the mustard-cutter the system wanted. They want refereed articles and academic books, the manuscripts of which are shoved very slowly (contradictorily) through the intellectual scanner to emerge as the real thing. Because, of course, she is in the boat, whether she likes it or not.

      There have been emails back from the publisher and, in response to her urgent calls for up-dating, there have been none – she has begun to think there is another book in this refusal to communicate. In the age of effortless communication, an email that takes thirty seconds is left unwritten for twelve months. Everyone is saying it. Publishers refuse to stay in contact. When contact took serious effort they used to nag their writers; now that it’s easy, they don’t. Their writers are the nags.

      She is a terrible waiter, the worst waiter she knows. Only she among her friends gets angry if a bus is late, if the traffic stops, if any person even a person she adores keeps her shuffling on the pavement for ten minutes. After twenty minutes her anger goes up by the minute. Fucking publishers! She is aware she swears too much. Remembers Kevin Spacey interviewed as Director of the National Theatre being asked if the British actors were very different from the US: Well, they say cunt a lot more than we do. She loses herself in cursing and once lost in this limbo, this rudeness of the other, of those who steal your time, she loses all tolerance. By the time they turn up she hates the world and her curses fall on them. Shitheads. Time should be used as planned and is never for wasting; to her the worst kind of waste there is – is suspension.

      Suspension is far worse than suspense. Richard, the boyfriend, here and not here, the book in manuscript only, here and not here. Suspension has no resolution, it is the nothingness that should be something, that wants to be something and it tears away at her.

      She wants something more physically real.

      Which is why she thinks, not for the first time, to fancy Angus. His hands-on world, the physicality of work and earth, of water and the long textures of plants. It was Herder (Johann Gottfried, the German) who said of all the senses the primary way we know the world is through touch. Way back in the 18C Herder was thinking that. What a smart mind he must have had. He gave short shrift to Aristotle’s favouring of the eye, of sight. Her own discipline.

      She must touch the world more. To feel. She wants to feel these made things of his so she can share in the pleasure of their being finished, that unlike manuscripts, they exist, they are here.