The featured image is a detail from a print I made called Closing Time (2019).  The woodcut was an earlier attempt at summative (or summary) autobiography.  I was undergoing chemotherapy for an indolent lymphoma: which will return.  It seemed (and still seems) a good opportunity to take stock.

I note the grains in the print that I picked out of my life as ‘illustrative’.

The books and the oil fields, the whitewashed cottage on the hill, the booze and pills: the chacmool : Schrödinger’s equation and the mutilated fragments of aphorism I have clung to through my life:

That which does not kill us…

Still only in Saigon…

God didnae put you on this earth to be…

Mary, in her armchair, glass in hand, bare-stockinged.

But we never really know when last orders will be called: ‘I’ am still ‘here’ after all.

For decades I have been taking notes, a self-informant, partial no doubt but diligent.  I thought for years that my ‘autobiography’ would be a simple transcription of those million (or so) words.  Raw, immediate, unreflective except in the blur of the moment.  Juicy, oozing, smart-arsed…sometimes witty.

But those million (or so) words are beyond useful transcription (though I adore reading other people’s diaries).

A journal is not a memoir is not an autobiography.

And, in the context of this wider enterprise – archeobiography, autobiography, futurography – I feel a certain distance is demanded.  Not quite ‘what did it all mean?’ – for all life is meaningless – but: why? (Or WTF?!)

This account, of course, should take into account the sensitivities and privacies of other lives which have impinged upon mine: some I have loved, some (frankly) I have hated, most I have misunderstood.  I have been guilty, complicit, petty (always ashamed) whilst earnest, loving, sometimes loyal, always effortful.  The question, in terms of past, present and future and in the context of our current predicament is….why?

And “So what?”