Yesterday I had great plans to write here; what happened to them, those plans? Coming back up on the train, great plans - I would write this, and then that, and writing would be freedom, the free act I would have waited for all the time I've been away; but today? Perhaps it is that I had too much coffee yesterday. Too much coffee on the train coming up. Perhaps it is because I barely slept the night before last, and there is also the jet lag -. Or was it that yesterday I was borne too strongly on the wind of a strong book - that divine afflatus, not mine, that would allow me the reader to dream that I could become the strong writer.
But isn't there a great deal to write? Haven't I had experiences enough to narrate? It should be no effort at all, to write. No effort: make a beginning and then narration would bear me from one experience to another; I would be able to write and even experience the benediction of writing - the saying that, regardless of what is said, is writing's beatitude, the gift it gives of itself and from itself like the emanation of the good in Plotinus. That's what I would experience, spreading the page on which I would write open like the new year, and allowing that newness to bear what I wrote.
I am back at the flat after a couple of weeks away. Back, and the water drips through the bathroom ceiling from the shower upstairs. Back, and the same mediocre view through the window: the sewage is gone from the back yard, that is true, but there is still the soaked concrete, still the walls with flakes of paint missing. Mediocrity: it is dawn, but dawn comes late in winter. I should buy some paint and fill in the long scar left when they pulled the pipe away from the world - the pipe that had leaked dirty water into the walls of my kitchen and even into the kitchen itself, until blackened water ran along the tiled wall. They pulled it away, but there is still the long blackened scar, still the evidence of the damage done.
Out of the window: clothespegs on the washing line, an oval rock from the beach on the concrete. The backs of the flats opposite and above them the trees. This is what I see in the dawn. This is how the dawn is no new beginning, and the new year brings the return of the old, untransfigured and obdurate. Isn't the yard the place where the beginning fails to begin? Isn't the concrete yard the failure of the beginning and the failure of any beginning? Everything that begins also ends here. The end is here, where there should be beginning.
Of what could I have written that would not have ended here, where time does not advance and space is voided of itself? What saying could be borne by writing that would have spoken by way of the concrete that is saturated with rain water? Nothing begins here; everything that begins fails again. What would a narrative be that did not begin and end with concrete?
You would imagine, wouldn't you, that to write of the yard would be merely a clearing of the throat, only the step into writing, writing's occasion? You'd imagine, then, that the occasion of writing would then be absorbed by writing and lifted into it, as though the contingent would become necessary and mediocrity redeemed. But what if writing's occasion becomes itself the saying of writing - a way in which writing speaks of itself, as if the concrete yard is an allegory of what leaves itself behind even as writing seeks to leap beyond the circumstances of its birth?
Concrete: mediocre substance, beginningless and endless. Concrete that closes the earth to the sky - crust across the dreaming earth that would answer the dreaming sky. Nothing begins here; there are no dreams. Nothing begins - there is nothing that can lift itself from what cannot begin. Over the last fortnight, I've travelled, I've read - I was overwhelmed by experience. So many thoughts! Marvellous conversations! So much drama! But today? Today - this perpetual first day on which writing begins only to fail to begin I know that what I have learnt is already covered by concrete. Today, the day did not begin. Today, writing did not release itself from itself.
Have I failed? Has writing failed? Or does saying let speak by disengaging the beginning from itself. Bataille will call himself the man of unemployed negativity. What will he do, he asks, with his dissatisfaction - what can he make, what can he affirm? He wants to know whether his unemployment is significant - what does it mean and what can it mean today, when everything is finished? Or is unemployment the experience of the endlessness of finishing, of the endlessness that voids time from within?
I cannot begin; I cannot advance. By this non-step does writing succeed in its failure. It's true, I've failed and failed by writing. It's true I've fallen behind the said. But by this lagging behind, by this division of writing, doesn't writing let speak the saying that it bears by way of what it cannot achieve? A great deal has happened; I travelled, I read, I conversed. But today I know these adventures are only another way of living what does not begin.
