Spurious

Sebald, from an interview:

I do believe that in the eighteenth century, say, Voltaire or Rousseau wrote much more naturally than people did from the nineteenth century onwards. Flaubert sensed this more than any other writer. If you look at Rousseau's letters, for instance, they're beautifully written. He dashed off twenty-three in a day if necessary, and they're all balanced, they're all beautiful prose. Flaubert's letters are already quite haphazard; they're no longer literary in that sense. He swears, he makes exclamations, sometimes they're very funny. But he was one of the first to realise that there was appearing in front of him some form of impasse. And I think nowadays it's getting increasingly difficult because writing is no longer a natural thing for us.

No longer natural - why do I think this is what allows us to get closer to writing? Closer: because writing is not natural and was never simply an extension of life. Write the words 'it is night' on a piece of paper one evening and by the next morning it is no longer true. Nothing I write here has anything to do with my life. Tyranny of the personal, of the authentic voice. No voice is close to you. Find another voice, an impersonal one. Let it discover itself in you, writing looking for itself through you and finding - only writing, only more occasions for writing.

Unnatural writing - the dream that blogging might permit this as it might interrupt the great circulation of information. There's too much communication. Or only a personal communication according to the general standard of what passes for life, our lives in this time. A new austerity. Speech that withholds itself in speaking. Terseness that guards a gap in speech. Here, I think immediately of This Space, the only 'literary blog' (ridiculous expression) that is necessary.

From an interviewer's discussion with Sebald:

The wandering that the prose does, both syntactically and in terms of subjects, reminds me a bit of my favourite of the english essayists, de Quincey: the need, in a sense, to almost sleepwalk, somnambulate from one centre of attention to another, and a feeling in the reader that one has hallucinated the connection between the parts.

Reading this, I think immediately of one of my favourite blogs, the mysterious Red Thread(s), and in particular a post like this one.

(Blog virtues: anonymity, fragmentary speech, a writing that reflects on the gesture of writing and marks it in writing (its voice does not come from nowhere, but nor is it personal either. Avoidance of the cute. Discretion. An interruption of writing (by way of writing) rather than more prose. A subtractive prose.))

Where do I end this rambling post, with its darkness and light, chapels and death, friendships and incommunicability; the general strangeness of things, attempts at speech, of being present?

Necessity

Almost any post at This Space is, for me, like a drink of cool water. With almost any new post, my hope returns of a writing specific to this new genre of blogging - fragmentary, near anonymous (names might be given, but not the clue that would allow us to situate the named), sometimes occasional (a post prompted by a contingent event, to be sure, but that engages some measure of necessity thereby. Necessity: the law this new kind of writing near-anonymous and fragmentary might discover), or sometimes more direct, speaking only of a desire to write, or that to write is to somehow to fall short of writing; that there is a Writing beyond writing; that writing lives only as the hope of that other Writing which is also the hope of another Life.

A Meeting of Styles

Tsvetayeva, the great letter writer, from her correspondence with Pasternak:

I do not like meetings in real life. Foreheads knocking together. Two walls. You just cannot penetrate. A meeting should be an arch. Then the meeting is above. Foreheads tilted back!

I have been delighted to meet many bloggers. But a meeting in writing - I think it is what I always dreamed of. A meeting of writing, and of styles, remembering what Barthes wrote:

Thus under the name of style a self-sufficient language is evolved which has its roots only in the depths of the author's personal and secret mythology, that subnature of expression where the first coition of words and things take place, where once and for all the great verbal themes of his existence come to be installed.

An investigation of style ... wasn't that what I replied when I was asked what my contribution was to be, were I to look back on everything I had written  (not here, but elsewhere)? A stupid answer. An embarassing one. But nevertheless, the word style is enough to move me tremendously. Style ... and a meeting of styles - to cite another across blogs, obviously or secretly ... yes, the meeting is, as Tsvetayeva said, above ...

Giving and Bearing

Blogs have archives, notes Jodi; they allow something like a self-management, a self-organisation. They save something - a path of thought, old interchanges - from the rush of events, from the news, which must always be new. And of course they are written from a particular perspective, to the extent one might speak of acts of witnessing rather than archives, acts in which testimony is borne (a beautiful expression).

Written stuff sticks, says Jodi -there's a whole trail leading to where we are, like crumbs in the forest. And that is also part of who we are, the journey as becoming. Rather dreamily, hot-eared (a sign that I am tired), I wonder whether writing might also be a way of abandoning, of stuff discarded rather than sticking. Whether there's a place that is not so much one one is trying to reach, but that trying itself, and that reaching. Utopia as nowhere, as the place of not-yet, as the eternal not-yet-in-place.

To affirm by writing - by the act of writing - that you are not quite yet. Witnessing it, bearing witness (another beautiful expression) in a writing that is never just a shedding of skin, as if the writer was born afresh with each act of writing (with each post), free from all fatality, but as writing is not only about keeping memory, but releasing it.

The writer giving then, but only as she is abandoned by what she has written, orphaned by it. Words are dead, the grammatical forms impersonal. Give them life by writing, but writing will also give you death. And what you write will never be enough, never be right, never coincide with what you wanted to say. Because words, too, want to speak, and grammatical forms thrash in the dark like the severed electricity cable that kills the boy in The Ice Storm.

What you want to give by writing abandons you. And Plato was wrong to suggest that what we want is immortality. It is also death we want, and to be lightened. Just as it is life - our lives - that is the desire of writing, as it arcs through our blogs to find itself by way of what we would write.

(Still, this is no political solution to the state Jodi diagnoses. And politics must be more than a retreat into the Garden of writing and a version of Stoic self-formation.)

February

The beginning of the month: nothing to write; begin again. But begin from what? Write about the yard. Write about the flat. Write about W. But only that the beginning will catch, and post give unto post continuously each morning, as day follows day. It is like the secret engine - time - that turns the finished day into a new one. The work of time: the page of the sky as it grows dark. And on the new page, it begins again, darkness becoming light. Why did our ancestors pray that the sun rise each morning? Not because they believed it would not, but because it rose.

January

The end of a month, or nearly. Admit it: the blog is measured in months, or that each month is something like a life, beginning tentatively, exploring a new, wide territory, before rising prolifically to the plateau at the middle - the stretch of days that opens as to the wanderer in Peter Handke's stories. But then, later on, the waste of days - diffuse anguish at the edge of the sea. Was it all for this? And what end has been reached, the soft green waves lapping at your feet?

The Cargo Crate

I came home this lunchtime to check on the workmen chipping off the rendering and pointing the brick on the kitchen wall, and it was as though I was present where I should not be - wasn't it the flat's time, in half darkness, curtains closed against the day? Wasn't it a chance for absence to drowse like a lazy cat in the afternoon?

I lay down for a while and read Richard Ford, and felt a wave of prose gather itself forward in me and thought: is this my voice, or someone else's? And then: never mind. But I had to go back to work, and forgot what was gathering itself in me to be written. Didn't I mean to entertain the idea that you can write only when you don't want to write - that writing begins when you relinquish it, or the desire to write, when it begins to gather itself in you, looking for itself, asking that you be absent so that it can roll forward in your place?

With whose voice do you write? By what act of ventriloquism? And I remember the image of one surfacing after a long time immersed. Surfacing, and breathing - another word for writing, or for what breathes itself to life here. And then I was to wander allusively through the several days when there was no writing: I was to write of my Visitor, presenting her only in silhouette - what an art! - or in the manner of a shadow that fell across my days. A shadow? But what is the opposite of a shadow, an image in the shape of light, and how to write of light passing through the shadow of my life?

And now the image that awakens in me is of Crusoe waking on the shore of an island. Who wakes? Who speaks? Sometimes the dream of beginning over again - a desire to lose my memory, like the protagonist of The Man With No Past, who sleeps in a cargo crate. A desire for that silence in which a voice might gather itself. The echoing walls in an empty flat. But then I know it is a voice that desires itself in me. To come to itself, but from no one's throat; to sound, but with no voice in particular.

Is there a way of letting writing echo? Perhaps, as Red Thread(s) says of Albaich's poetry, it must be made of space and sparseness: 'the white of the page sings through; the words and phrases seem to float.' But with prose? With lines and lines of prose? How to write what echoes as one speaks in a empty room, a cargo crate? Unless the blog is itself that room. The blog - my life - across which light passes like a shadow.

The Hobby Shed

Does the blogosphere have an unconscious?, asks Blah-Feme, and wonders whether there is a performative contradiction in right-wing blogging: don't the practices of citing, pointing, referencing and quoting overturn a simple, unilateral notion of agency? Don't they enact a kind of refusal of the reduction and simplification of the social field?

But I suppose a libertarian right would say this is what various kinds of deregulation have allowed - trade moves more freely; supply and demand are always entering into new dances: there's more to buy and more to sell, and the new world is a glittering ball room across which we all spin, enraptured.

But this same world depends upon the near invisible mediation of money, which to forget itself, and the measure it provides, as it translates itself so quickly into the acqusition of goods and services. Never, we tell ourselves, do we desire money for its own sake, but only for that to which it would provide access.

But money desires its own increase in our stead: doesn't our economy depend on those who seek only a return on their investment, one which, now, outstrips what any of us could possibly pay? How many earths would be needed to pay back all debts? Our own earth is wagered, and our lives are pledged by capitalism all the way to death.

Meanwhile, money desires its increase and the whole world writhes like a Chinese dragon. Is it all we have in common: money, and the pledge unto death? Has the general equivalent cleared the ground in advance whereupon we might live in common? Bloggers depend upon another general equivalent: to write is likewise a mortgage; language needs death, if this is allowed to name the way words can function in the absence of their referent.

But isn't there, too, a kind of writing that looks for what is lost (Lacan: for what precedes castration)? Looks for it, and only as it seeks to wager abstraction, to look for life in the midst of death in the singularity, the specificity of a voice? It matters, certainly, what is said, but there is also the 'how' of that saying, the voice that does not efface itself as it mediates what there is to be said.

A thickened voice, a voice congealed: there is a kind of equivalent, I think, that is no longer general. Voice alongside voice, one archipelago of posts alongside another - isn't this a collective of movements to the singular, of the search for an idiom? An endless search, it is true, and a blog does not need to have one voice, but many.

'Develop your own legitimate strangeness': and this may mean the absence of a comment facility, or those long silences in which the idiom regathers itself in the darkness, ready to break forward again. But of course this is not enough. Let a million voices rise: but this, still, is nothing, when it is the same earth that is being wagered.

Then this kind of writing, blogging (mine, perhaps, despite Joseph's generous remarks), can only be a hobby. The search for the singular, for the idiom sacrifices the philosophical task of shaping concepts like weapons. And it threatens the conventionally political task, too, of redressing injustices, of remembering the earth. Doesn't the collective risk falling apart into voices narcissistically concerned with themselves - not, now, as they are measured by the ego, by the petty reporting of a life, but as they vanish into themselves, searching for the 'itself' that summons a certain kind of writing?

Writing looks into itself, fascinated. Writing flees into itself, all the way to its own voice: but this is not philosophy, nor politics, and if it seems political, this is a measure, perhaps, of how far our sense of this word has fallen. How to defend it, then, this kind of practice, if practice it is, and not its suspension? Is it more than a kind of new-agism, a private pleasure, a retreat from the buying and selling of the world? I think there is a great difference between a collective philosophical, political practice and a sphere of private bloggers.

Perhaps the end of blogging is nothing to fear. This new medium will appear old in turn. How strange the resurgence of writing in the text message, the writerly blogosphere and the way Google is programmed to search! But this is a phase and it is passing. No, the creative writing class will never disappear - and perhaps there are more of them now, and more 'literary ambition' than ever before. But isn't life-writing a great distraction, a fleeing from the world into the hobby-shed?

Perhaps that is nothing of which any of us should be ashamed, especially if it pushes towards the proto-philosophical or the proto-political. The availability of theoretical blogs, and of those that attempt to think and enact a kind of politics is still impressive. But then, as Jodi says, the former depends on a slower kind of work, a different temporality. 

A Nuptial Art

I think it's another way to write, only permitted in our new medium, that can make an essay not a series of assertions, but a bundle of questions barely held together, like a raft afloat. The Japanese, I read, speak by indirection - or perhaps they'd call us, if they had our words, too direct, too quick to come to disagreement (or, perhaps, agreement: for isn't it unbearable to be thought to agree?).

I have wondered whether they might not be nuptial arts, comparable to martial ones: arts of gentleness, but then remembered Mishima's impatience with what he thought was the feminisation of Japanese culture: didn't he work on his laugh to deepen it, just as he transformed his own body to give it the muscle and girth of his imagined St. Anthony?

But Mars is not strong in my birthchart, and nor do I seek to make up for its lack; once again, unlike Sinthome, I have a marked dislike of discussion, being suspicious always of what I take to be its frame. Insinuation, quieter movement, and in the end, a writing that does not seek to deal blows or to parry them, but that lets continue the movement of others, though in another way, because it is itself only motion, like a river into which tributaries pour. Only I imagine this river running backward, and the distributaries that join it are like a river's delta. How can a river leap back to its origin?

To be touched - and sometimes touch, according to a choreography that our writing knows, I think, and before we know ourselves. There are spheres, of course, in which such an approach is unwelcome, and sometimes it is necessary for bloggers to relaunch, to begin again, because, as I would put it, their voice has become too harsh.

A nuptial art instead, then - but is this only an evasion, and an art of evasion? isn't it necessary, sometimes, to write in your own name, to take responsibility? One response, which K-Punk makes, is to show how a nom de plume can have as much consistency as a real one, but isn't there another? How to bear no name in particular?

In Japan (my imaginary Japan), it was possible, I read to take different names as would accrue to you as you crossed different thresholds in your life. As a child, one name, as a worker, another, and in my retirement, another still. Perhaps this was never true. But couldn't you bear more than one name at a given time, or, perhaps, to bear a name and also the other of all names?

Spurious is the name of a blog, and Lars is its author: that is true. But mightn't the former name that origin from which the latter can never quite be born? I think anonymity is too crude a name for what is needed. Pessoa divided himself into heteronyms, as I imagine a flock of birds might come apart in five directions in the air. Five new flocks, each different (was it five names under which he published? more?), and held apart in different ways. And there is Kierkegaard, whose case is yet more complex ...

Spurious, adjective. 1. Not genuine, authentic, or true; not from the claimed, pretended or proper source; counterfeit. 2. Of illegitimate birth; bastard. Synonyms: false, sham, mock, feigned, phony. Antonyms: genuine.

I find it easy to know people when there is some gap of space or time that calls for writing. In this age of email, I am still disturbed by the near simultaneity of communication it permits - but not as disturbed as when the phone rings, and I find myself having to lend presence to what I would say by my voice. But perhaps that voice, too, speaks in its another way, and, it also lets time pass, and spaces open, such that it does not merely communicate across a distance, but lets distance speak.

As with the mellifluous, searching voice of the narrator who speaks to his mother in Mirror - what sweetness!: it, too is present, even as it is set back away from what I would want to say. And do not forget that scene in Lost Highway, where the Mystery Man speaks - laughs - both in person and then acousmatically on the phone. Let speech say itself again, and speak its condition. Let writing write all the way back to the origin.

I think there is an etiquette for writing of this kind, although I'm not sure what it might be. Some know it, I think, and others do not; or perhaps this only my fantasy, and I am drawn to those who, in some way, resemble me. Who are the blunderers, I ask myself, that find it easy to speak, and write? - and then I laugh at my intolerance, knowing it to be without significance.

Perhaps it is our fantasies which individuate us, and which allow us to find others, with similar fantasies, who are like us. I feel as though at the foot of some great, ruined edifice - that I've come too late, and something good and great has been lost. But then I know, too, that I could only come now, when it was ruined, and there is something of me that is a wrecker, and that in some way its ruination is my fault.

How, in my weakness, could I have broken the tower? But there are many like me, shameless wreckers, who ape a language they have not earned, and speak by way of what they caused to fragment. But this, too, is a fantasy: there was nothing safe, no monument, and the time in which there were men and women of taste is itself a fantasy.

It is as if a secret has been revealed: that my shame has revealed the shame of a great imposture, and that what was great was never so, and the booming voice of culture is revealed as the wizard behind the curtain. Not genuine, not authentic, not true; of illegitimate birth, or born too late; with what name dare I speak, who speak for all the shameless? Even Beckett, even Bernhard rested in what did not seem to them to be the wreckage of Old Europe. Schubert and Brahms: the sweet, great legacy of nineteenth century Germany. And in what do we rest? Who speaks?

Dream of an etiquette that allows distance to speak. An intimacy that passes by way of distance, letting those solitudes it links be what each of them also is: Aristotle's god? his beast? Or the one who has not yet settled into a name, or one in whom the nameless looks to lose itself. I think it is the origin that speaks with us, trailing from our sentences. And the origin that summons speech, that it may be wrecked somewhere between us, so that it speaks, also, of what fails to speak, and lets non-speech continue in what is spoken, in what is written.

Perhaps a blog turns great sails to catch this wind, and to move with it. Or it is the like the chime whose noise gives body to the passing wind. The ancients thought the great movement of the sky found its correlate in practices on earth; as the bowl of heaven turned, so it gave momentum to what turned down here; the macrocosm reached the microcosm; all were united.

I think the ruined tower of my fantasy is the shattering of what unifies, and that behind the sky of stars, there is another sky, which opens beyond sidereal space. Let us speak according to this block, this break. Speak as it is neglect that passes through us like photons from blown out stars.