Spurious

'I have a Project'

It will never happen, that's what this day says to me. Never - but what, what isn't to happen? Behind every word here - or ahead of them, far out ahead like a sail: the 'project' - is that the word? I don't like that word. The project - something thrown out ahead. A fishing net? Can a sail be thrown out ahead? Ahead and catching the wind, dragging everything here behind it?

Now I imagine the spread parachute like sail of the land yachts that race along the sand. Ahead - but it's not even real, I don't think it's real. Ahead and uncertain, yet dragging everything along: what. 'I have a project': so says the character in Godard's Eloge de l'amour. Red Thread(s) quoted that a long time ago, just that, the character (Edgar?) saying, 'I have a project'. But do I have one? It will never happen, that's what this long drooping Sunday says to me. You'll never do it, never complete it. But what? Complete what?

This is it, I want to say. These words are what it is, and nothing beyond them. And yet the sense that there's a kind of shadow that they belong to. That their real sense lies beyond them, to something that has already happened, and can only make sense in that way. Ruined words - remnants - but from some disaster that will happen in the future, not the past. That is gathering itself in order to happen. That sucks the air away from the present as a tsunami is said to do, drawing the air into itself before the wave crashes on the beach. 

Hope

I disapprove of Cioran, and when I ask myself why, I find the answer, he is too satisfied with the forms his writing takes - with the essay, the aphorism, and perhaps with himself, too. Oversatisfied in being himself, he is not claimed, by the indecency of writing from the 'I', relying on the 'I', leaning upon it, upon what he takes to be himself, it's as if writing - the experience of writing - never touched him. Of course, he writes,

My books, my work: the grotesquerie of such possessives. Everything was spoiled once literature stopped being anonymous. Decadence dates from the first author.

But look how he writes - in an isolated aphorism set alongside others ... why do I suspect him of bad taste? Why do I think he wrote in bad taste, as if it mattered - as if my opinion mattered? He is complacent, I think to myself. He is obdurately himself, despite everything, despite writing, despite everything he's written.

Perhaps I cannot bear him because I once admired him ... I read him at that time when books formed a magic circle around me. I wanted to be protected, I think that was it. I was looking for something - what? - at the heart of the circle? I even recommended Cioran to others ... I find that, too unbearable; I want to wash my hands.

Admiration for those for whom writing, the experience of writing, is itself something. For whom something is at stake, and for whom writing is hope - a 'merciful surplus of strength', a last strength at the bottom of weakness. And even the only hope ... How melodramatic! How necessary!

This, from an old post from This Space:

There is one reason that keeps me writing: hope. The hope that I might be able to write what I need to say because it could not be said in any other way.

That said, I am not writing.

There is also the hope of reading, which is much the same: to find, at last, the narrative that allows me to breathe and to step forward actually; not vicariously through a character or the author’s experience, but actually to step forward. The metaphor is the only means.

That said, I am not reading either.

Writing or Life?

Writing or life - but is it a choice? 'When you eat, eat': the old Zen proverb. Eat, live - and do not think about writing as you eat and live. But conversely, when you write, write - and what would that mean, to press writing more deeply into writing? to write as concentratedly as you would live?

But surely writing lives from your life - from what you can recount of your life. Surely writing is always parasitical, and to write is always also not to have lived, but to have saved something of life for writing. This is Greene's famous claim about the writer having a sliver of ice for a heart: always watching for an experience to relate, for the beginnings of a plot. A coldness, a distance from life: how can this be avoided?

Another thought: isn't it from a surfeit of life that one might write - the too much of the day, its great breadth and the many events happening everywhere? Write in order to die, says Kafka. Write because there is always too much to write. And what does death become? A shelter. Or writing becomes a shelter for death, for dying.

Whence Rilke's Malte who cannot but die in the death-boat that was made for him. But his horror is that he'll die like any other in the big city to which he has come. In modern life, he thinks, we have lost death - death has lost meaning. What then of the storyteller?, as Benjamin asks. Can there be stories when death is no longer part of life, of living? How can stories find their end when there is no real end to life - or death?

Writing or life? Writing the non-end of our living. Writing dying, anonymous death in our cities. Is it that life cannot, now be written? That a whole alibi for writing has vanished? Writing or life - and now writing becomes a desire for what is missing from life; it is life searching for life and via the left to right movement on the page.

But read down our pages and what will you find? A writing that has become strangely obsessed with itself. Writing that asks for life in order to be more than life. Not to provide our testament, the last will that our life, if it cannot be rounded off in death (the rituals that surround death) must be rounded off in writing.

For writing also testifies to itself - to that demand by which it draws the living to its own non-life. Upon what would it seize? For what is it looking? For its own icy heart. For the ice of its non-heart, writing lost within itself and wandering.

White Writing

To write close to writing. To keep close. But this means, too, that you will have to write of something other than writing; a detour is required, for writing is nothing in itself. A detour: write of yourself, write stories, narrative fragments, write of this, of that - but how to let what you write come close, nonetheless to writing? How to let writing reverberate in what is written?

I am guilty, say that. I am innocent, say that. I am judged, everything written has been judged; white light falls indifferently over all of us. And white light, too, burns upwards from the page; a white writing writes within my own.

How to unwrite every word I have written? How to erase my footprints, and leave the snow pristine, trackless? Wait, wait for writing. Fall down, sleep, and send your dreams ahead. Die in the snow of writing's indifference. Expire in the indifference of writing, its white snow-banks all around you.

Voided Sight

Writing is what looks away from you; it shows no interest. Its perspective is given from elsewhere; it sees from an angle you cannot access. Is it watching? Are its eyes open? It sees all; its eyes are open in all that is written, like light that flashes back the sky from the sea. It sees - but what does it see? What sees itself in the tide of words as it flashes light upwards and away?

The parent watches the child, but writing does not watch you. The lover's gaze rests upon the beloved, but writing watches no one, and watches where no one has his place. I will take your place, says writing. I'm going to take your place. And so does it watch from you, by taking your place. So does it open its eyes in your own, and your eyes reflect back the sky; so do they become voided of what you might see.

Vision minus itself. Light subtracted from light. 'I can't see you'. - 'But I, seer, see in you'. - 'I can't see you'. - 'But I, seeing, have voided your sight'.

Trackless

To learn from what writing, from what you have written; to follow your own tracks in the snow. Until - no tracks, and no way forward. Snow without tracks, unmarked pages.

'Was it here I disappeared?' - 'It was here you stopped disappearing. Here when your absence could no longer be hidden. - 'Was it here I lost the ability to write?' - 'Rather that that inability spoke of writing's own inability; that your malaise became the malaise of writing, and it spoke, rather than you'.

Writing without writing. The suspension, the droop of writing. And you fall from yourself, too. Who are you, non-writer? Who are you, unable to mark the page? But the days go forward nonetheless. Writing, without writing, continues to go forward.

'I would like to write'. - 'You cannot write'. - 'I would like to begin'. - 'But writing has already begun'.

Page-blind

Rise early each morning, prepare to write. Rise early, clear your desk and your thoughts, and begin, begin to write. But what when writing fails you? What when you cannot write a line, and the white page seems to press up against you? What when sense refuses you, and the measure of sense? But it is also writing that you meet, albeit without being able to write. It is also writing that burns beside you now, white fountain, the page within the page.

Isn't it now that you can learn what writing is? Isn't this the moment, the apocalypse, in which it is revealed disrobed? The page, the white page on which nothing can be written. The page without writing, and that allows no writing. What speaks, and by way of this absence? What, and by way of the absence of sense, of sense's erosion, of writing cored out from within?

The whiteness is intolerable. The page's white in white burns intolerably. Its indifference. Its withdrawal. A bank of snow on which you can make no impression. A pristine cloud-bank rising in the distance. You cannot mark it. Ink will not touch it.

Intolerable: have you gone snowblind? Sky-blind? What can you see except whiteness? What but the light that burned behind everything, and all along. For the page is also the sky. It is also light, light gone mad in itself, lost in itself. The page is the condition of meaning, of the opening of the world. And the going-mad of meaning, the opening that is also a closure, the too-much of bright light.

'I can't see' - 'But only now can you begin to see'. - 'I can't see a thing'. - 'But only now do you see everything'. - 'Why couldn't I see it before?'- 'You could see too much'. - 'Why can I only see it now? - 'Because you've given up on sight, or sight has given up on itself in you'.

To write, to make a mark: why is that impossible? A single line - why can't you achieve that? Because writing is incapacity; writing the failure to write. It is the page-apocalypse, the pristine beginning upon which you can make no impression. And the return of that beginning, which is your non-beginning, your failure. And the billowing return of your non-beginning, the white sails that nonetheless bear writing forward.

'I can't begin'. - 'But it is already beginning'. - 'I can't make a mark'. - 'But writing has begun without you'.

The Page

The inability to write - how to endure it? A writer faces eternity or the lack of it each day, says Hemmingway - but how to endure it, the lack of eternity? How to endure the withdrawal of writing? 'I'm blocked', says the writer, 'I can't write a line'. So he removes himself from writing; he reads awhile, he travels. Everything but the page, the white rectangle of the page. But eventually, he'll have to face it again.

'I was waiting for you', it says. 'I lay here, waiting'. White page, the distant sky: one and the same. The absence of writing, the absence of sense that is the sky: one and the same. The same sky that watches over famine and wealth; the same that passes across battles and feastdays. The same page that is indifferent to what is written upon it, be it good or bad. The page, white rectangle, that glows with its own kind of light, that seems to illuminate itself.

'I can't reach you. I can't find you'. - 'But I'm here before you, the page'. - 'I've lost you. I'm looking for you'. - 'But I'm here right in front of you: the page'. And I know for every page I've written, the page is waiting. And for every page I've read, there will be another that refuses reading, in which I've lived my reader's life. The page waits; its whiteness invades every page; its waiting aches without significance on every page.

And when I've tried to write? I forgot it, that's true. Perhaps you have to forget it in order to write. The page, the absence of sense - how can you know it except via the impossibility of writing? And I think this, in the end, is why writer's block is propitious, why it joins you to what withholds itself in writing, and not only because you cannot rise to meet it, not only because your strength has failed.

'Stop writing. Do not try to write'. - 'But I want to find you. I want to write.' - 'But you will find me only by ceasing to write. By putting your pen down. Stop writing, stop trying, and I will come close to you. Stop, and the page, the double of the day, will burn beside you'. - 'I can't write'. - 'But it's only then, in your incapacity, that writing can come close to you'. - 'I'm blocked, I can't write'. - 'But it is only thus that writing rises and wraps itself around you like the day'.

Writer's Block

Writer's block - what is that? The retreat of writing, writing concentratedly held back in itself. How to reach it? How to draw upon the vanished strength to write? Writer's block - but isn't this a relation to writing, to writing itself?

You can't face writing head on, I know that. Can't demand writing to write, as if it were reposed in itself, waiting for a call. Writing is nothing in itself - there is nothing to writing, nothing that belongs to it; it has no subject of which to speak. But that is to say its substance is borrowed; the cloak of incident and character clothes nothing, hides nothing.

Writing can be nothing other than what is told. And yet it also other to that telling; it is what is borne in it, what suspends itself as the story rolls on. Perhaps it is the fact of a story, the surprise that it is. But what is it? Nothing other than the story. Writing itself: borrowed substance, garments clothing nothing.

On the page, writing by means of character, by means of incident, writing fails to come to itself. The approach, the non-approach: how to tell of telling itself? How to summon the failure to come? Writing is not here yet; and that is the story the tale untells. Writing cannot come close: and that is the untelling of the tale, its artifice, its imposture which, I think, allows something else to be heard.

Writing fails - is that it? But with reference to what? To what task? Nothing belongs to writing; its demand is hollow. Nothing belongs to it - but writing also hollows out writing; writing seeks also to core itself out, until, denucleated, there is nothing left but words (ringed around an absent centre). Nothing - and by way of a story that also tells of its unravelling.

Writing that is not - and never yet. Writing incapable of itself, of attaining itself, that is perpetually 'to come', but as what? bringing what? Its absence, its dissimulation, appearing in every other guise but its own. 'I don't recognise you. I can't see you as you are'.

Writer's block - what is it? The withdrawal of writing in writing; the telling that untells the tale. How to reach it? How to draw upon the ability to write? By drawing yourself into relation with the incapacity to write, to writing's failure to attain itself. By passing by way of the 'to come' of writing, which can never arrive. 'I'm looking for you'. - 'You will not find me'. - 'I want to come close to you'. - 'But I am far away from you, in a past that has never happened, and a future that will not arrive'.

A String of Scarves

In my foolishness, it is of a kind of prose that I dream. Prose, writing, as it launched from itself, out of itself, like a magician's string of scarves. From where did it come? From where, arising of itself, and according to what law? How to surprise writing in writing? How to let it arise, giving itself, and giving itself as giving?

Abandonment: I think that's how writing arrives. I think it abandons itself to life, and gives itself as it is lost, and as it loses its writer. I want to be abandoned, and by writing, I tell myelf. I want that: to be abandoned, to be left behind by what I've written. A magician's string of scarves; a dove conjured from nowhere: the miracle is abandonment, casualness, writing not minding itself, writing singing to itself like a lost child in the wood.

What kind of hunter are you?, says writing. What are you looking for? And I dream of a hunting that is also a becoming one with the hunted. A hunter who aims arrows at his own heart. A hunter who discovers himself as quarry. And by what bliss would you let the arrow pierce your own heart?

I think there is a self-abandonment necessary to writing. I think there is a kind of relinquishment. I want to be abandoned, and by myself, I tell myself. I want that: to be left behind by what I made, to let it go forward without me. To go forward - to search far ahead of me. To search far ahead, having lost me. How to lose myself, then? How, in writing, to forget that I am writing?