To reach a kind of writing where only writing writes. Without theme, without event. A limpid surface to reflect – what? Not a sky, but the absence of a sky. Not the starry night, but the night without stars. Aspiration: to reach, in writing, that great annihilation in which the world disappears. Anti-narcissism. But one tied, inevitably, to the traces I leave as I try to exit writing by means of writing.
‘It’s like looking in a mirror’, says R.M. of blogging, which she distrusts. What kind of mirror? I wonder to myself. The membrane between this world and another, like Cocteau’s Orphée? The many surfaces of Tarkovsky’s film in which one generation is permitted to see another? In which the young actress who plays his mother, wiping the mirror, sees the director’s mother, already aged? If the film itself is a kind of mirror, and this is as it seems from the letters Tarkovsky quotes in the first pages of Sculpting in Time, then it was not, as his cinematographer objected, too personal a project. That cinematographer left, to be replaced by another. And what happened? The most personal film was the one in which we all seemed to recognise something, if not ourselves, then – what? – a kind of edge along which each of us is exposed. A place in which sharing is in movement. Or a kind of substitution in which each of us finds ourselves reborn in the film.
The post I most want to write is called Common Presence. I have written another post under this heading, but am still unable to find the words I want. I know it concerns a kind of roundplay, a game of substitution in which each participant can take the place of any other. I know I want to present in terms of the circulation of a strange kind of currency – an anti-currency, if you like. I am thinking of that beautiful phrase of Heraclitus’s: ‘fire is an exchange for all goods’. The general equivalent is fire. The measure of all is fire. Heaven blazes. ‘Now come, fire’, writes Hölderlin in The Ister. A coin which destroys coins as it circulates. Which, in destroying, gives but does not give itself. Which buys us each the power to give.
Common Presence. How to find the words to evoke this secret circulation of all things?