What have I learnt, over a thousand posts? A thousand - well, perhaps a tenth never made it to publication, and another tenth was deleted, later - but this is the thousandth written over the last two and a half years; the thousandth attempted. Which were the best posts? Which the most necessary to write, and which revealed best those necessary books and films and philosophies which have made and remade my imagination?
Do not turn back; better to remember than to reread and to remake in a new post what I remembered myself writing in an old one. Strange that amplification that works its change on what was written - that increase realised when I return and rewrite what I remembered writing before. Sometimes, I'll tell myself, that was a crucial post, and, looking back, will find it said nothing at all. What was important, then, was the necessity it imposed on me, upon my imagination; how, setting itself back in me, performing its secret work, it would allow me to return to the same topic, later.
Later: I have been surprised by what I've written - but what other reason would there have been to write? Surprise - but it is as though I surprised myself, or that another in me, my double, had awoken to write what did not seem to come from me. To write it and then, sinking back inside me, to dream of it, until those dreams crossed over with mine and changed them.
And aren't there posts I've completely forgotten writing and that were never captured by any particular category? Posts like walled up rooms - posts with false walls in front of them so you'd never know they were there. Strange gifts to receive from oneself months - years - after writing them. Forgotten posts, watching out as though they stood as watchmen over an unknown frontier. But for what were they watching? Who are they, sentries who should long ago have been relieved of their duties?
I began writing having returned just after Christmas to my city. It was snowing; I spent New Years Day in the office, stepping over the glass from the break-in. I wrote about the narrative voice in Blanchot; I constructed timelines of the rue saint-Benoit, and I incorporated quotations into the blog, drawn from all sources. That was 2004; over that year, I refound themes and images I'd written about in other media - letters to friends, private notebooks. Finishing one book and then another in the real world, I decided in mid 2005 to prioritise the blog, to make it the first thing in the morning that I came to.
So the summer passed - every evening I went out and drank golden beers and ciders in the pubs of the Ouseburn Valley, and every morning I rose early to write, still half-hungover. Gone the attempt to write drafts here of what I could rewrite elsewhere: the blog was to come into its own. Did that happen? It is a new medium, blogging. A new kind of writing is called for. That, at least, is what I told myself as I set myself a year to write whatever I pleased, following the winding paths of memory.
Beginning the new book earlier this year meant this blog-work had to be interrupted. What now?, I ask myself. Continue the book or, half-drowsily, write here as though on the edge of sleep, close to dreams, close to what has never emerged into the bright light of consciousness. Both, perhaps - both at once, as though I wrote with my left hand and my right; but isn't that too hard a task, when one hand, in order to write, must hold the other steady?
I think I am at that age when Dante found himself lost in a dark forest - halfway, that is, through my three score and ten. How is it, though, that when I write here I am always at that halfway, as though I'd discovered that hinge where my life was articulated? As though I were joined and unjoined at the same moment; as though the course of a life was separated from itself.
And sometimes I put it to myself that there is another who writes here, or that writing at the blog brings him forward out of the darkness. I felt closest to him, I think, in late January this year, when I was jet lagged from a trip overseas. I thought in the posts from that time, I approached the essential - but when I read back, I know I will not find it, and what is important in what I write is the future they give me, a kind of destiny.
I can remember what seemed to write itself then, in January. I remember his approach, the way he seemed to write my sentences for me. But he disappeared; the posts that came after tried to find him, but in vain. February and March passed too quickly; I was occupied with other tasks. And now, in April? I know of what I would like to write this Spring. No - I know the one I would like to bring forward in order to write in my place.
Put your hand on my forehead to give me strength, wrote Kafka on a conversation slip when, dying, he was robbed of speech. It makes me feel special when you do that, says R.M. when I kiss her forehead. And what was that line from Trakl? I've half-forgotten; was it: wounded on the forehead, I speak of far things? Now I remember the photograph of the young poet at the beach. He died age 26 - was it in the war? Franz Marc died in the same war, I remember. His wife and he kept two deer, a picture of which I framed and hung on my wall when I moved back to the Thames Valley in 2000. Whenever I hear the word, apocalypse, I think of Marc, and of his last, wild paintings, where all the animals run together.
A thousand posts. When will you come forward, double, and place your hand on my forehead?