Spurious

A Greater Age

I always thought of you under the sign of neglect. Who watched out for you? Who appreciated you? No one at all; and what could I do from a distance? I was always too far away. Still, I always wonder about distance. Is there a kind of attention which can only reach you from afar - that is necessarily distant?

I was always in the North, and you in the South. But wasn't that same distance carried in the letters that used to criss-cross the country? Just as our friendship was never really a friendship, and our relationship never a relationship, I imagine the distance rising into a kind of plateau, a way that can only be crossed when you could lift yourself to that height. As, perhaps, we lifted one another.

Distance: we barely saw one another - did that matter? We barely spoke - did it matter? Perhaps there is a kind of speech that can reach you only by way of distance, by a kind of neglect.

I am with you, I am not with you. Or: I am with you, but also far away, living my own life. Or: with you, but something else is happening here, many things are happening, of which you will not know; with you - and despite what happens here, despite what happens from day to day, and isn't this the testimony to my love? A neglectful love - but is it love? - that would reach you only because of distance, for the reason of distance.

There must be a threshold, a space. No instantaneous communication, no telephone - except very occasionally, and unexpectedly (the rule: keep each other's numbers). None of the temptations that would allow a kind of camaradarie to our friendship. For isn't the danger, despite the many joys sharing a day to day life might bring, that that distance would disappear which was always the third term in our friendship?

Distance - and in relation to which each of us could meditate upon the whole of our lives. The whole - wasn't that at issue each time we wrote? Wasn't it a question, each time, of meditating upon our lives and before the threshold, before distance? When we met - rarely then, and now almost never - it was always by way of what separated each of us from our daily lives.

It was a rare event, an exception. Did I want to see you sometimes, more than you me? And were you sometimes frustrated by a distance that always kept us apart? But over the years, it was the distance that kept us; we reached each other by way of its strangeness. Letters - emails - in which we would each report musingly on the whole of our lives.

Such relationships as these - where you meet very rarely, and writing only occasionally - amidst some crisis or another, perhaps, or simply because there gathers in you the need for distance, and to write, to speak, by way of that distance - are too rare. How often I think of friends with whom I am no longer in contact! Women, exclusively. Women - and I have no idea what has happened to them, nor how I can get in contact, nor, if I do, whether it will be welcome.

What does it matter now? I suppose I want to learn of the shape of a life, and to speak to others of the shape of mine. To write, to speak, by way of separation. I suppose I have a good memory, or that I spend too much time alone. The past is alive for me; I remember, I like to remember, not to press myself against the details of a vanished world, but to experience it by way of the temporal distance that separates me from it, diffusing event from event, insinuating itself into what happened then, even as it seems to suspend the order of completion.

Nothing will complete itself; we are still walking through the woods in the dark, as we used to do. Still meeting on occasion in the town centre on Sunday afternoon, you speaking of a new boyfriend. Do not keep memories - neglect them. Do not impose continuity on what has gone before, but neglect them, let events be incomplete, let sentences trail off into nothing.

Isn't this the wonder of Tarkovsky's Mirror? Neglected memories, events freed from themselves and rising into the air. 'I can speak now' says the cured stutterer at the beginning of the film. But isn't it better to say, 'I cannot speak'? I cannot speak; speech has neglected itself in me. Speech lies down. Writing lies out beneath the stars. 'I cannot speak': what neglects itself in me? What neglects itself as the past, in me?

This is the joy of being alone: never having to recount, for another, the order of the day, of a passage of weeks, of a life. And then letting the day return, and those weeks, and that life as if from afar. Letting them come, by neglecting them, as they neglect you. Freud said we had to kill His-Majesty-The-Baby in each of us: the imperious child who is the centre of the world. Kill him by neglect. A kind murder.

Neglect that lets the world turn away from you, and welcome you in its turning. That allows you to relate to others without seeking attention from them - to be one among many, a walker among walkers, conversation lightening itself of anything in particular. Happy neglect! Life without contour! What do you want? Nothing in particular. What do you require? No more than anyone else.  The tyranny of the question, How are you? The lightness of the answer, Not too bad.

I suppose this is how I understand my relationship to other bloggers, by way of their blogs. How is it I've come to know something of the lives of those whom I have barely met, if I've met them at all? And isn't it the more beautiful when a blogger writes under a pseudonym that is rigorously enforced (as mine is not, alas): then anyone at all could have written the blog you read. And couldn't you speak to anyone as though they were that writer (it could be him, or her - or him - or her -)?

Do I want to know who you are? Or do I prefer the gentle neglect of your anonymity, the way it falls peacefully around me like snow? Foolishly, stupidly, I wonder if the world of blogs isn't that world Handke is said to open in a book forthcoming in translation next year (via This Space)?

... 'a greater age' in which contemplation, love, goodness, beauty and peace are not only construed as utopian possibilities, but can be generated and made viable propositions  by telling stories.

And isn't that a reason  not to have comments on the blog? To neglect my readers (are there any?), and to ask for neglect in turn, which is to say, start your own blog (if you haven't started one), or carry your comment to your own blog, and let it bloom there in solitude. A gorgeous, generous solitude that can give of itself only because of this solitude; that will reach me by way of its separation. I am close to you; I am not close to you. I can hear you breathing; I can hear nothing.

Literary Research

An idea can also have a kind of life. An idea - escaping, now, the psychologism or the historicism that would confine it to a peculiarities of a life, or to an historical context - and that even contextualises those contexts in turn: an idea from which you live, and to which you owe duty.

Isn't this the way to read the biographical data Blanchot allowed to printed on his books? 'Maurice Blanchot, novelist and critic was born in 1907. His life is entirely devoted to literature and to the silence unique to it.' Isn't this the first way in which one should understand his life? But I suppose the idea that contextualises a life must also be contextualised: it is necessary, too, to trace its origins, even if, as it comes to itself, it slips back before it and runs ahead of it: even if, as idea, it begins to live its own life and to impose its own imperatives.

Blanchot himself gives the clue in the little text Les Recontres, where he sets a few names aside one another: Levinas, Bataille, Char, Antelme, in terms of the friendship with whom the course of the idea might be understood. This is not to say the idea is unoriginal, or that it was formed in collaboration: it is more complex than that, for what drew him to each of these men was also the idea, even as it sought to give form to itself, to live.

With Levinas, the reading of Heidegger, and the negotation of his thought. With Bataille, ideas of communication, transgression and experience: each friendship must be understood in the context of the destiny of an idea. Imagine that: isn't it what it means to live deliberately: to be caught by an idea, to be claimed by it, and to let it lead you into friendships and perhaps through them, as Breton discarded certain Surrealists from the fray. The idea can exhaust a friendship. Move on, move away. It must burn between us, the third, or we are nothing.

Of course, with Blanchot, it is still more complex, for the third is the exploration of the conditions of the genesis of the idea in friendship. Then it is friendship itself that is at issue in his friendships; it is the third term. Just as it is community that is at stake whenever Blanchot allows enters into political life. And it is literature - writing - that is the third term whenever he writes. Each time an experience - each time a kind of test that friendship, community and writing must endure.

Does he live for an idea? His life is not his life because of that idea. It is more than him - or less. And to its demand he responds wholly, making a gift of his life, giving his life to silence. But a gift that is not quite a self-sacrifice - that isn't only the result of a deliberate will. What effort did it cost him not to be photographed or interviewed, or not to meet researchers interested in his work? Perhaps very little. Perhaps it barely bothered him. Nevertheless, each time, it was the conditions of his work that mattered. His work, his life - the gift he was given: the idea. The gift he could give: his life - but only as it had already been caught and implicated by the idea.

Who doesn't want to live for an idea? To blaze with certainty? I am only certain in the mornings: then, for an hour or so, I have a fanatic's zeal. It is beautiful, even if in the rest of the day I am a  husk. Could I say I was in the grip of an idea? - that an idea had reached me? Later, on, as the day tilts towards evening, I will say: I've never had an idea, not one. Slightly earlier, in the afternoon, I might say: its was his idea, not mine. And earlier than that?

Is there really a kind of research that is literary, or at least writerly, where it matters not only what is said, but that it is said, and in a particular way? In The Unnameable, Beckett allows him to name narrators of his previous books, and not only in the Trilogy, as if he had always been following a single path: Malone, Molloy, Moran, but also Watt. And Blanchot's récits seem to recall one another, and to follow on from one another, in a single trajectory. What is being sought, and by what means? Or rather, what seeks itself, and by way of what kind of sacrifice?

The Third

You can be pretty - beautiful - enough to feel a responsibility towards your beauty: what does it deserve? how might I curate it? Hasn't it marked you out for an extraordinary destiny? High cheekbones, let's say, a slim waist, let's say, a soft skin: haven't they come to live their own lives, those cheekbones, that waist and that skin? Hasn't beauty become, for you, a kind of fate, demanding to be curated and bestowed to the world?

'I owe it to myself': no, you owe it to your beauty, and it is as though you lived in a National Trust property. There are rules to be followed; what is yours should also be for the good of all. What beauty! they will say when they see you, and even you are surprised. But doesn't beauty also demand a kind of modesty, that you efface yourself before what you have been given by chance?

Beauty lives its own life; it unfolds a fate for you of which you are part. 'I was beautiful then': said when you were very old, meaning: in me, across me, beauty led its life. But what beauty can ever say to herself: I am beautiful? Whoever admires their own limbs, or the brightness of their face? True, these limbs, this brightness can become part of an armory: a device to ensnare whomever will give you what you want. But still, even then, your beauty precedes you; it advances ahead of you into a room; it catches you in intrigue. And don't you owe it to your beauty to be intriguing?

When I remembered, with her, the immense beauty of X. (another X. - those posts are gone), she said, everyone young is beautiful, and perhaps she was right about that. Perhaps it meant, beauty travels through the faces of the young; it seeks itself there - it finds itself and doesn't beauty seek out beauty to mirror itself, to play lightly across bodies? Those faces are so young they haven't an expression of their own - they're not owned, not particularised. Who is responsible for them?

Then beauty can be caprice, cruelty. A single look and you are slain. Better not to be hypnotised by beauty - better not to be lost where it leads you. Everyone young is beautiful, said X., and didn't this mean everyone was also no one, and that a young face, as yet uncarved by smiles or frowns, as yet ungrooved, unwrinkled, was also everyone's face, anyone's face?

No doubt beauty's wasted on the young, like youth: what do they know of what, for a time, will possess them? What do they know of it, the beauty that passes through their faces, their bodies, giving them the chance of a great destiny? Do you really want to be picked out by your beauty? Selected, as though light was always shining on you?

What was the name of that beautiful nun who held a hot iron to her face? Beauty was her trial; she wanted to sink into another anonymity, far deeper than the anonymity of beauty. And this is what X. said, modestly refusing to acknowledge the beauty that once played across her and even condemning herself for letting what she called her prettiness lead her through life like a unbridled horse: hadn't it led to to risky adventures, to misery in a foreign country, where she was whisked away like a prize?

This is what she said, although her beauty had taken her everywhere, all around the world: she wanted to be the anonymity of obscurity, wanted all eyes, all attention to turn away from her. She was happily obscure, she said; still beautiful, although her beauty was softer, more dispersed. Although it was like a mist through which also shone a great benevolence.

A little girl, alone on an island, will make jewellery for herself: where did I read that? and isn't it nonsense? Still, beauty asks to be supplemented - ornamented. It asks - and don't you deserve to give it what it asks - to be set into that frame that will let it shine still more brightly? Eyeliner and mascara make the eye into something to be watched - the most delicate register of passing mood.

She looked away - she looked at me - each time it is as though the whole universe had turned away from you, or turned towards you. I've been selected, picked out - to be seen, and by her, a beauty. Or I was selected not to be picked out, for her glance to pass over me, and forget me. Divine forgetting! Divine neglect!

And mustn't it be a dreadful pest to be bothered for your beauty? Who's sent over champagne? Who's dancing next to you? Who spoke to you on the train? 'I wanted to stab his eyes out,' said X. many years ago, of man who looked lasciviously at her on a train. Not to be seen, to subtract sight from sight, to be allowed, for a short time, relief from your beauty: but that isn't part of the deal.

You are exposed to sight all the time. You are beautiful when you wake, and when you fall asleep, beautiful dressed up or scruffy; your neglect only sets beauty off more strongly; your indifference increases the charm of your beauty, its insouciance. What will you ever know of the world? Who will ever tell you of anything bad, or dark? You charm everyone, they want to see you laugh, and your eyes to shine out yet more brightly.

His aunts, David told me, used to take turns to comb the hair of the prettiest sister. And didn't I see it for myself, girls grooming another girl, the most beautiful one, as though they would each have a share in its brightness, its light? Console yourself with this: the beauty will learn little of a world that is drawn to its best whenever she is seen. It will part for her; the world will make way, and she will think it is the kindness of the world and not the kindness of her beauty to which she owes her life.

The women of Blanchot's novels are often called beautiful - and young. Each time, beauty and youth live their own lives, unfold their own destinies. Blanchot often writes of the way the corpse seems to absent itself from the world and draw the world with it: this is the source of its fascination. But doesn't he write, even more often, of beauty, of youth? For both, each time, are impersonal - both are possessing; both become a kind of fate, a way you survive without yourself. For neither can be kept, youth, beauty. They keep you; their play is that keeping, remembering and forgetting itself in your face, your limbs.

Divine sport! Divine caprice! - and isn't it cruel to you from whom beauty begins to withdraw, whose face is like the world that is made by God's absence, even as it still remembers him, and dreams of him. Beauty's withdrawal can also be seen, like a beach at low tide, stretched out, expansive. Yes, that is where beauty was; it is there that beauty loses itself and dreams of itself, in those shallow pools that look upward to the sky.

Beauty withdraws - and who are you now, half-beautiful, quarter-beautiful, in whom others can see only traces of what once possessed you? But X., like the former Miss Yugoslavia in Handke's No Man's Bay, welcomes beauty's retreat, her new anonymity. Who is she? One who can lose herself anywhere. One who is happily lost, one among others, and she could not have been before.

Who was she, then - all those years ago - when her beauty was sufficient to turn the world from its axis? Who was she, for whom an adventure might begin as she walked up the street? It came to her, the world - it ran up to her like a puppy, or a child: trusting, wanting your love, wanting to be bathed in it.

The adventure could begin today, or tomorrow, and you were young even as anything could begin, and at any moment. But this, too, was the temptation: couldn't beauty lead her from where she should remain? Couldn't it chase ahead of her, her fate, leading her away from what was most certain? But while she was young, she was also this will o' the wisp. Wasn't that her youth? Wasn't it what let the world hover on the brink of adventure?

Dangerous adventures, though. Quagmires. Happily, in the end, she was rescued - she rescued herself; she stayed in the room in which I am writing with a worthy beloved, and I thought, beauty has released her. Beauty is leaving her behind, and I could see she was happy.

What is happier than watching beauty anoint itself - those ceremonies of perfuming and the application of make up? Once, in my naivety, I asked Y. why she made herself up at all, and in that high Manchester bedroom, she said, 'watch' and I did watch as she talked me through her beauty ritual. She had become beautiful; she'd assisted beauty, letting it come to herself. I was impressed; in a few minutes, I had learnt a great deal. She sprayed perfume on her wrists and she was done; beauty was in the room. Beauty was the third, the other one, accompanying us. 'Do you see?' Yes, I saw.

Insouciance

To wake in the morning carried by what was begun the morning before; to rely on writing, to lean back on it: isn't this the dream? And to have spent the previous evening enjoying the glow of what had been written before, as though, after an adventurous youth and prosperous middle age, there was time to dwell in the satisfaction of what had been achieved. Or that the evening was also a time of work, and this a way to combat tiredness: to open morning in the evening, or at least to experience as promise what is ordinarily a gradual shutting down, a kind of coming to death. A morning that remembers itself in the real morning to come; rebirth both times - to be born again in both cases, living again through writing what was once lived in life.

The gods thought the ascetic Shiva was still too inexperienced to have renounced the world. Had he really tasted the life of a householder? Did he know the joys of marriage and fatherhood? so Shiva let himself be born into a human body; he lived, married, rose children and then, in time, died like any other mortal. But a whole life on earth is an eyeblink in heaven; and when he opened his eyes, the other gods bowed in veneration and went away. Truly Shiva was above temptation; truly he had come to the end of life, and lived beyond it. Then he closed his eyes again in meditation, already dead to life, already living beyond life.

Then is writing like Shiva, closed eyed and meditating on itself, only on itself, even as this 'itself' comes apart, even as it disperses itself to the farthest corners of the universe? All that remains is desire, a kind of impersonal movement that gathers itself from the disparate. So will writing, like the universe, move on. But writing is not life, but a kind of death, wherein everything that was lived returns again, but in a new form, and as though under glass. Yes, writing is always the subject of writing - and its object, too. As though writing only sought to return to itself, to that dispersal in which it is lost anew, even though, as its condition, it first has to construct an effigy in the form of a narrative, a kind of wicker man it then has to set aflame.

That is why I prefer to all others narratives that come close to the condition of writing - their own condition, but simultaneously, their own uncondition, since it disperses what narrative would hold apart, and disperses it as it is held together. A writing, then, that places form at stake, and whose content is always voided. How is that such narratives have always seemed to have begun before, to have attempted to tell themselves a thousand times? And that their narration is an attempt not only to reach us, but to reach themselves, to join the past they would recount to the future that will let them live? Cursed narratives, or narratives which seek to undo, by narrative, the narrative curse: how will they shake themselves from the linearity on which they seem to depend?

I once saw, on a tropical island (X.'s island), a wave roar up that held in its cross section large fish, facing in a single direction, suspended for an eternal moment before the wave broke. How to keep before it breaks such a form in a writing that takes itself as its own theme? The green wave broke, that is true, and the fish shimmered back out to another wave - I suppose they were big enough, strong enough, to hold themselves thus: but how to find a topic that would also survive the irregular waves that pass through narrative, and hold itself there, a form quivering in the formless?

Perhaps it is not strength that should be sought, nor size, but a kind of filigree delicacy: a net whose filaments would let the wave pass. Is this what happens in the second half of Blanchot's Death Sentence, where a series of events are recounted that seem to reverberate as though shaken equally by the return of the 'push' of narrative, of writing's return to itself? A series of events, of unimportant events, but important for that they concentrate what would otherwise be lost by that return. Did it take strength to write them? Or, as I imagine, a kind of sublime carelessness, a detached insouciance that let each event crystallise from the others, making a shimmering lattice, event linked loosely but surely linked to event?

Such a narrative is not written from divine caprice. Its lightness is the price of its engagement; what happens can only do so when seen, as it were, from the corner of the eye. And isn't this the miracle, that separates Death Sentence from the last of Blanchot's novels published in the same year, the turgid The Most High?

I will read neither narrative here, remembering, instead, what Thomas Carl Wall wrote about the former:

What the narrator recounts, and would like to end, are those things that distracted him: his seeing someone again whom he had forgotten even existed, his multiple dwellings, his strange and unpredictable moods (neither of which he takes very seriously), odd encounters with neighbours, comings and goings in and out of the rooms he and others enter enter by mistake [...]

None of these things had anything to do with his important and consequential work as a journalist at the time of the Munich crisis[....] While the events of the war years are dead, these inconsequential happenings have managed to live on and remain undead and unrecorded by virtue of their insignificance.

They are of secondary, inessential, non-primary importance [...] They are what happens when nothing happens, just as writing only happens when nothing happens.

Nothing happens. There is a kind of urgency to Blanchot's telling, it is true, but there is also a lightness, even a neglect - I have already called it an insouciance - that seems to have lifted what is written from itself. But still, this is not the light, creative joy of the deity who creates one world and can then dance away to create another. The lightness in the details, that bears them, is not arbitrary.

There is effort here - a narrative effort, even as it becomes possible only in a kind of gliding, where disparate events seem to bring themselves together into something resembling a plot. An effort, perhaps, to let the narrative be engaged by what it will henceforward take on as its own necessity: the task of narrating what undoes the narrative, and breaks it apart. And yet the narrative holds; the wave rushes through the net.

The Open Door

Do you know as it happens that a particular event is the last of its kind, that henceforward it will harden itself into a kind of icon of a relationship? Everything is there, if you think about it. Everything is concentrated there, and in the future that's how it will sum itself up, in the event that becomes the last, even if it is not the last.

So the last day with X., even if it was not the last: the Bacon exhibition in a white roomed studio, then to the London Review of Books bookstore for how long? Did I persuade her not to buy the three volume Marothy? But she bought more Bernhard, I remember that. 'I remember': and isn't it difficult to become a kind of archive, to contain more, in memory, than lives in the present?

It's very early. I woke three times in the night. It's the beer, I thought to myself. The bottle of Leffe from Londis. 'A man who drinks becomes interplanetary', writes Duras. Several times, she took the cure. Her liver was ruined. If she drank anymore, she'd -. But she still drank, she and Yann Andrea - her lover, her non-lover, then in the 1980s, after giving up filmmaking and retreating to write a series of books.

He met her at a book signing or somesuch; he wrote a few letters - and eventually, she replied. And then he visited her, a young gay man. They were lovers for a time - she was in her 70s now - but he would still go out to the hotels to find men. They drank together all night, all day. He soon caught up with her. They were both alcoholics, both wrecking their livers.

I think of them often, not, no doubt as they were, but as I imagine them to have been. Duras writing her journal of the year 1980; The Atlantic Man; The Slut of the Normany Coast; The Malady of Death: should I call them absolute books? And they drank, and walked on the beach, and she wrote, and he went out to pick up men.

They rowed - screamed at each other. Then, reconciliation. Departures and returns. She had to take the cure; she took it more than once. And she wrote, she continued to write, discovering a kind of absolute idiom, an absolute book. Only she could write it.

We have to write what only we can write, I tell W. sometimes. What can we do that no one else can? But who is this 'we' - he and I? Each of us, separately? Or more of us - more like us? 'Develop your legitimate madness': who wrote that? Nin? I took her books, along with Henry Miller's, to Oxfam a long time ago.

Your legitimate madness: Sebald, to the last, considered himself a scholar first, a writer second. Austerlitz, of course, is a terrible book - self-consciously grand, inflated, grotesquely exaggerating the tropes that made his earlier books so wonderful: the narrator who wanders, who comes close to madness, the presence of ghosts, of great events ... And the book is incessant, immodest; it rambles without cease.

Remember, instead, the story of Ambros in The Emigrants - remember as his journal writings release themselves from the narrator's account of his life and mental collapse. The writings from his journal, that he wrote when still young, accompanying his master through the Middle East. Ah, lightness itself, and full of youth.

Lightness like Duras's account of the year 1980, her published diary, that lifted itself into the air of Neauphle like a seabird. Will there have been one time in my life that lifted itself thus? A stream of diary entries, or letters, or posts?

Sometimes I think nothing has been left to chance in my life - there's no drifting. When was the last time a friend, passing, knocked on my door? Not once over five years; and barely before then. Besides, I wouldn't welcome it. I like to move undisturbed from one room to another.

Staying at Blah-feme's during the renovations, I once woke and went out to the toilet, past a sleeping Norn, and found the front door open. It was late - or was it early? The front door was open. I thought: this is like a dream. And then: Blah-feme's flat has entered my unconscious, and this is how I will remember it, and these days, when, rising early, we would sit at the table and drink capuccinos, before forming our little peloton to head to work.

It's been a long time since I lived with others. Five years - and wasn't it unbearable, then? Didn't R. and I go out to the garage and stare back at our big house, thinking, why are we here?, why do we live here? R. still phones, always drunk. I bought a caller ID phone so I know not to answer him.

Drunk, he has great plans for us. We're very funny, he says, we should write comedy together, he says. He might join the Foreign Legion, he tells me. This is his last year - you have to be under 40 to join. But it would sort him out, he says, and besides, he would learn French. They'd give you a new identity, too. R. could leave his debts behind. When he gets drunker still, R. tells me I haven't lived, that he's lived and I have not. I should write about his experiences, not mine, says R.

I moved into his room after he'd left in a hurry, being kicked out, and not for the first or last time, for drinking. I found a play he'd been writing. He admired the Beats; he left Kerouac's books, too, in that room. We used to quote favourite lines from Burroughs at one another. Drinking, taking drugs - it was his Beat adventure. R. was an adventurer, he told me; he was truly alive. He addicted himself to crack so he could descend into the underworld. 'It's what Burroughs would have done', he told me.

Meanwhile, Duras and Yann Andrea are drinking. She calls him Yann Andrea Steiner now - another Steiner, another character in her fiction. She writes - what is she writing? She collected some old photographs and decided to write a commentary. So The Lover was born. That's how it came together - as a kind of commentary.

Once, in a student house, on a visit to the careers service of my old university, a friend of a friend quoted the whole first page of The Lover from memory. I remember two phrases: 'one day, when I was already old', and 'ravaged'. That's what he quoted, drinking tea in his dark room.

It's not so early anymore. I should be writing my review. Should be doing anything else but writing here. But I need to wake up - to wake myself up, and there is a kind of writing that does that. Tilt your head back, says my brother-in-law. It's good for you to look up at the sky. Tilt it up then; look up: is the dawn coming? Not yet; soon.

Sometimes I imagine my unconscious is full of rooms, like Doom, or like Quake. Pass from one to the other. That room opens onto that one, unexpectedly. Doesn't the artist's room in The Trial open unexpectedly on the court? And I remember Wolfe's Peace, too - the ghost awoken in a vast house whose doors open into rooms of his past: the orange juice factory, the party at which he plays at Indians with his mother, the room beyond which he knows the Christmas tree is, burning by itself. Open the door, I tell myself. But it is already open, like Blah-feme's front door, letting in the orange light from the streetlights.

Duras died in her Paris flat, I think. At least that's where she used to receive her biographer. Monique Antelme is the last of them, the writers who used to gather at the rue Saint-Benoit. Blanchot had returned from the South; Mascolo and Antelme were already at work on le 14 Julliet, then came the drafting of the Manifesto of the 121 ...

This morning I tell myself I stand at the end of a whole history, that the door has opened onto a final room. Everything's been written; that world, the literary one, is finished. Pick over the remains, the memoirs. That there are some who can link you to the past: this is marvellous. That there are others, like you, who remember - this, too, is important, but in the end, your knowledge is for nothing, and you will die like one who is the last speaker of a language, with no one to understand you.

It was over, the literary dream drained away, when Duras moved back to her apartment to Paris and then - as I learnt from the only edition of Le Monde I ever bought - died. Back to the rue Saint-Benoit, no. 5, where Merleau-Ponty used to visit, and Lacan; where she would prepare 'steak a la Blanchot' for him to eat very slowly (he was always ill - that photograph of him as a young man, sitting with Levinas on the back of a car already has him with a cane). Duras, who would drink with the others every night.

Didn't I see, in Paris, the last time I visited (many years ago), a Duras cookbook? How funny! Her son published it, I think - the one they nicknamed Outa, the mite., and whom she spoke about in the interview attached to the English edition of Destroy, She Said, as belonging to a new, blank generation who cared nothing for the future. She placed all her hopes in them, the new generation, but what happened?

Picture it: Duras, between Blanchot and Leiris, their arms joined, during the Events of May 1968. Later, Leiris would condemn Blanchot for playing revolution in his journals. How indiscreet! How disrespectful! But I have always admired Leiris for the pictures of himself he allowed to circulate. An uncalm man, a man disturbed: yes, I like him very much, this rich man, this Sunday writer (he only had one day a week, he said, on which he had time to write.)

I think the dawn is coming. Open the curtains: is that the dawn? Outside, the big box that contains a dishwasher delivered to me in error. Should I sell it on, or let it rot there, outside. I'd asked B and Q to pick it up, they'd send delivery men, they said, but I waited a whole Wednesday in vain, and in the end crossly pushed it outside, scratching my wooden floor as I did so. But staying in, didn't I discovered the new joy of my flat, which I used to leave as early as I could in the morning, even at weekends, even on Sunday, to work, instead, in the office?

A whole life with X. finished in the summer. John Sandoe books, the London Review of Books bookshop - and World's End bookshop at the bottom of the King's Road. I think we saw Anthony and Cleopatra at the Globe the last time I was down - too much of a pantomime, played for laughs, X. and I standing stiff-legged among the groundlings.

Isn't that where Corin Redgrave stood when he came to the Globe? Where else? Where else would he stand? Was it a year before that we went to the last night of his King Lear by chance? And I remember cycling across London Bridge in the rain to see Kevin Spacey as Richard III. But that life is over; the door is closed, althoughI think it stands slightly ajar in my dreams, like the door at Blah-feme's house.

R. rang twice last night. Neither time did I answer. How loudly the phone rang! But it was his number that showed up on the caller ID. Doesn't he understand that while he drinks, he belongs to the past. The door is closed; I'm pushing it against him.

'In Paris': and that, too, was another life. I remember looking for the bookshop, Des Femmes, to see Cixous books all lined up. It was closed, though we took a long time to find it. The bookshop by the Sorbonne, that was the best. But I didn't belong in Paris, just as I didn't belong in London.

Another life. Did I know it then? Did I know it was an episode? Your affairs are like novellas, David used to tell me. And I thought, no, like recits - events that never quite seemed to happen, to complete themselves. That turned around a moment that could never come into the present.

Affairs - that could never be lived in the present, leaving memories oddly stranded, without context. The Rodin museum. The Picasso museum; his glorious ceramics. The day out at Versailles; it was my birthday that day; I had turned 30, and I couldn't accommodate the size of the gardens - were those dots people? How far, then, did the water stretch?

Later, we walked through the woods, and I thought of the House Absolute in Wolfe's Book of the New Sun: a House whose rooms opened to the outside, a House so vast, so ancient, that huntsmen pursued their prey through its corridors. But did I know it was only an episode - that that day, like so many others, would set itself back in my memory, as though it were behind glass? But an episode that did not complete itself, and set out to look for writing, like a hunter searching for its prey.

How to Live Deliberately?

Nearly three years of the blog, the three years of my mid 30s, recording how I gradually fell away from academic work, from writing papers and books, and to my current fallen state, writing nothing in particular, doing nothing in particular, barely reading anymore. How do the days pass? Administration? Bureaucracy? Not even that.

Was it this time last year I enjoyed writing autobiographically? I remember writing a great deal; I haven't reread those long posts, written as summer became autumn, and finishing (I think) as winter came. Then the time after I returned from India, my jet lag waking me very early in the morning, long before dawn. And then, another phase - the drama of job applications earlier this year, intense work on papers, stress of every kind.

And then, the long phase which brings me to the present - the pretentious phase, as I like to think of it, which I  seemed to arrive at through a kind of ascesis. Other forms of writing fell away; I deleted many older posts. What is going on here now? I don't think that question is easy to answer.

Sometimes, especially early in the morning, after a coffee, I feel a great certainty about what is perhaps ridiculous to regard as a 'project' (a project of what kind?) I need nothing else, I am carried along, from one post to another. But then, there come quite suddenly, great waves of tiredness, when writing is impossible. Tiredness, especially, in the late afternoon, as everything seems to be for nothing, as though I had already lived a whole life.

I admit I'm still surprised that I have not been able to turn out a book a year. I lost interest. Perhaps, as my job became more secure, I discovered a sense of shame. No more books, I thought. And no papers. Read; work in private. And so I did - two years ago, Marx, Deleuze ... - for a whole summer. X. was here; we played tennis in the evening, and crossed the cowfield home. Was that a happy time? Either way, the reading didn't continue. How intensely I used to work! Night and day! This morning, finishing something like an article, I thought: you've already peaked. I thought: that was it, your peak. How laughable!

How strange to move into a new life, without work! Without the great struggle to find a job, and then to keep it. After the struggle - what? 'What are you working on?' - 'Nothing, nothing.' Last summer was the great summer of going out. Every night, and until late; the Ouseburn Valley. A sundowner at The Free Trade, then to The Cumberland to sit outside in the evening.

Every night! I'd never lived like that! It was marvellous. This summer was its echo; so many nights out, but then the sadness, too, of the long breakup with X. And then to find myself alone, and in the middle of life. We drank Cava and cassis in the evenings; we ate together - again, the happiness of life, its substance. I said to Blah-feme to write about food, but I should have done so myself.

Yes, that was the summer, which ended as the workmen came to transform the flat, at last, at last. A new ceiling, a new bathroom; the central heating fixed, the electricity made to work again, the damp driven away, the drains cleared ... of course it came back, the damp, and worse than ever. And then we found it, the swearing plumber and I, a great leak from upstairs.

An insurance job. Phone the insurers, then. And phone B & Q to pick up the dishwasher they misdelivered. And write a letter of complaint to the dampproofers for ruining the floor. And to Comet for not the delivering the fridge until all the food had rotted. Banal, bourgeois dramas, of which I feel ashamed to write. I always remember, rather stupidly, that line from Thoreau: 'I went to the woods to live deliberately ...'

And all the time, the blog. Ceaselessly, blogging. To escape life? But it is not that simple. To work? No - it is not that, either. The explanation lies in the posts themselves, which I have to reread to remember. Why does it seem that I'm a ghost of the certainty I feel as I write, early in the morning?

A curiosity: I cannot help linking the posts I write to particular places. That bridge by Plymouth station which reminds me of 'The Arm of the Sun.' The roundabout by Morrisons, which recalls the long piece I never finished, on Kafka and the everyday. As I walk round town, I will suddenly remember a post.

'To live deliberately ...': but what can that mean? I only give Dogma papers now, and almost always collabaratively. Nothing to publish. I've written about love, friendship, my favourite music, my favourite book. But I could barely finish the last paper, the one to which only one person came. I had the whole of August, but for half the month, I was exhausted, and for the other half, I lost myself writing here, I think only because I'd been so tired before, because I'd fallen away even from writing about falling, that old stalwart ...

Richard Wollheim's Germs lies on the floor by the bed. I should read it, I though, to reawaken memories. To give myself, as I did last year, the vastness of the past. Because in truth, my present is narrow; the nights are very long. For a long time, earlier this month, I went to bed as soon as I came in from work, and watch episodes of The Simpsons, the whole lot, from series 18 back to series 1.

Exhaustion. Was it the change of seasons? Something else? This weekend, I stayed in, rather than going out to the countyside as I had intended. In, passing from room to room, eating tinned fish then bowls of plain yoghurt and jam. A coffee first thing, and half a green tea, later. Tuna and brinjal pickel. Hard boiled eggs with pepper. Ikea crispbread with good olive oil.

Passing from room to room, my new neighbours quiet, and all the while thinking, what should I write? How to live deliberately? A pile of books arrived this morning. The Marx I don't already know. And another pile of books to arrive soon, by or on Lacan, to help my with a long review I'm writing. Piles of books, but I have to force myself to read.

How to live deliberately? There are many friends from whom I don't take phonecalls. Write, I tell them, I don't want to talk. It's true I am out most evenings. To talk - no, that's no good. But to write instead ...

In the summer, I got a new mobile phone and a new phone with caller ID. I got broadband at last, and I was given a mini ipod and a laptop. Everything was to work, I told myself. Everything, at last had to function; and so it did. Next, a new television, one that takes freeview and a scart plug to play DVDs. All to clear the space for a deliberate life ...

It is a kind of indifferent speech that has come to obsess me. An indifferent speech, an indifferent writing - without know what is meant by either phrase. As though I could smooth down writing. Or as though, by writing, I could reach an absolute smoothness, the ice on which nothing can live.

To write: what might it mean to achieve that: the bare infinitive. To write ... Do I think I'll find my way to it tonight, that to write without forethought, to ramble, is a way to surprise writing writing? Laughter: I've caught writing out in me. Writing wants to write, to say nothing in particular. And I should be glad it will keep me up - it's nine o'clock, nine bells, and I must not give in to sleep.

Papa M playing in the other room. Succeeding John Fahey, one album after another on the computer. Live from a Shark Cage. You can still hear Slint in his playing. I have so much music now. All the music I want. But how to live deliberately?

Some posts I wrote were very popular. I do not write in those styles now. Pare it down - less styles, always less. No more Bernhard-isms. And shouldn't I drop Blanchot, the last companion? And what about these kinds of questions, stolen from Handke to enliven a line of prose, to awaken it?

There's no doubt: I was much more careless when I began. I hadn't written in this way for a number of years, not since all my correspondences finally fell away. It was a struggle to begin, and even to find my way to a beginning. I remember I made datelines of the activities of this or that member of the Rue Saint-Benoit group.

Yes, that's how it began. And then, very slowly, completely alone in the days after Christmas here in the city, I began to write of the narrative voice in Blanchot, and found my way to quote Kafka on the 'merciful surplus of strength'. That was the beginning, the barest beginning, and these are still my concerns, although I am not alone in the city anymore. And still I ask myself, how can I live deliberately?

And I've lived in the city for nearly five years. Five years, up and down the passage that runs to the back entrance to the office. It is a peaceful city, a benevolent place. Will I be here forever? Moving around is no good. To begin again, to start over again - it's no good. But didn't I come close, this year, to getting a job in X.? And mightn't I chance, soon enough, on a job in Y.?

I'm keeping myself awake. By writing, I'm awake; I'm even thinking of the future, of that little place I might hollow for myself in these hours before sleep, like a kind of snow burrow. Freezing to death is like sleeping, I'm told. You'll be given the choice: sleep and die, or keep awake. And to sleep is to fall sweetly into death.

I read an interview over the weekend with Terrence Davies and felt great anger. The interviewer wrote of X.'s campness, of his upset as though he was a specimen under a microscope. I like X.'s films very much. It means a great deal to me that he is British, as I am.

I remember his three early shorts, the last part of which showed the death of the man we had met as a boy in the first short, and as a young man in the second. Now he was dying, and it was not a pretty death - sputtering, coughing. A black and white film.

And I remembered, long ago, at university, watching a South Bank Show on him in the television room in student halls. The others were laughing at him. He was so camp! The director spoke of recreating a street from his childhood. There it was, the street. The Long Day Closes: was that it?

I think again of the interviewer and sudder. I feel a great rage - Davies is to be admired first of all, and unconditionally. For what was the interviewer fit for, who would separate himself from Davies as a scientist does from a specimen? Typical Guardian rubbish, I told myself.

And then another memory: the wordless refrain at the beginning of Vaughan Williams's third symphony, and a shot of black water. Everyone sang in those Davies films! Always singing. And another scene: fists through glass, yes that was beautiful. Like the arms of the prisoners in Genet's film, that reach one another through the bars.

Genet. Say that name and you are protected. He sought to live deliberately. He lived deliberately, exemplarily. Five novels, a few plays - he knew when to stop. And then Prisoner of Love, the coda. And then death. A beautiful life.

And now I know what I want tonight. To write a post that would resemble one of the songs John Cale and Lou Reed wrote for their tribute to Andy Warhol, Songs for Drella. The song is called 'A Dream', and Cale narrates it. 'It was a very crisp, clear Fall night ...': its supposed to resemble a diary entry by Warhol. Who knows, it might have been one of those entries! It is desperately moving, because Warhol is already dead, and I fancy I can hear something of him in his words, spoken in Cale's Welsh accent. Warhol who is another figure close to me, someone else who lived deliberately. Now I know what I want to write.

Sometimes, readers write to me. Emails, making connection - a flurry at first, and then nothing, and then, perhaps, another flurry. Most of it forgotten straightaway. I have an enemy, who likes to write to berate me. I have allies, who want to tell me they appreciate me. I reply to them simply. I think in addition to writing, these readers should start blogs of their own. Everyone should start blogs of their own, that's what I tell myself, in what I imagine is Warhol's voice.

I used to have a copy of his Diaries, Warhol. But like so many books, it couldn't come with me from place to place. You can't keep all the books you buy, nor all the photographs you take. The Diaries were too big, anyway - and too inconsequential. But I admit it was the inconsequential that drew me to them. Nothing was said, never anything in particular.

Warhol would ring his friends every morning and speak, just speak. I like this, too. Cixous used to ring Derrida and just speak. He would keep quietly. Sometimes, Derrida would ring Blanchot. And Blanchot wrote to Monique Antelme that she should call him whenever something good happened to her, or something bad.

Letters! Do you remember when they used to arrive? Do you remember the last letter you ever sent? I used to wait for letters every day. Letters from ... yes, every day, for years on end. And then - how many years ago? 5? 6? that desire came to an end. It stopped, simply.

Was I free? I gave myself to academic writing. Several hundred thousand words - it kept me busy. Nothing I wrote was very good. Did I learn about writing? What I learnt, I forgot; I can barely put together a paper.

The last letter. An interval; academic writing, and then - the first posts on a blog. And then, a few months later, my own blog, now that I was free from waiting for letters, or desiring to send them.

Isn't this where it was all coming, to the blog? Wasn't it all leading here? As though a gathering wave had finally met a shore to break against. It broke and spread - so much writing! Not necessarily good, nor bad, but - there could be writing!

Laughter, incredulous voice: and you are proud of this? With all that's going on in the world, you are proud of - this? W.'s apocalypticism. He made me listen to Godspeed's Dead Flag Blues in silence. 'These are truly the last days.' The last days: 'we're finished,' says W., 'it's over. We're fucked. We - are - fucked.'

Papa M.'s cover of 'Turn! Turn! Turn!': play until the tape ends, he decided. Write until your hour's up, I tell myself; and it almost is. I'll finish when he finishes. I'll finish - now.

('This is an idiotic voice. It's inane.' - 'But I like it's inanity. I like it's idiocy.')

Garden Aeroplane Traps

Five years, and nothing happened. Nothing happened - that's what we decided as we walked down the stairwell. And wasn't it doomed - five years ago, it nearly coincided with ...? It 'began' the day after the catastrophe. A bad sign. Everything that has happened since has done so under a bad sign.

Events want to complete themselves, to fall into linear sequence. Each episode wants to be caused by the one before it, as in a novel. How then to narrate those moments that seem to slip out of time, that are not allowed to come to completion?

The récit, the tale is supposed to bear upon what happened in the past - a single event, that a narrator mulls over in the present. But what happens when that event never completed itself, and thus never really happened, detaching itself from all linearity?

Did it happen? You cannot be sure. It has not coalesced, has not rounded itself off into an episode. What happened? But even that is unknown. It was not allowed to happen; it was not supposed to. But what did not happen broke into the order of time, it turned there. The détourned instant, the fragment broken from time's course: what does it want but completion, the future in which it could arrive?

It hasn't happened yet. It isn't finished. Or: it still hasn't happened, and that is what is happening. So we came to incarnate that non-event, the future of what will not happen. Until what happens is trapped by what does not, unfolding against it, a tragic struggle, freedom against necessity.

Time has passed. How old are we now? How impossibly old? We have outlived the event, missed our appointment. Or it is that it has outlived us, but not in time, not in our order of time.

Somewhere else, in another life, we are becoming younger, together. Younger: and all the way to the inception of the event.

And meanwhile? I miss you even when I'm with you. Or: am I ever with you when I'm with you?

Faith: it will happen. It will be brought to completion, now as for the first time. Yes, that is our freedom, lived somewhere else.

And meanwhile, this 'other' freedom, the instant stranded by time, which asks for mercy. You said - or was it me - 'is it ever going to happen?' I said - or was it you? - 'another five years ...?' Each time, it was the unfinished instant that spoke, we knew it.

Was it pitiful? Resigned? I'll use this word instead: indifferent. It was indifferent to us. And wasn't that its charm?

Charm: the 'background' of speech, always there. Indifferent, but there. We could depend upon it. Everything we said it tore apart, gently. Everything said was dispersed across its surface.

Like the wind that passes among the table things in Mirror, turning them over. A bottle rolls and falls to the ground. Isn't that the miracle of Mirror - that it is made up of the continuity shots that are supposed to pass unnoticed in a film? Continuity - when a camera is held onto a face for too long, when it lingers over a detail. What happens then? What fails to happen?

Isn't it very beautiful, the sense that what happens does not do so for you? Indifference: that I do not possess the world, or myself. That I barely possess myself - and you? - who are you?

As though you can only see it from the corner of your eye. As though it is reached only by indirection. - 'I cannot find my way there.' - 'Ah, but it will find you.' To be found - but by what? By what is indifferent to you. Finding you as it would find anyone. But you, now, are this anyone. Happiness: to be no one in particular.

It is His-Majesty-the-Baby, as Freud calls him, who must be killed. The brilliant, charming child, centre of the world. But how is the child - the child who still lives within you - to be found by someone other than his parents, or those around him who are like his parents? How to live an obscure life? How to be found by the obscure?

Write not to find, but to lose. No: write to be found - write every day so it will find you, what does not approach directly. Then a blog is like one of Ernst's Garden Aeroplane Traps.

Five years: waiting waits beside us, without object. Waiting turns in itself.

Write until you are neglected by writing. Until writing writes itself. 'Itself': there where it is not, and you are not.

Wait until it does not know you are waiting. Until waiting loses itself object and all transitivity. Only then will it come. Only then will I be able to say to you, come.

Letters

Sometimes, apart for months, years, we corresponded. I wrote too much; you wrote very little, and what you said seemed to say nothing. Pure froth - but was it that? There was a letter; something was written - and wasn't that enough, that you'd addressed me?

Occasionally, a more serious letter would come, and you would speak with great brevity. I have been very unhappy. I've decided to leave my job. Absolute letters. Decisive ones, in which a new turn was announced. Why did you need to tell me? Why that need, to join what was said to what could not be said, the written to the unwriteable? For it was also in order for speech to rest in silence that you wrote, and that I wrote to you. To rest, to be addressed - speech was lightened by that crossing, by the letters that were sent over the body of England.

Sometimes, alone, I imagine my words are addressed to you. My words - not mine, and you as the guardian of my speech, just as I am the guardian of yours. Peace: I wanted them to rest in your silence, to find peace there. And then it is as though we are still young, that this day joins itself to another, half our lives ago.

Language Doubled

Language doubled, language that no longer disappears into mediation: how does it call you, how does it come to claim you? When the right word does not come, perhaps: when the word that would allow you to speak eludes you and, in its absence, seems to unjoin your capacity to speak from itself. When you stammer, and language seems to stammer, according to a rhythm that interrupts the rhythm of speech. Or is it arrhythmical, the voice that joins yours? Stuttering, hesitancy - distrust the ability to speak. Speak by way of blocks and breaks. Then what you cannot say joins what you say. Speak, and it is not only you that is speaking.

Or - another example - speak by way of what everyone says. Engage gossip, be engaged by the rumour - pass speech along without detaining it; speak of nothing, of nothing in particular, and least of all yourself. Lightness of a speaking that belongs to no one. Light speech, that seems to stream without reference to what is said.

And then there is the speech of the infatuated - errant, wandering because it cannot yet pose what is obvious: the fact of attraction. Speech wanders from what both parties would want it to say. Wandering speech, that speaks by way of what cannot be said. Think of the dialogues of Henry James.

And still another kind of speech - the one that accompanies images, but seems to have little to do with what is presented. That belongs to itself, that clears a space for itself, letting those images become more dense and more strange. The poems of Tarkovsky's father in Mirror. The dialogue in Godard's In Praise of Love. What are they saying? What is going on? And the image of the Seine, the bridges: what does it mean? Errant speech, again. Wandering speech, once again.

And finally, the free association of the analysand, the automatic writing of the Surrealist: it comes close that murmuring that undoes the sense of speech, that seems to indicate a secret meaning only for meaning to withdraw its measure. Who speaks? What speaks? 'A modest recording device', says Breton, and now we cross from speech to writing.

Write, tell, until writing chokes its own channel. Write until the grit fills the filter. What was it that you meant to say? What did you mean to write? Writing lives its own life, away from you. Lives it, and draws what you write of your life into its streaming. Indifferent to you, turned away from you, concerned with itself, only it has no 'itself' and has no face. Setting your life quietly aflame. Setting what you have written coldly aflame.

Or there is a practice of fiction that leads narrative away from chronologically arranged sequences to their interruption and their condition. That speaks of what makes writing strange to itself and its writer as it pushes back before the capacity to speak, to write, was first granted. A before that never issues into a beginning, but accompanies it, doubling, mocking it, parodying the certainty with which it cannot coincide. Dub writing. Hauntology.

Or poetry, performative writing, that burns up a life, sacred speech that catches flame in words detourned from the world, in a naming that names the world's absence, its interruption. Or the painted word, Cy Twombly at the Tate: what is he trying to write, aphasiac, in the half-light. What has written? But writing has written in those blazing words. Writing where words let speak the speaking of words.

Or song, where the voice floods sense with nonsense. Flooded sense, pools where darkness burns in darkness - a singer possessed, dispossessed. Who has lost herself by way of her voice. Her voice is loss. Lyrics that double what is lost by way of that loss. Cat Power. The desolation of singing. You Are Free: but by what freedom? The voice lost in its own corridors. Lyrics lost without sense. But the 'without' blooming like a night flower.

Or the choked blog, like a dawn marsh with steaming fog. A blog running nowhere, standing water, stagnant water. Or that is like rusted metal, turned all colours. Or the objects from Stalker's nightstand underwater. An encrusted hull in drydock. A throat filled with mucus.

Language Itself

In the beginning there was language, say that. In the beginning, language set itself back from the beginning, the fact of speaking from the capacity to speak, so that it might always return, regardless of the will of anyone who spoke, who wrote. But what returned?

Failed language, language whose sense was suspended in sense: a word that referred but also suspended this reference - a sentence that presented only a parody of sense. Language seemed to be given twice over - firstly as that gift that allowed you to speak of the world, but then again as what robbed speech of speech: the fascination of words, the drone or the mantra, the sung words of ritual or the magic words of incantation. Right away, language belonged on the side of the sacred - it separated itself from itself, and the world from the world.

Language itself: but how can language be experienced as language? Only when the sacred is reduced to itself, when there is nothing divine. The sacred, the separate - certain kinds of writing, of speech follow the detour of sense, but by way of sense. Language was led to itself, but only because its author, its speaker, was ensorcelled, was lost in a trance. Led to itself, but not by one who would use language, who would dispose of it.

In the beginning, language, but language set itself back from the capacity to speak, to write. Always the chance of a writing, a speaking to come. Always the chance of return and by way of what spoke, what wrote, without the will of the speaker, the writer. By way of fate, then - by necessity. But also by freedom, language's freedom, as it opens, through a sudden leap, that space that gives speaking and writing life anew.

Their rebirth, their eternal novelty, but only by way of came before - by that writing over which none of us could exert our power. Does this mean, then, that language only belongs to a greater order of power, that, like God, it lets open the field of creation, the playground of possibility? But the terror is that no power belongs to it; there is no language itself. Unless this names only that wandering that lays claim to writing as it fascinates the speaker, the writer, and fascinates her listeners, her readers in turn.