How should a post begin? What should it contain? I think there should be rules as with haiku for this strange new genre. That you should write of the season, and the time of day, and perhaps of what lies around you. Ordinary items, extraordinary ones ... anything that catches the attention, even if it does so as it seems to come forward only when you let your gaze wander over what is usually taken for granted. Perhaps the ordinary and the extraordinary change places thereby.
I think it should be a rule to write of the ordinary, of the most ordinary. I took a bottle of wine - a Rioja - to the kitchen just now to open, anticipating of the sound wine makes as it is poured, and the glass from whose thin lip I would drink it. But I couldn't find the opener and took it as a sign: hadn't I decided, a few weeks ago, not to drink alone?
For my cheeks would grow hotter, I knew, from drinking, and the lightheadedness to come would desert me again, on the other side of that ripple that passed through the darkness of my evening. And isn't it more difficult to sleep, when you have drunk? I find myself awake at three o'clock, or two, my mouth parched and know then there's no point attempting to sleep.
I think it is different when you sleep with another, or at least that's what I remember. (And now a post has seemed to spin itself, accruing by those details with which it began those associations that let it gather itself forward, as though it were a body of contained water, spilling over its brink.) There is at least another not to disturb, which I would do if I rose and came in here to work. And I would know the strangeness of rising as early as a monk, and of that solitary life I lived before.
Every day, with such a companion, takes place after what the song calls the day before you came. After - and isn't that unimaginable, those nights, alone, when I rise very early, or late, for morning is not even close, to try to distract myself from sleeplessness? Afterwards, like another country spreading before me, another life beyond the plateau across I'm stumbling. But as I stumble, I can still give myself the excuse that my life has never quite begun, that there's still time - but for what?
Time for what? Not to write, and finish a book, but never to begin one. Time never to begin, and to know what it is not to begin: the expanse of time in which no work is possible. Once, when I was young, I think I thought I might fill that expanse: that if I gave myself time enough, then anything was possible. What did I find that others have not found? Neither talent, nor aptitude; but I didn't shrug my shoulders; I was never resigned enough to let go.
Somehow, the message never arrived, as though it had a dinosaur's long body to travel so that the brain could move the tail. Or that it had lost itself somewhere, congealing and thickening in a secret recess, and merging with that through which it should have passed. I imagine an octopus's ink in water, but which changes the substance of the liquid instead of staining it black. A medium, now, that is not so: the glass that will not let light pass, but that traps it instead.
And now I think of a prism that keeps light instead of separating it into seven strands, or of Duchamp's Large Glass that traps light, rather than merely slowing it. In some theologies, there is a darkness that shines, and I think it is there God lives: his absence is bright; although his presence is the opposite of all the ordinary things we keep about us. Or God is there as they become extraordinary, or is it just that darkness that conceals itself in what we think we can see? But then, too, the condition of light hides from itself in our own seeing, and that there's another seer altogether, with eyes all pupil, or with a white pupil like the cataract of an eye.
These are ways, at least, of letting speak this silence within sense. In Japanese, I read, there is an onomatopoeic sound for silence: sin, pronounced as sheeen, and the sound trailing off. 'Like "whoosh" is the sound of a sword cutting through the air ... "sin" is the "sound" afterward, when all is done ... and only the silence remains'. Shouldn't it be a rule that the post lets speak that silence - that it lets it trail behind like a comet's tail?
(And now the thread of the post is lost, or it has frayed and parted. Not for nothing did Breton call for vigilance in automatic writing ...)
Open on my desk, a volume of the literary prose of Basho, in whose introduction I find annotated marks, drawn in faint pencil. I bought it in Oxford, earlier this year, in Blackwells, and then read it by myself when I took the room for an extra night (grace: I was never charged).
'... Basho was deeply imbued with a sense of the passage of time and the impermanence of all things, he wrote often of the continuity of the past into the present'. This after a brief rumination on Basho's journeys, in which, in his notebooks, the poet would refer to utamakura, places that had been made famous in literary tradition. And now some lines of Basho that have something of the quality of Debord's Panegyric:
Of places made famous in the poetry since long ago, many are still handed down to us in verse. But mountains crumble, rivers change course, roadways are altered, stones are buried in the earth, trees grow old and are replaced by saplings: time goes by and the world shifts, and the traces of the past are unstable. Yet now before this monument, which certainly has stood a thousand years, I could see into the hearts of the ancients. Here is one virtue of the pilgrimage, one joy of being alive. I forgot the aches of the journey, and was left only with tears.
I tell myself - and this is another rule - that a post should also have something of that sense of impermanence, and joy, and perhaps tears. Impermanence: for what has to be written must be rewritten, and each day anew, for a blog moves forward in time. Joy: because resignation is not complete; and tears because it should be.
(A broken backed post, that lost its way. I put it up anyway - and isn't that another rule: to neglect writing into existence?)