One-and-a-half hours before I meet friends for a drink and a film, I am stranded in the office without being able to write anything for the book. What to do instead? write about what you cannot write, so at least you have some relationship to what needs to be done, even if it is only at one remove. Vicarious writing, writing by proxy: this is what blogging permits, as letter-writing used to do.
Once upon a time, I would have used this interval to have written to a friend. Such a writing seems very far away now. Remember the joy of criss-crossing letters: one sent to X and another received from X and so on, each with the two to three day wait which detached what was written from what was experienced in the moment of writing. But this is already naive, as if writing did not always demand such a detachment: as if to write and to write a letter was already to have lost what was experienced and to have regained it in a new way, as words on the page.
Now, instead, words on a screen. But this is happiness: the sense something was done, that I will have made something from these vacant minutes.
It is six o’clock here in the office. I arrived hungover at ten this morning; I set to work with the aim of finishing a draft of the first chapter of the book, suffice to say this was not possible. Besides me, a pile of CDs. I listen to the odd numbered Beethoven symphonies. And besides me, too, two printed out drafts of lectures W. intends to give. ‘It is not because Pascal is unhappy that he writes, he is unhappy because he writes …’
What did I do today? Any answer I give betrays the feeling that nothing happened today, and that it happened such that this nothing became tangible, ever-present, there in the blank whiteness of the sky. What I do? Nothing happened and I remember the conversation W. and I have when we are in our cups: what does it mean to write as a philosopher? What does it mean for Heidegger to write, or for Blanchot? ‘For all that he wrote on boredom,’ one of us says, ‘Heidegger knew nothing of boredom’ – ‘By writing on boredom rather than with boredom,’ says the other, ‘he betrays it.’
Steve’s new essay on Auster’s Oracle Night sent me out on the street to look for the book in question, not to buy it, but just to look. I found it in one of the two Waterstones. I wanted to confirm what Steve reported of Auster: that he is unafraid to use cliches if only to release himself from that movement of writing which would have been halted if he had paused to rephrase them. That it is writer’s block that he would avoid by so writing. Then I remembered placing a star in the margin of Josipovici’s article ‘Kierkegaard and the Novel’. Here is a part of that passage:
[Johannes de Silentio] can make us feel vividly that he – and we – cannot really understand Abraham, but the implication remains that so long as he goes on writing about Abraham he himself will never be a Knight of Faith. This is Kierkegaard’s problem. He cannot remain simply ironical, like his beloved Socrates. Times have changed[….] he is committed to writing in order to make people see the lies they are telling themselves, but so long as he goes on writing he remains in the subjunctive mode and so cuts himself off from the life he most desires.
Life! Kierkegaard is like Kafka in wanting to leave writing behind. Should he stop writing?, Kierkegaard asks himself, should he take Holy Orders? Is this what God wants for him?
One could say that Kierkegaard’s personal tragedy lay in the fact that he was not enough of a writer to take pleasure in the writing process itself, but too much of one ever to be a Knight of Faith.
W. and I speak of a thinker we admire. ‘He is always absolutely serious’, says W., ‘it’s just as Blanchot said about Bataille: something serious is always at issue when he speaks’. I agree, remembering that W. always says the opposite of me. ‘You are my id’, W. says, ‘nothing is ever serious in our conversations’.
Does it change when we drink? I remember what Bataille reports of a drunken reading session with a friend. Drunk, they take it in turns to read aloud from a book. It is as though drinking changes the relation to the book. As though something becomes possible in the act of reading.
W. is an advocate of philosophy as friendship, as face to face contact, intimate groups of discussants, impassioned talk. I remind him of what he already knows: when Blanchot praises the seriousness of Bataille’s conversation, he is referring not to the content of what Bataille said, but to the seriousness of speech itself. What does this mean? That there is a way of communicating which interrupts the great circulation of words, which allows there to be felt a contentless declaration, a thundering silence, even a kind of call.
Blanchot had friends whom he never met. He sent short letters to them in a beautiful hand. Asked if he wanted to meet by a friend such as Edmund Jabes, he demurred. Derrida reports a dream where, speaking to Blanchot at the door of his flat, he tries to peer inside to see what is there.
Interruption. This post is growing rather long, so I will note simply that great writers, great thinkers have also sensed those interruptions which divide the facility of writing from itself. Mishima cursed the fact that a rain of words had never stopped falling within him. Bataille needed to break the smoothness of philosophical discourse. Hasn’t friendship, philosophical friendship something to do with this interruption?, I want to ask W. I am thinking of Bataille’s drunkenness, of Blanchot’s retreat, of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. I am thinking of another kind of boredom and of writing with boredom, rather than making of boredom one theme among others.
The last line of the Josipovici essay follows the last sentence I quote above:
But then that too could perhaps be seen as the best way of defining all those modern writers whom, like Kierkegaard, we may call ‘essential writers’ to distinguish them from the scribblers, even the highly talented scribblers, who will always be with us.
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