Links are made and are broken; new readers come as others disappear. On rolls the blog into the future. Can you write anything more today? Is there anything to be written – that asks to be set down so that it will not be a question of forcing a confidence or a thought? The most pressing question: shouldn’t you being doing something else, attending to something else, awakening your attention to what matters most? In answer, I would say an academic life in its entirety is an alibi, but I know this is a lie. I feel simple guilt about the matters to which I am not attending (fortunately it is still early, eight ten, the day has barely begun).
If a blog, kept daily, is a corridor rolling into the future, there are doors it prevents you from trying. You would like to turn left or right instead of rolling on, to investigate a topic in more depth, to pause and rewrite this or that post. But there is something like a blogging imperative not because you are pushing towards the new and different, but because something of me has been caught and now lags behind. It is in terms of this lag that this writing should be understood, the substance of each post revealing the unfortunate fatality of a forgotten event as well as its formative force, being unable to grasp it as fact but being fascinated by the traces it leaves in your memory.
I should like to become able to speak of the event to which these traces lead, to discover it as a beginning instead of lacuna, to find out what I am rather than being deprived of myself and deprived of everything. Lack sings of itself, relating to itself. What seems to come from the future does so because of the propulsive force of the past. But that force is the wave that curls back on itself as it breaks into the future. It draws you back, and with it the whole of your present. That’s why it is necessary, sometimes, to begin blogging by recalling the circumstances in which you write. You recall them because they are losing their consistency and threatening to evaporate. Having cleared some space and time to write you would rather hold more tightly to this space, this time, rather than write.
Even then, you write from a desire which has hardly become itself – inchoate, formless, it seeks to hypostatise itself into a few definite paragraphs. But what when that hypostasis undoes itself, as it must? When the words you write attest to a desire in lieu of itself, feebly searching for itself, necessitating that you begin, tomorrow morning, all over again? When the paragraphs are stretched over the luminous void (a void without depth, that is pure lambent surface) which shines gently through every word you write?
Against the words, falling back from them, against the particular acts of memory you would accomplish, there is a reserve which is forgotten and must remain forgotten. What speaks? Who speaks? What hidden fatality? Dream of a version of deja vu where you see not what you have already encountered, but what will happen. A premonition, if you like, not because you have a clairvoyant’s gift, predicting earthquakes or lottery numbers, but because part of your future was snagged by the past.
It’s happening again – but what’s happening? It’s happening again – you remember, but there is nothing at the bottom of your memory. What happened? – You’ve forgotten, but that’s not the word. You are made to forget. The traces destroy themselves just as Bergman makes a film cell catch fire in his Persona.
This is the miniscule drama of writing of blogging. One unnoticed except when the other projects which sustain my writing come to an end. A book behind me and another unknown one to begin (but I have no idea what it will concern nor how I will find my way to its beginning), I cannot hide behind the alibi of academic work.
Lars Iyer's Blog 