Rush-That-Speaks

The Image

The ambition, here, is always to generate writing as though from itself, out of itself. To write to mark only the act of writing, to say, today writing was possible. Palliative of blogging: writing is allowed to write itself. Writing marks itself as event, as achievement, and can then die away. There is no need to detain writing in a book; no need to round off what is written – to draw it into an essay or a story. The post is complete because it is dated – because it was what was written on this day. But is it complete?

Was it in a story by Borges that there was a mirror that called what it reflected into existence? The image came first, I remember that, and then the ‘original’. So does the event of writing call for more than an enigmatic signature to say, I achieved myself. Writing asks to be made flesh; it calls for an event to relate. Something must be related – writing is not music, it is not painting. It must speak, and speak with words. Something must be said. But with blogging, what is said stretches itself much more thinly over the event of writing. ‘Beneath’ what is recounted, there is the marking of the event of writing. As if to say, I was able to write today, writing was possible today.

What is it that was marked? in Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, there is an explorer far ahead of the adventurers of the story. He leaves his signature here and there. He leaves his name, his mark. Something was possible – I was here. I was here, and I am ahead of you, you who follow me. So with blogging. I was here. Only now, the blogger is not ahead of you, but behind you. Nearly every day was marked, not so the blogger could lay claim to it, but to himself. To say simply, it was possible, writing; I was able to sign my mark across the day.

Crusoe

Sometimes I dream of sustaining what is written here over the course of a book, or at least an essay, to be published elsewhere. To be borne by the momentum of what is written here to make a whole book, a sustained piece of writing. But I know I would miss what is most important by doing so: to keep my appointment with the day, to put my mark on the blank surface of the day as on a clean page.

I imagine myself as Robinson Crusoe who makes a calendar to mark the passing of days. Crusoe who fears he will lost in time if he doesn’t make his mark. But there is always the hope that I will do more than leave a mark: that writing will need details with which to clothe itself, that a small narrative will be possible. But what is there to narrate? Only that I have spent a great deal of times in rooms like this one trying to mark my presence in the day. That I waited for the surplus of strength that would bear me from boredom and dissipation to mark the day.

The mark is a struggle, I know that. The strength to write raises itself against the day. How do I meet the day at its own level? By lying down. By giving up and wandering the streets. By leaving any particular task and letting the day carry me. How do I struggle against the day? By leaving the dated entry that will mean it will not pass without me – that the day will not have carried me too far from myself.

Rush-That-Speaks

Is this why the most imposing theme at this blog is stagnancy and lassitude? Is it because it is over stagnancy that I have triumphed in order to write? Then to write of stagnancy is to stand over the body of the loser. I am the victor; I won – what did not allow me to write is now mine to write about. I, the victor, can write of my defeat.

But defeat is waiting for me again, I know that. John Crowley’s Engine Summer is narrated, we learn at the end, by a construct, a little machine, who is kept filed away until one comes to ask his story. He speaks (his name is Rush-That-Speaks), but all he is is speaking, and when he finishes he will be switched off again. So it is here – speak, write, and know by doing so this is your chance to struggle against the day. Speak, write, but time is drawing short and the story will find its end.

Unless there is a way to tell the same story over and again. Unless the story of stagnancy can be begun anew each day. And now I am Sheherazade, who must come up with a new story each day lest she be executed. Speak, write, because otherwise the end will come. But of what is there to write? The ‘there is’ of writing, that is true. The address.

Sheherazade

To write in a notebook is not enough, although what is written there is already public. The notebook does not open widely enough; its pages are fixed in size and shape. Dream of pages without dimension, of a writing written on the sky and earth. I was here: speaking of itself, writing of itself here, at the blog, clothing itself in this or that little story, writing reaches unknown readers straightaway.

You are found right away, reader. The pages open as wide as the internet and can be found on those searches which pass through every webpage. Now, as Crusoe, I do not write to keep my place in time, scratching a mark on the wall so I know the date, but have placed a message in a bottle without knowing who it will find. There it goes, out to sea – but where does it ago? Across the day, as though opening the pages of the notebook as broadly as the day itself. Across the day and doubling the vastness of the day.

Writing resembles itself. It speaks itself, and resembles itself. But in this resemblance, it passes through all the things of the world. Writing passes through everything in order to give substance to itself. What is writing apart from the materials it gathers to itself like a dresser crab, which augments its shell from what it finds on the ocean floor? But writing has no shell; it is made from what it does not own. To mark itself, its address to unknown readers, it must borrow what it is from elsewhere, must tell a story.

Writing is Sheherazade, speaking only to survive. And who am I, who writes? The means writing has to speak of itself. It borrows me; it borrows my life and my body; it writes with me. Then who is it who writes here? Is it I who leaves my mark? Or is it writing as it makes that mark tremble? Writing takes what I write away from me. I know it by the experiences from which it deprives me. I was allowed to speak – I wrote – but what I write was lost by writing.

Then I am not Crusoe who marks the day, or even Crusoe who throws a message in a bottle in the ocean. Writing is the ocean, and to write is already to have lost oneself. I am not the victor; what I take to be my triumph is not mine. Writing has already laid claim to what I have written. Who writes, who speaks? Writing brings us forward, each of us, as Rush-That-Speaks. And then we are switched off and filed away.

The Double

Who writes? Who speaks? Writing marks itself. Writing leaves a trace of itself. But what about the one who would, by writing, leave his mark? What about the one who marks by writing his triumph over the day, over the stagnancy of the day? Writing is also stagnancy in which it is impossible to begin. Writing, stagnant in advance, is the invasion of the beginning by what does not begin. Then the beginning, the event of writing, cannot complete itself, and this is the lesson.

In the most elegant and well-rounded post, in the post which forms itself, like Schlegel’s fragment, into a curled up hedgehog, there is already that opening which spreads it across everything that exists. As though writing, by resembling itself, had to pass through all the things of the world. As though writing lived by transforming the world into its own image.

Then writing borrows the body of the world as it borrows my body. Writing, double of the world that by writing calls the world into existence. Writing, reversal of image and original. Writing that swaps one for the other and makes of the writer a double of himself.

Abstract Writing

Writing, non-event. Writing, which signifies by way of withholding signification amidst signification. What would an abstract writing be like? A writing that is the equivalent of the abstract painting? Magnificent peace! Peace without words! But impossible, for all that. Writing means and must mean; it signifies and proceeds by way of signification. Then the task is to interrupt writing in writing; to render abstract what appears to be most concrete.

So blogging, in which the concrete (the story that is related, the blogger’s musings) wears itself away. Blogging in which the ‘there is’ writing speaks by way of the concrete and in the trembling of the concrete. The story, the musing, is worn away. Writing affirms itself. Writing says: you, blogger, are only Rush-That-Speaks, and I the one who has switched you on. Writing that has borrowed your body and given you writing, but on condition that you relinquish your hold over writing.

Readers to Come

It is the 27th October. It is 10.32 in the morning. I listen to Hex Enduction Hour by The Fall and look out over the yard. The plants look ill; a drain is overflowing. Perhaps they are ill because their roots, in their pots, is being nourished by overflowing water. 10.33, and the students upstairs have gone to the university. I am Rush-That-Speaks. What time is it, what day is it? Only you, who are reading, know. From where have you come? From what corner of the earth?

It is upon you that writing depends, as it speaks of itself. What time is it? What do you see, beyond your monitor? Writing depends on you. But there are always other beyond you. Always other readers, readers to come, readers who chance on this site by searching on Google for Team Aniston or Team Jolie tee-shirts, or by asking how tall is Brad Pitt?, and others who have just set out from the far corners of the world.