Today

Leap into writing, write of this and that. Leap, and the day is only the occasional for writing. You push the day back; it is your launchpad, your anchor. You write, you blog, and the day is what bears you, the day is what allows you to begin. But what if the leap is interrupted? What if the power to leap withholds itself and there is strength only to mark the failure to begin?

What does it want with me, the day? To attest to itself? To summon a blindness correlate with its own blindness? To fog the glass of writing so that nothing is communicated? Breath on glass, opacity – you see what you once allowed you to see. The medium no longer mediates; the glass speaks, invisible surface. It speaks, boundary, of what separates the world from writing. It speaks, the mirror is fogged, a kind of blindness spreads across the surface of writing. So does it signal across signification what cannot be brought to speech.

Writing: remembrance, conservation. Writing remember and conserves, but what would I conserve? This yard, the drain water, the dying plants, this cup of coffee, this monitor, this keyboard: the same ‘facts’, the same as is present every morning? Or the act of writing as it is braced against these facts and against the blindness of the day? Does I summon the day, djinn, to write of it, or does it summon me, asking to be witnessed?

Every morning, the same; every day the same: rise, a cup of coffee, sit at the table, turn on the computer. The same, until the same is worn away by repetition. Until it is as though it tore itself apart and tore the day apart. The same frayed, the same torn across the sky. Then to fray the sky in turn – to write, to mark the happening of the day, the non-happening of the day, to write of what happens by not happening.

What would I conserve by writing? What would I remember? Or is it, by writing, a kind of forgetting might happen, not happen? Is it that nothing conserves itself, and marked in signs is what signals by not-signifying. The word today becomes an infinitive – the to day, the daying of the day – and the infinitive is attenuated as the day attenuates itself.

The not to day, the undaying of the day. The day as non-event. The day that did not happen. Nothing happens, but this non-happening is marked in writing. Nothing happens, the day resembles itself and I am called forward as one who would remember this nothing-is-happening. I summon nothing by writing. The day is not mine, it does not grant my wish. Not mine, it refuses my desires, it turns them aside.

I look through the window. The same yard, drain water in pools, drain debris, ill plants and the wheelie bin; two clothes-lines and the plant that grows out of the wall. Through the window, until the window mists. Until what I see is the misting of vision. Until it becomes the mirror that does not reflect me. And I am the vampire who cannot be reflected.

What do I see? The world as what I am not. Mute opacity. What do I write? Anonymous words, even as what I write here is gathered under the unity of a name. Now the words themselves seem arbitrary. Why these words? Why these words to name what I see – what I don’t see? How to name not only the things of the world, but the verb that bears these things? And how to name not the verb, the ‘to be’, but also their becoming, the infinite attenuation to which they answer?

Nouns dissolve, just as things dissolve. But now that dissolution will not let itself be named in the verb, or by being. Becoming, the becoming of being: now this is not a word, but a river, in which it is impossible to step even once. River in which what streams is the attenuation of the world. River of the nothing-is-happening.

Today, what has happened today? What does the day call for, today? Say the word today until it becomes unfamiliar. Write the word until it can provide no anchorage. No longer is the day the beginning place for writing. No longer does blogging anchor itself at the outset of the day. No longer can blogging summon the day as event; nor can you brace yourself against the beginning in order to launch yourself into writing.

Nothing begins. Writing, too, does not begin; it cannot clothe itself in incidents, it searches in vain for what would give it substance. But writing still says, mark what does not begin.  Mark the non-beginning of the beginning.