Is the dream over? I used to have a nightmare – a nightmare daydream (for it would come to me in the day, too, when my attention was drifting): the wasp with half its body missing buzzing in a glass. It was a real memory – a trapped wasp which by the rim of the trapping glass I had accidentally severed one part of its body from another. Distress: the animal divided in two, not dying, but still alive, buzzing against the glass.
That was my nightmare. One day I wrote about it, here – one day, when, I don’t know, I wrote about a trapped wasp with half a body and the nightmare disappeared. Isn’t this what Tarkovsky said of Mirror? By Mirror he spoke of his childhood, of his childhood home, even sowing the seeds around the house with the crops he remembered. But by Mirror he lost his childhood; this film about dreams was also the end of dreaming.
And here at the blog, when I write of trapped wasps – and of other obsession-dreams? The dying cat, for example. My friend the drunk for example. I have not thought of them since. So do I forget by writing, by way of writing. Plato was right: I have delegated memory to writing, and by that I have lost it. But how welcome the dark waters of forgetting! How welcome this great forgetting-flood!
Is the dream over? Is there nothing else to write, now I’ve lost the thread which carried me from day to day? It’s true, there’s no momentum here, the blog’s becalmed, and there’s no wind to fill the sails. I am content; there is no hatred. But contentedness is not joy; the days turn – the days accrete, one on top of another, forming a coral reef of weeks and months and seasons. If I stay in this city, my life will be this gentle laying-on-top; years will pass, and there will be nothing to write.
Pleasant days; my living room floor is covered with candleholders and beer glasses, an empty bottle of Sake, a full bottle of Tequila. And can’t I imagine, one day, the whole of my life will be similarly marked by a few objects? – the whole of my life in remainders of a life lived, known by its evidence. So will I have lived. But will that have been life? Death comes like the waters of forgetting. But what was it that was forgotten?
It is winter; I haven’t opened the curtains yet, but perhaps I will see snow. Isn’t the desire to retreat into warm rooms – to leave behind the world, and everyone else – a sign of winter? Retreat. Hold out against the cold. And isn’t each post at the blog a warm room, a habitation at the beginning of the day? I would like so say each post marks a stage on the journey, but there is no journey. Only each day to forget – to release memory into forgetting. By each day comes forgetting – this is welcome. Each morning, a dream is forgotten – this is welcome.
And on the day when there is no more to write? I’ve opened the curtains; the blizzard did not come. The sky is blue and far. And when you’ve written enough that your own life is likewise blue and far? You never will have lived – you will have rubbed out your traces as you went. There is writing instead. Writing will have remembered for you. Writing remains – but what remains?
I have always marvelled at those books, those voices, which seem to issue out of themselves, like the scarf pulled from the magician’s mouth. A speaking of nothing in particular, a writing held together only by its own volubility. How marvellous it would be to find this babbling voice! Marvellous to write without particular topic, to drift through memory and to forgetting!
Sign of this writing: a path of forgetting through memory. As though memory were a block of snow and writing-forgetting the tunnelling that leaves great, hollow absences. As though writing opened a tunnel in the snow: forgetting and what is written is written on the ice beneath the sky. Who remembers? Writing remembers for me. Unread, open to the sky, writing remembers, but I have forgotten.
I remember a poem where the narrator is ill, perhaps dying, and says his dreams wander on without him. So writing – that strange body that is not ours, strange prosthesis we do not own. Of what does it dream? Now in my dreamscape I image that above writing there shines the aurora borealis, sign of the dream of writing, of writing as it dreams of my life without me.
Lars Iyer's Blog 