Succour

When your life fails, you can write, my life has failed; failure becomes success – something has been achieved and this something bears what you have written. But if you were really a failure, would you have been able to write? Bad faith of writing: to have marshalled the strength to write, I am a failure is already to have left failure behind; you are a liar.

I have failed – with this lie, everything can begin; will you have the strength to ring changes on this sentence? To link it to others? Now you have made something: a few sentences, a paragraph – is that enough? Is it enough to push failure aside? Draw back, reread what you’ve written and what do you find? Is there a dramatic plot? A particular incident? Only nuances, variations – more and more of them.

Chronicler, what you have written shows failure as though lit up from within. Writing has interposed itself between you and failure. It has not saved you. Failure: that is what is written on the shell of writing – but the shell protects the soft inside of the egg. Consolation: a soft light reaches me through the membrane of writing.

Writing does not substitute itself for failure, but has potentiated it: now failure is propitious – it is on the brink of giving birth. To be close to that light! To know failure by way of writing! Everything else is mere episode. How is it I’ve always seemed to be living a double life? Failure, I felt you come near and write this sentence out for me. Failure, was it you I was waiting for when in moments of fulfilment, I thought: it’s not here yet?

It is important, I tell myself, to give the writing project a vulnerability – it must be exposed on as many sides as possible. So is blogging a beginning again each morning. So must creation begin as if for the first time. But what risk can there be when there is the strength to write? The strength that makes what you write of failure the happiest of lies?

In the afternoon, it is true, what was written in the morning is forgotten. And in the evening? We grow old each day, but whereas the journal keeper meditates in the evening on the day’s events, speaking with the wisdom of old age, I prefer to begin when there is nothing to say. Today – what will happen today? What is ahead of me? Here, at the head of the day, nothing has begun. This ‘nothing has begun’ asks for justice. How to write without recourse to experiences, without plots and conflicts? How to write of nothing in particular?

Failed writing – why is this not a novel, a continuous narrative? Why does it fail to lift itself from the occasional and the day to day? Because it belongs each day to what surprises me by writing’s interposition. Bad faith, succour: one and the same, so long as what is written is first of all the surprise of writing. There is writing – that first of all. There is writing – and so does a soft light reach you through the things of the world by way of writing.