I should have the strength of the morning, but I have no strength; where is the power to write, for I would like to write – where is it, the power that makes the incidents of my life, everything that has happened, only the fuel from which writing will burn? Until writing consumes everything but itself, solitary star. Yes, that’s what the morning should be for: the ardency of the star, the light absolute. And when it is impossible? When it’s impossible to write in the dream of the fire that would reach me from the other side of writing?
The drains have been unblocked; the yard is no longer filled with sewage. Two green wheelie bins and plants rotting because they have not been propped on bricks above the sludge; the long scar in the wall where the pipe was pulled away; the wall from which patches of paint have fallen: mediocrity, that’s what I see. The mediocre world, the backs of the houses opposite, and above them trees without leaves. The cold has returned, but the wet surface of the yard is not streaked with frost as it was a couple of days ago.
How stubborn and obdurate the world this morning! The yard: algae-covered stones, a couple of bricks, the rotting plants: everything that will not allow itself to be taken up in writing. The fire will not come; the world is a damp bonfire that will not ignite. What does it matter? This morning, the world won, not writing. Defeat is to be pressed up against those same things as would be dissolved by writing.
Isn’t that the struggle: to clear a space to live by way of writing? To clear a living space, a breathing space by a writing which folds the world back upon itself? But if it is freedom that is sought, it is not mine. It arrives, freedom, it is the event of that folding-back; it is the day no longer lived as necessity. Receive it again, the day, the mediocrity of the day. Receive it by way of writing and let it pass thus the test of the eternal return. It is the same returning; it is not the same. The same returns – and by returning it is not the same.
And if you cannot write? Receive nothing. Receive the same barren nothing that opens itself in the morning.
Lars Iyer's Blog 