Fiction, non-fiction: did what I record here really occur? Did it happen to me? I am not sure, though I would say it had some place in my experience – that it was born there, and was not yet the walking over air I imagine fiction to require. It happened – but to me?
I have always wanted to write of what seemed to happen of itself and to no one – to remember when time seemed to lag behind itself, and space could no longer be kept to its place. It has always seemed that life never coincided with myself, that life was divided into what I could live and what I could not. How was it I was already my own ghost?
Perhaps it is our bodies are our fate – that we live according to their dark law. Sometimes, it is true, I am alive, active – a great deal is accomplished. Who has more energy than me in the mornings? Who is more awake – as though awakening turned itself out, and the morning was inside me, and it was I who contained the sun?
Sometimes the morning is my kingdom; I rise very early and by the time the world has arisen, I have already created the sun and the stars and set the day turning. But who has less energy than me in the afternoon? Now the stream that once cut its way through mountain rock and meandered across valleys now lost itself in a marsh that spreads as widely as the sea. I am lost in the afternoon – I do not live. How to write of such afternoons? How to summon them to me as ghost to ghost? How to press them into something real?
I will not assign them to a subject, to one for whom they occurred. That would be the fiction, and not the other way round. I will not lay claim to them, those experiences. Did something happen? Did an event complete itself? Or was it rather that what happened failed to happen – that experience did not come to itself and the event did not eventuate? Passivity without subject, without object, the indefinite: these abstractions do not help me. What matters is to give flesh to a phantom, to give what was experienced a definite outline.
Confine yourself to details, I tell myself. Write of what was seen and heard. Write of the world. But is there a writing that can speak of the undoing of the world? Is there a way of speaking of that? I have dreamt many times of the expanses of ice, a glittering surface and the stars in the sky and across the ice, the stars redoubled in the ice. Yes I have dreamt of that: the stars which flash out and the aurora borealis that flashes above the stars. Abstraction: when I hear these words, I imagine those stars, that ice, and the raw wind which passes between them.
Stick to details: write of what is seen and touched. Write of the monitor before you and the desklamp beside you; write of your television guide and your phonebill; write of the pot of moisturiser and the CD remote. But another voice says: write of what causes each item to fall apart from the others: write of what stops your hand from reaching them and your eye from seeing them. For that, too is necessary, even if it does not lend itself to the power of memory.
The world become ice. The body exposed, all along its edge. The body unravelled and flayed across the ice. What kind of images are these? Substitutes, allegories – but for an experience which will only permit allegories and substitutes: the sole content, I tell myself, of what is written here. I confirmed it this weekend, did I not, archiving all my posts, transferring them into Word? I saw it, didn’t I – it became clear how those thousands of ghosts seemed to condense into a single pane of glass through which I could not see but that seemed to look into me, pouring a gentle, glowing light into the room of my life?
For isn’t that, too, another aspect of the experience: at once, it is pain and dislocation but also comfort – the reassurance of a presence beyond me, as if I learnt the world was alive, the expanses, the sky and the ice; that we had merely exchanged places. But let me be more precise: it was that the experience voided me, flayed me, until my body was a single surface, occupying two dimensions. It was the ice-plain, it was the child’s idea of the sky in which the stars were pin pricks. In the end, ice, sky and stars were one – they were part of a single two-dimensional space that was twisted upon itself.
But it was also that when I was returned to myself – when the word, I, was mine again, I contained the same plain and the same sky; they burned inside my heart, where I was exposed. Instead of that beating organ, there was a hollow space, and that was what my body was, the same hollow container in which the silence reverberated and through which flashed the arctic lights. A container – but one whose inside was infinite in depth, extending in every direction. So was my body a shell that, when cracked, would let spill the entire universe, its light and its coldness. Every post I had written was a creature of that world – a ghost, but one of a horde of ghosts that, when pressed upon one another, let the outlines of another creature be seen.
What was it, then, that seemed to bend down to my window? What was it, this creature of light that crouched so it could peer at me through the window of this blog? I knew it was somehow also what I am, and that my hand, touching the window would meet his golden hand. How was it I also lived in that body? I was burning – but that was how I lived, there, on the other side of the mirror.
Night, and I can write again. A weekend has passed, and what had I done? Backed up the blog, that was true. Prepared some documents for photocopying. Did I know that there was gathering in me a kind of push? That my body, into which I’d poured a quarter of a can of Irn-Bru, was readying itself for ecstasy? It was a little after that, when I was cycling home from the station, that the pressure began. I thought, how will I write of this? And then, but this is only a prelude to writing – it is the push of writing, it asks for words.
So it was; that I write here, now – it is half-past nine, one hour later – is tribute to the strength of that push, which has borne me through these sentences and paragraphs. I will be doubly tired tomorrow, I tell myself. I can only bear so much! But what have I borne? Nothing that happened to me. Allegories, fictions – it’s the same each time. How to speak of what will not let itself be spoken? How to write of what bears all writing?
Lars Iyer's Blog 