Write, says the day. It’s bright, the air’s fresh and clean. There’s something of the North in the wind: it reaches me from keen Arctic places, from blue glaciers and the frozen-over sea. Were it possible to write with the same ice-clarity, the same precision!
A single sentence would be enough. A single sharp sentence, and not the usual fug. How is it nothing keen can announce itself here? How is it I cannot write in a single gesture, ice scratching on ice? Not the usual disappointment with each phrase. Not the botched sentences and muddled paragraphs.
Precision: to write what is essential, to uncover the Word, to let it speak. But what if the Word is the undoing of words? What if it turns all words from themselves? Behind this day, the keen day, there is another. Apocalypse: what reveals itself is muddle. The world will dissolve back into the mire, the great stagnancy to which my life is linked. The day turns in itself without issue, writing and unwriting itself.
Is this what Cy Twombly has painted? Words obscured; part-sentences and broken phrases. It makes no sense, or rather, sense brings with it a cloud of non-sense. To the sharp and keen the simple stroke of the calligrapher, who writes in a single gesture. And to the muddle, the great fug of the day?
Stunted writing; deformed sentences. Paragraphs like the swamplands that open when Spring comes to the far North. And always the haze, like the haze of mosquitos. Nothing settles; nothing completes itself. Ruined writing, because it bears the trail of non-writing like ectoplasm.
In the beginning was the Word, the non-Word. In the beginning, the non-beginning, from which no action will separate itself. Mishima, is this what you tried to resolve with your suicide? Did you dream of opening your insides to the sun? But our insides are infinite, and our intenstines the labyrinth in which we all wander as through the rooms of the house of memory.
Death is clouded with dying, writing with non-writing. In the beginning was the Word; but in the beginning, too, was what drew it back to the non-Word that allows nothing to begin.
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