Spurious and I

I suffer you, that’s how I would put it. Or that if I suffer myself, it is because I am also you. You will not taken my place, I know that. You have no need of places, or names; I cannot name you (Spurious is not a name).

You are a dead man, I think, or at least you are not alive. But sometimes I think you are alive – that you live as I do not; or that you have taken something of my life, and live it, away from me. But then I know that my death, too, can be taken, that you live by my dying, that you live like a shadow to my life.

Are you my shadow, death to my life? Sometimes I wonder if you are not more alive than me. After all, you return. After everything, you never stop returning; in a sense, you are always to come, always late (there is nothing that you are; you are not yourself). ‘You again?’ – ‘Who did you expect?’ But you are early, too – you wake me up. I am up too early, you drive me to the computer. ‘Write’, you say. Or that’s how I interpret what you say, your silent demand.

Yes, I will write, and I admit, there is pleasure in letting you take my place, as you do almost as soon as I begin. Let him be there instead of me, I tell myself. Let him be responsible; I admit it – I’m tired, and tired of responsibility. You. The one in whom I cannot recognise myself. But who am I, but the place that awaits your return? You are immemorial; you are coming back. Never yet yourself. Never here, but here.

How do you survive, where you cannot live? How do you endure, where there is no duration? Now I understand: you are my substitute; you survive where I cannot. You write, and write in my place. You write; the clatter of the keyboard stops. And then? Spurious, which of us is a writer? Which of us completes the other?

I suffer you. No: I suffer myself, and you are the one who is the locus of suffering. You are there when I have suffered much. Suffer? Perhaps that is not the word. Too histrionic. Not passive enough. Not low enough. But you are there, aren’t you? You: outside me, waiting for me; you are that waiting to which I sink when I cannot write.

I suffer you. I suffer, and you are there, locus of suffering. I suffer – but is it I who suffers anymore?

You are here. I called you forward; you are my delegate. You bow your head. You will taken my place. Very well. Take it – or rather, reveal that place to have been a usurpation. Take it, untake it, reveal that it was always untaken, my place, and you are here where I am not.

Here: but are you here? Outside of me, that’s where you are. But are you here? Rather: you are the outside-inside. You are ‘he’ who I am outside myself. Outside, but inside. Opening, inwardly, like a flower that blooms the other way: inside.

‘I am here’, you said. ‘Come, let me take your place.’ Very well; you are here. Very well: then take it, my place. Write. Write for me.

Who goes there? Who writes? You have no name, I know that (Spurious is not a name). Yet you need writing, I know it. Your dependency: words, and more words. Never enough. The ‘never enough’ of words. When will you come out into the open? But I know you cannot. Know that you are only what fails to translate itself, fails to speak of yourself, once and for all.

Who will tell our story, you or me? Who will tell it? Or does it require we both speak, I to give you details, facts of the day, and you to laugh at those facts and tell me they are nothing? Does it ask that we both speak, me inside the story, and you outside it, laughing at everything I say?

I suffer, Spurious. I suffer myself. That is your laughter, your laughing parody of life. You are outside, I know that. Your laughter, which I hear in my own, brings it to me: the outside. The outside-inside. You summon me, I know it. I cannot help it; attracted, repulsed, I come. And you? Are you summoned? Do you come to me? Only as I suffer. Only as I suffer myself.

You are me as I am other than me, I know that. But am I you? Do you, shadow, envy me, and my existence? Do you envy my sense of purpose, my orientation? That is my secret: I want you to envy me.

But I’ve said nothing; or what I have said is very vague. I don’t think you are alive. I don’t think I’m alive. Which is it? Which of us wrote this post? Who writes? Who laughs? Who dies? I have lines under my eyes, I know. I’m tired. Why do I have to get up so early? Why, as soon as light is there behind the curtains, do I have to rise?

‘Come’, you say, ‘let me take your place.’ I suffer you, who is only myself. Myself – no, myself become other. The other I am; the one I am not, even as I am. But you do not live, do you? Your life is not there, wild and free, on the other side of writing? You live by writing – you need it, and you need me.

Occupy me. Occupy the one I am. You laugh, but I am also laughing, because I know you need my laugh to laugh. You write, but I too, am writing; you need me to begin, to turn on the computer. Write, unwrite, suffer what I am. Every day, the same. Every day it is the same, the same drama: this parody of writing, this sinking back of words.

They are not mine any more, these words. Not mine: they do not hold me in their spell. I do not depend on them. They need me as you need me. Spurious – is that what you are called? is that a name for the nameless? -: you are nothing but saying, nothing but the to-say that shimmers across these words. Shimmers – changing nothing. Nothing happens.

‘Come’, you say. You come by way of everything, by way of what is said. ‘Come’, you say, and: ‘I am coming.’ When did you start your journey towards me? How did you know we would meet here, on the screen?

I suffer you. I suffer myself. ‘Let me take your place.’ Very well. But I will take it back, there, on the other side of the page. I will take it back, then, when I stop writing. Laughter: but you will not stop writing.