Tautology

A sharp pencil and a new notebook (I must have lost the old one), but what is there to write? The dream: to return writing to writing, to allow writing to relate to itself and accomplish its tautology while I – who am I? – become no one at all. No one – no, not quite. Or that it is I am joined to the endless lapping of writing, the undoing of anything that is said. Say nothing; say it again, and by means of what you would write. Write of your life, and of everything that has happened to you, but say nothing; let nothing say itself again.

Who would you like to be? Who would you like to be today? A new notebook. The water supply cut off; workmen from the water company on the other side of the yard wall. The yard outside, plants left unwatered for a week. Plastic bags overspill from the wheelie bin. New clothespegs on the line. Nothing at all, no one at all.

I read in bed, in the other room. The slats that hold up the mattress have fallen from the rim; the mattress tilts. A sharpened pencil. A new notebook – not yet ‘the notebook’, not yet owned. I drank two cups of coffee, but I couldn’t make a beginning. What would you like to say? Nothing at all, nothing in particular. Until what you say is what is written on the way of writing, of the tautology of writing.

One day – when? – writing will complete itself. One day, the tautology of writing will be complete, and writing will be there where I am not. Immortality? No: the page will be where I am already dead. The surface of the page will be testimony to that death which continues to return inside me. Serene pages, without me. Serene for that absence, which lifts itself from the yard, from the new clothes pegs and the straggly plants.

Not, then, I want to live forever, but I want never to have lived. Never to have lived, and from that death that reaches into my past, that cancels what was lived. – ‘You took a wrong turn; the whole of your life was that turn.’ – ‘Yes, that is true.’ – ‘You lost yourself; you were lost.’ – ‘Yes, it is true.’

And isn’t writing a way to undo that loss? Let it come to itself, let it come, the tautology. Until it speaks of nothing but itself; until it speaks everything but its exhibition. Writing that is not yet. Writing that is the life of the future without me. How to offer everything I have lived to its sacrificial flame?

Tautology: it will complete itself, there where I am not. It will come to birth, wings opening in the sun. Then will it act, writing, and without me. Then it will complete itself in a single gesture. Impossible day. Writing comes to itself; it does not come. That coming non-coming is the blank page of a notebook; it is a sharpened pencil.