Up early to write and then nothing to write. Read instead. I pick up a travelogue, and envy the narrator who could feed the desire to write with stories about his passage. Wandering in the world is the correlate of writing; what hope is there for me who travels nowhere and has no desire to travel anywhere?
In the end, I put the book down, telling myself its narrator was frightened to face himself as the ghost of his writing – that he travelled only to remove himself from the double that was set back within him as soon as he began to write. He would become something like a ghost, I told myself, but a ghost of this world, hungry for experience.
But isn’t this the avoidance of writing, or the attempt to answer its demand by throwing everything into its sacrificial flame, and letting its flames rise higher? In the end, it is the flames that triumph, dying down so there is nothing left but a low flickering and white ash. Writing will not extinguish itself, though it will burn everything you feed it.
Writing’s revenge: one day you will no longer have the strength to write. One day, you’ll fail writing, by having nothing to offer it. What will you write then, traveller without the means to travel? Writing will let you wander from yourself as though you had been buried at the crossroads. You will not find a place to die: so will writing have its revenge.
But what of those who were never able to write, who had not life enough, adventures enough, who lived in the same quotidian world as anyone else? I have a friend who visits crack houses in order to have something to relate; filling himself up with drink for Dutch courage, he wanders into the most dangerous parts of his city. He saw a man die in front of him, and defended his dealer from an attack; who, at dawn that morning, when they sat together in Platt Fields, told him he wanted to give up the business and lead, like him, a regular life.
All this my friend tells me on the phone, along with his new plan to join the Foreign Legion. Imagine starting a chapter, he says, ‘And so I joined the Foreign Legion.’ Then my friend would fill his life with events in order to feed the demand to write. Sometimes he charges me with writing his adventures. What matters, for him, is that a record be kept. He is like the Greek hero who writes so his deeds will reverberate across the world.
In the East and West, the ghost is often thought as having unfinished business, whether it is a desire for revenge or for justice. Buddhist traditions call the ghost ‘hungry’, since it is still attached to the world; a Vedic purana has ghosts living on the excresences of the body: on piss and vomit, on tears and coughs.
I think my friend is haunted by a hungry ghost. But does he know the ghost of writing, writing’s demand, will eat up the whole of his life, his tears, his coughs, his vomit and his piss? He moved from one flat because he soaked a sofa with piss after his binges. He moved from another because he was beaten by rivals to his dealer. Writing will lick up piss and blood and more besides.
One day, my friend will find his way back to prison, and lie again in the upper bunk, smoking weed. One day, once again, he will again have to show himself the tough man of his wing, and send me letters about life inside that I am to keep as a record.
Meanwhile, outside prison and spreading everywhere, the mundane world, the quotidian, which seems to deprive writing of all topic. The world is the world, and nothing besides. The world is the world, and there are no more adventures. How, then, to write? How to let rise your own ghost and stir the fire of writing?
In Chinese traditions, I learn that some ghosts, especially those of the drowned, try and murder the living to steal their right to reincarnation. To be killed thus is to be substituted, to become a tìsíguǐ (a ‘substitute death ghost’, a ‘substitute devil’) as your capacity to die and to pass into rebirth is taken from you.
How to substitute for writing? How to steal from it the capacity for rebirth, its return as the same gaping demand? But I know it is I who have already been substituted by writing; that there is one in me who is always the tìsíguǐ, who writes with me and dreams with me, all the while drinking the tears from the corners of my eyes.
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