Do you need blogging or does blogging need you? For the former, a kind of narcissism – dreaded word, a ‘self-analysis’ carried out in public. For the latter – the opposite of narcissism, for it would be blogging that loses itself in the mirror of the blog, and these words the nymphs that seduces it to tumble.
But then what is blogging that it would need to look at itself? A god, a beast (remember Aristotle’s expression: the man who would live alone is a god, or a beast)? Neither. It is what sets itself back as soon as a certain practice of writing begins. Phrase in italics. Not the blogger as agent, as controller of what is said. As also the one who relinquishes agency in agency, control in control.
And isn’t this the oldest definition of inspiration: breath, received from outside? Divine exhalation? Breathed into the nostrils of the creator, who always creates with, and not alone. Whence figures of inspiration: muses, gods, goddesses, intermediary beings like angels or daemons – a whole bestiary, a whole angelology, a pantheon.
Breathed – or whispered, or sang – or written. Written with, so that writing is active and passive, both at once. What perfomer does not know this? What writer? And that, further, it can never be a question of self-expression.
Easier to see with fiction. The line is crossed. Easier to see with singing. The performance begins. But understand performance everywhere, a priori, from the first. Not your performance, understand. Or that outperforms what you perform, that lets you become actor or dummy. And isn’t there a writing that writes with you as you write? Writes with you, but sets itself back from you; it is not in your power.
It is the angel who writes. It is your forebears. It is your race that sings inside me; your people: all this a figuration of what sets itself into a past that cannot be lived and sets itself into a future, which is why a people is always to come, even as its prototype existed in the murky past.
It is why God is waiting for what you write even as he launched you on the path of writing. And isn’t the devil waiting, too? A host of angels and a crowd of Muses? To see what you write? In a sense. To see what is written by you, and by way of you.
There is writing, there is blogging – but what does that mean? In the past you did not live and the future that is ever to come. Time displaced, time out of phase: write from what does not meet itself in your present. Write from the present disjoined. No narcissism where what is written will not return. No fort-da where what is lost will not come back to you.
Trailing behind you, flowing ahead of you: there is writing, blogging. Writing, blogging sets itself back – and dashes forward. And in the space opened by this movement? In the blank box in which there is to be writing? Make a mirror for blogging, for the god, the beast. Mirror the solitude that lives by way of your writing. Who lives as relation – the relation to you, writer, blogger. As relation – and never rests in itself, is never identical with itself.
Tonight, leave out a dish of water for the god to see himself. Tonight, a bowl of water for the beast. And what will you see in that mirrored darkness? Only darkness. Nothing to be shown. And above all, not you – not you face. Who are you, looking, through whom looks the solitude of a god, a beast? Whose eyes are yours that let a devil’s eyes open at their centre?
To write is to die, always. To be sacrificed – to live, now, only as figure, as silhouette. You are not preserved. No fame – nothing lasts. No one will speak of you. Or you are the object of rumour, of a gossip that dispenses with its object, passing the word along. Torn apart, now like Orpheus, it is not your song that sings from your disembodied head. Drowned like Narcissus, but it is not you who drowns.
A certain practice of writing. A way of blogging, an ascesis. To be without yourself. To let trail the past you will not live, and the future that never arrives. The present disjoined; the self lived apart from itself. Lived – died. How is it the words come to mean the same? A life, a writing. Indefinite article. There is blogging – but with an ‘is’ that crosses itself out, and what word here is not under erasure?
Hope: what speaks across these words, what lives, dies, instead of me, is like the wind that stirs the heads of wheat. That passes like a rumour, like gossip, that bears no weight and does not matter. Darkness in the dark water of the pool; the night drowns itself, the night lives. Life is joined to death, and death to life. Who is there, in the mirror? It is not your face. Who lives in your place? Who dies there?
Blogging sees itself. Who writes? No one who could say my blog. No one who could sign their name to what is written. Or rather, who turns what is mine from itself – who lets the signature tremble. Do you need blogging, writing? Or is it that blogging asks that you become figure?
Lars Iyer's Blog 