1. Why does it seem, as I try to write again, that I’ve never written before? ‘Begin.’ – ‘But I can’t begin.’ – ‘Begin, drag the non-beginning into the beginning, let writing make itself from its own impossibility.’
Isn’t this what tiredness reveals, and by way of its impossibility: the leap that writing must be – the leap that lets writing become a kind of fate? Pass through impossibility, traverse it; experience what cannot lift itself into the beginning. And then – strange chance – there is a beginning amidst the non-beginning, and what is written now marks itself with the memory of what it could not accomplish.
It is this trial that lets writing be writing – that allows it to appear as itself at its own limits, there where it shimmers before you as the impossible. That’s when it begins: then when it cannot begin, and it has no future.
2. But how does this trial mark writing? How does it leave its trace such that what is written turns around it? I don’t know the answer, except that I sometimes know that what I read has passed through that tiredness that has come to the end of itself. No: that passes through tiredness and continues to pass there, that never has done with the unlimiting of the limit.
Then writing is also lost in writing – or there is another current that bears what is written away from what signifies by way of the text. Bears it away – and brings it back, returning, as the trial of a writing that tears itself away from reference, from signification.
‘Itself’: but what does that mean? Slave of sense, slave of reference, language could only arrive at itself only as came to its limit. But the limit is undone. The limit undoes itself and the end is not the end, and nothing can begin.
Then it is brought back and by way of writing: the end that never arrives. And it is recalled to the present and by way of writing: the beginning that never lifts itself from what does not begin. Future and past are joined there, in the present of writing. Joined? But only as they void that present. Only by turning it aside, thickening it, and casting it outside the succession of moments that pass.
The present of tiredness – the future that does not come; or the past that is never left behind. So is writing anticipated. So does writing wait for itself, ahead of itself, and dream of itself before it begins. ‘And do you wait, too, writer? Do you dream?’ – ‘Something in me is waiting. Something in me is dreaming.’ – ‘But waiting for what? Dreaming of what?’
Waiting relinquishes itself in waiting, and dreaming within dreaming. Waiting unlimited, and the dream unfolding, at its heart, what turns it aside from anyone in particular.
The bloom of dreaming, the bloom of waiting, writing comes as memory is forgotten, and anticipation loses its hold on the future. Comes to itself, from the forgotten past, from the unknown future: this is the miracle of writing, its mercy, its surplus.
Lars Iyer's Blog 