My ‘Work’

… the problem is with my thinking, my writing, my ‘work’.

‘What are you working on?’, asks one artist of another, or one writer, or one academic. My fantasy of blogging: that the answer comes, to that question: ‘nothing, nothing at all.’ Comes from that writing that wears the life of a writer away, speaking for her in her absence, and in the echo-chamber of its lack.

"My thinking, my writing, my ‘work’ …": citation that lets each word speak as though unsure of its own meaning. ‘My thinking, my writing …’: the interval between words stretched to the infinite. And a stretching that pulls those words apart, that lets them speak without reference and without the chance of truth.

Inadequate words, wings that beat in the throat, the steady panic of a speech that is lost in itself. ‘My "work"’: quotation marks around the word work, and around every word.

Who speaks? What writes in your place? Second fantasy: it is in this falling back from achievement and the measure of achievement that your singularity is marked. Who are you? A way in which failure thickens and lives itself.

Ah, it was only then that I met you – only then that I read you. Friend, we share that of which we are each incapable.