The Dead Sea

Sinthome writes:

Transferentially, what is suggested in suspecting that one’s writing always harbours the seeds of disaster and one’s own destruction? What is the unconscious desire or intention behind such paranoid posts?

A familiar experience: your writing is seized by the current of writing; a frail vessel sets itself out into a broader channel; you write with an enhanced fluency, with the breath of inspiration in your sails. Now writing seems to live by itself: what wonders you discover as you let the movement of writing lay claim to you. Happiness of being able to speak of this, of that; your life is given to you again – a life to be written, yes this is the glorious mirage that burns on the horizon as the river opens itself to the sea.

But what gives itself also withdraws; the measure of inspiration falls back into itself, and who are you, writer in lieu of the fluency of writing? A reader of your own words, and a disappointed one. Wretched disappointment in a writing that seemed to carry itself so urgently: how could what you were gifted to write let itself flow into this salt marsh?

Choked writing, writing that does not move. No dream, now, of the book into which writing might lift itself. What is there left to you but to wait for writing to come again, if only to push your post further down the page. Curse of writing, that seems to give birth to itself through its own inadequacy.

Writing lacks itself – or that that ‘itself’ is already lack and truthlessness. Never will writing break from itself and refer. Never will reach the other shore, granting that adequation from which truth, the redeemer, might shine. Errancy, then; a daily failure. Isn’t this your own disaster, your destruction? The sea drowned in salt?

Unless the dead sea floods back into the veins of your writing. The sea that is a desert. To write of the failure of writing – to catch it out, the ‘itself’ into which writing seems to withdraw. But it is you who are caught thus, who desired to entrap what was lying in wait before you ever began to write. ‘Who desired’ – for desire belongs to that relation to the present that has lost itself in you. Unless, now, there is another desire, that does not catch yours and sweep it along like a current, but shows the vessel of your writing was always broken apart.