The Ram

Is it a novel you wanted to write? Or, at least, a narrative? Is that what continually fails to let itself begin here, at the blog? Abraham asked to murder Isaac, God’s future on earth, was allowed to sacrifice a ram in his place. Thereafter, says the narrator of Blanchot’s When the Time Comes, Abraham saw Isaac shimmer with the image of that ram, which had been substituted for him.

And isn’t it in that way that, asked to sacrifice what is written here for a greater work, a finished work, I find in that work, which I cannot begin, the vain sacrifice that is each of these posts? No finished work, no completion: only posts that mark the return of what does not begin and cannot conclude.

Then narrate the impossibility of narration – write of what you cannot do. But, that is nothing I can bring about. It is only by chance – and one that might have eluded me – that narrative can mark its own impossibility, bear it, and let it speak. Chance: this, then, is the faith of the blog: let what cannot begin pass this way. Let it prevent itself from finishing, that passage that can never gather itself into an ending.