Saturday evening, with Cava. Should I pour another glass? A whole day in with a cold, in the refurbished flat – new kitchen, new bathroom, electricity working again, heating working again, only the great hole in the ceiling I opened to find the source of the damp that, I found out, has rotted away the load bearing joists, along with staining brown the newly replastered walls.
But no, someone says inside of me, you cannot write in this way. Or, write away, but soon it is writing that thickens itself into a glutinous double of what you meant to say. Writing, then, as what interposes itself – as interposition itself, that kind of mediation which refuses its mediacy.
No loquacity. No chatter. Unless it is the chatter of writing itself, of the ‘itself’ of writing, speaking as it withdraws from sense, and to carry sense along in its withdrawal. Then writing becomes a kind of parody of writing, the fruitless repetition of sense and its withdrawal.
Sense given and taken; sense interrupting sense: how stupidly simple it is, this sense that what gives itself by way of writing is withdrawn by the same stroke: that the written is the body loss gives to itself. But a gift that is lost as it carries away its body, as it becomes parody, overwriting, that grotesque doubling that offends the good sense of the communicator for whom language, in some degree, must offer itself as mediator.
The experience of language: a simple, stupid phrase. Experience – trial, suffering, endurance – and of language: as language reaches its limit and is trapped there. As the limit is the sticky foam in which an insect traps its prey. The limit becomes limitless, you wander along the edge of sense. But as you pass, the limit clings to you and you are gradually immobilised by what wants to write with writing.
Are your trapped? Dying? A last chance remains to you. Begin a fiction; send the spool of writing ahead of you and let it return. Fiction: the writer’s fort-da. Characters who live and act, mirrors of the living and dying of others in the world.
Tolstoy only knew his mother by a preserved silhouette; he made Nathalia in the image of the this absence of image. He loved her, and we love her, too. Coetzee’s suicided son becomes the dead son of Dostoevsky. Travel very far, write a great deal, but like Kelvin in Solaris, it is your father you will embrace, there on the surface of a faraway planet.
But what happens when you know it is not your father whom you hold but some ghost of writing? Not your suicided son, but the undead one who supplants the living and will supplant everyone?
Now the truth of all characters, of all characterisation returns, like another version of Hamlet’s father, to prophesise the dying of the author who created him. Or to say to him: I am your dying gone bad, the corpse of Lazarus with his winding sheets and stench. Even your mother, Tolstoy, is death given life, and she will come apart, dust lost in the wind.
Write not to preserve something from death, but to give yourself more thoroughly to it. Write to die not once, but over and again. Writer, prophet: isn’t it the experience of language you touch as you dream of the farthest future? A dream that is the cause of your writing as it belongs to what is always to come?
Then what you have made by your novel is a ghost-ship; the Marie Celeste that everyone has deserted. What you have written, but also what gave you to think you have made it yourself, is part of the fort-da of writing; it is writing’s game that lives with you and lets itself die again with your death. It is writing that gave you life, and will withdraw it. Given and taken, and through everything you write and have written.
But then you, too are a character, the persona writing gives itself into order to send itself out into the world. Proxy, your substance is borrowed; the author is in search of his authority even before the characters come looking. And what would they find if they found you? Another character, not an author, and one already engaged on his own quest: to stand face to face with what called him, and to call it to account.
In truth, writing only writes of itself. Language lives by a great reflexivity. Your life is lived in the return of writing to itself, writing’s death-drive. An ‘itself’ that thickens itself into a counter-world, into the spider’s web of writing, on which everything you lived was allowed to catch itself. There it is, your flat, your open ceiling and its joists; there is your yard, with the pots of grasses and heathers, but covered in a thick, strange substance, like the spit from a spider’s mouth.
This world is already Solaris; it is already the Zone of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. And who are you, proxy, writing’s idiot? Who are you, born into a life that was never yours? A character in the fiction by which writing lives. The narrator who is lent writing only to have writing withdraw, turning his books into a quivering indication whose every element is magnetised by what is to come.
Why does it need you? To give itself substance. To let you rise like an avatar, and live a life in the world. But then to fall back, with your death, into its own deathlessness.
Could you pity it, then, language, for this desire to give itself flesh, to go out into the world, in order to return? Might you pity it for its dependency, its love of the first creation it immediately overlays with destruction? More terrifying: there is no one to pity. Writing is not itself, or its ‘not’ is also what it is.
Language’s experience – living, dying, and unfolding the game of life and death in its own recurrence. Sense given and taken, fictions made and unmade, but everything pointing to what is still to come, not because it will save and redeem what has gone before, not because it will complete it, but because it is from there it will come again, the necessity of writing’s fort-da, the freedom it gives by way of its return.
Lars Iyer's Blog 