Insouciance

To wake in the morning carried by what was begun the morning before; to rely on writing, to lean back on it: isn’t this the dream? And to have spent the previous evening enjoying the glow of what had been written before, as though, after an adventurous youth and prosperous middle age, there was time to dwell in the satisfaction of what had been achieved. Or that the evening was also a time of work, and this a way to combat tiredness: to open morning in the evening, or at least to experience as promise what is ordinarily a gradual shutting down, a kind of coming to death. A morning that remembers itself in the real morning to come; rebirth both times – to be born again in both cases, living again through writing what was once lived in life.

The gods thought the ascetic Shiva was still too inexperienced to have renounced the world. Had he really tasted the life of a householder? Did he know the joys of marriage and fatherhood? so Shiva let himself be born into a human body; he lived, married, rose children and then, in time, died like any other mortal. But a whole life on earth is an eyeblink in heaven; and when he opened his eyes, the other gods bowed in veneration and went away. Truly Shiva was above temptation; truly he had come to the end of life, and lived beyond it. Then he closed his eyes again in meditation, already dead to life, already living beyond life.

Then is writing like Shiva, closed eyed and meditating on itself, only on itself, even as this ‘itself’ comes apart, even as it disperses itself to the farthest corners of the universe? All that remains is desire, a kind of impersonal movement that gathers itself from the disparate. So will writing, like the universe, move on. But writing is not life, but a kind of death, wherein everything that was lived returns again, but in a new form, and as though under glass. Yes, writing is always the subject of writing – and its object, too. As though writing only sought to return to itself, to that dispersal in which it is lost anew, even though, as its condition, it first has to construct an effigy in the form of a narrative, a kind of wicker man it then has to set aflame.

That is why I prefer to all others narratives that come close to the condition of writing – their own condition, but simultaneously, their own uncondition, since it disperses what narrative would hold apart, and disperses it as it is held together. A writing, then, that places form at stake, and whose content is always voided. How is that such narratives have always seemed to have begun before, to have attempted to tell themselves a thousand times? And that their narration is an attempt not only to reach us, but to reach themselves, to join the past they would recount to the future that will let them live? Cursed narratives, or narratives which seek to undo, by narrative, the narrative curse: how will they shake themselves from the linearity on which they seem to depend?

I once saw, on a tropical island (X.’s island), a wave roar up that held in its cross section large fish, facing in a single direction, suspended for an eternal moment before the wave broke. How to keep before it breaks such a form in a writing that takes itself as its own theme? The green wave broke, that is true, and the fish shimmered back out to another wave – I suppose they were big enough, strong enough, to hold themselves thus: but how to find a topic that would also survive the irregular waves that pass through narrative, and hold itself there, a form quivering in the formless?

Perhaps it is not strength that should be sought, nor size, but a kind of filigree delicacy: a net whose filaments would let the wave pass. Is this what happens in the second half of Blanchot’s Death Sentence, where a series of events are recounted that seem to reverberate as though shaken equally by the return of the ‘push’ of narrative, of writing’s return to itself? A series of events, of unimportant events, but important for that they concentrate what would otherwise be lost by that return. Did it take strength to write them? Or, as I imagine, a kind of sublime carelessness, a detached insouciance that let each event crystallise from the others, making a shimmering lattice, event linked loosely but surely linked to event?

Such a narrative is not written from divine caprice. Its lightness is the price of its engagement; what happens can only do so when seen, as it were, from the corner of the eye. And isn’t this the miracle, that separates Death Sentence from the last of Blanchot’s novels published in the same year, the turgid The Most High?

I will read neither narrative here, remembering, instead, what Thomas Carl Wall wrote about the former:

What the narrator recounts, and would like to end, are those things that distracted him: his seeing someone again whom he had forgotten even existed, his multiple dwellings, his strange and unpredictable moods (neither of which he takes very seriously), odd encounters with neighbours, comings and goings in and out of the rooms he and others enter enter by mistake […]

None of these things had anything to do with his important and consequential work as a journalist at the time of the Munich crisis[….] While the events of the war years are dead, these inconsequential happenings have managed to live on and remain undead and unrecorded by virtue of their insignificance.

They are of secondary, inessential, non-primary importance […] They are what happens when nothing happens, just as writing only happens when nothing happens.

Nothing happens. There is a kind of urgency to Blanchot’s telling, it is true, but there is also a lightness, even a neglect – I have already called it an insouciance – that seems to have lifted what is written from itself. But still, this is not the light, creative joy of the deity who creates one world and can then dance away to create another. The lightness in the details, that bears them, is not arbitrary.

There is effort here – a narrative effort, even as it becomes possible only in a kind of gliding, where disparate events seem to bring themselves together into something resembling a plot. An effort, perhaps, to let the narrative be engaged by what it will henceforward take on as its own necessity: the task of narrating what undoes the narrative, and breaks it apart. And yet the narrative holds; the wave rushes through the net.