Writing, Non-Writing

A writer faces eternity or the lack of it every day: is that the quote? Eternity, then would be a passage of writing – to take that, at least from the day. And the lack of it? No writing; nothing done. What misery! But here I remember a passage often quoted at Red Thread(s); it’s from Duras:

There should be a writing of non-writing. Someday it will come. A brief writing, without grammar, a writing of words alone. Words without supporting grammar. Lost. Written, there. And immediately left behind.

Of words alone? As though there were a word for each thing, for everything. And to place words a certain way would be as to paint a still life. Those words – there; perfectly placed, perfectly connected to one another, like Cezanne’s apples.

But then of course there cannot be a word for everything – or rather, what names everything is what denies the indefinite multiplicity of everything, the great sprawl of the singular. To write a still life must be to make a poem that would avoid, in its operation, the idealisation of the world it would lay before us. Can the poem become itself a thing; can it thicken itself into a still life of words, ideal words, it is true, but composed so that they have, in their arrangement, the semblance of singularity?

So would language be reborn; so would it give birth to itself and as though for the first time: words, now, like things, and arranged into a thing; language roves in the world as anything roves; it speaks like a fallen branch or a leafy stump; it speaks like a rockpool or the spreading surf: how did it make the leap out of abstraction?

A writing of non-writing, a language of non-language, that will come, beaching words without grammar. Words, just words – arranged, placed like sea shells on the sand at dusk. Sea shells placed, unplaced by the sea. Lost – and then left behind.

By what divine neglect would such a poem be born! Words lost as the items in a Zen garden – lost, placed, unplaced – by what skill to aspire to a divine neglect – to that indifference that lets a word be lost? It is a god who writes, or the poet is a god. The words placed themselves thus. The words asked to be placed thus; they stranded themselves here; they asked to be lost here.

Or: it was language that asked. Language weary from signifying; language tired of transporting sense. That said: I would like to lie down. I would like to lay down in words that lay down. Eternity – or the lack of it, each day: but doesn’t this still bind the author too strongly to what falls away from the divine? Doesn’t it make writing a matter of will, of the deliberate placing of words?

Only a god can neglect. Only a god can turn away from you as she faces you. I think that’s what the ancients knew in their sacred groves. I think that was what was known when names were invented for the gods of the earth and the sea and the sky. What was named thus – what gave itself to name a god – were words unplaced – lost words, words content to lose themselves, and asked to be lost.

Eternity, the lack of it: there is a writing, a non-writing that dissolves this alternative. Words lost, and left to be found in their loss: eternity and uneternal, ordinary words that seem to call out to the farthest parts of the universe, but for all that they are ordinary.

A writing of non-writing, a non-writing writing: is this what is at issue in a book called In Pieces that I received from the post? The fragment, here, is the gathering of words to be neglected. Often, they are dated as in a diary (the same is true of Red Thread(s)); but doesn’t the date only recall the unlimiting of the day, its blossoming?