Idioms

I think my favourite writing moves by jolts from one image to another, and arrives at that way, carelessly, neglectfully, at ideas. Carelessly, because they are not the motive of writing, but an epiphenomenon; they arrive by way of writing, that is true, but only as those words lurch, jolt from image to image. I want to be surprised by the way in which one paragraph is joined to another, and even by the movement from sentence to sentence within the paragraph, and even in the sentence itself, which Henry Green in particular can open in such a way that its last phrase is not pregiven.

I tell myself such writing, such thinking, is possible only for creative writers – for novelists, perhaps, but can’t it also be found when artists or musicians speak of their work? But novelists first of all, or poets, when they write about writing, when it is their practice that is their focus, in its nudity, its simplicity: to write, to let words come on a page; to type; to jot words like Handke’s narrator in No Man’s Bay who goes out into the day with a stub of pencil and a notebook.

Perhaps there are thinkers who write this way. Doesn’t Derrida say he spent the 70s learning to wager his own idiom by attempting to give body to the idiom of that upon which he would write? I think the texts he wrote then, in the 70s, when the problem of writing was not simply the object of his thinking, but was performed in his writing, exasperate everyone but me.

My relationship to them is secret, or nearly so – I won’t be their defender, nor his – and neglectful, for how often do I read them, really? Aren’t they an example of what Sinthome told us a few weeks ago, can have no interest for us. No interest – in themselves (if I understand Sinthome properly) – but only as they allow us to write, to live in a new way.

It is the same, for me at least, for the films of Godard: they give me permission to live differently – yes, just, that, to live: I wake up, but as though to a life that is greater than mine, even though it was furled within it; for a time – freedom, a great opening, a flag in the wind, fluttering. And wasn’t that the old punk ethos: do not listen, act – play without knowing how to play, sing without being able to sing – that I would like to think should rule our blogosphere?: writing written without knowing how, or why.

Write – and for what purpose? To let others find their own interest? Not even that, for this is not missionary work. What was it Nin wrote about finding our own legitimate strangeness? Is that the goal: to seek an idiom which, if it is not ours, summons us to the space it opens, like a garden, or a grove. And to wander in the corridors it opens for us. The question comes at once of what is to made thus, as a collective? Or will idioms (‘specific voices’) proliferate as the cane toad did in Australia? Shouldn’t we call it the rhizosphere?

Too tired to work this morning – to continue, as I ought to, my review, or at least with the reading that should direct me towards it – I pick up those books I now have piled against my bedroom wall, about a 100 of them. Necessary books? I did not pick them deliberately, but brought them piecemeal, as according to my whim, from the office – but perhaps they are necessary all the same.

Duras’s essays; a compendium of Green’s articles and abandoned writings, some critical work on Gene Wolfe: do they interest me? Or is it something else I seek in their mirror – the idiom that calls me to the space it opens. To write: I think that’s what I want, and by way of reading. And to write neglectfully, without forethought. To wander in writing for an hour or two as this part of the world turns into the sun.