The Mark

To mark a date, a time – to have been capable of marking it with a little writing, if only to scratch a mark on the walls of time – why is that enough, at least for me? why is it necessary, so that to fail to scratch means, like a prisoner kept unaware of the date, that I forget in some sense what day it is? What day?

Not that I cannot tell it’s Wednesday, or early December, but that the day without writing fails to open for me. As though, by writing early in the morning – and didn’t I, this morning, wake at half past one? – I’ve a headstart on what occurs such that it might happen not to others, but to me.

I will have a stake in this day, that’s what writing announces. It will be partially mine; the hours will part for me like the Red Sea to the Israelites – they will let me have passage, and so join the passing of this day to the passing of others, and so on, through my life, letting it be mine, and letting me live. And better still, for me, the knowledge that I will have forgotten this, what I have written, by the time the day is over: that I am like one who loses his memory overnight, so that each day he must find himself again.

A liberation, because it breaks me from the dominion of the past by a neglectful forgetting, and lets the future open to me as it is not measured by the past. Is it this eternal youthfulness I want, a wheel propelling itself, like Zarathustra’s child?

I think this is how I want day joined to day, each morning: this that will be the hinge of my days, or the point around which they turn: that happy forgetting that means writing must come again to mark the day, to say: here I am, even when, by the next morning, I have forgotten yesterday’s mark, and must mark it again, and that that is the condition of memory, and passage.

Here I am: then it is not the succession of days I would mark, but the rebirth of the day. The mark must be marked again. Here I am: but where am I, when I’ve forgotten by evening that there was a mark at all?