Too often I write to say nothing at all, or only: I am here; or rather – I was here – and isn’t that the strangeness of reading diaries that have been transcribed as blogs, updating every day, though they were written a century ago: for does Barbellion really write alongside me? and Kafka? But they are here nonetheless, and very close, and each word in their diaries lets them say, each in their own way: I was here; once, like you, I wrote to mark the days in their unfolding – one day, another, and when I could not see the great wars you know are coming like storm clouds from the horizon.
‘Then came long years of restless wandering, culminating in the misery of the second world war …’ From Janouch’s introduction to his conversations with Kafka, where he says, even as ‘Kafka’s twilight kingdom of shadows became a perfectly ordinary day-to-day experience’, he gets out the notes he wrote back then, as a 22 year old, and decides to select and arrange them anew.
Appelfeld says we cannot understand what the death of millions might mean, when the death of one close to us is already overwhelming. I have found little about Janouch, but I feel I know him in some way through the conversations he records. From his presence that lets Kafka, even a fictional Kafka – Janouch’s invention – speak in the way he did.
This morning, just as any other, even as I imagine myself smoothing a page on which to begin to write. Smoothing it, this imaginary white surface, in order to make a mark as for the first time, just as I once saved to buy with my pocket money the pads such as you used to be able to find in W.H. Smiths. What happiness to begin writing on the first loose leaf page, to begin, to make a beginning, and with a fine-tipped pen!
I learned to write with a minute hand, and when I came to keep diaries, from the same stationery, but hard-bound now, and a day to an A4 page, it was with such a minute hand that I filled them. Perhaps it took time to know it mattered little what was said, and that what was written was never important enough but to be set down in anything but a sovereign neglect.
Neglect: is this why I think no one should speak about blogging? – or that one might do so only after writing a million words or so, coming up for a gulp of air having descended very deeply? But still the joy of reading blogs by those of whom we know the least, who turn themselves away from us except for what they chose to show, and how glorious that showing, fireworks against the darkness, when it is from the darkness of anonymity from which they write – and to let, as I read, the most negligible carry me into its arms.
I think I would like to read of nothing at all, just as I would like to write of it: to mark the passing of days, and the fact that each of us is alive, though our bodies are so delicate, and don’t I always worry, upon saying goodbye, that I will never see the one to whom I wave again?
Lars Iyer's Blog 