One blog feels another appearing in its outstretched filaments – by the record of its stats and referrers, say, which record incoming links, or from trackbacks. A new blog: and it can be opened up, in another window: is it brand new, or only new to you who have found it, such that you cannot really call yourself a discoverer?
Happiness at the thought that alongside your corner of the blogosphere that there are other corners, whole forests of blogs and links. Happiness that you have stumbled into it as by turning the handle of a secret door, or is it that a door has opened into your own corner, and the blogs you keep around you?
Sometimes, you forget them almost as soon as you open them up. Read, scroll down, and then look through the archives: another life, another path of writing, now alongside yours. How often do they update? Is it a living blog, or a dead one? Dead ones can have their charm, and how sad when an old, dead blog disappears.
Where did they go, The Young Hegelian and No Cause For Concern? Many times I went back to wander through their corridors. But Invisible Adjunct is still there, one of the first blogs I read frequently. And will mine, too, disappear one day? No matter, when there are new blogs proliferating.
Perhaps it will crash down like a telegraph pole, carrying incoming links like cables down with it. But that, I think, is too violent an image. Now I see the links snapping like web filaments delicately breaking. Broken links wave like filaments in the air. Who notices they are broken? Who follows them? No one.
No one: and isn’t that beautiful? To disappear, drawing oneself from the corner: isn’t that what you want? In some way, I am the opposite of Sinthome, with what he tells us of his narcissism. I think by this blog I want to prepare a kind of sacrifice, but one no one will notice as it burns.
To be anyone at all: what kind of fantasy is that? No self-analysis here, however it might appear. A kind of drifting, just that. Don’t wake me up, that’s what I’m telling you. I don’t want to wake up, not here; I am too awake in the world. And isn’t that it: that one who has to speak too much, and with too much reason sets speech loose here instead?
Speech set loose – but now without forethought, without preparation, unless a whole life lived was preparation, unless all the books I’ve read weren’t preparation enough. But for what? To fall asleep and write asleep, just that. To write asleep and as the voiceovers sound in Godard films; in In Praise of Love: ‘I have a project‘.
Scarcely a project, scarcely that. Unless the film follows the way a project wanders, lost from itself. A wandering speech, a speech lost but which, for that matter, does not want to wake up. Or, perhaps – and this is how it will end, though it will never end – I will wake into another life, not mine, just as though I were a god who lived my life as an avatar.
In my foolishness, I search for old posts I wrote that seem important to me. Disappointment follows – but doesn’t that mean I’ve made progress? To wander back through the archives is to see the prose lose its life: does that mean, then, that today’s prose is more alive? But even this prose, the freshest, I find repugnant, and sometimes I make great plans for weeding out most of what has been done.
But I am writing too much. Or rather, awakening is rising up through my writing, like a creature coming up for air. And now writing is drawn towards the surface where it must stop so that I, awakened, can take real breaths. Ah, but won’t I miss it almost as soon? Won’t I carry something of my sleep with me, dragging behind me like a robe?
Like a sleepy child, I love what I’ve lost. Can’t I close my eyes again? If only to know the one who falls in me before he rises. What’s his name? What kind of beast is he, who knows nothing but to fall? Sometimes I imagine that all blogs are falling together, but linked together, like skydivers holding hands.
But isn’t there a way in which we rise, too, each of us? Do not each of us, in their own way, come up for air? But then, too, we are each that child who rubs sleep from its eyes, wanting to go back to bed. And isn’t there something in us still falling, still asleep in waking?
Perhaps this image is too idyllic. Or I should add others, which I discovered only through my own wandering. That it is not from sleep we would awake but from the terror that inhabits sleep – a stirring presence like the Biblical Leviathan that, for a time, calls you from the heart of what you write. That there is an awakening within sleep, a kind of secret vigilance that keeps watch while you do not.
And isn’t it from this beast you flee in wanting to find your way back from the world, and that it is fear you can see in your own eyes, as if your pupils’ blackness was borrowed from his own? And then you’ll see more than you can see, and know your sight reveals itself in a kind of blindness, and that, at that moment, another writes where you cannot, but like an idiot, he can form no letters.
But this image is too grand, too dark, and I think once again of anonymity and neglect. Because there is something triumphally unimportant about writing: it does not matter; it matters to no one, I tell myself, and not even to itself. As if it was born only by neglecting itself and lived through this neglect. As though it wandered without memory and without sense.
How to follow it, then? How to fall, there, to its level? By not caring enough. By not wanting enough. By writing as one might casually brush away an insect. It does not matter: say that. I’ve failed: say that, for isn’t the abandonment of ambition its condition? Or rather, of ambition abandoning you, like Isaac Luria’s God, who created the world as he fled it, and for whom the universe is only the fabric torn open in his escape.
To be abandoned, then, but not to yourself. To a kind of distracted solitude, like a child doodling to pass the time. It doesn’t matter. An abandoned notebook; a graffiti tag no one needs to understand. Why write? To let writing abandon itself. Why? To let writing not matter: and isn’t this what remains of a project at this blog?
A project: but what throws itself forward? After what am I thrown? The attempt to abandon writing by giving it to itself. And then to offer my life, the substance of my life, as the pyre that must burn so it can come into flame. But that, again, is too much. To write of nothing at all, nothing in particular, making no claim. To write as I imagine anyone might write, as though I joined them, anyone, everyone, as they pass along the street like the commuters I used to see in London.
Let nothing distract you but distraction, I tell myself. Write like a god, or a child, I tell myself. There is nothing to begin, and nothing important to say; write like one who has no belief in anything, like the most ordinary person of all, drifting with the others in a crowd. But one so ordinary, I tell myself, he’s a cousin of Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith, but one who does not leap as he walks, but falls – who walks only by falling forward, stumbling, and who speaks in a stammer, like Moses.
You see, I am not eloquent; or what appears to be eloquence and writely style is only borrowed, and I’m not sure from where. If I read back, which I do rarely, I notice that I do not follow the rules of grammar: there are phrases of which I am unsure, but I set them down anyway.
Beyond Moses, who stammers, isn’t there one whose speech is borrowed, entirely borrowed, and isn’t he more admirable than that? Whose speech clothes nothing, no thought, and is itself a garment sewn together from others. And who is he, the imitator?
‘I have a project’. My speech is not my own; I find that a wonderful admission. What I write is not mine; that, too. To write as I roll over in my sleep. Or as in those rare nights where I forget what happened because I drank too much. Or when, in imagination, I meet one I know on the street who does not know me. ‘But I know you, don’t you remember?’ – ‘I’ve no idea who you are.’
Lars Iyer's Blog 