Of course, you can set to publish posts on past days, too, which I often do, making a secret archive only visible when I scroll back from month to month. But then I never do that, seeing them by chance only when, for example, through curiosity I look at the blog through a feed. It is the knowledge they are there, that the architecture of the blog conceals another, and there are fossil-posts intercalated among the others, which sometimes have only a secret meaning, and one that I, too, have forgotten.
To whom are these signs sent? To no one, and not even myself. But also to everyone, potentially, insofar as they are published. Can you alter the past? Perhaps to send posts backwards in time, or at least to withhold them from publication until a month is up, and they’ll no longer appear on the front page, is to open the past wider than it was: to prop a stick vertically in a crocodile’s mouth to hold it open.
Now the past will not shut tight; there will be a few secrets left; somewhere, in the darkness, there might be posts that bear no meaning in particular, meant for no one, not even me. Dropped idly into the past, or left to open there like night flowers that bloom away from everyone’s gaze.
Then, too, I wonder whether it is an architecture they open, or rather the fissures in what accretes here like the coral reef. Post lies down on post – but what of the cracks that pass through them all? What of the fissures that attest to the lines along which it is ruined, rather than the structure itself? A counter-architecture then: a way for what is built to be unbuilt, the unmaking of the made.
But what is this to say? That what is made here unmakes itself in secret? Or that there might be a way of erasing writing as it is written, so that only its edge remains, like the tip of a sparkler in darkness, and the circles made as you turn it in loops, that fade quickly from the night. Then it is the night itself that speaks – the darkness set back from the momentary figures drawn by writing.
The night as the past – is that it? Not the beginning, but what never begins in beginning – the same that returns and as the decay of what is written, its fate. I think that’s it: the secret law of writing, the blackness it vanishes against and that it lets speak in its exhaustion.
Fate: then it is the inexorable that writes. The past is that, and inextinguishable; I will not find its end. And, as I search – or as it searches for itself in writing, looks to return to itself in that loop that joins past to future – it is the future that opens, but now pushed beyond itself, beyond anything that might happen.
And I know it in the future, as in the past: the return of what comes by way of writing in order to return there, to itself, and in repetition. To say nothing other than itself, but, in so doing, letting the sparkler’s tip of writing speak, making loops against the darkness.
I believe in this intensely. I think I discovered it here, and by this writing – or at least discovered what I had written elsewhere, and in another key. But there (elsewhere) it was written about and here it is done, and wasn’t that the aim?
‘I have a project’: Jodi reminds me of the journal Kierkegaard has Quidam write, that is set in different strata of the past: one set of entries from one year ago, and another from a month: might one not conceive of a set of posts that might only be published years from now, and when everyone is dead?
In my fantasy, they outlive us all, and lie down like gems in the strata of dirt that will form over our cities. And then, too, in my fantasy, my life is only that tip of fire in the dark, looping even as writing’s hand holds the sparkler.
Somewhere else, I would like to rest like starlight reflected upon ice, flashing back up at the sky. Or like light on water, opening a million eyes into the night. Writing is also a kind of prayer – not for you, the writer, but for itself, its own survival. A Jew cannot destroy a piece of paper on which is written the name of God. And can you erase the prayer that might always be found in the world wide web?
Speak, and wait for those who descend like frogmen to probe the mysteries of the deep. Perhaps they will never come. But what does it matter? Writing is patient. I find that very beautiful. Patient, and waiting with indifference. Hidden too deeply for even wood s lot to find.
Am I guilty? not guilty? Quidam’s question. And of what does Bataille accuse himself when he names his notes Guilty? Amazed that anyone publishes except on the net. Haven’t I found myself defending blogging (not my own practice, but that of others) in the last few weeks?
Enough. Time to keep quiet for those who can’t see it. But how to publish beneath net and web? How to escape the net’s trawl and the web’s stickness, and to let fall, as into the deepest ocean, what is here written? I admit I will not change address and lose those who link to me as by strands of silk. We are together somehow, and falling. ‘Angel, angel, down we go together.’
Ah, but that is my fantasy as I yawn and let my back arch like a bow. Isn’t this writing as easy as the rise and fall of my chest by breathing? Ease: the word gives me an image of shoal of fish quickly passing. Follow them; follow writing – but how to let writing draw me to itself? How to find the current that makes it easy?
Push out your skiff into the river; drift. ‘Go by going’, as Lispector says. And then may a current seize you, even as it only tries to return to itself, and to what never began. But the origin is rising like a kraken, like Erebus at the bottom of the waters. I think it is the past that is rising, or the future, and what does not fail to come like fate.
Drop your posts into the past, then. Cast them from your hand into the water, and watch them glow as they fall, and then disappear. Faith: more is written than appears. Faith: that the most buried writing waits for readers, and the mouth of the blog will open one day like a crocodile’s, and you will see them glowing there.
Lars Iyer's Blog 