Footprints

I rise very early to write something or other; but what? Enough just to write – or rather, to be brought to that moment before writing anything, with a sentence fragment or two floating in my head and a sense that that fragment calls for others, and that soon a post will be knitted as sentence joins itself to sentence.

Just to write, and by so doing, have a kind of headstart on the day – to have made my place before the light comes, to have set up a kind of base camp. Sentence fragments come (but whose voice carries them?), but I think what matters is the origin against which they set themselves back.

I can begin, sentence linking to sentence, but the origin, without beginning, accompanies me. I think of it falling back, silently. And then I wonder what it would be to make sound out of silence, to speak not by adding noise to the world, but by subtracting silence from noise, as you draw with your finger on condensated windows.

To speak by subtraction – to let silence sound and to speak thereby: isn’t this what Blanchot means when he claims it is by a violent tearing away that the writer begins to write? That it is by stopping his ears to the Sirens whose song has already drowned him?

But to begin is not to draw the origin into the beginning. Something of it remains, murmuring, non-silent, to rush into the silencing of its noise through which the act of writing can begin, as, perhaps, water rushes in to fill the imprints your feet leave on the sand.

He says somewhere it is the tone of the work that differs from writer to writer – the way, perhaps that murmuring noise is allowed to call in the work. The way the Sirens call, but in a different way with each author. As if those finished books were footprints the sea fills up, until the impression is nearly erased. But still the imprint, still the traces feet leave on the shore – a momentary silencing that cuts into the anonymous streaming of noise.

And isn’t that the company you seek by reading? The footprints of others, of Man and Woman Fridays – the others who sought also, in my fantasy, to write upstream of the day, to go where the river runs clearest, and youngest? I know I have company; there are others who want to push their way to the head of all waters. And by this relationship, I know a kind of amity with them, with the others, whom I know only by their traces, half washed away.