Tired, with a cold coming on, I know in some sense I’m getting in my own way, and that this will only get worse with age, and the morning will carry with it a reminder of my own heaviness, of the reluctance of my body to let me write.
By what kind of training is it possible to rise, and write? How can the phrases which allow the beginning come to arise? How to find that silence that is their backdrop, the sense of the sea that comes forward to sweep the beach clean?
I get in my own way; I stumble over myself – for how long can coffee, which I drink only in the morning, alone, and at the head of the day, give me the confidence in beginning? Only slightly ill, and it’s impossible. Tired, and it’s impossible – but then, by what chance is it sometimes eminently possible, the seemingly highest act?
Of course I am not speaking of what is actually written: that doesn’t matter. Reading back, as I do rarely, the same disappointment. Not even a beginning, I tell myself. Not the barest of beginnings. But still, in the day that began with writing, and that seems borne along by what began there, before dawn, there seems a beginning, a way of being braced against what happens, a few sentences being set against silence, arising against it, as, I imagine in my delusion, a calligraphic sign, drawn at a stroke, arises against the whiteness of the page.
But it is delusion, just that. Nothing begins here, but this isn’t why it is necessary to write. It is not even failure that drives me, though there is no question of my failure. To wake, to begin, and to carry the origin forward in beginning: just that. To have allowed it to speak, the origin, as it rustles in writing, passing like the wind in the leaves in Tarkovsky’s film: no, I can never say that has happened, not here.
But writing has faith enough in me. Writing, as I wake calls to be written. But even that is not true: it is just what I wish were the case. I wish it now, slightly ill, but not ill, writing – but not really writing – in the darkness. Writing in lieu, writing of what is lost by writing, and wishing the wind from the impossible would tousle my hair: perhaps.
What would I like to say? What is there to be said? Only what sets itself against silence and lets it speak. Only what lets silence and in its struggle into existence, the one against the other. Struggle – or play, one rising higher as the other rises, finding their way into a sky I would like to spread around me, like the seven headed snake that spreads its canopy above Vishnu.
A sheltering sky. But where what shelters exposes, like the slit in the nomad’s tent that is the opening to God. A sheltering silence, slashed in the walls of sense: not the record of passing days the prisoner keeps by scratches, but its opposite, as if every day was the first day, and 1 + 1, as is written on Domenico’s walls in Nostalgia, always equals 1.
How young you have to be to write!, I exclaim in my stupidity. How young so that you no longer get in your own way! But perhaps this is a youth that can only be achieved with age, and that a great clearing away is necessary so that the shore is revealed in its spreading simplicity.
Lars Iyer's Blog 
