How to write my pages today? (True, the box in which I see my writing on the monitor is not a page – but when I copy and paste these lines into Word, solely to take advantage of the spellchecker, it is pages I see, black lines running through paragraphs). How to write, if only to push the dross of my life a little further on?
This is how I will deploy the glacial metaphor: what leaves itself of writing at the blog is the terminal moraine pushed by a glacer’s snout: a landscape over which the desire to write has passed, leaving strange formations in its wake. What leaves itself, what is left here, but desire has already passed, it is always passing, and where it seems to be it has already left, although it leaves its absence quivering in the air.
A morning like any other; another morning when I’ve risen too early and am lost in those hours where no one is awake. Is it morning? Only to those monks who rise at two. But they rise together and sing together, and who is awake with me at this time? This is no time to be awake. Bury yourself, then. Forget you’re awake. Write – call up writing like the sandworms in Dune, and hook open the gap between the worm’s plates that stops it from plunging back into the sand.
But write of what, as you ride along? Isn’t this the curse, that writing demands substance to become real? But then what of your life can you give it, when you’ve risen too early, there’s no day yet to reflect upon; no experience – and doesn’t that thought always come to me: that to rise early is to rise very young, whereas to write at the end of the day, when the rolling body of the earth has already tipped into darkness, is to write as an old man?
Two A.M. is a time of absolute youth. Absolute – separate – and burning unto itself like a star. But a star, now, that has nothing to consume – that does not live through that great, controlled explosion that keeps a sun burning for five billion years. Nothing to burn, and there is no burning – only the husk of a sun; the cinder after the nova’s explosion: what is there to write, before and after everything? Can I call it insomnia, this vigil that has outlasted the world and was born before it? An insomnia in which something else stirs itself and awakens in me, looking up in blindness to stars that burn in blindness?
I think it is at this time that the magnificent child in me is dead – Freud’s His-Majesty-the-baby: the one who rises in his parents’ eyes: the glorious child who, says Serge Leclair, has to be killed over and again. Over and again – but in this suspended moment, the edge of the plow as it pushes forward the snow, there is no child, not yet.
No one watches him, and he does not watch; if eyes open in him, they are blind, and they open only from the centre of his forehead: Bataille’s pineal eye, perhaps, or the third eye that opened on Shiva’s forehead, say the Puranas, when Parvathi playfully placed her hands over his other eyes, and the universe was plunged into darkness. That is why his worshippers have horizontal lines traced across their brow: a third eye intimates itself there – the god’s eye that is the condition of our sight.
What is that element that allows us to see?, asks someone in Plato’s Republic: what is it that allows our sight? The sun of intelligibility – the noetic sun that rises over reason: so it is our sight is given its measure. But for those other eyes, the eyes of vigilance? Sight goes mad; ‘night is also a sun’ (Zarathustra), and the lines across the brow remember the eye that cannot see but that rolls in blindness.
Isn’t that what is intimated when the eyes roll back into the head in orgasm, perhaps, or as another speaks in the seer’s place? Let the eyes roll back into the centre of the skull. Let them open themselves towards that darkness which also floods the universe. What is the element that allows our blindness? What unjoins the intelligible relation to the world?
To speak is not to see, says Blanchot. The Other is invisible, says Levinas. But you, too, are invisible – or it is that when the night burns like the sun, it also burns from where you should be; it takes your place. You are a piece of the night, dreaming of night. Or you are where the night has come to know itself, joining a future that has not begun and a past not yet finished at the moment’s edge.
And isn’t that what happens at two A.M.? You are part of the circuit of the night – part of that flow from future to past, and vice versa: of that great loop of the serpent on whose body burns what we see as stars. And the dross of your life is what burns itself up to reach there, and joins your body to the body of everything.
I send back the power of memory like a fisherman’s net. And like the great nets I use now, it is as if they scrape the whole seabed clear, and along with what I would catch – discreet memories – I have brought everything else along, too. Muddied water. Black water. And what I remember has blackness behind it as when you look at your room reflected in the window at night.
‘I can speak now’ says the stutterer cured by hypnosis at the beginning of Mirror. ‘I can see’: but what is seen? Think of it aurally – a great roaring or mumbling out of which only traces of forms arise, and even then, the same roaring. Think of a touch that passes through everything, but knows, still, the pressure of something like a countertouch.
Isn’t this what is spoken of in the oldest cosmogonies: the universe that comes out of chaos, determining itself, giving itself form? But dream of the chaos to come, and the great unloosening: isn’t that what happens when you wake at two A.M., at the moment’s edge? To come – or it was already here, suspending those relations that are measured by light.
‘I can see now’: you are seen; night watches at your heart; night hears itself; night has reached a hand through the void and found you, a pleat of the void. What is the opposite of a cosmogony? What names the coming apart of time, of space? Whose hand unfolds the folds and lays everything as flat and simple as a blank page? The opposite of God: God’s opposite, or a god gone mad: I think of Shiva’s great rages when he breaks from his hair grotesque grey beasts with clubs of nails and sticking out tongues to exact his vengeance.
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