A swig of Lucozade one day is enough to ruin the next one; energy gained one early evening is energy lost the next morning. What was it I intended to do? But I’m lost from that and any task; I cannot rise to the day. Honey on ricecakes instead. I keep the curtains drawn.
Should I go into the office and read my email? But there’s email unanswered at my private address, too, and the eternal debt of letters to write. Other debts, too – abstracts and whole papers to put together. Why did I agree to speak there, and there, and on those topics?
Why should I have anything in common with other Jews, Kafka asks, when I’ve nothing in common with myself? But that ‘nothing in common’ need not be anguished. Isn’t it pleasant to be relieved from the tasks you have been set, and even from catching up with correspondence?
You’ve been let off, I tell myself, and now the day, and a year of such days opens in another way. This line from Handke’s journals: ‘I am deathly afraid, I pick up my pencil and am surprised how calm everything becomes. Afraid? No, not that. Vague. Lost somehow. ‘Dreamy’ as Richard Ford’s character would have it: is that the word? In lieu of – something.
Whence the book the character writes. Whence Handke’s mighty oeuvre. But from that first being-in-lieu – not a debt as such, but that hollowing that allows a call to echo inside you. To be called – is that right? Called – but only as you fall. To fall and be called as you fall; to place a few words side by side even as you forget them. Even as you’ve forgotten already what was written yesterday, and the act of writing of them.
But you can imagine day pressed upon day, one day, another, and each hollowed out exactly alike. Hollowed out in you, who become the echo chamber of what does not cease to reverberate. Perhaps there is a kind of speech that is the interruption of speech – that silence which places parentheses around the chatter of the day.
Isn’t this what Heidegger calls the call of conscience? But it is the converse I imagine: a kind of rumour, a movement of unsubstantiated gossip so light that it drifts willy-nilly from speaker to speaker. A speech that no one owns, such as the one Duras allows her characters to speak at the long party in The Vice-Consul – and shouldn’t I add the speech of the Grandmother in her apartments to the old antiquarian in Fanny and Alexander?
The interruption of firm and directed speech, then. A kind of gossip, then: a speech so light that it only bows the tips of the wheat in the field. A wind you hardly knew that passed, but it passed. And now I remember Red Thread(s)’ glacial writing, vast but also ignorable in its tiny forward movement. ‘Constant, incremental movement’: that’s how he thinks a daily act of writing.
An act as transparent as the day and that lets the day shine there. Shine? But the day is only transparency, that medium through which light might pass. Unless the day, like Duchamp’s large glass only slows light down, and now the medium is no longer a medium, and your writing is like the whiteness of a cataract. The day cannot see, not anymore. Blind day, that sees only what it cannot.
I think last year was made of such days, one lying down upon another. I imagine a flowerpress, and then a distillery – and the distilled essence of the day, opaque like ouzo mixed with water. Pressed days, one upon another until they hint at some kind of final, definitive shape: what is it I know that forms in a writing that begins anew day after day? But perhaps it is my curse not to know it, and it’s under that curse that I write. What does it mean to become a rorshach to oneself?
Analysis is supposed to allow affect to be reunited with thought – no longer will you feel without knowing how you feel. You’ll live in common with yourself once again – no more will your feelings drift like low cloud over the moors. But what when thought is only that drifting, the movement of clouds in the white sky? What when thought has opened wider than itself, and affects are so diffuse as no longer to be able to name particular moods?
Are you alive, and for whom? Do you live anymore, or are you only the image of the same white sky that looks at you without being able to see you? Under no one’s gaze you are nothing at all. A rumour on everyone’s lips. A kind of sigh that bears all speech, but that disappears when you try to hear it. And now you are neglected like that neglected speech of which you dream.
Word is placed against word, sentence against sentence; you write quickly, all at once, and only later do you break them apart into separate paragraphs. First of all, that rush of words, that drifting rush, obscure urgency. A passing in which no one passes: what does it mean to have fallen?
Idle speech, chattering speech: do not think you can draw it back to itself, Gerede to Rede. Do not think you can bear it in common, that which turns each of you from what is said to its whispering to-say.
I think this is what The Sportswriter does, and remarkably: to let what is written wear thin that of which is so brilliantly written about. Bascombe’s light joy, his insouciance, his dreaminess which, he says, he has in common with all sportswriters: the events he reports (but I am only 100 pages into the book) seem to speak without settling into the firmness of a plot.
Events retold only to give substance to the demand to write, to the call that comes only as he has fallen from his marriage. Fallen – and now he hears, for he is hollowed out, the imperative to set down events as they are given. Given – as he gives them again in writing, letting them push themselves forward as the tips of wheat might be bowed by the wind.
This is a writing that bows to writing. Like the second part of Blanchot’s Death Sentence what matters is to set down those events which allow the redoubling of the world, producing its image and not the world itself. No longer will day pass simply into day. Something must be kept, some opacity, a glass of cloudy water.
Drink! as Derrida commands at the end of his second long essay on Levinas. Drink, then – let the passing of days congeal in you. Let it clot your arteries and kill you. What does it mean to die without knowing that you’re dying? What does it mean to survive death?
And now I remember D.H. Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Died’: he remembers his past life at a distance, Lawrence’s dead man. It’s far away from him now, and he can begin again, this reborn Jesus, who is no longer the Christ. Of whom, now is he the Messiah, when he has nothing in common with himself? Messianicity without messianism – is that the expression?
I think there is a kind of speaking that lets that same messianicity resound. I think you can hear it at the back of our throat (Lyotard on Malraux). I think it can be heard in the breath, which is only the continuation of that which we recieved from our Maker. But what if there is no Maker, and no one to animated the damp clay from which we are made? That clay, too, can speak – the body’s words, like a mouth full of blood, speaking to say nothing in blood bubbles, letting a life dribble from your lips.
Speech is prophecy; it runs ahead of us. Speech as it thickens and kills us by its clot. Speech as blood dribbles from our mouths. What is the line from Trakl? A cut on the forehead. Speaking of far things. But speech that is called speaks always of the far, and brings it close.
The future is here – but it is not mine. The future – but it is not mine. To have died and still to know the future, to know it dimly, like Lawrence’s character. To stretch dead limbs. To take air into the bottom of dead lungs. Smoothen the page with your dead man’s palm; take up your pen with your dead man’s hand. Write; speak.
To know a year of such days; to awaken dead and write from it each morning; to forget, with the forgetting of death. What is the future Lawrence’s character knows for himself? I open my curtains: the yard, the dried out soil of the potted plants. I go into the kitchen and run the edge of my hand along the damp walls. I switch the kettle on for tea: events, non-events, curling open like molluscs from their shells.
To what do they bear witness? To whose call do they respond? The sky is blue behind white. It’s five years and one day since I moved to this city, I tell myself. Five years and one day since we drove up in a hired van. It’s nearly one year since I came back from India, I tell myself. It’s a handful of days since my Visitor departed, opening this whole flat to me anew in her wake.
Anew: memory is thick in me. Memory like molasses, where no event stands out from the streaming of the others. It’s a few hours since I awoke, tired, into this Sunday, and forty minutes since I began this post. Separate your prose into paragraphs, I tell myself. Pull up your writing and let it stand by itself, like a ship that is pulled up to stand up in a bottle.
Have I spoken? Have I let speaking speak? (I’ll awaken my trolls with those kinds of questions. ‘You’re so pretentious’, etc …) Never mind those questions that ask for a judgement of which I am incapable. Never mind the answers that arise only to come apart in the turbulence of a call. This morning I know my year to have failed just as last year failed. Failed – and I fell, across the days, and opened my eyes as I fell, and unclenched my hands. And saw what failed to see me: the opaque sky, light that burned from nowhere.
Shouldn’t I write, I ask myself, until my hour is done? I am listening to Espers – the first and second albums. Richard Ford’s book is open in the other room. Hadn’t I dressed to go into the office? Shouldn’t I be there now, answering emails and tidying my desk? First of all, a title for my post. Idle Speech, I consider. No: too bland. Glacial Writing? Too derivative. And now I know: Pressed Writing, as I remember the twin flower presses that were bought for us once, my sister and me.
Pressed Writing: and why do I also remember the musical box I wanted as a child to buy for my mum? What would I want one of those for?, she said, and I thought: small things are always secret, and it is nice to share a small thing with a small tune.
What made me think of that? Idle thoughts, drifting thoughts that unbraid themselves like a river that splits into distributaries: is that what has happened to my life, such that I can barely write to plan? Has its course become silted up – has its long streaming given way to islands of silt and the choking of channels? And isn’t that another way to understand this blog, and all of my blogging: clots in my arteries, silt-islands in the stream?
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