Again? Yes, here again, in a post I should put in parentheses, for what is there to write now that I didn’t set down hours earlier? what, in this part of the day, evening moving towards night that is not the same as morning? The same LP – I Trawl The Megahertz, the same wind outside, the same bottle of Cava on my desk, though it is unstopped now, and empty (I only drank half – two fizzy glasses – last night).
The same -but to be here again, to write again, is necessary if I am to enjoy what Sinthome has called my Sainthood – and shouldn’t I ask, rereading his posts, whether he is not also a saint? – but then perhaps he knows that, with his punning Lacanian name. Sinthome, Saint homme: isn’t he also traversing the fantasy (supposing I myself am doing the same)? isn’t writing over again that small jouissance left in the wake of the big Other’s collapse?
Ruins all around us, but writing still, freshly beginning, and no nostalgia. Begin again, write again, and this surplus is what is left of the fantasy. A post in brackets, then, and nothing to say but everything: for to say it again is to say it anew. To say it, and worn all the way down to saying: that address, that first time which is the repeated act of faith that seems to stitch together my life.
An act – hardly an act, for it is never yet complete, or never complete enough, but there is enough jouissance here, for all that it stays unfinished. The interminable, the incessant: writing to no one in particular, for no one: a few lines in excess, a few lines unasked for, here as daylight fades to darkness.
And shouldn’t I close the curtains of the blog right now? Shouldn’t I shut off the light that lets those outside know what happens in here, in my life, between these walls? But it matters that what is written is public. Matters, then, that the act of publishing calls to a public, however phantasmal. That way I can turn from my life, or so I think. Or my whole life turns and takes aim in an act that simplifies it and pares it down.
To write at the your own edge: what would that mean? To write by leaning forward into the future: but what is that? One day passes, another. I marvel at the dried pink plaster in the bathroom, very smooth, and according to the meter of the man from the drying company, the damp course is holding. Dry, smooth walls: miraculous.
And I watch for the leak from the bathroom upstairs, and it seems that that, too, is fixed, and there is only the thinnest slither of water damage – only that trace of those great indoor showers through my ceiling. And the great plane of sanded wooden floors calmly spreads the way from room to room, even though it tilts down to the middle, both sides, to where I imagine the flat is collapsing (there was a mineshaft right outside the doorway once, I saw it on the mining survey; is that why a faint crack runs along the doorstep?).
And peace: my neighbours, very quiet, seem to be away. Peace: as wide and pleasing as the floor. Peace all around me, preparatory. Couldn’t something begin here? Couldn’t a step be taken? And I dream of that great breath I might take, to draw in all the world, and then to breathe it out again, and for the first time. Anew: but isn’t this what writing is: expiration, and not its opposite: an attempt to breathe the world alive again?
Eight thirty. At the threshold between evening and night. At the threshold, the watershed, there where two rivers might divide on either side of a ridge, or where two corries let their glaciers surge downwards, divided by an arrete.
How many times can you say it? How many times to find the words to say? But it is the words that come to the act, and not the other way around. Words that seem to belong to it, to fit – words that come, I think, because of the hour that it is, and because of the day. And because of me, too – I know that. Because the act gathers me to the edge of itself and asks, as its price, that I give it something of my life for it to consume.
And so must the curtains remain open: so this house does not hide itself from the passerby. To be published, even in this way, is necessary. To show – but to show what? You’ve worn away all welcome, I tell myself, and the pleasure is only your own.
But I am also on the outside, looking in (this wall of prose is blank to me, too). Words, streaming – whose? Whose life is being written? But it is no one’s life that matters, not now. Blackness behind your reflection in the window. Blackness: there, bottomless, you are no one at all.
Look back over the days, the weeks. Look through the categories. What have you traversed? What’s been broken through? But nothing’s been accomplished, not now, not once and for all. Again, and isn’t this the effort? To be here, and leaning into the future?
Again: whisper it: and behind your life, it is spread like a reflection on a night window, black and bottomless. The void that calls writing forward; the object cause it also is, divided in itself between the saying and the said.
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