I came home this lunchtime to check on the workmen chipping off the rendering and pointing the brick on the kitchen wall, and it was as though I was present where I should not be – wasn’t it the flat’s time, in half darkness, curtains closed against the day? Wasn’t it a chance for absence to drowse like a lazy cat in the afternoon?
I lay down for a while and read Richard Ford, and felt a wave of prose gather itself forward in me and thought: is this my voice, or someone else’s? And then: never mind. But I had to go back to work, and forgot what was gathering itself in me to be written. Didn’t I mean to entertain the idea that you can write only when you don’t want to write – that writing begins when you relinquish it, or the desire to write, when it begins to gather itself in you, looking for itself, asking that you be absent so that it can roll forward in your place?
With whose voice do you write? By what act of ventriloquism? And I remember the image of one surfacing after a long time immersed. Surfacing, and breathing – another word for writing, or for what breathes itself to life here. And then I was to wander allusively through the several days when there was no writing: I was to write of my Visitor, presenting her only in silhouette – what an art! – or in the manner of a shadow that fell across my days. A shadow? But what is the opposite of a shadow, an image in the shape of light, and how to write of light passing through the shadow of my life?
And now the image that awakens in me is of Crusoe waking on the shore of an island. Who wakes? Who speaks? Sometimes the dream of beginning over again – a desire to lose my memory, like the protagonist of The Man With No Past, who sleeps in a cargo crate. A desire for that silence in which a voice might gather itself. The echoing walls in an empty flat. But then I know it is a voice that desires itself in me. To come to itself, but from no one’s throat; to sound, but with no voice in particular.
Is there a way of letting writing echo? Perhaps, as Red Thread(s) says of Albaich’s poetry, it must be made of space and sparseness: ‘the white of the page sings through; the words and phrases seem to float.’ But with prose? With lines and lines of prose? How to write what echoes as one speaks in a empty room, a cargo crate? Unless the blog is itself that room. The blog – my life – across which light passes like a shadow.
Lars Iyer's Blog 