‘Tell that story, then.’ – ‘What story?’ – ‘The story of stories, the story that tells itself in every story, and that untells those stories as it speaks. For isn’t every story told by language as it turns over in its sleep? Every story the dream of that sleeper who has never yet awoken, and can only come to itself by unravelling the stories we tell and the words we use?
‘Strange deity who is always asleep. Strange god asleep beneath the surface of the sea and the land, and who has us tell stories only to awaken a little in what we tell of our lives. To awaken – to open its eyes, but these are only the eyes of a sleeper.’
Curious that you can only approach the story crabwise, and never head on. That you have to feed it details, like a handful of grass to a horse, until it becomes nothing other than those details strung together. But sometimes you can sense it, a strange necessity that runs beneath what is told. That there is a story beneath all stories like those rivers that are said to run beneath Antarctic ice. Of what does it tell, and by way of details, plots and characters? Of what does it speak, even if it does so like a fleeting touch on your arm, or the silent pressure of that column of air that reaches right up through the atmosphere?
When I let my mind drift, mornings when I am not at work, it is of the same thing that I dream: to make a work, to break off a piece of me by writing and to let it become, broken, something indifferent to me, to my life. A work – a piece of my life narrated – that now stares upward, transfixed by another vision. To have been survived by what you’ve written: isn’t that enough? But only, in my dream, as the written has broken itself entirely from my life.
And when I was younger, wandering up the road as I never wander now, a dream which begins with a title – North, I think, was one of them – around which a book would crystallise. A book, fragments of narrative, around the title that seemed to bear with it a fatality. Could I write it? Would I be worthy of it? As I wandered, it seemed eminently possible. And my life would be drawn into the work that broke from it. A basket under a balloon sent wandering into the sky.
I never wander about now. Never through the streets with no particular purpose. Then writing could be left indeterminate; the work was only a fresh breeze blowing in from the future. Life hadn’t begun – was that it? There was a sense that it would begin elsewhere, around the corner. That what you had written had only to go halfway to reach it, and it would come. Life was elsewhere, and right here was the ‘not yet’ in which you could dream of anything.
A great deal has happened, that’s for sure, between then and now. Everything – a whole life. And now I tell myself you cannot write until you lived that – a whole life. That like the god reborn into the life of a human being in order to experience birth and death, you cannot write, you have no right to writing until at the end.
So many writers passed very close to death. As if going to death, or surviving it, with death close behind you, is to have reached the flat plains by the ocean that were once its bed. Plains like an open page ready to be touched by the lightest touch of writing. Brushed by a dying hand, or a hand close to dying. Written then, close to the end, which was pushed back – the miracle – so it was no longer the end.
Necessity, urgency: how to find that in your writing? How to let it lean back into what will drive it forward like fate? The second part of Blanchot’s Death Sentence: the miracle is in the movement from episode to episode. Why did that happen, and then that? No answer. Or the answer is only in the imperative to write of which the narrator speaks in the opening lines of the récit.
Another thought: what if it’s out of some kind of neglect that writing could begin? Sovereign neglect, as in Bataille, where it begins because making a book is the less important than anything … Wander again, but in writing and with no thought of a book. Go by going. Everything begins right here, right now …
Neglect and necessity, from one to the other. A law of writing you’ll have to fall back to find.
Lars Iyer's Blog 