I lack any real discipline, I know that. I lack some faculty of application, the patience to proceed day by day on a greater work: to labour at anything where gratification is not immediate. It is enough to be able to write at all – to make a kind of mark, to sink another telegraph pole into the earth as it is attached, however tenuously to the one planted the day before.
Until a kind of continuity appears: the way behind me stitched together by what was written. A thread of writing drawn through the skin of my life. And if I were to pull it out now – to delete everything, what would have been lost? Very little, I think, for I barely remember what was written yesterday, or the day before. It seems to matter just that there was continuity, just breath enough to continue. Just to press the instrument to my lips.
Continuity – and perhaps this, in the end, why nothing should be deleted: for it is by the courage of a thousand beginnings (closer, I think, to a thousand and a half) that a beginning can be made. I’ve set an example to myself, I who lack discipline. I shown it is possible to breathe rather than gasp, that I can take in a lungful and exhale it again.
That is to say, I remember by what was written only that writing was possible. Remember that rhythm that seems to suspend the forward movement of my prose just as the cable sags between telegraph poles. A curious rhythm, that catches me just as a boat, moving into midstream, is seized by a current.
Yes, I think it is by that slackening that something here is done, by that small sag, by the lag of a cable that is never pulled taught. As though what is made here is only a series of folds into which I might crawl and sleep. Or as though writing fell asleep here, and this prose were like the turning of a cat in circles when it looks for a resting place.
To sleep in prose. Or rather, to fall asleep for a span of time. No more than a moment perhaps. No more than that, as time breaks its continuity. As it seems to spread out across the land, breaking from the river of my life like an ox-bow lake.
And perhaps writing is also that – a kind of gap in life, and what is written day by day an unstitching, a way of opening life wide, of exposing it – but to what? An ox-bow lake broken from a meander. A space – a wound – where there was only time. And that says: everything you’ve lived is accidental. Everything weighs the same. You concerns are as significant or insignificant as anything else.
I lack discipline, I know that. And what is written here is only a simulacrum of discipline; the way a life sways from its path and falls down like a drunkard. And that it does so regularly – daily – what is the significance of that? It reveals the necessity of the opposite of discipline – of that unalertness by which I fall asleep at my post, then wake, blinking, wondering what happened.
Lars Iyer's Blog 