Giving and Bearing

Blogs have archives, notes Jodi; they allow something like a self-management, a self-organisation. They save something – a path of thought, old interchanges – from the rush of events, from the news, which must always be new. And of course they are written from a particular perspective, to the extent one might speak of acts of witnessing rather than archives, acts in which testimony is borne (a beautiful expression).

Written stuff sticks, says Jodi -there’s a whole trail leading to where we are, like crumbs in the forest. And that is also part of who we are, the journey as becoming. Rather dreamily, hot-eared (a sign that I am tired), I wonder whether writing might also be a way of abandoning, of stuff discarded rather than sticking. Whether there’s a place that is not so much one one is trying to reach, but that trying itself, and that reaching. Utopia as nowhere, as the place of not-yet, as the eternal not-yet-in-place.

To affirm by writing – by the act of writing – that you are not quite yet. Witnessing it, bearing witness (another beautiful expression) in a writing that is never just a shedding of skin, as if the writer was born afresh with each act of writing (with each post), free from all fatality, but as writing is not only about keeping memory, but releasing it.

The writer giving then, but only as she is abandoned by what she has written, orphaned by it. Words are dead, the grammatical forms impersonal. Give them life by writing, but writing will also give you death. And what you write will never be enough, never be right, never coincide with what you wanted to say. Because words, too, want to speak, and grammatical forms thrash in the dark like the severed electricity cable that kills the boy in The Ice Storm.

What you want to give by writing abandons you. And Plato was wrong to suggest that what we want is immortality. It is also death we want, and to be lightened. Just as it is life – our lives – that is the desire of writing, as it arcs through our blogs to find itself by way of what we would write.

(Still, this is no political solution to the state Jodi diagnoses. And politics must be more than a retreat into the Garden of writing and a version of Stoic self-formation.)