Madeleine

Begin to write – really write – and you can’t stop. Begin – but to write what? Perhaps only to evoke the taste of madeleine on your tongue that first awoke your desire to write. But does that taste exist anymore outside the writing itself? Does it stand above writing in some vital way, as a mountain emerges rocky and snow-capped from the jungle?

The time before I wrote, you could say. The time before I disappeared into writing. Dim memory, but a memory now owed to writing; the mountain top the jungle has enclosed. Look back and you see a sea of words through which there runs a path of churning water – your story, the story you want to tell. But a story that is only a perturbation of the surface of the sea; a path of glistening light that will come to disappear. A path that you’re not sure is even a path, so transient is its appearance -light rocking on the waves.

Isn’t as if you’d written nothing before? As if, like Honda at the end of The Sea of Fertility, nothing that you remembered ever happened. A dry sea, a sea of dust on the surface of the moon – the story you told was nothing but that. And now it’s blowing away, one particle after another. Were you ever here? Did the events of which you wanted to write ever happen? The story wanted you; telling wanted you; but only to disturb the surface of language. Only to let a disturbance pass across the waves like a rumour

And then I think this kind of book comes after something, or before – that it is the dispersing of the path that a ship runs behind it in the water. The dispersal of literature, of everything that literature has been, of all ‘universal classics.’ In some way, writing has attained itself through literature. Has come to itself, but blindly and unknowing, forgetting everything and dispersing it all like the sower of Van Gogh’s great paintings.

All that was told will be untold, and the groove literature left in language will be smoothed over. Language will again be the shining sea across which no path passes. And now I think of Zarathustra’s last men, who have discovered happiness and blink. And of the way they reappear in Kojeve and Fukuyama: last men, capable of everything and of nothing in particular. Whose life is the life of termites and not human beings …

The deeds of the world are slowly disappearing. The suburbs will spread everywhere, and all writing henceforward will concern the ordinary, the everyday. There will be nothing of which to write but that. And language, meanwhile, will turn over like a sleeper. And all of literature will have been part of its dream. And everything we’ve done, likewise. And when it awakens, it will face us without a face and look at us with no eyes and speak in long words that will be our words unravelled.