Rise early each morning, prepare to write. Rise early, clear your desk and your thoughts, and begin, begin to write. But what when writing fails you? What when you cannot write a line, and the white page seems to press up against you? What when sense refuses you, and the measure of sense? But it is also writing that you meet, albeit without being able to write. It is also writing that burns beside you now, white fountain, the page within the page.
Isn’t it now that you can learn what writing is? Isn’t this the moment, the apocalypse, in which it is revealed disrobed? The page, the white page on which nothing can be written. The page without writing, and that allows no writing. What speaks, and by way of this absence? What, and by way of the absence of sense, of sense’s erosion, of writing cored out from within?
The whiteness is intolerable. The page’s white in white burns intolerably. Its indifference. Its withdrawal. A bank of snow on which you can make no impression. A pristine cloud-bank rising in the distance. You cannot mark it. Ink will not touch it.
Intolerable: have you gone snowblind? Sky-blind? What can you see except whiteness? What but the light that burned behind everything, and all along. For the page is also the sky. It is also light, light gone mad in itself, lost in itself. The page is the condition of meaning, of the opening of the world. And the going-mad of meaning, the opening that is also a closure, the too-much of bright light.
‘I can’t see’ – ‘But only now can you begin to see’. – ‘I can’t see a thing’. – ‘But only now do you see everything’. – ‘Why couldn’t I see it before?’- ‘You could see too much’. – ‘Why can I only see it now? – ‘Because you’ve given up on sight, or sight has given up on itself in you’.
To write, to make a mark: why is that impossible? A single line – why can’t you achieve that? Because writing is incapacity; writing the failure to write. It is the page-apocalypse, the pristine beginning upon which you can make no impression. And the return of that beginning, which is your non-beginning, your failure. And the billowing return of your non-beginning, the white sails that nonetheless bear writing forward.
‘I can’t begin’. – ‘But it is already beginning’. – ‘I can’t make a mark’. – ‘But writing has begun without you’.
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