The inability to write – how to endure it? A writer faces eternity or the lack of it each day, says Hemmingway – but how to endure it, the lack of eternity? How to endure the withdrawal of writing? ‘I’m blocked’, says the writer, ‘I can’t write a line’. So he removes himself from writing; he reads awhile, he travels. Everything but the page, the white rectangle of the page. But eventually, he’ll have to face it again.
‘I was waiting for you’, it says. ‘I lay here, waiting’. White page, the distant sky: one and the same. The absence of writing, the absence of sense that is the sky: one and the same. The same sky that watches over famine and wealth; the same that passes across battles and feastdays. The same page that is indifferent to what is written upon it, be it good or bad. The page, white rectangle, that glows with its own kind of light, that seems to illuminate itself.
‘I can’t reach you. I can’t find you’. – ‘But I’m here before you, the page’. – ‘I’ve lost you. I’m looking for you’. – ‘But I’m here right in front of you: the page’. And I know for every page I’ve written, the page is waiting. And for every page I’ve read, there will be another that refuses reading, in which I’ve lived my reader’s life. The page waits; its whiteness invades every page; its waiting aches without significance on every page.
And when I’ve tried to write? I forgot it, that’s true. Perhaps you have to forget it in order to write. The page, the absence of sense – how can you know it except via the impossibility of writing? And I think this, in the end, is why writer’s block is propitious, why it joins you to what withholds itself in writing, and not only because you cannot rise to meet it, not only because your strength has failed.
‘Stop writing. Do not try to write’. – ‘But I want to find you. I want to write.’ – ‘But you will find me only by ceasing to write. By putting your pen down. Stop writing, stop trying, and I will come close to you. Stop, and the page, the double of the day, will burn beside you’. – ‘I can’t write’. – ‘But it’s only then, in your incapacity, that writing can come close to you’. – ‘I’m blocked, I can’t write’. – ‘But it is only thus that writing rises and wraps itself around you like the day’.
Lars Iyer's Blog 