Writer’s block – what is that? The retreat of writing, writing concentratedly held back in itself. How to reach it? How to draw upon the vanished strength to write? Writer’s block – but isn’t this a relation to writing, to writing itself?
You can’t face writing head on, I know that. Can’t demand writing to write, as if it were reposed in itself, waiting for a call. Writing is nothing in itself – there is nothing to writing, nothing that belongs to it; it has no subject of which to speak. But that is to say its substance is borrowed; the cloak of incident and character clothes nothing, hides nothing.
Writing can be nothing other than what is told. And yet it also other to that telling; it is what is borne in it, what suspends itself as the story rolls on. Perhaps it is the fact of a story, the surprise that it is. But what is it? Nothing other than the story. Writing itself: borrowed substance, garments clothing nothing.
On the page, writing by means of character, by means of incident, writing fails to come to itself. The approach, the non-approach: how to tell of telling itself? How to summon the failure to come? Writing is not here yet; and that is the story the tale untells. Writing cannot come close: and that is the untelling of the tale, its artifice, its imposture which, I think, allows something else to be heard.
Writing fails – is that it? But with reference to what? To what task? Nothing belongs to writing; its demand is hollow. Nothing belongs to it – but writing also hollows out writing; writing seeks also to core itself out, until, denucleated, there is nothing left but words (ringed around an absent centre). Nothing – and by way of a story that also tells of its unravelling.
Writing that is not – and never yet. Writing incapable of itself, of attaining itself, that is perpetually ‘to come’, but as what? bringing what? Its absence, its dissimulation, appearing in every other guise but its own. ‘I don’t recognise you. I can’t see you as you are’.
Writer’s block – what is it? The withdrawal of writing in writing; the telling that untells the tale. How to reach it? How to draw upon the ability to write? By drawing yourself into relation with the incapacity to write, to writing’s failure to attain itself. By passing by way of the ‘to come’ of writing, which can never arrive. ‘I’m looking for you’. – ‘You will not find me’. – ‘I want to come close to you’. – ‘But I am far away from you, in a past that has never happened, and a future that will not arrive’.
Lars Iyer's Blog 