Writing or Life?

Writing or life – but is it a choice? ‘When you eat, eat’: the old Zen proverb. Eat, live – and do not think about writing as you eat and live. But conversely, when you write, write – and what would that mean, to press writing more deeply into writing? to write as concentratedly as you would live?

But surely writing lives from your life – from what you can recount of your life. Surely writing is always parasitical, and to write is always also not to have lived, but to have saved something of life for writing. This is Greene’s famous claim about the writer having a sliver of ice for a heart: always watching for an experience to relate, for the beginnings of a plot. A coldness, a distance from life: how can this be avoided?

Another thought: isn’t it from a surfeit of life that one might write – the too much of the day, its great breadth and the many events happening everywhere? Write in order to die, says Kafka. Write because there is always too much to write. And what does death become? A shelter. Or writing becomes a shelter for death, for dying.

Whence Rilke’s Malte who cannot but die in the death-boat that was made for him. But his horror is that he’ll die like any other in the big city to which he has come. In modern life, he thinks, we have lost death – death has lost meaning. What then of the storyteller?, as Benjamin asks. Can there be stories when death is no longer part of life, of living? How can stories find their end when there is no real end to life – or death?

Writing or life? Writing the non-end of our living. Writing dying, anonymous death in our cities. Is it that life cannot, now be written? That a whole alibi for writing has vanished? Writing or life – and now writing becomes a desire for what is missing from life; it is life searching for life and via the left to right movement on the page.

But read down our pages and what will you find? A writing that has become strangely obsessed with itself. Writing that asks for life in order to be more than life. Not to provide our testament, the last will that our life, if it cannot be rounded off in death (the rituals that surround death) must be rounded off in writing.

For writing also testifies to itself – to that demand by which it draws the living to its own non-life. Upon what would it seize? For what is it looking? For its own icy heart. For the ice of its non-heart, writing lost within itself and wandering.