Neglect

He wants to explain it to me, but how can he explain? How can he put it into words? There is something triumphally unimportant about writing, he says. It does not matter; it matters to no one, and not even to itself. It adds nothing to the world. It takes nothing. It's as if it were born only by accident, when someone wasn't watching. As if it were born by a kind of neglect, and lived on in neglect. As though it wandered like an amnesiac, without memory and without sense.

How to follow it, then? How to fall to its level? By not caring enough. By not wanting enough. By writing as one might casually brush away an insect.

It does not matter: that's the condition of writing. Neglect, absentmindedness: that's how it begins. Isn't the abandonment of ambition its condition? Or rather, of ambition abandoning you, like Isaac Luria's God, who created the world only as He fled it, and for whom the universe is only the space torn open by His escape.

To be abandoned, then – but not to yourself. To a kind of distracted solitude, like a child on the road, singing to itself. It doesn't matter. An abandoned notebook; a grafitti tag no one needs to understand.

Why write? To let writing abandon itself. Why? To let writing not matter. To write of nothing at all, nothing in particular, making no claim. To write as the most ordinary person would write, who drifts with others in a crowd.