Every morning, he wrote, the poet says; every morning he stopped writing. Or writing failed him, trailing off in a million ellipses. Once, he had thought that by writing, you saved something from death. Preserved it – this memory, that – so as to arrest the flow of time.
Wasn't that why he kept a journal as a teenager? He had a sense that childhood was falling away. Adulthood was here, and time was rushing forward. Write, then. Remember. Hold fast to what would fall away.
And now? He wrote to forget, to experience what he could of death. Ellipses trailing. For an hour, he had written; he was a writer. And now? He was the ghost of his morning's work, which had shut itself off from him. The doors clanged shut. He was an exile from what he had written, and from himself as a writer.
Would he ever write again? He'd forgotten how. Forgotten, and each morning, would have to remember anew, find his way to writing anew. Make his mark. Mark it, and then fall away from marking. And now the pages he had written were like the Marie Celeste which everyone had deserted. It was writing that gave him life, and now it was writing that took it from him.
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For the Hindu, the soul, after death, needs to be fed and looked after. It's search for the doorway to heaven depends on its deeds in life. And in the meantime? It searches, it is dreadfully vulnerable. Pity too his writing, the beginning he made each morning by writing, the poet says, which barely set out on its journey before it dispersed again.
Strange gathering that is the beginning of dispersal. Strange work that unworks itself, leaving nothing but the attempt to come to itself anew. To begin, to make a beginning, and then to lose hold of the beginning, and fall back into nothingness.
Nothingness: that's what divides the paragraphs of Solar Journal, the poet says. Life is not lived elsewhere, only here. Life comes to itself only here, on the page. Writing marks the return of life, hope, to themselves, and then their imminent dispersal. That will have been your life, those paragraphs by which you marked your days like a prisoner. That was it, those lines and crossbars, where weeks pass, years pass, but nothing passes.
But then he knew, too, that it was by those same marks – those lines, those crossbars – in which the passage of time failed to mark itself, that there was also a passage of sorts. It was enough to date the paragraphs – to mark the passing from one day to another. Here I am, each mark says, each dated paragraph. There I was, he could murmur to himself as he scrolled down the document, there I was, that day and the day before that …
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