Category: Blogging

Sebald, from an interview:

I do believe that in the eighteenth century, say, Voltaire or Rousseau wrote much more naturally than people did from the nineteenth century onwards. Flaubert sensed this more than any other writer. If you look at Rousseau's letters, for instance, they're beautifully written. He dashed off twenty-three in a day if necessary, and they're all balanced, they're all beautiful prose. Flaubert's letters are already quite haphazard; they're no longer literary in that sense. He swears, he makes exclamations, sometimes they're very funny. But he was one of the first to realise that there was appearing in front of him some form of impasse. And I think nowadays it's getting increasingly difficult because writing is no longer a natural thing for us.

No longer natural – why do I think this is what allows us to get closer to writing? Closer: because writing is not natural and was never simply an extension of life. Write the words 'it is night' on a piece of paper one evening and by the next morning it is no longer true. Nothing I write here has anything to do with my life. Tyranny of the personal, of the authentic voice. No voice is close to you. Find another voice, an impersonal one. Let it discover itself in you, writing looking for itself through you and finding – only writing, only more occasions for writing.

Unnatural writing – the dream that blogging might permit this as it might interrupt the great circulation of information. There's too much communication. Or only a personal communication according to the general standard of what passes for life, our lives in this time. A new austerity. Speech that withholds itself in speaking. Terseness that guards a gap in speech. Here, I think immediately of This Space, the only 'literary blog' (ridiculous expression) that is necessary.

From an interviewer's discussion with Sebald:

The wandering that the prose does, both syntactically and in terms of subjects, reminds me a bit of my favourite of the english essayists, de Quincey: the need, in a sense, to almost sleepwalk, somnambulate from one centre of attention to another, and a feeling in the reader that one has hallucinated the connection between the parts.

Reading this, I think immediately of one of my favourite blogs, the mysterious Red Thread(s), and in particular a post like this one.

(Blog virtues: anonymity, fragmentary speech, a writing that reflects on the gesture of writing and marks it in writing (its voice does not come from nowhere, but nor is it personal either. Avoidance of the cute. Discretion. An interruption of writing (by way of writing) rather than more prose. A subtractive prose.))

Where do I end this rambling post, with its darkness and light, chapels and death, friendships and incommunicability; the general strangeness of things, attempts at speech, of being present?

Almost any post at This Space is, for me, like a drink of cool water. With almost any new post, my hope returns of a writing specific to this new genre of blogging – fragmentary, near anonymous (names might be given, but not the clue that would allow us to situate the named), sometimes occasional (a post prompted by a contingent event, to be sure, but that engages some measure of necessity thereby. Necessity: the law this new kind of writing near-anonymous and fragmentary might discover), or sometimes more direct, speaking only of a desire to write, or that to write is to somehow to fall short of writing; that there is a Writing beyond writing; that writing lives only as the hope of that other Writing which is also the hope of another Life.

Tsvetayeva, the great letter writer, from her correspondence with Pasternak:

I do not like meetings in real life. Foreheads knocking together. Two walls. You just cannot penetrate. A meeting should be an arch. Then the meeting is above. Foreheads tilted back!

I have been delighted to meet many bloggers. But a meeting in writing – I think it is what I always dreamed of. A meeting of writing, and of styles, remembering what Barthes wrote:

Thus under the name of style a self-sufficient language is evolved which has its roots only in the depths of the author’s personal and secret mythology, that subnature of expression where the first coition of words and things take place, where once and for all the great verbal themes of his existence come to be installed.

An investigation of style … wasn’t that what I replied when I was asked what my contribution was to be, were I to look back on everything I had written  (not here, but elsewhere)? A stupid answer. An embarassing one. But nevertheless, the word style is enough to move me tremendously. Style … and a meeting of styles – to cite another across blogs, obviously or secretly … yes, the meeting is, as Tsvetayeva said, above …

Blogs have archives, notes Jodi; they allow something like a self-management, a self-organisation. They save something – a path of thought, old interchanges – from the rush of events, from the news, which must always be new. And of course they are written from a particular perspective, to the extent one might speak of acts of witnessing rather than archives, acts in which testimony is borne (a beautiful expression).

Written stuff sticks, says Jodi -there’s a whole trail leading to where we are, like crumbs in the forest. And that is also part of who we are, the journey as becoming. Rather dreamily, hot-eared (a sign that I am tired), I wonder whether writing might also be a way of abandoning, of stuff discarded rather than sticking. Whether there’s a place that is not so much one one is trying to reach, but that trying itself, and that reaching. Utopia as nowhere, as the place of not-yet, as the eternal not-yet-in-place.

To affirm by writing – by the act of writing – that you are not quite yet. Witnessing it, bearing witness (another beautiful expression) in a writing that is never just a shedding of skin, as if the writer was born afresh with each act of writing (with each post), free from all fatality, but as writing is not only about keeping memory, but releasing it.

The writer giving then, but only as she is abandoned by what she has written, orphaned by it. Words are dead, the grammatical forms impersonal. Give them life by writing, but writing will also give you death. And what you write will never be enough, never be right, never coincide with what you wanted to say. Because words, too, want to speak, and grammatical forms thrash in the dark like the severed electricity cable that kills the boy in The Ice Storm.

What you want to give by writing abandons you. And Plato was wrong to suggest that what we want is immortality. It is also death we want, and to be lightened. Just as it is life – our lives – that is the desire of writing, as it arcs through our blogs to find itself by way of what we would write.

(Still, this is no political solution to the state Jodi diagnoses. And politics must be more than a retreat into the Garden of writing and a version of Stoic self-formation.)

The beginning of the month: nothing to write; begin again. But begin from what? Write about the yard. Write about the flat. Write about W. But only that the beginning will catch, and post give unto post continuously each morning, as day follows day. It is like the secret engine – time – that turns the finished day into a new one. The work of time: the page of the sky as it grows dark. And on the new page, it begins again, darkness becoming light. Why did our ancestors pray that the sun rise each morning? Not because they believed it would not, but because it rose.

The end of a month, or nearly. Admit it: the blog is measured in months, or that each month is something like a life, beginning tentatively, exploring a new, wide territory, before rising prolifically to the plateau at the middle – the stretch of days that opens as to the wanderer in Peter Handke’s stories. But then, later on, the waste of days – diffuse anguish at the edge of the sea. Was it all for this? And what end has been reached, the soft green waves lapping at your feet?

I came home this lunchtime to check on the workmen chipping off the rendering and pointing the brick on the kitchen wall, and it was as though I was present where I should not be – wasn’t it the flat’s time, in half darkness, curtains closed against the day? Wasn’t it a chance for absence to drowse like a lazy cat in the afternoon?

I lay down for a while and read Richard Ford, and felt a wave of prose gather itself forward in me and thought: is this my voice, or someone else’s? And then: never mind. But I had to go back to work, and forgot what was gathering itself in me to be written. Didn’t I mean to entertain the idea that you can write only when you don’t want to write – that writing begins when you relinquish it, or the desire to write, when it begins to gather itself in you, looking for itself, asking that you be absent so that it can roll forward in your place?

With whose voice do you write? By what act of ventriloquism? And I remember the image of one surfacing after a long time immersed. Surfacing, and breathing – another word for writing, or for what breathes itself to life here. And then I was to wander allusively through the several days when there was no writing: I was to write of my Visitor, presenting her only in silhouette – what an art! – or in the manner of a shadow that fell across my days. A shadow? But what is the opposite of a shadow, an image in the shape of light, and how to write of light passing through the shadow of my life?

And now the image that awakens in me is of Crusoe waking on the shore of an island. Who wakes? Who speaks? Sometimes the dream of beginning over again – a desire to lose my memory, like the protagonist of The Man With No Past, who sleeps in a cargo crate. A desire for that silence in which a voice might gather itself. The echoing walls in an empty flat. But then I know it is a voice that desires itself in me. To come to itself, but from no one’s throat; to sound, but with no voice in particular.

Is there a way of letting writing echo? Perhaps, as Red Thread(s) says of Albaich’s poetry, it must be made of space and sparseness: ‘the white of the page sings through; the words and phrases seem to float.’ But with prose? With lines and lines of prose? How to write what echoes as one speaks in a empty room, a cargo crate? Unless the blog is itself that room. The blog – my life – across which light passes like a shadow.

Does the blogosphere have an unconscious?, asks Blah-Feme, and wonders whether there is a performative contradiction in right-wing blogging: don’t the practices of citing, pointing, referencing and quoting overturn a simple, unilateral notion of agency? Don’t they enact a kind of refusal of the reduction and simplification of the social field?

But I suppose a libertarian right would say this is what various kinds of deregulation have allowed – trade moves more freely; supply and demand are always entering into new dances: there’s more to buy and more to sell, and the new world is a glittering ball room across which we all spin, enraptured.

But this same world depends upon the near invisible mediation of money, which to forget itself, and the measure it provides, as it translates itself so quickly into the acqusition of goods and services. Never, we tell ourselves, do we desire money for its own sake, but only for that to which it would provide access.

But money desires its own increase in our stead: doesn’t our economy depend on those who seek only a return on their investment, one which, now, outstrips what any of us could possibly pay? How many earths would be needed to pay back all debts? Our own earth is wagered, and our lives are pledged by capitalism all the way to death.

Meanwhile, money desires its increase and the whole world writhes like a Chinese dragon. Is it all we have in common: money, and the pledge unto death? Has the general equivalent cleared the ground in advance whereupon we might live in common? Bloggers depend upon another general equivalent: to write is likewise a mortgage; language needs death, if this is allowed to name the way words can function in the absence of their referent.

But isn’t there, too, a kind of writing that looks for what is lost (Lacan: for what precedes castration)? Looks for it, and only as it seeks to wager abstraction, to look for life in the midst of death in the singularity, the specificity of a voice? It matters, certainly, what is said, but there is also the ‘how’ of that saying, the voice that does not efface itself as it mediates what there is to be said.

A thickened voice, a voice congealed: there is a kind of equivalent, I think, that is no longer general. Voice alongside voice, one archipelago of posts alongside another – isn’t this a collective of movements to the singular, of the search for an idiom? An endless search, it is true, and a blog does not need to have one voice, but many.

‘Develop your own legitimate strangeness’: and this may mean the absence of a comment facility, or those long silences in which the idiom regathers itself in the darkness, ready to break forward again. But of course this is not enough. Let a million voices rise: but this, still, is nothing, when it is the same earth that is being wagered.

Then this kind of writing, blogging (mine, perhaps, despite Joseph’s generous remarks), can only be a hobby. The search for the singular, for the idiom sacrifices the philosophical task of shaping concepts like weapons. And it threatens the conventionally political task, too, of redressing injustices, of remembering the earth. Doesn’t the collective risk falling apart into voices narcissistically concerned with themselves – not, now, as they are measured by the ego, by the petty reporting of a life, but as they vanish into themselves, searching for the ‘itself’ that summons a certain kind of writing?

Writing looks into itself, fascinated. Writing flees into itself, all the way to its own voice: but this is not philosophy, nor politics, and if it seems political, this is a measure, perhaps, of how far our sense of this word has fallen. How to defend it, then, this kind of practice, if practice it is, and not its suspension? Is it more than a kind of new-agism, a private pleasure, a retreat from the buying and selling of the world? I think there is a great difference between a collective philosophical, political practice and a sphere of private bloggers.

Perhaps the end of blogging is nothing to fear. This new medium will appear old in turn. How strange the resurgence of writing in the text message, the writerly blogosphere and the way Google is programmed to search! But this is a phase and it is passing. No, the creative writing class will never disappear – and perhaps there are more of them now, and more ‘literary ambition’ than ever before. But isn’t life-writing a great distraction, a fleeing from the world into the hobby-shed?

Perhaps that is nothing of which any of us should be ashamed, especially if it pushes towards the proto-philosophical or the proto-political. The availability of theoretical blogs, and of those that attempt to think and enact a kind of politics is still impressive. But then, as Jodi says, the former depends on a slower kind of work, a different temporality. 

I think it’s another way to write, only permitted in our new medium, that can make an essay not a series of assertions, but a bundle of questions barely held together, like a raft afloat. The Japanese, I read, speak by indirection – or perhaps they’d call us, if they had our words, too direct, too quick to come to disagreement (or, perhaps, agreement: for isn’t it unbearable to be thought to agree?).

I have wondered whether they might not be nuptial arts, comparable to martial ones: arts of gentleness, but then remembered Mishima’s impatience with what he thought was the feminisation of Japanese culture: didn’t he work on his laugh to deepen it, just as he transformed his own body to give it the muscle and girth of his imagined St. Anthony?

But Mars is not strong in my birthchart, and nor do I seek to make up for its lack; once again, unlike Sinthome, I have a marked dislike of discussion, being suspicious always of what I take to be its frame. Insinuation, quieter movement, and in the end, a writing that does not seek to deal blows or to parry them, but that lets continue the movement of others, though in another way, because it is itself only motion, like a river into which tributaries pour. Only I imagine this river running backward, and the distributaries that join it are like a river’s delta. How can a river leap back to its origin?

To be touched – and sometimes touch, according to a choreography that our writing knows, I think, and before we know ourselves. There are spheres, of course, in which such an approach is unwelcome, and sometimes it is necessary for bloggers to relaunch, to begin again, because, as I would put it, their voice has become too harsh.

A nuptial art instead, then – but is this only an evasion, and an art of evasion? isn’t it necessary, sometimes, to write in your own name, to take responsibility? One response, which K-Punk makes, is to show how a nom de plume can have as much consistency as a real one, but isn’t there another? How to bear no name in particular?

In Japan (my imaginary Japan), it was possible, I read to take different names as would accrue to you as you crossed different thresholds in your life. As a child, one name, as a worker, another, and in my retirement, another still. Perhaps this was never true. But couldn’t you bear more than one name at a given time, or, perhaps, to bear a name and also the other of all names?

Spurious is the name of a blog, and Lars is its author: that is true. But mightn’t the former name that origin from which the latter can never quite be born? I think anonymity is too crude a name for what is needed. Pessoa divided himself into heteronyms, as I imagine a flock of birds might come apart in five directions in the air. Five new flocks, each different (was it five names under which he published? more?), and held apart in different ways. And there is Kierkegaard, whose case is yet more complex …

Spurious, adjective. 1. Not genuine, authentic, or true; not from the claimed, pretended or proper source; counterfeit. 2. Of illegitimate birth; bastard. Synonyms: false, sham, mock, feigned, phony. Antonyms: genuine.

I find it easy to know people when there is some gap of space or time that calls for writing. In this age of email, I am still disturbed by the near simultaneity of communication it permits – but not as disturbed as when the phone rings, and I find myself having to lend presence to what I would say by my voice. But perhaps that voice, too, speaks in its another way, and, it also lets time pass, and spaces open, such that it does not merely communicate across a distance, but lets distance speak.

As with the mellifluous, searching voice of the narrator who speaks to his mother in Mirror – what sweetness!: it, too is present, even as it is set back away from what I would want to say. And do not forget that scene in Lost Highway, where the Mystery Man speaks – laughs – both in person and then acousmatically on the phone. Let speech say itself again, and speak its condition. Let writing write all the way back to the origin.

I think there is an etiquette for writing of this kind, although I’m not sure what it might be. Some know it, I think, and others do not; or perhaps this only my fantasy, and I am drawn to those who, in some way, resemble me. Who are the blunderers, I ask myself, that find it easy to speak, and write? – and then I laugh at my intolerance, knowing it to be without significance.

Perhaps it is our fantasies which individuate us, and which allow us to find others, with similar fantasies, who are like us. I feel as though at the foot of some great, ruined edifice – that I’ve come too late, and something good and great has been lost. But then I know, too, that I could only come now, when it was ruined, and there is something of me that is a wrecker, and that in some way its ruination is my fault.

How, in my weakness, could I have broken the tower? But there are many like me, shameless wreckers, who ape a language they have not earned, and speak by way of what they caused to fragment. But this, too, is a fantasy: there was nothing safe, no monument, and the time in which there were men and women of taste is itself a fantasy.

It is as if a secret has been revealed: that my shame has revealed the shame of a great imposture, and that what was great was never so, and the booming voice of culture is revealed as the wizard behind the curtain. Not genuine, not authentic, not true; of illegitimate birth, or born too late; with what name dare I speak, who speak for all the shameless? Even Beckett, even Bernhard rested in what did not seem to them to be the wreckage of Old Europe. Schubert and Brahms: the sweet, great legacy of nineteenth century Germany. And in what do we rest? Who speaks?

Dream of an etiquette that allows distance to speak. An intimacy that passes by way of distance, letting those solitudes it links be what each of them also is: Aristotle’s god? his beast? Or the one who has not yet settled into a name, or one in whom the nameless looks to lose itself. I think it is the origin that speaks with us, trailing from our sentences. And the origin that summons speech, that it may be wrecked somewhere between us, so that it speaks, also, of what fails to speak, and lets non-speech continue in what is spoken, in what is written.

Perhaps a blog turns great sails to catch this wind, and to move with it. Or it is the like the chime whose noise gives body to the passing wind. The ancients thought the great movement of the sky found its correlate in practices on earth; as the bowl of heaven turned, so it gave momentum to what turned down here; the macrocosm reached the microcosm; all were united.

I think the ruined tower of my fantasy is the shattering of what unifies, and that behind the sky of stars, there is another sky, which opens beyond sidereal space. Let us speak according to this block, this break. Speak as it is neglect that passes through us like photons from blown out stars.

How should a post begin? What should it contain? I think there should be rules as with haiku for this strange new genre. That you should write of the season, and the time of day, and perhaps of what lies around you. Ordinary items, extraordinary ones … anything that catches the attention, even if it does so as it seems to come forward only when you let your gaze wander over what is usually taken for granted. Perhaps the ordinary and the extraordinary change places thereby.

I think it should be a rule to write of the ordinary, of the most ordinary. I took a bottle of wine – a Rioja – to the kitchen just now to open, anticipating of the sound wine makes as it is poured, and the glass from whose thin lip I would drink it. But I couldn’t find the opener and took it as a sign: hadn’t I decided, a few weeks ago, not to drink alone?

For my cheeks would grow hotter, I knew, from drinking, and the lightheadedness to come would desert me again, on the other side of that ripple that passed through the darkness of my evening. And isn’t it more difficult to sleep, when you have drunk? I find myself awake at three o’clock, or two, my mouth parched and know then there’s no point attempting to sleep.

I think it is different when you sleep with another, or at least that’s what I remember. (And now a post has seemed to spin itself, accruing by those details with which it began those associations that let it gather itself forward, as though it were a body of contained water, spilling over its brink.) There is at least another not to disturb, which I would do if I rose and came in here to work. And I would know the strangeness of rising as early as a monk, and of that solitary life I lived before.

Every day, with such a companion, takes place after what the song calls the day before you came. After – and isn’t that unimaginable, those nights, alone, when I rise very early, or late, for morning is not even close, to try to distract myself from sleeplessness? Afterwards, like another country spreading before me, another life beyond the plateau across I’m stumbling. But as I stumble, I can still give myself the excuse that my life has never quite begun, that there’s still time – but for what?

Time for what? Not to write, and finish a book, but never to begin one. Time never to begin, and to know what it is not to begin: the expanse of time in which no work is possible. Once, when I was young, I think I thought I might fill that expanse: that if I gave myself time enough, then anything was possible. What did I find that others have not found? Neither talent, nor aptitude; but I didn’t shrug my shoulders; I was never resigned enough to let go.

Somehow, the message never arrived, as though it had a dinosaur’s long body to travel so that the brain could move the tail. Or that it had lost itself somewhere, congealing and thickening in a secret recess, and merging with that through which it should have passed. I imagine an octopus’s ink in water, but which changes the substance of the liquid instead of staining it black. A medium, now, that is not so: the glass that will not let light pass, but that traps it instead.

And now I think of a prism that keeps light instead of separating it into seven strands, or of Duchamp’s Large Glass that traps light, rather than merely slowing it. In some theologies, there is a darkness that shines, and I think it is there God lives: his absence is bright; although his presence is the opposite of all the ordinary things we keep about us. Or God is there as they become extraordinary, or is it just that darkness that conceals itself in what we think we can see? But then, too, the condition of light hides from itself in our own seeing, and that there’s another seer altogether, with eyes all pupil, or with a white pupil like the cataract of an eye.

These are ways, at least, of letting speak this silence within sense. In Japanese, I read, there is an onomatopoeic sound for silence: sin, pronounced as sheeen, and the sound trailing off. ‘Like "whoosh" is the sound of a sword cutting through the air … "sin" is the "sound" afterward, when all is done … and only the silence remains’. Shouldn’t it be a rule that the post lets speak that silence – that it lets it trail behind like a comet’s tail?

(And now the thread of the post is lost, or it has frayed and parted. Not for nothing did Breton call for vigilance in automatic writing …)

Open on my desk, a volume of the literary prose of Basho, in whose introduction I find annotated marks, drawn in faint pencil. I bought it in Oxford, earlier this year, in Blackwells, and then read it by myself when I took the room for an extra night (grace: I was never charged).

‘… Basho was deeply imbued with a sense of the passage of time and the impermanence of all things, he wrote often of the continuity of the past into the present’. This after a brief rumination on Basho’s journeys, in which, in his notebooks, the poet would refer to utamakura, places that had been made famous in literary tradition. And now some lines of Basho that have something of the quality of Debord’s Panegyric:

Of places made famous in the poetry since long ago, many are still handed down to us in verse. But mountains crumble, rivers change course, roadways are altered, stones are buried in the earth, trees grow old and are replaced by saplings: time goes by and the world shifts, and the traces of the past are unstable. Yet now before this monument, which certainly has stood a thousand years, I could see into the hearts of the ancients. Here is one virtue of the pilgrimage, one joy of being alive. I forgot the aches of the journey, and was left only with tears.

I tell myself – and this is another rule – that a post should also have something of that sense of impermanence, and joy, and perhaps tears. Impermanence: for what has to be written must be rewritten, and each day anew, for a blog moves forward in time. Joy: because resignation is not complete; and tears because it should be.

(A broken backed post, that lost its way. I put it up anyway – and isn’t that another rule: to neglect writing into existence?)

Of course, you can set to publish posts on past days, too, which I often do, making a secret archive only visible when I scroll back from month to month. But then I never do that, seeing them by chance only when, for example, through curiosity I look at the blog through a feed. It is the knowledge they are there, that the architecture of the blog conceals another, and there are fossil-posts intercalated among the others, which sometimes have only a secret meaning, and one that I, too, have forgotten.

To whom are these signs sent? To no one, and not even myself. But also to everyone, potentially, insofar as they are published. Can you alter the past? Perhaps to send posts backwards in time, or at least to withhold them from publication until a month is up, and they’ll no longer appear on the front page, is to open the past wider than it was: to prop a stick vertically in a crocodile’s mouth to hold it open.

Now the past will not shut tight; there will be a few secrets left; somewhere, in the darkness, there might be posts that bear no meaning in particular, meant for no one, not even me. Dropped idly into the past, or left to open there like night flowers that bloom away from everyone’s gaze.

Then, too, I wonder whether it is an architecture they open, or rather the fissures in what accretes here like the coral reef. Post lies down on post – but what of the cracks that pass through them all? What of the fissures that attest to the lines along which it is ruined, rather than the structure itself? A counter-architecture then: a way for what is built to be unbuilt, the unmaking of the made.

But what is this to say? That what is made here unmakes itself in secret? Or that there might be a way of erasing writing as it is written, so that only its edge remains, like the tip of a sparkler in darkness, and the circles made as you turn it in loops, that fade quickly from the night. Then it is the night itself that speaks – the darkness set back from the momentary figures drawn by writing.

The night as the past – is that it? Not the beginning, but what never begins in beginning – the same that returns and as the decay of what is written, its fate. I think that’s it: the secret law of writing, the blackness it vanishes against and that it lets speak in its exhaustion.

Fate: then it is the inexorable that writes. The past is that, and inextinguishable; I will not find its end. And, as I search – or as it searches for itself in writing, looks to return to itself in that loop that joins past to future – it is the future that opens, but now pushed beyond itself, beyond anything that might happen.

And I know it in the future, as in the past: the return of what comes by way of writing in order to return there, to itself, and in repetition. To say nothing other than itself, but, in so doing, letting the sparkler’s tip of writing speak, making loops against the darkness.

I believe in this intensely. I think I discovered it here, and by this writing – or at least discovered what I had written elsewhere, and in another key. But there (elsewhere) it was written about and here it is done, and wasn’t that the aim?

‘I have a project’: Jodi reminds me of the journal Kierkegaard has Quidam write, that is set in different strata of the past: one set of entries from one year ago, and another from a month: might one not conceive of a set of posts that might only be published years from now, and when everyone is dead?

In my fantasy, they outlive us all, and lie down like gems in the strata of dirt that will form over our cities. And then, too, in my fantasy, my life is only that tip of fire in the dark, looping even as writing’s hand holds the sparkler.

Somewhere else, I would like to rest like starlight reflected upon ice, flashing back up at the sky. Or like light on water, opening a million eyes into the night. Writing is also a kind of prayer – not for you, the writer, but for itself, its own survival. A Jew cannot destroy a piece of paper on which is written the name of God. And can you erase the prayer that might always be found in the world wide web?

Speak, and wait for those who descend like frogmen to probe the mysteries of the deep. Perhaps they will never come. But what does it matter? Writing is patient. I find that very beautiful. Patient, and waiting with indifference. Hidden too deeply for even wood s lot to find.

Am I guilty? not guilty? Quidam’s question. And of what does Bataille accuse himself when he names his notes Guilty? Amazed that anyone publishes except on the net. Haven’t I found myself defending blogging (not my own practice, but that of others) in the last few weeks?

Enough. Time to keep quiet for those who can’t see it. But how to publish beneath net and web? How to escape the net’s trawl and the web’s stickness, and to let fall, as into the deepest ocean, what is here written? I admit I will not change address and lose those who link to me as by strands of silk. We are together somehow, and falling. ‘Angel, angel, down we go together.’

Ah, but that is my fantasy as I yawn and let my back arch like a bow. Isn’t this writing as easy as the rise and fall of my chest by breathing? Ease: the word gives me an image of shoal of fish quickly passing. Follow them; follow writing – but how to let writing draw me to itself? How to find the current that makes it easy?

Push out your skiff into the river; drift. ‘Go by going’, as Lispector says. And then may a current seize you, even as it only tries to return to itself, and to what never began. But the origin is rising like a kraken, like Erebus at the bottom of the waters. I think it is the past that is rising, or the future, and what does not fail to come like fate.

Drop your posts into the past, then. Cast them from your hand into the water, and watch them glow as they fall, and then disappear. Faith: more is written than appears. Faith: that the most buried writing waits for readers, and the mouth of the blog will open one day like a crocodile’s, and you will see them glowing there.

One blog feels another appearing in its outstretched filaments – by the record of its stats and referrers, say, which record incoming links, or from trackbacks. A new blog: and it can be opened up, in another window: is it brand new, or only new to you who have found it, such that you cannot really call yourself a discoverer?

Happiness at the thought that alongside your corner of the blogosphere that there are other corners, whole forests of blogs and links. Happiness that you have stumbled into it as by turning the handle of a secret door, or is it that a door has opened into your own corner, and the blogs you keep around you?

Sometimes, you forget them almost as soon as you open them up. Read, scroll down, and then look through the archives: another life, another path of writing, now alongside yours. How often do they update? Is it a living blog, or a dead one? Dead ones can have their charm, and how sad when an old, dead blog disappears.

Where did they go, The Young Hegelian and No Cause For Concern? Many times I went back to wander through their corridors. But Invisible Adjunct is still there, one of the first blogs I read frequently. And will mine, too, disappear one day? No matter, when there are new blogs proliferating.

Perhaps it will crash down like a telegraph pole, carrying incoming links like cables down with it. But that, I think, is too violent an image. Now I see the links snapping like web filaments delicately breaking. Broken links wave like filaments in the air. Who notices they are broken? Who follows them? No one.

No one: and isn’t that beautiful? To disappear, drawing oneself from the corner: isn’t that what you want? In some way, I am the opposite of Sinthome, with what he tells us of his narcissism. I think by this blog I want to prepare a kind of sacrifice, but one no one will notice as it burns. 

To be anyone at all: what kind of fantasy is that? No self-analysis here, however it might appear. A kind of drifting, just that. Don’t wake me up, that’s what I’m telling you. I don’t want to wake up, not here; I am too awake in the world. And isn’t that it: that one who has to speak too much, and with too much reason sets speech loose here instead?

Speech set loose – but now without forethought, without preparation, unless a whole life lived was preparation, unless all the books I’ve read weren’t preparation enough. But for what? To fall asleep and write asleep, just that. To write asleep and as the voiceovers sound in Godard films; in In Praise of Love: ‘I have a project‘.

Scarcely a project, scarcely that. Unless the film follows the way a project wanders, lost from itself. A wandering speech, a speech lost but which, for that matter, does not want to wake up. Or, perhaps – and this is how it will end, though it will never end – I will wake into another life, not mine, just as though I were a god who lived my life as an avatar.

In my foolishness, I search for old posts I wrote that seem important to me. Disappointment follows – but doesn’t that mean I’ve made progress? To wander back through the archives is to see the prose lose its life: does that mean, then, that today’s prose is more alive? But even this prose, the freshest, I find repugnant, and sometimes I make great plans for weeding out most of what has been done.

But I am writing too much. Or rather, awakening is rising up through my writing, like a creature coming up for air. And now writing is drawn towards the surface where it must stop so that I, awakened, can take real breaths. Ah, but won’t I miss it almost as soon? Won’t I carry something of my sleep with me, dragging behind me like a robe?

Like a sleepy child, I love what I’ve lost. Can’t I close my eyes again? If only to know the one who falls in me before he rises. What’s his name? What kind of beast is he, who knows nothing but to fall? Sometimes I imagine that all blogs are falling together, but linked together, like skydivers holding hands.

But isn’t there a way in which we rise, too, each of us? Do not each of us, in their own way, come up for air? But then, too, we are each that child who rubs sleep from its eyes, wanting to go back to bed. And isn’t there something in us still falling, still asleep in waking?

Perhaps this image is too idyllic. Or I should add others, which I discovered only through my own wandering. That it is not from sleep we would awake but from the terror that inhabits sleep – a stirring presence like the Biblical Leviathan that, for a time, calls you from the heart of what you write. That there is an awakening within sleep, a kind of secret vigilance that keeps watch while you do not.

And isn’t it from this beast you flee in wanting to find your way back from the world, and that it is fear you can see in your own eyes, as if your pupils’ blackness was borrowed from his own? And then you’ll see more than you can see, and know your sight reveals itself in a kind of blindness, and that, at that moment, another writes where you cannot, but like an idiot, he can form no letters.

But this image is too grand, too dark, and I think once again of anonymity and neglect. Because there is something triumphally unimportant about writing: it does not matter; it matters to no one, I tell myself, and not even to itself. As if it was born only by neglecting itself and lived through this neglect. As though it wandered without memory and without sense.

How to follow it, then? How to fall, there, 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: say that. I’ve failed: say that, for isn’t the abandonment of ambition its condition? Or rather, of ambition abandoning you, like Isaac Luria’s God, who created the world as he fled it, and for whom the universe is only the fabric torn open in his escape.

To be abandoned, then, but not to yourself. To a kind of distracted solitude, like a child doodling to pass the time. It doesn’t matter. An abandoned notebook; a graffiti tag no one needs to understand. Why write? To let writing abandon itself. Why? To let writing not matter: and isn’t this what remains of a project at this blog?

A project: but what throws itself forward? After what am I thrown? The attempt to abandon writing by giving it to itself. And then to offer my life, the substance of my life, as the pyre that must burn so it can come into flame. But that, again, is too much. To write of nothing at all, nothing in particular, making no claim. To write as I imagine anyone might write, as though I joined them, anyone, everyone, as they pass along the street like the commuters I used to see in London.

Let nothing distract you but distraction, I tell myself. Write like a god, or a child, I tell myself. There is nothing to begin, and nothing important to say; write like one who has no belief in anything, like the most ordinary person of all, drifting with the others in a crowd. But one so ordinary, I tell myself, he’s a cousin of Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith, but one who does not leap as he walks, but falls – who walks only by falling forward, stumbling, and who speaks in a stammer, like Moses.

You see, I am not eloquent; or what appears to be eloquence and writely style is only borrowed, and I’m not sure from where. If I read back, which I do rarely, I notice that I do not follow the rules of grammar: there are phrases of which I am unsure, but I set them down anyway.

Beyond Moses, who stammers, isn’t there one whose speech is borrowed, entirely borrowed, and isn’t he more admirable than that? Whose speech clothes nothing, no thought, and is itself a garment sewn together from others. And who is he, the imitator?

‘I have a project’. My speech is not my own; I find that a wonderful admission. What I write is not mine; that, too. To write as I roll over in my sleep. Or as in those rare nights where I forget what happened because I drank too much. Or when, in imagination, I meet one I know on the street who does not know me. ‘But I know you, don’t you remember?’ – ‘I’ve no idea who you are.’

Too often I write to say nothing at all, or only: I am here; or rather – I was here – and isn’t that the strangeness of reading diaries that have been transcribed as blogs, updating every day, though they were written a century ago: for does Barbellion really write alongside me? and Kafka? But they are here nonetheless, and very close, and each word in their diaries lets them say, each in their own way: I was here; once, like you, I wrote to mark the days in their unfolding – one day, another, and when I could not see the great wars you know are coming like storm clouds from the horizon.

‘Then came long years of restless wandering, culminating in the misery of the second world war …’ From Janouch’s introduction to his conversations with Kafka, where he says, even as ‘Kafka’s twilight kingdom of shadows became a perfectly ordinary day-to-day experience’, he gets out the notes he wrote back then, as a 22 year old, and decides to select and arrange them anew.

Appelfeld says we cannot understand what the death of millions might mean, when the death of one close to us is already overwhelming. I have found little about Janouch, but I feel I know him in some way through the conversations he records. From his presence that lets Kafka, even a fictional Kafka – Janouch’s invention – speak in the way he did.

This morning, just as any other, even as I imagine myself smoothing a page on which to begin to write. Smoothing it, this imaginary white surface, in order to make a mark as for the first time, just as I once saved to buy with my pocket money the pads such as you used to be able to find in W.H. Smiths. What happiness to begin writing on the first loose leaf page, to begin, to make a beginning, and with a fine-tipped pen!

I learned to write with a minute hand, and when I came to keep diaries, from the same stationery, but hard-bound now, and a day to an A4 page, it was with such a minute hand that I filled them. Perhaps it took time to know it mattered little what was said, and that what was written was never important enough but to be set down in anything but a sovereign neglect.

Neglect: is this why I think no one should speak about blogging? – or that one might do so only after writing a million words or so, coming up for a gulp of air having descended very deeply? But still the joy of reading blogs by those of whom we know the least, who turn themselves away from us except for what they chose to show, and how glorious that showing, fireworks against the darkness, when it is from the darkness of anonymity from which they write – and to let, as I read, the most negligible carry me into its arms.

I think I would like to read of nothing at all, just as I would like to write of it: to mark the passing of days, and the fact that each of us is alive, though our bodies are so delicate, and don’t I always worry, upon saying goodbye, that I will never see the one to whom I wave again?

I think I like most a writing whose source is obscure, a buried writing. Do not link to a blog where the photograph of its author looks at you face on: it is unbearable. The author should look away, or her image be replaced by one of someone else: might it then be possible to use an analogue of that old phrase, ‘… as the poet said’ when you quote another? ‘… As the blogger said’: but now to refer to any blogger, all bloggers, and we are all the same, falling through our lives together.

Perhaps you should always set your post to appear in the future, as is possible on Typepad. To let your words survive you, and survive everything (but a writing is not truly neglected when you have to pay a subscription for your account …)

Mandelstam: ‘I wake from the dead/ to say the sun is shining.’ But when did he write those lines? Was he was already a prisoner? The miracle: those words reached us. But also that the sun is shining, as I can write of this bright morning.

Sometimes there come runs of posts that seem to be important. Waking, I already hear sentences that seem borne from yesterday’s posting, as though it were the secret work of dreams to push forward what was thought the day before: that it is dreams which work, or perhaps that they have been made to do so, being transformed from a mess of impressions to an indication of what is to be written in the morning.

And a sense of the fragility of such runs – that the visitor from Porlock (was it Porlock?) might interrupt them; that some illness might come, rising as out of the water like a whale’s back; that I must make a trip to another part of the country and come back exhausted. And then the more general urgency – why do I feel this? – that there is not much time, and everything must be written now.

Foolish superstition: those who write much will die young. But mightn’t death be brought about by writing much – too much? Foolish thoughts, foolish superstition. And when there is no run? When the morning beaches you without thoughts, without phrases that call our promiscuously for the company of other phrases? No thought – nothing to be said, to be written, but only the desire to say, to mark my passage.

Because my sleep is never unbroken, and I awaken, usually, much too early, sometimes looking at the clock to find it was only two hours since I went to sleep, I regard it as an achievement to sleep late – to reach eight o’clock, say, or – but this never happens – nine. I always think that when I have no thoughts, when no run of posts bears me from morning to morning, I deserve to awaken later, beached guiltless and thoughtless on the shore. But this never happens, and without such a run, the hours before daylight are more hollow – for with what am I to fill them?

To live on one’s own is to know well the strangeness of the illnesses and fatigues of the body – but also those moments of strength, of possibility. How was it, for a time, that my evenings woke up because of writing? For a few weeks, tired, I’d gone to bed at eight and watched episodes of The Simpsons streamed on the laptop. And then – some posts that let the evening broaden and spread outwards: now the early darkness did not bother me, and behind the curtains, this room was a cave in which, sitting upwards at my desk, typing, I was moving and the room through time, through my past, which came alive again, and so to the future.

For a few evenings, it continued in this way, and I was eager to come home, rather than staying out to drink. Home – and to write, because for a few days at least, writing was possible and it gave me the possible; the evening was thrown like a spear into the future. And then, of course, it fell away as it must do, and I was left only with a sense of energy unbound. Not work, then, and the steadiness of work, but a scattering, and in all directions. What was there to do but to retreat to the other room, behind the bevelled glass and lie there as the hours passed unmarked, all the way up to sleep?

I decided instead to drive my evenings on by reading, and so ordered many books – some difficult, some easy because they were books I had before, and that I’d read before, and to read was to glide, as I was doing last night, when I finished two thirds of the first book of Gene Wolfe’s tetralogy. I made it all the way to midnight: fabulous achievement, burrowing through the night.

Possibility was mine; hadn’t I already braced myself for this new reading – my first in 15 years, I think – by reading speculative critical studies by Robert Borski and others? I don’t think I can resist a mystery, and the detective work that comes from working things out; braced by Borski I would read attentive for the clues that would guide me in understanding the mystery of the book (or would only lead me deeper into the mystery, as I know it is not bound up, say with the question of Severian’s ancestry, so much as what gives and withholds itself by way of Wolfe’s prose).

Always there is the writing – Wolfe’s supple, strong-limbed prose – and those asides which make the fiction come alive: those lovely pauses in the story that I think I like more than the story itself. But I made it all the way to midnight, and to the brink of this day, today – and wasn’t that what I wanted: to be carried by reading through evening to night?

Of course there is also my review to think about; I should be writing that – but sometimes it is sufficient just to get through days and nights as I imagine does an ordinary person: one who lives according to normal rhythms, who has strength and then rests in the evening when his strength is exhausted. Are there any such people? And besides, what do I know of exhaustion? Didn’t the weights have to be lifted from me when the other day I loaded too much by chance upon the barbell?

In the gym, I allow myself to read Saul Bellow as I train, but I’ve lost the plot of Humboldt’s Gift so infrequently have I gone lately. I think it will be necessary to turn a new page in my life, to begin again, in some new way. And that requires travelling back to the head of the day, to the place where resolutions might be made, or renewed.

But what resolutions have I? It is enough, today, just to write. Enough that in the hours before dawn (but dawn comes very late; it is winter) that I can make my mark, or rather make it again, having forgotten what was written yesterday, or remembering only that a mark was made and must be made anew. Isn’t that enough? To open up an evening, or a morning, to live, or only to mark that moment where a sense of living opens up? But why is it necessary? Why writing, and why here?

It is morning now, and bright. Perhaps the coming of light in winter cannot be called dawn – or at least that dawn should be something unshared, with the sense that only a few of us are awake at this time, very few. Morning, then, just that, and the busyness of the day. Am I braced for it now, and ready for the office? But I would rather the day was forgotten and I knew only the latest in a run of posts, not for what it said, but for the urgency of its saying, that seemed to let fate direct me as soon as I awoke, and gave a single orientation to my dreams, which otherwise tend to linger where I would rather they did not.

What does the Other want of me? It is in these terms, Sinthome explains, that we might understand the notion of fantasy. What matters is not what I want, but what I think the Other wants of me: my sense of what I am is given by this kind of projective transference.

But of course the Other, too, does not know what she wants – she, too, is without answer. The prospect of discovering her as such is terrifying, since it threatens to overturn the fullness and completeness I seek in her. I am steered close to ‘subjective destitution’ by confronting the fact that, in Lacan’s aphorism, ‘the Other does not exist’. Rather, she does not exist as I understood her to be: a discovery that also holds the prospect of overcoming the fear and anxiety that arose from my projection.

With respect to writing (still following Sinthome’s account), I project that Other wants me to write in a particular way – even as I unconsciously seek to write otherwise. A transgression that depends upon my projection of the desire of the Other. Then the fear and anxiety I feel when I write (if I understand this correctly) is a symptom of a fantastical structure for which I am responsible, albeit unconsciously. The overcoming of transferential projection, then, opens the chance of discovery a pleasure in writing as it accords with my desire – of writing as pleasure, as jouissance.

As pleasure, as jouissance? Or does another kind of projection announce itself in the relation to writing? A projection, now, that reverses its polarity, as though it were writing that desired me – as though, by some strange counter-transference, it fantasised me into existence, I who am now only the eidolon of writing?

A desire on the part of writing, that does not belong to me: how difficult it is to formulate the strangeness of a demand that reaches me as though from a place higher or lower than where I am! Am I only inventing another kind of Other – a God, a father to whom writing would be a sacrificial tribute? Is it not for the Other that I would burn, sacrificing my life by appeasing a higher power?

But then writing is not a term of a relation – it cannot be arrested in a particular figure. The Other does not exist – and nor does writing exist, if it supposed to name that upon which my desires can be projected. What, then, of the counter-transference of writing, of writing’s resistance to the measure of jouissance and the measure of fantasy?

I suppose I am referring to what happens only when writing approaches the condition of writing, when, perhaps after a long time, it courses towards the question of its own possibility and turns there. Isn’t that a question that blogging can reach, but only as it suspends the ‘why?’ and suspends the order of reason?

Not ‘why write?’, then – nor ‘why blog?’, but the fact that there is writing, there is blogging. A fact that is not a question, but the erosion of questioning. And that is not even a fact, a ‘that there is’, but the non-place where writing disappears; the remove of writing as it is given in writing. As it speaks of the experience to which it must return.

Strange formulations. But how to speak of the ever-strange performance of language, in which language is brought to its limits and it is those limits that speak? Not language as tool, as medium, but as language, there where it reaches what it can say only as it withdraws itself from reference. As it speaks – itself, but a self, now, that is in lieu of itself.

Writing does not exist. Writing desires. It suffers – but only as I, the writer, give myself to suffering. Only as I am given, after a long time, after writing a great deal, as kind of relay in writing’s perpetual tautology, its return to itself.

What does it mean to theorise blogging – to think the activity that blogging is? Nothing so long as what is theorised is not also performed – as it is drawn to the limits of language, to what can be said, not in order to gasp of the ineffable, but to fold language back upon itself, to allow it to come forward in its thickness, in a kind of materiality that withholds itself from reference even as it seems to refer.

For Sinthome, Joseph K. is engaged by the fantasy that he will one day discover who accused him, and of what crime. A fantasy he escapes only when he is murdered ‘like a dog’, says The Trial. But I also think of The Castle, in which, perhaps because it is never brought to an ending, or perhaps because of its length, and the incessance of its paragraphs, seems to approach the condition of writing as I have tried to invoke it.

The fantasy of writing. The desire of writing: but now read each genitive both ways. Fantasy of writing, writing of fantasy: at what point does writing give itself to that incessance in which it seems to speak only of itself, of what does not refer? Desire of writing, writing of desire: when it is that the writer is engaged such that his desire is turned inside out like a glove?

There is a kind of writer who can endure subjective destitution. Sinthome writes of his fascination with those who show him no respect – or enacting that fantasy by seeking out conflict. As though (and this is my fantasy) conflict might catch him out, just as it has done, he says, on his blog and in the discussions into which he has entered at the blogs of others.

I’ve often wondered whether this is one path to subjective destitution – to exacerbate conflict, to let yourself be punished. Everything depends upon the experience of failure – of failure’s near completion (Blanchot: ‘an almost infinite nihilism’). You have achieved nothing, you’ve written nothing of worth: endure the limit of your strength as it undoes itself and becomes limitless.

Is this why, reading blogs, I feel closest to those who I fantasise are close to despair? Close, very close – but, nevertheless, Kafka’s ‘merciful surplus’ that lets a writing be born that attunes itself to inachievement. That folds the limitless into the limit. That performs it.

I think to myself that a great space should be cleared so that desolation is allowed its voice, and that the one who speaks becomes sacred in their lament. Subjective destitution is necessary; it is the test of writing, the test of blogging, and reveals its condition.

How to tear your face from itself? I tell myself that it is writing that reaches you, and now as it sacrifices its own term. Just as you, too, will be sacrificed.

Sacred writing. Writing that separates itself and its writer. Solitude before the day begins, when you are not alone with yourself, but with writing. What sun is rising through me? What destitution?

… the problem is with my thinking, my writing, my ‘work’.

‘What are you working on?’, asks one artist of another, or one writer, or one academic. My fantasy of blogging: that the answer comes, to that question: ‘nothing, nothing at all.’ Comes from that writing that wears the life of a writer away, speaking for her in her absence, and in the echo-chamber of its lack.

"My thinking, my writing, my ‘work’ …": citation that lets each word speak as though unsure of its own meaning. ‘My thinking, my writing …’: the interval between words stretched to the infinite. And a stretching that pulls those words apart, that lets them speak without reference and without the chance of truth.

Inadequate words, wings that beat in the throat, the steady panic of a speech that is lost in itself. ‘My "work"’: quotation marks around the word work, and around every word.

Who speaks? What writes in your place? Second fantasy: it is in this falling back from achievement and the measure of achievement that your singularity is marked. Who are you? A way in which failure thickens and lives itself.

Ah, it was only then that I met you – only then that I read you. Friend, we share that of which we are each incapable.

Sinthome writes:

Transferentially, what is suggested in suspecting that one’s writing always harbours the seeds of disaster and one’s own destruction? What is the unconscious desire or intention behind such paranoid posts?

A familiar experience: your writing is seized by the current of writing; a frail vessel sets itself out into a broader channel; you write with an enhanced fluency, with the breath of inspiration in your sails. Now writing seems to live by itself: what wonders you discover as you let the movement of writing lay claim to you. Happiness of being able to speak of this, of that; your life is given to you again – a life to be written, yes this is the glorious mirage that burns on the horizon as the river opens itself to the sea.

But what gives itself also withdraws; the measure of inspiration falls back into itself, and who are you, writer in lieu of the fluency of writing? A reader of your own words, and a disappointed one. Wretched disappointment in a writing that seemed to carry itself so urgently: how could what you were gifted to write let itself flow into this salt marsh?

Choked writing, writing that does not move. No dream, now, of the book into which writing might lift itself. What is there left to you but to wait for writing to come again, if only to push your post further down the page. Curse of writing, that seems to give birth to itself through its own inadequacy.

Writing lacks itself – or that that ‘itself’ is already lack and truthlessness. Never will writing break from itself and refer. Never will reach the other shore, granting that adequation from which truth, the redeemer, might shine. Errancy, then; a daily failure. Isn’t this your own disaster, your destruction? The sea drowned in salt?

Unless the dead sea floods back into the veins of your writing. The sea that is a desert. To write of the failure of writing – to catch it out, the ‘itself’ into which writing seems to withdraw. But it is you who are caught thus, who desired to entrap what was lying in wait before you ever began to write. ‘Who desired’ – for desire belongs to that relation to the present that has lost itself in you. Unless, now, there is another desire, that does not catch yours and sweep it along like a current, but shows the vessel of your writing was always broken apart.

Is it a novel you wanted to write? Or, at least, a narrative? Is that what continually fails to let itself begin here, at the blog? Abraham asked to murder Isaac, God’s future on earth, was allowed to sacrifice a ram in his place. Thereafter, says the narrator of Blanchot’s When the Time Comes, Abraham saw Isaac shimmer with the image of that ram, which had been substituted for him.

And isn’t it in that way that, asked to sacrifice what is written here for a greater work, a finished work, I find in that work, which I cannot begin, the vain sacrifice that is each of these posts? No finished work, no completion: only posts that mark the return of what does not begin and cannot conclude.

Then narrate the impossibility of narration – write of what you cannot do. But, that is nothing I can bring about. It is only by chance – and one that might have eluded me – that narrative can mark its own impossibility, bear it, and let it speak. Chance: this, then, is the faith of the blog: let what cannot begin pass this way. Let it prevent itself from finishing, that passage that can never gather itself into an ending.

Would you like to work what is written here into publishable form? To join post to post as fragment to fragment to make a larger whole? Perhaps there is another experience of the fragment that forbids this whole – a desire that asks for a kind of forgetting that would interpose itself between post and post. A margin – white space, and not simply that which would divide blocks of prose on the page.

A margin in time, as though between each post, each entry, there was an interval so vast that everything was lost therein. An interval, a desert greater than the Biblical one, that takes not forty days to cross, nor forty years, but more than the whole of time. Time loses itself there – or is it space? The becoming eternal of space, the becoming infinite of time: eternity, infinity, interposes itself before and after the post.

But doesn’t it, too, pass through the posts themselves? Doesn’t it allow itself to mark itself there, to set beginning adrift into the non-beginning, and the future into what will not come about. It will not end, that which did not begin: desire to write, and to sacrifice the desire to finish anything, or to work what is written here into a finished whole.

The inexhaustible: write from that weariness for which the end is impossible. Bear in it the post that turns aside the post. The date at its bottom is not the date. Or it is what lets it ring out, lost, in eternity.

The oldest topic on this blog, which is also what makes writing here possible, even as it seems also to deny that possibility, excluding it from any kind of project, and making it only the repetition of its exposure to the impossibility of beginning: how to mark that writing born from the exhaustion of strength, the ‘merciful surplus’, as Kafka called it? How to mark that turn in exhaustion, where suddenly – and by what miracle? – it becomes propitious, allowing there to begin what seemed to have no chance of beginning.

Exhaustion: the limits of strength. A limitless limit, because exhaustion seems without end, and that is its trial: who are you that cannot collect himself into a task? Who has fallen from anything but a waiting for waiting, that has forgotten the realm where a task might be completed and waiting takes an object? A forgetting of forgetting, too – for you must have exhausted all kinds of nostalgia for action, all memories of power, so that something might begin.

These strange formulations are necessary if the time (the non-time) of exhaustion is to be remembered. The word waiting, like the word forgetting, is suspended between transitivity and intransitivity, each falling back into what deprives them of object. So they can be put into play such that they echo exhaustion and let it speak in the way it, too, seems to strip possibility of itself and then, sometimes, bestow it again, the chance of action.

Then exhaustion is part of the rhythm of the withering and regaining of strength, of the ability to be able. A mysterious rhythm that allows, in with the withering of your powers, power to be regained, and not by an initiative that belongs to you. This is what Kafka calls the ‘merciful surplus’: the capacity of writing to come to itself, and for you to write of the exhaustion that kept you from writing.

But how to remember the time before writing seemed to wrench itself from itself, to give birth to itself and come to itself, all at once? How to mark what could not begin in the writing that begins of itself and seems to carry itself away, having never arrived at what it was? Writing wrenches itself from what cannot begin; it comes to itself – but only as it can now write of anything, just as you might speak of anything, in the lightness of speech.

What an extraordinary capacity! Extraordinary lightness, when the world opens to you as it gives itself to the power of writing, of speech. Of what can I not write? What can I not offer for writing to thicken itself? Writing becomes happy loquacity, the empty chatter despised by the philosopher, just as speech can speak of nothing in particular in rumour and gossip.

Who speaks? But there is only the lightness of a writing that wanders everywhere and illuminates itself according to what it speaks. This can be the happiness of blogging – an errant writing, a writing that circumvents the channels of publication. Or that publishes itself without shame, without embarrassment, writing easily of anything at all. But what, then, of a writing that remembers the violence of its own beginning, that draws with it the time before writing gave itself to the measure of possibility.

What of that time before time, which should not, perhaps, be thought in terms of rhythm, which lets it be joined too quickly to that same measure? What relates writing and the impossibility of writing? It comes down to this, to the question of relation – and to that attempt, in writing, to speak of a relation that seems perpetually in suspense, that withdraws itself insofar as it does not take, as its term, the human being who has the ability to begin.

Without initiative, then. Without possibility. And then as though the measure of possibility was granted at the same stroke as something else withdrew – the strange modality (but is that the word?) of the impossible.

A modality, now, that is without you, the writer, the reader, that wanders in itself and dreams of itself. But isn’t this wandering in advance, this strange avant-garde that has already cast you from yourself, that from which possibility comes, and the chance of beginning? Isn’t it out of the impossible that the measure of possibility is made, folding itself into the linearity of time, into life lived in the first person?

But impersonal life is also streaming, and the river into which you cannot step even once has already altered time in time. Isn’t this what redoubles itself in that writing that would remember the violence of its beginning as it set itself back from the impossibility of such? Isn’t this what remembers itself – obscure memory – as the event tore itself from the primordial non-event?

Strange cosmogony, in which what does not begin encrusts the beginning, in which the power to create is a mutation of non-power. Redoubled, marked: writing remembers the ‘other’ modality, and not simply the death of the writer that preceded writing, as though the non-beginning occurred once and for all. For the non-event, impossibility, doubles and ghosts the event, it writes with your writing, and you, writer, have an obscure double.

Who writes? He and you, together. The one and the other, joined by a relation that suspends itself as it joins (without joining) the possible with the impossible. Without joining – then your double is forever separate from you. Obscure companion on the other side of the mirror. Isn’t he the one Kafka wanted to become, as he dreamt of writing in a night within the night?

Only Blanchot, I think, has sought to confront this companion of writing, and bring him forward. Uncannily, in The One Who Standing Apart From Me, he is made to speak in our language, as though he were more than a simple refusal to speech, the withdrawal of its measure. He speaks, but only, it is true, as he resists the one who interrogates him, the writer whom he accompanies. And his speaking is such that it allows Blanchot’s tale to mark the possibility of writing his tale as it sets itself back into what makes it, at the same time, impossible to tell.

Possible and impossible, where the conjunction must be thought as that suspending relation that joins time with the ‘other’ time, Chronos with Aion. His récits hover in that peculiar juncture, where what is joined also unjoins – where the present is doubled with the ghost of the present, and the future gives itself also as the return of what never began.

Peculiar formulations – pretentious, perhaps, and certainly lacking all elegance, all good sense – but they have to be risked. Risked, though in a language that is also brought to suspension – that redoubles the performance of the récit, and sets it in motion again. Blanchot comments of Paulhan, that everything he wrote was a récit. Certainly one could write the same of Blanchot.

But putting his work aside, even though everything I write is drawn towards it, what does this mean for a practice of writing, blogging, in which everything can be published and everything said (and by anyone, as the author of In The Hall of Mirrors reflects), everything – and also, for that reason – nothing of what marks that irruption that lets writing begins as soon as a post is opened. I suppose others might find it easier to write – or that that ease does not recall the difficulty of writing that must, from the first, for me, be overcome.

A difficulty – an impossibility – that seems to fascinate what I write with the chance of its not happening, and draws me to that mirror in which I see the other who writes with me. Then nothing is advanced here, nothing goes forward. An idiom falls into itself, it thickens, it forms a clot in the veins of sense; it does not flow. No fluency here, if that it means that things might be said – said, and left to stand for themselves.

Nothing stands here. Nothing rises above its own ruin. No accomplishment, nothing is said, nothing began. Only the fall of the beginning into the non-beginning, of telling into its impossibility, as though all I could narrate is that of which I am not capable, and first of all of narrating. Why write? But there is no ‘why’ that does not fall back with this falling. Why tell? But no telling that does not expire within its own impossibility. And why are you telling me this?

Who tells, and to whom? Is there a way in which companion might call out to companion, that what might be shared and by way of writing – of the performance of writing – is the ‘other’ time as it calls forward our doubles? Shared – but only as it turns us from ourselves, as the first person gives way to the third, and, in each, it is a kind of refusal that is made to write and to read, to speak and to listen.

And in this way, too, I wonder whether there might be a kind of affinity, a friendship, that passes by what is common to each of us – common, according to that relation which suspends relationality. A friendship of incapacity, of what opens us in vulnerability, in a responsiveness that is also exposure, the risk of reading, writing, of speaking and listening that we might share.

1. Why am I telling you anything at all? Why?: but what kind of question is this?

Ask it, with Steve, of a novelist.

At the beginning of every novel written in the third person, the question I always ask is : why am I being told this? As soon as the narrator begins to speak, I ask, why are you telling me this? If the questions remains unaddressed, much as I might enjoy the novel – and I enjoy them as much as anyone – ultimately it seems to fail as a novel.

And ask it, with Jodi, of the blogger:

A fundamental problem accompanies reading blogs: we ask, but cannot answer, ‘why are you telling me this?’ As readers, we ask it of the blogger. In so doing, we assume me, viewing the ourselves as the one being told – why are you telling me this? – as if the text or performance were for us, specifically or more generally. We forget that the writing has nothing to do with us.

2. Gratuitousness of writing. No one asked for it. Then why presume to write? Somewhere, Derrida speaks of the presumptuousness of speaking without invitation. And says, he writes when he is asked to publish – or to commemorate an occasion when he is asked to speak. Is this why he allows the markers of such spoken occasions to appear in his texts? Is this why he risks all his writing appearing merely occasional? Then his discretion is impressive. True, he came to publish a great deal, but, he suggests, he did so only when asked.

Secondly, Derrida insists that he alters his idiom according to the topic on which he his writing. The topos his writing, too, inhabits. How to do this without a mechanical repetition? How, without parody, to perform a writing in response. Of course it is this performativity that infuriates many of his readers. Those longwinded introductions – when will he ever begin? Pure self-indulgence, I’ve had enough, he was burnt out years ago.

Late on, Derrida will claim only Lacan tooks performative risks as he did. Not Deleuze and Guattari, then – not Lyotard. Lacan. But remember it is Deleuze, he claims, of his contemporaries, who is closest to him – Deleuze never attacked me, I think he said, Derrida who was so sensitive to being attacked (but this is part of his charm: his vulnerability. He’s human just like us.) But what about Deleuze and Guattari, what about the ever-underestimated Lyotard?

3. Questions that don’t matter to me, not really. Why am I drawn to the previous generation – to Bataille, to Blanchot, to Levinas, to Klossowski? Why do I feel, foolishly enough, that for them – for the first two in particular – writing was more urgent, that it bore more risks? A simple anti-academicism?

Writing, for them, I tell myself, could not have been considered presumptuous. It was a necessity. No questions – no idiomatic risks. First of all writing, and as with the great moderns. Mandelstam and Kafka, Tsvetayeva and Rilke, Pessoa and Joyce: there must be writing, and that first of all. This is my fantasy. Those are the writers who wrote in order to mark the fact that there is writing.

‘Are you really suggesting this is entirely lacking in the coming generations? Do you really think it’s absent in Foucault or Bourdieu, in Nancy or Lacoue-Labarthe, in Cixous or Irigaray?’ – ‘This is my fantasy, I told you. There are some authors for whom writing is necessity. Writing – not communicating by way of writing, but writing.

Then ‘why’ of their text sets itself back into the surprise that there is writing. I remember Angelus Silesius: ‘a rose is without why. It flowers because it flowers.’ Writing writes because it does. And now Heidegger, from the Principle of Reason, part 5 (via Lichtung):

cognition is on the lookout for reasons to render. This happens insofar as cognition asks: why does the cognised exist, and why is it the way it is? In the ‘why?’ we ask for reasons. The strict formulation of the principle of reason: ‘nothing is without rendering reasons’ can be formulated thus: nothing is without a why.

4. No ‘why’ with writing. No writing without presumption. No need to mark the surprise of writing. The question of idiom need not arise, because it is already there, it already speaks. That it is. That there is. Writing.

Gerrude Stein: ‘a rose is a rose is a rose.’ Writing is writing – and that surprises the writer. That there is writing – and writing first of all. Isn’t this what Blanchot understands? Isn’t he pre-eminent as he knows writing demands a writer in order to return to itself? That the writer is like electricity – not a thing, but a way things happen?

But then writing, too, is not a thing. It is also an event, but one that is different from those which have a straightforward relation to agency. It happens. The most ancient figures of inspiration combine passivity with activity: you are set back into the origin – and it is from there you will write.

Write – and as though you life depended on it. As though you lived for nothing else. But more: as though your life had already run out, and isn’t this it, the criteria which divides, in my fantasy, one kind of writing from another? You have to die before you begin to write. Or better: bear dying with writing. Die with writing, and as you write. Begin writing as you begin dying, as it comes to you, bears you. And then writing binds itself, too, to what cannot begin, and what cannot be written. It is marked by what it cannot do.

The impossible: begin from that. The urgency of the ‘cannot’, which pays no regard to talent. Urgency, gratuitousness: even the most refined writer writes crudely. The beginning must be crude. Writing torn from nowhere, from itself, autochthonous: how crude it is, how simple. The fact of writing, and that first of all. Begin from the fact. Wrench what does not begin into a beginning. Or rather, receive from the non-beginning that turning that gives you – merciful surplus – the power to begin.

5. Why are you telling me this? Bataille, writing Inner Experience: because you, my unknown readers, are part of this community, and are there from the first. A virtual community – to be read by unknown eyes – this already breaks the horizon. Why are you telling me this? Because you, too, are borne by dying.

A mortal community, then – but dying, now, seems to leave physical death behind, and not because it has become a metaphor. Dying as passage, as errancy, as a movement away from the world in the world. Oedipus led by Antigone, looking for a place to die. The last man of Blanchot’s story who draws those around him into the uncertain space of their dying. Duras’s Vice-Consul, who is in some way already dead, though he carries on living.

I am dead: impossible sentence, unless it is framed as a fiction. I am writing: impossible phrase. I am reading: likewise impossible, when what is read gives you to dying.

6. Why are you telling me this? Give me an account. Tell me of what bears you. Thinking, once again, of what Steve wrote, I think I want from a fiction only a kind of irruption – a block, a break – a tearing that tears the book from the world, so that when I begin to read, I know I am also at stake in what I read. As though I were participating in a kind of sacrifice.

Perhaps this is why the first lines of a novel are so important: will I find it there, that block, that break, so that I am gathered up into the urgency of telling? As I read, I hope with the hope of the narrative – I live from its life. It carries me and shows that I am carried – that I live two lives at once, or that my life is divided between what is possible for me, and unfolds according to the measure of my ability, and what is impossible, and measures the one that I am.

Measures me, and then sets me back from myself and the world, suspending those relationships that usually hold me in place only as it, the telling, relates itself to itself through me, by sacrificing me. And then I know that it is in my own sacrifice that I have participated, and I am already dead. Or that sacrifice is what continues away from everything, Cratylus’s river into which I cannot step even once. This is also what is told in the novels of which I think: the return of what never began in the fiction, of the non-beginning in the beginning.

Beckett, Stirrings Still:

One night as he sat at his table head in hands he saw himself rise and go.

Here is a tale that knows the gratuitousness of its beginning. That carries it, without rendering account. As though the narrative act had laid itself bear, in its freedom, its surprise. And now the ‘why?’ that would seek to render account is set back into a question that has no answer, and only turns in itself, as it asks reader and writer (and the writer, now, is only the first among readers), whom each of us is to whom writing lays claim.

6. Why are you telling me this? Jodi shows us how blogging leads to new practices of reflection, affinity and self-cultivation. I dream of a reflection in which language sees itself in its own mirror. Who am I?, it asks, and by way of you, reader, writer. Writing itself, lost in itself, but suddenly awake and asking who it is, and by way of what is written.

And I dream of that affinity in which writing, too, is at stake, as though there were a secret between us – but a secret now, that allows us to share that to which we are each vulnerable. Dying measures us. Dying has reached us. It is as if we live two lives, or that life divides itself from itself and from the world. The better, perhaps, to come to itself – not to arrive, but to enter that waiting that detaches itself from waiting, in which life gives up its self-identity and forfeits the possibility from which it seemed to begin.

‘Why’ without answer. ‘Why?’ that erodes its own answer and is set back from itself as question. Then it names a responsiveness, a vulnerability. It names that exposure, for writers, for readers, that lets a kind of light shine through the stretched membrane of the personal. A dark light, the darkness become light. The ‘why?’ turns in itself on the other side of writing. The ‘why’, lost from all reasons, a question that has become a wandering, and turns there.

Automatic speech, free association: to be brought into an experience of language where every word is as though cited. Every word, belonging to you, does not belong to you: language becomes indifferent, writing speaks without enunciator, spreading like a delta until it covers the surface of the world.

Automatism, streaming writing, what would it mean to speak without you being spoken? To speak: and now language is like a stone or the sky; it has attained itself, labyrinth wandering in itself without referring to the world.

No reference – or rather such a play of reference that language refers to any possible world – to all worlds, and even beyond that, to the wearing away of worlds, of possibilities, being indifferent to everything but its babbling.

And now every word sets back behind it like a comet’s tail a murming stream; every word carries with it the reserve it must also cite. Cited words, cited murmuring, where what speaks is also the background of speech, that vast indifference of language lost in its labyrinth.

When you cite me, I hear that background behind my words. Behind them and carrying me away: what does language become without intention, without reference? A stone in my own mouth, a river in my fingers.

To be linked to – touched, by a writer or another blog. Touched – to say, I agree, or I disagree, or with great generosity, here is something worth reading; here is something new, or extraordinary. Touched – or brushed, as by a tangent. To say: I was passing this way, and over there, another is passing.

Company, community – and especially when the link is made in passing, and without fuss. When it is part of a block of writing, and integrated within it. But then integration is never complete. Doesn’t the link touch the linker? Then what reaches out to touch is already touched; the tangent carries with it the whole of the blog of the one who links, like the miraculous swerve of the atomists.

What is touched touches back – no, it had already reached you, it had touched you so that you could touch, it gave you that capacity. Peguy’s wound, he said, preceded him; he affirmed the accident that fell upon him by chance. What would it mean to affirm the alteration that happens when you are touched by the writing of another, and especially when you reach out to touch it in turn? To what kind of friendship does it attest?

Do you need blogging or does blogging need you? For the former, a kind of narcissism – dreaded word, a ‘self-analysis’ carried out in public. For the latter – the opposite of narcissism, for it would be blogging that loses itself in the mirror of the blog, and these words the nymphs that seduces it to tumble.

But then what is blogging that it would need to look at itself? A god, a beast (remember Aristotle’s expression: the man who would live alone is a god, or a beast)? Neither. It is what sets itself back as soon as a certain practice of writing begins. Phrase in italics. Not the blogger as agent, as controller of what is said. As also the one who relinquishes agency in agency, control in control.

And isn’t this the oldest definition of inspiration: breath, received from outside? Divine exhalation? Breathed into the nostrils of the creator, who always creates with, and not alone. Whence figures of inspiration: muses, gods, goddesses, intermediary beings like angels or daemons – a whole bestiary, a whole angelology, a pantheon.

Breathed – or whispered, or sang – or written. Written with, so that writing is active and passive, both at once. What perfomer does not know this? What writer? And that, further, it can never be a question of self-expression.

Easier to see with fiction. The line is crossed. Easier to see with singing. The performance begins. But understand performance everywhere, a priori, from the first. Not your performance, understand. Or that outperforms what you perform, that lets you become actor or dummy. And isn’t there a writing that writes with you as you write? Writes with you, but sets itself back from you; it is not in your power.

It is the angel who writes. It is your forebears. It is your race that sings inside me; your people: all this a figuration of what sets itself into a past that cannot be lived and sets itself into a future, which is why a people is always to come, even as its prototype existed in the murky past.

It is why God is waiting for what you write even as he launched you on the path of writing. And isn’t the devil waiting, too? A host of angels and a crowd of Muses? To see what you write? In a sense. To see what is written by you, and by way of you.

There is writing, there is blogging – but what does that mean? In the past you did not live and the future that is ever to come. Time displaced, time out of phase: write from what does not meet itself in your present. Write from the present disjoined. No narcissism where what is written will not return. No fort-da where what is lost will not come back to you.

Trailing behind you, flowing ahead of you: there is writing, blogging. Writing, blogging sets itself back – and dashes forward. And in the space opened by this movement? In the blank box in which there is to be writing? Make a mirror for blogging, for the god, the beast. Mirror the solitude that lives by way of your writing. Who lives as relation – the relation to you, writer, blogger. As relation – and never rests in itself, is never identical with itself.

Tonight, leave out a dish of water for the god to see himself. Tonight, a bowl of water for the beast. And what will you see in that mirrored darkness? Only darkness. Nothing to be shown. And above all, not you – not you face. Who are you, looking, through whom looks the solitude of a god, a beast? Whose eyes are yours that let a devil’s eyes open at their centre?

To write is to die, always. To be sacrificed – to live, now, only as figure, as silhouette. You are not preserved. No fame – nothing lasts. No one will speak of you. Or you are the object of rumour, of a gossip that dispenses with its object, passing the word along. Torn apart, now like Orpheus, it is not your song that sings from your disembodied head. Drowned like Narcissus, but it is not you who drowns.

A certain practice of writing. A way of blogging, an ascesis. To be without yourself. To let trail the past you will not live, and the future that never arrives. The present disjoined; the self lived apart from itself. Lived – died. How is it the words come to mean the same? A life, a writing. Indefinite article. There is blogging – but with an ‘is’ that crosses itself out, and what word here is not under erasure?

Hope: what speaks across these words, what lives, dies, instead of me, is like the wind that stirs the heads of wheat. That passes like a rumour, like gossip, that bears no weight and does not matter. Darkness in the dark water of the pool; the night drowns itself, the night lives. Life is joined to death, and death to life. Who is there, in the mirror? It is not your face. Who lives in your place? Who dies there?

Blogging sees itself. Who writes? No one who could say my blog. No one who could sign their name to what is written. Or rather, who turns what is mine from itself – who lets the signature tremble. Do you need blogging, writing? Or is it that blogging asks that you become figure?

Undo a category like the ones on the left, and what happens to the posts? They are kept, but dispersed – kept without connection (although, unpleasantly, Google searches reveal the presence of posts on the net that I’ve long deleted). Kept, but dispersed. But hardly kept, since they can be found, now, only by chance. This gives them an uncertain future – for who will find them, and by what search? And who, finding them, will know the whole of which they were once part?

Perhaps blogging only appears to be a fragmentary form; posts are divided by a span of time – a week, a day, an afternoon; the white space around the post is a correlate of this temporal division. But is the post itself divided? In what sense does it embody interruption, rather than forcing it out all around it, and allowing it to mark as margin only the interval between writing and not writing?

This is so even for the post discovered by chance, as from, say, a Google search. A kind of silence surrounds it, that is true, made present by the space of the page, but this does not mean writing includes silence, or that it is fragmented in itself.

No writing without sense, without the horizon of sense; but is there a way for writing to break that horizon? A way of speaking that wears out sense, that pushes sense beyond sense? Continuity: the madness of a text that does not stop. Or then a disrupted speech, the line that breaks sense even as it appears to grant it.

How delicately it must be balanced! How difficult to let the fragmentary evidence itself! If it’s necessary to break with every notion of value, not just because today’s techniques are already outmoded (the fragmentary is not an avant-garde), but because the outmoded is the condition of what writing would point towards in the name of the fragmentary, of the fragmentary demand.

Then it is this indication that is important, not the external form of the fragment. Or rather, fragmentation begins only where writing points beyond what it is, where the said is doubled by a saying – not as it would be spoken by this or that individual, but by writing itself, by the fact that there is writing.

When does the chance of saying begin? In one sense, the place of saying was taken by the gods who spoke by way of writing. The gods, the Muses – then the Ideas, then God: what is writerly inspiration but the engagement with writing as it speaks itself? But haven’t the gods got to disappear, and this disappearance be experienced as it is before saying, infinite questioning, can speak in its own name?

It has no name – this is what is realised; or that the name God was only a placekeeper. No name – and what is it to write so as to allow names to undo themselves, to become indications – and then to allow the whole of what is written become a single quivering arrow?

Typepad is down, so what will you do? You can’t transfer writing into the ‘post introduction’ from anywhere else, bceause the format goes wrong, and words as simple as ‘everyday’ are scrambled. Don’t write, then. But how to find yourself back to the writing compared to which everything else is a mere episode? Is it that I lead a double life everywhere else but here? Or is to write to separate life from itself in another sense? In the world, distance and I are no longer one. But here, where to relate to life is to double life by writing?

Last night, not writing, I rediscovered my flat, tidying and reorganising, finding again the framed paintings I had long since taken down from the wall. I cleaned the kitchen floor, and broke up old furniture to make way for the chest of drawers and wardrobe that are to arrive this morning. I found a flat within my flat, or it became, in these silent days after the departure of the students upstairs, a home. But what about writing?

Husserl calls an epoche that suspension of the world through which the phenomenologist must proceed in order to attend to the things themselves. But what if those things can only be written about, not seen with the theoretical eye of the investigator? I think the world doubled itself when the first human being stepped into it. Being was unjoined from beings; the creation was inverted or parodied as things appeared in place of themselves.

To speak of the world, to write, is to double the world. The capacity to speak already entails that doubling. And the speaker, the writer, is also doubled; we lead double lives. All at once, this is forgotten. Who can bear the shimmering where the world is unjoined from itself? Language, which was once allowed to be sacred, falls into the mundane. Literature is confused with the representation of the world as it is, rather that the undoing of the world, and the holding of the determinate into the indeterminable.

What is theory blogging, when theory still retains the etymological reference to sight, to that measuring of the world which abstracts from the world? Can theory be brought to know its own operation, the blindspot of sight? Blind theory, wandering like Oedipus who was led by his daughter to find a place to die, it is only now you experience the doubling of the world. Only now do you come up against the limits of knowledge, you who embody the new claims of knowledge itself against the ancient wisdom of the gods (Goux).

To write is not to see. Or, there is a writing that is not a seeing. Who are you double, coming close to write out this sentence for me? Who are you, distant one? Who are you, distance of the world, its doubling?

To give, to be given: do I envy what Gorchakov would have protected when he held a lit candle in cupped palms and went across the drained pool? Twice the flame was snuffed out by the wind; twice it was relit, until, on his third crossing, he fulfilled the promise he made to the madman: he was across, he had crossed. Then, a groan, off camera. The sound of a fall. Gorchakov has fallen; has he died?

Then I remember the letters Blanchot wrote to inquirers, ‘Although I might like to meet, the circumstances of my work make it impossible …’; ‘Henceforward I live in such retirement that …’ He no longer saw even his closest friends, he told one inquirer, and Jabes, in an interview, said his communication with Blanchot consisted only of those short letters, written in an exquisite hand, such as all his correspondents received.

Then, as he approached his tenth decade, his hand became unsteady, and those epistolatory exchanges, often marked by long breaks, began to cease altogether. What was he protecting, what did he need to protect, so that he could meet no one, and that what he called friendship passed only by way of the exchange of letters?

The silence of literature, that is one name, but it says very little. Silence? Rather a kind of murmuring, an indetermination that makes the most decisive speech tremble. Did he need to be alone to let that experience be kept? Or was it that his whole life had been lived so it could best experience that indetermination, so he could let it claim him as one who could not help but write?

Do I envy that retirement, that separation from the world? Do I envy the sense that it was only possible to speak in one’s own terms, or better, in the terms of that writing, that speech, that the course of thought, of a whole life was an attempt to honour? Light the candle; walk across the drained pool. Now I understand: to write here is also to protect writing. And to write of speech, of speaking, is, every day to attempt to cross again that pool.

Of what would you write? Or what, by writing, would you keep of speech? What you write must respond to what comes from afar, and unexpectedly. With, not alone – but with whom? Alongside whom? First of all, alongside oneself, which asks for that separation between one who writes here and the other who lives, who acts. To live alongside, to live that separation that holds the lit candle as between closed palms.

Do I envy him, the one around whom my palms are closed? But he is not here yet, as he will never come. Hope: I have cleared my life for his arrival. And what I have written is only that clearing. But there are others who also know that opening. Writers, readers: friends as they, too travel alongside themselves.

The god Shiva loves Parvathi, his consort, and the goddess loves him. Why then do they consent to being reborn on earth, to give themselves unto forgetting and mortality? Shiva is a fisherman, and Parvathi a peasant woman. What happened in heaven repeats itself on earth; the fisherman loves the woman just as the god loved the goddess.

And is it when they fall in love that they remember again who they were? But they do not remember, or it is memory that remembers them, uniting them in order to return memory to itself, but, this time, as the memory of no one, or of the tale that tells itself by way of the avatars of Shiva and Parvathi as they find one another on earth.

What is this tale, which tells itself in every tale? What seeks to accomplish itself by telling? There is no heaven, and we are born and reborn as avatars of no-one. Or it is the avatar who is born with us and is allowed to be rediscovered in telling – rediscovered, but not by anyone in particular?

And what I tell here? It is the same. Who speaks? Yes, I speak, I am speaking (writing), but isn’t it Spurious (this blog) which also speaks? Spurious, as it names that dubious birth, a birth no one engenders, which returns each time there is telling.

I would like to say something remembers itself here, that there is another, a writer like me, on the other side of the mirror. But I know that if he is there, he is not writing and has never written a line. And besides, what can he remember, he who is not even present to himself?

I feel sorry for him, Spurious, and that is why I write. I pity him who has forgotten himself and forgotten forgetting. Pity the one who, without himself, is the condition of all that is written here. But then I feel a kind of gratitude to him too, an indebtedness, for how can I repay him for what he remembers in my place?