Category: Today

What day is it? Monday afternoon. But which one, which Monday afternoon? Any one, any Monday at all. Stolen time in the office. An empty desire to – what? Write? Is that it?

Begin by quoting someone else, I tell myself. By making an occasion for writing, I tell myself. Writing needs that – an occasion, and particularly when one Monday afternoon is like any other. But who should I quote? A book by Bolano on my desk – I haven’t opened it yet. A daunting book by X. … shouldn’t I be writing in the direction of something like that?

The inescapable feeling that it all went wrong somewhere. That writing turned a corner and ran into a swamp. And what is this afternoon but that, that swamp? Begin with an observation, I tell myself. Test your powers by observing the world. A hazy blue sky through the row of office windows. A view of the suburbs from the sixth floor. What should I write about them, the suburbs? And what of the sky?

If I was writing on a horizontal surface I could say I wanted the page to mirror the sky. A page written without occasion, lost in the mirror play of Mondays all exactly the same would lose itself in a sky that belongs to no particular day. A Monday sky like any other; a Monday page like any other. But the page (it’s not a page, but a monitor, exactly like every other monitor) is vertical, and I’m typing, not writing.

There’s no notebook here. No handwriting. Words appear letter by letter behind the vertical line of a cursor. There’s no occasion, nothing to mark by writing, and no reason to write. But it’s Monday, and I would like to begin. It’s Monday afternoon and I would like to mark a new phase by beginning. I suppose you should have projects, something that you’re working on. I suppose that is the way it’s done, a way to bind day to day, to assemble them in a single chain and pull yourself up through the weeks and months. The project as pulley; the task that turns the swamp of Monday afternoons into a cliff face.

Climb, then; haul yourself up. By the task you will continue to be born. I’m working on … I’m writing … And when you’re without projects? When your task has come apart and there’s no movement through the day? You’ve failed the beginning; you’ve failed the test of beginning. Writing, that would need an occasion, has none. Even the poorest writing has that, an occasion. The poorest part of an oeuvre: occasional writing, merely occasional writing, still has that, an occasion, which you so signally lack.

Monday afternoon. One hour, that’s what I’ll allow myself. One hour … I want the wheel of the day to turn. It’s Spring, the days are lengthening, and therefore it’s more important than ever to get the wheel of the day to turn. Nothing worse than the sense of being stranded in the middle of the day, when it becomes eternal.

It’s the indifference of the day that’s frightening. At least you can huddle against the night. At least close the curtains and turn on the light … The sky’s not as wide, the day’s not everywhere. At night, a kind of beginning is made by switching on a light; in the day, the eternal day, the light was already on, and will always be on.

No beginning, then. No occasion when the day’s back is turned. It’ll drive you mad, the day. There’s a kind of claustrophobia in its sheer breadth. Light falls upon all, equally. Light upon everyone, and eroding everyone. We’re all dying, and I’m like anyone else and, I tell myself, especially similar to everyone else, though it makes no sense.

Not even a beginning, I tell myself. Not the barest of beginnings. But still, in the day that began with writing, and that seems borne along by what began there, before dawn, there seems a beginning, a way of being braced against what happens, a few sentences being set against silence, arising against it, as, I imagine a calligraphic sign, drawn at a stroke, arises against the whiteness of the page.

But it is delusion, just that. Nothing begins here, but this isn’t why it is necessary to write. It is not even failure that drives me, though there is no question of my failure. To wake, to begin, and to carry the origin forward in beginning: just that. To have allowed it to speak, the origin, as it rustles in writing, passing like the wind in the leaves in Tarkovsky’s film: no, I can never say that has happened, not here.

What would I like to say? What is there to be said? Only what sets itself against silence and lets it speak. Only what lets silence and in its struggle into existence, the one against the other. Struggle – or play, one rising higher as the other rises, finding their way into a sky I would like to spread around me, like the seven headed snake that spreads its canopy above Vishnu.

A sheltering sky. But where what shelters exposes, like the slit in the nomad’s tent that is the opening to God. A sheltering silence, slashed in the walls of sense: not the record of passing days the prisoner keeps by scratches, but its opposite, as if every day was the first day, and 1 + 1, as is written on Domenico’s walls in Nostalgia, always equals 1.   

To double the day – to speak it; to catch out its secret, its blandness. Day, I will arrest you. Day I will preserve what you present to me.

What is a day? A span of time. But what is it, what is a day?

A lifetime; I often think that. As though I was born upon waking, lived my adolescence in the morning and my middle age in the long afternoon.

And what am I now? An old man writes; an old man remembers and writes. And if I live my life as I have done today, what then? There will be nothing to remember, for nothing happened. I was born; I lived – and now, close to midnight? close to death?

Nothing happened today. A blank page in the journal. A day that did not catch fire. A lost day, that I will not remember. What happened today? I rose; I worked; I went to the office and then to town. I came home; I cooked a late lunch. That was my middle age. And then … and then …?

Close to death (is that what is coming – death?) memories thicken themselves into nothing. What is a day? What was it? An opacity; the white lens of corrective glasses. Light thickened until it is no longer a medium. I can’t see – I’m lost. The day disappeared into itself. The day contracted, light into light.

What happened? What happened today?

I think there is a god of the same, and of the Same of the same. A god lost in the heart of the turning of the days and has gone mad there. Mad because turn in the same element. Because the same can only happen again.

Why make anything at all? Why begin, or seek to separate yourself from the hours stuck to one another like grains of glutinous rice to make a beginning? I think it is to translate the eternity of the day, its exhaustion, the madness of the same into a new eternity: to mark by beginning what fails to begin or to close itself into an ending. Only to mark it again – to make a mark to let quiver the interminable, the incessant. Perhaps art is only the attempt to make a mark. To double up the everyday, to lend it another kind of consistency. To give it form, even as that form is allowed to tremble.

But why seek to make? Why the desire to form? Are you the child that would make a yo-yo of the day, like Freud’s grandson, sending the death of his mother away from him and back, as if to master absence? To the master the day, then – or the Same of the day. Not to be trapped. Not to endure their blind turning. And this is why the makers are those who attuned to the Same, who suffer it. Who suffer the everyday as what it is: blank time, dissolution.

It is out of a kind of exhaustion you must begin. An exhaustion so great it dissolves you. Only there’s a minimal doubling up, a minimal reflexity. Something of you is there. Something of you crawls to mark a place, like the flag in the Sea of Serenity. But what you’ve made is only part of the day, a change, an alteration, and nothing else. And what you are is only a limb of the day, a way the Same can know itself.

I would like to work, say that. I would like to begin, say that. Tiredness can be greater than we are. Or that what we are emerges out of a prior field, a kind of ocean that floods up, returns, when our hold on ourselves has gone. I think that is part of what it means to be alone: not to have others who address you, and call you from that vague drifting. Others who call you to attention, awakening you from that other waking state into which you fall. In which, alone, another awakens in your place. Or is it that your vagueness spreads you open like a picnic blanket, out beneath the sky?

To work, then. To think, there where thoughts need the form of the ‘I’ to support them. But there are other thoughts, I know that – or someone else in me knows, where knowledge is only opening, unfolding – thoughts that are of that same unfolding, thoughts like clouds that drift without you. Mist-thoughts that have not coalesced. And I think their condition, too, is a kind of solitude, in which, somehow, you are not alone. Or not, at least there to be alone, no one wandering in your place.

Where another knows, and another thinks. Or that knowledge and thinking are each shaken out like a sheet to be tucked freshly round a mattress. Then how to speak of the other thought, the other knowing? How to bring it to speech, to let it bring you there, like the spread sail of a land-yacht, or the great sails that will, some say, catch the solar wind and bear us between the stars?

To let speak a kind of desolation, an exposure. Solitude without consciousness, blank absence, anaesthesised space … but these formulations will not do. How to speak of an absolute concretion, or a thought that is the opposite of abstract? How to think a universal that is one with matter, with all that is?

I will tell you how I imagine it. Days pressed upon days. Days congealed with other days, hours stuck to other hours. Each day a gauzy veil through which the other days are seen. One day like another, the same routine. One like another until time breaks from chronology, until it separates itself like an ox-box lake or an eddy. Time that turns in the same day, eternally. The same as it returns as this day, as all the others.

Yes, that is how I see it, as I hear its dull murmur. As I hear all the days like sheets rustling on a washing line in the wind. All the days, and everything that happened, stirred by a wind that moves through them equally. A wind like a ripple or a wave. A single wave that crosses all at once, the wind that bows the heads of corn.

So are my days brushed by the eternal. So does eternity make my days bow their heads, humbled. And now I imagine great bells that ring out from the heart of time, there where time does not turn, and one day is like all the others. Bells that sound only to the solitary, in separated rooms, in flats, cast out on the ocean like waterlogged rafts.

6.00 AM, a cup of coffee in my ragged dressing gown. 6.00 – too early, and there’s sunlight in the yard like a mockery. Too early – the days are too long. Eternal light. Light eternal, before you rise and after you sleep. When will darkness ever come? Not for 20 hours. There’ll be 20 relentless hours of light.

Nothing’s happened yet. The day opens before me. Nothing’s happened. Silence, some birdsong. Blackbirds nest in the outhouse. Waste from upstairs’ soil pipe runs down the wall. Last night in bed I saw a new dark patch beneath the white wallpaper in the bedroom. Spreading splotchily beneath. Waiting to darken the surface like a liver spot.

And the kitchen still strewn through the flat. The washing machine beside me here; the microwave; a stranded set of cupboards piled with Corwood CDs. Time to write, I tell myself. Time to draw the line from which to begin. And so I have my coffee. And I sit at my desk, ready. And I have my books at my side – a hardback, from which I read last night, and a softback, over which I’ve glanced.

Begin, then, I tell myself. It’s morning, the day has spread its billowing sails; time to catch those winds that will carry you to work. To begin – but what’s that? To be carried into beginning, becoming a worker – what’s that? To disappear into work; to write and patch up the holes in the text. To write transitional passages. And edit. And then, after a trance of work, to look out at the yard and say inwardly, I’m done. Done, and braced against the day, having made my stand. Done and the day pushed back into the beginning, the day made to make sense. The day steered, the day ridden all the way until, tired, I dismount and pat its back and return in righteous tiredness to the house of my life.

Yes, that’s what it would mean to begin. To push off from the side of the pool. To swim the lane, one length and then another; to plunge into work like Brancusi’s sculptures would plunge into the sky. To be a ship of work, held together by work, streamlined and burning off the inessential. Until your whole life would be just that: work. Until you become a projectile of work, arching through the air, inevitable. The day aimed, the day directed, every hour accounted for. Every minute burning forward like a rocket’s fiery tail, and the hours jettisoned like the unnecessary fuel tanks that boost a ship to orbit. Until, at the end, the whole earth is beneath you. Until, weightless, it is the whole earth you see spanned beneath you and you sleep in the air like a swift.

What it would be to work! To work – and to live, work and life as strokes of the same movement! To work and to live, one step and then another! The steps of a giant in the sun! Of the lusty fellow on Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, shirtsleeves rolled up, forearms tanned, ready. Of the carpenter Kafka would like to be, as he tells Janouch, who catches him in his exercises of the afternoon.

Am I ready to begin? Worthy – of the day as work, of the hours bound to one another like the carriages of a train? Ready to steer myself like a cowboy’s herd across the desert? But the herd is scattered and the carriages lie upturned. Or there was no herd and no train. Nothing began, nothing assembled itself to begin; all the forces were scattered; the army deserted in advance; the troops have joined the partisans. And so is the line of the beginning scrubbed out right away. So are life and work lost to one another. So I advance like a hemiplegic, with one side paralysed and then another: work and life, both numbed.

A line in the sand – is that what you’d like to draw? A line that would let work be work, and life, life. To make a criterion, there where you stand; to pitch a tent in the midst of exile. But the wind is rising in the desert. A sandstorm blows in these morning hours. There is no line and no chance of a line. The pitched tent has spun away. A whirlwind turns in these hours. Life and work unravelled. Life and work spun apart. What did you think you could do? Of what did you believe yourself capable? Of writing a single line? The clear stroke of a single line? Laughter: the line is lost and the desert is everywhere. No work and no life, but the desert grows.

Write at dawn, as day lifts itself from night. The day is coming: write that. The day has come: write that. So is its arrival lifted into eternity. The white page: there, alone, can writing arrive, for look, outside: soon evening will come; soon the day will fall from itself. Then the white page is the day, and more day than the day: the eternity of sense, the supernumerary day of black on white.

The flag of writing flaps in the wind of time. Time mocks it: ‘you say the day has come, but it has not come’, but writing mocks time: ‘the day completes itself on my page.’

Night comes. Time says: ‘isn’t night the ink of writing? Doesn’t the day live by the blood of night?’ Time pauses and goes on, ‘You have killed the day to make the day. Writing is also a tomb, and the words "the day has come" is the trail of blood running from the lips of a dead man.’

And writing laughs and says, ‘you know my secret. In truth, I can only write of the day in the ink of night; I bring the day only by way of deep oblivion. Somewhere else, another day is rising, a brighter sun. Somewhere else is rising the day to which all days are mere indices. How to write of the day itself, free from night? How to write in white ink on a white page, or in darkness upon darkness?

‘I know this is your dream, time, which is why you look for me.’

The same: the day comes to itself each morning. Comes to itself: the same day, the same each time. Why is it necessary to accompany it with writing? Why, if not to help the day complete itself, to complete it in a written act that sets its seal on its coming? The day comes to itself on the page. Or what is written marks its completion, redoubles it.

The day has arrived: that’s what writing says. But writing keeps its arrival; it does not need to come to itself anew. The day has come: write it now and it’s written forever. Why rewrite it, then? Why does it have to be rewritten? Now I wonder whether writing marks what the day does not have. Whether it is in writing, and writing alone that the day can come to itself.

Is that why it asks to be written, and each morning? Is that what it seeks, in the writing it asks for? Mark the day; mark the turning of the day. Mark what can never complete itself, once and for all, as the day’s coming. Set the seal on its coming; write: it has arrived; the day has come, even if, as you write, you know the day cannot come, or can only come to itself in writing.

I rise very early to write something or other; but what? Enough just to write – or rather, to be brought to that moment before writing anything, with a sentence fragment or two floating in my head and a sense that that fragment calls for others, and that soon a post will be knitted as sentence joins itself to sentence.

Just to write, and by so doing, have a kind of headstart on the day – to have made my place before the light comes, to have set up a kind of base camp. Sentence fragments come (but whose voice carries them?), but I think what matters is the origin against which they set themselves back.

I can begin, sentence linking to sentence, but the origin, without beginning, accompanies me. I think of it falling back, silently. And then I wonder what it would be to make sound out of silence, to speak not by adding noise to the world, but by subtracting silence from noise, as you draw with your finger on condensated windows.

To speak by subtraction – to let silence sound and to speak thereby: isn’t this what Blanchot means when he claims it is by a violent tearing away that the writer begins to write? That it is by stopping his ears to the Sirens whose song has already drowned him?

But to begin is not to draw the origin into the beginning. Something of it remains, murmuring, non-silent, to rush into the silencing of its noise through which the act of writing can begin, as, perhaps, water rushes in to fill the imprints your feet leave on the sand.

He says somewhere it is the tone of the work that differs from writer to writer – the way, perhaps that murmuring noise is allowed to call in the work. The way the Sirens call, but in a different way with each author. As if those finished books were footprints the sea fills up, until the impression is nearly erased. But still the imprint, still the traces feet leave on the shore – a momentary silencing that cuts into the anonymous streaming of noise.

And isn’t that the company you seek by reading? The footprints of others, of Man and Woman Fridays – the others who sought also, in my fantasy, to write upstream of the day, to go where the river runs clearest, and youngest? I know I have company; there are others who want to push their way to the head of all waters. And by this relationship, I know a kind of amity with them, with the others, whom I know only by their traces, half washed away. 

To mark a date, a time – to have been capable of marking it with a little writing, if only to scratch a mark on the walls of time – why is that enough, at least for me? why is it necessary, so that to fail to scratch means, like a prisoner kept unaware of the date, that I forget in some sense what day it is? What day?

Not that I cannot tell it’s Wednesday, or early December, but that the day without writing fails to open for me. As though, by writing early in the morning – and didn’t I, this morning, wake at half past one? – I’ve a headstart on what occurs such that it might happen not to others, but to me.

I will have a stake in this day, that’s what writing announces. It will be partially mine; the hours will part for me like the Red Sea to the Israelites – they will let me have passage, and so join the passing of this day to the passing of others, and so on, through my life, letting it be mine, and letting me live. And better still, for me, the knowledge that I will have forgotten this, what I have written, by the time the day is over: that I am like one who loses his memory overnight, so that each day he must find himself again.

A liberation, because it breaks me from the dominion of the past by a neglectful forgetting, and lets the future open to me as it is not measured by the past. Is it this eternal youthfulness I want, a wheel propelling itself, like Zarathustra’s child?

I think this is how I want day joined to day, each morning: this that will be the hinge of my days, or the point around which they turn: that happy forgetting that means writing must come again to mark the day, to say: here I am, even when, by the next morning, I have forgotten yesterday’s mark, and must mark it again, and that that is the condition of memory, and passage.

Here I am: then it is not the succession of days I would mark, but the rebirth of the day. The mark must be marked again. Here I am: but where am I, when I’ve forgotten by evening that there was a mark at all?

Imagine it this way. Just as the sun sends out great flares from itself, great fiery loops which arc back to its surface, so is what you write an arc of the day. Imagine a sun that was made of such arcs; that is nothing more than their leaping. You, writing, are an arm of that sun, a mirror held up to the day, and by which the day will know itself.

But this, too, is analogy, for what can the day know? Its first trait is blindness. It does not see. Its second trait is unconsciousness. It does not know.

Sometimes I imagine that it dreams, and its dreams are those solar arcs. Or imagine that, as a writer, I am like the astronauts who orbit Solaris. The day speaks; I write; but it does not know that it speaks, and I do not know what I write. Do I dream? Or is it that the day dreams in my writing, that to write is also to dream with the day?

Now I know: my first trait is blindness. My second trait is unconsciousness. I am an arm of the sun, of the day, by which it continues to unknow itself. To unknow, to forget: isn’t that the task the day sets for writing? To betray the day: isn’t that what it wants? To betray it, yes, but only by way of telling the day – of speaking of those events, great and small, that belong to the continuity of time.

Tell. But the sun arcs through you. It speaks, and you do not. It dreams, and what you write cannot reach it. But you know its return. You know it by writing, by the whole of your writing, as the day uncouples it from itself.

‘Why does the day need the blog? Why does it need this mediation, this detour, on its return to itself?’ – ‘Because it can only approach itself through detour; because that detour is the whole world, and everything in it as you retell it. Write of the world – tell everything as it happens, the most extraordinary, the most banal, and you will indicate this detour, without naming it.’

– ‘Then it is something more than a detour, or it seems to hold itself back from the events of the world.’ – ‘It is held back, and held back, too, from the recounting of the world, its telling.’ – ‘Then how to approach it? How to stand facing it, as I face the sun at noon?’ – ‘All telling is indirection, like the magician who tricks you by distracting your attention. You will not face it. There is no sun. The day is not itself, it is only the approach to itself, and you, blogger, are the means of that approach.’

There is a fire that does not consume, but that burns nonetheless in all things, and in what can be written of those things. Offer what happens by writing to sacrifice. Repeat, through sacrifice, the burning of things. Sacrificial writing, pyre of the world, let the day offer itself to itself. For is fire not already the day, burning in all things?

‘Then the day sacrifices itself to itself?’ – ‘The day is sacrifice; returning to itself through the burning of things.’ – ‘But nothing is consumed. Nothing is destroyed.’ – ‘Every word is already a destruction. Everything, as it comes to stand by the word, is already destroyed.’ – ‘But where is destruction? Why can’t I see it? Touch it?’ – ‘Because you are also burning. You are also sacrificed.’

Fear: What if I am nothing at all – what if there is nothing to me, no ipse, no self? Fear: I am at the threshold of a story. I am outside the story in which everyone is caught but me. Outside: I cannot speak of myself in my own language. Or: I have no language; what I speak is not mine.

Image of myself, image of nothing, I am drinking a bottle of beer on my own in the flat. Open curtains, the yard. A book on my lap. Fear: to be other than myself – other than anyone. I am supposed to be writing. I’m supposed to be planning my summer. Writing, planning – and instead?

The day passed – it was too long, too vast – and this is the evening. But there’s still light, too much of it. If I could close the curtains – then what? If I could close the light down – what then? But that is what I’m trying here. To double the day – to speak it, to catch out its secret, its blandness. Day, I will arrest you. Day, I will preserve what you present to me

But I know as I write that I am only the one who relates to the day. I belong to it, the day; I am the day become self-conscious, the day awake. And now I will watch over you, day, as you fall into evening. Watch over you, over myself – the day is too long – until I return to the one who can plan, who can write.

Another day, white skies, showers, how is it possible?, I ask myself. How, again, another day? Some insect swarming over the fields. Flying insects stick to my face, to my hair. Another day: I cleared up the flat earlier, to be braced against it. Changed the lightbulbs and the sheets. Thought: I should try and preserve some details of this day, somehow. Should try to capture it, so it doesn’t disappear, day among days.

Thought: but nothing much is happening. Then: not enough is enough; narrate: tell the blog what happened. Thought: I can only tell what did not occur. Nor even that. Can only substitute the occurrence of tiny events for the non-occurrence of the day. Because it did not happen, the day. Or it happened by not happening, by purging itself of events. And isn’t that what the blog is about? To bring narrative to the edge of what it cannot narrate?

The story of the day is dead. There is no story. Only the non-story, the ‘there is’ of the day. The day that says itself in great dull waves. The day that says ‘I am’ only as it pulls me slowly apart. But by the blog, I have caught you out, day. By the category, ‘Today’, have I caught you out. Did you think I could not speak of you? Did you think I could not lift you from forgetting?

Fragment, day, I know you are alive only as you separate yourself from narrative, from narration. Fragment, I know you live by your separation from the whole. Nothing about you adds up to anything consequential; you leave nothing behind, no hostages, nothing in which your image might be caught. This is why I dream of a blog that is a day-catcher, the trap of the non-event.

I will not sum you up. I will not let the negligible substitute itself for you. I will make you speak. Speak, then, across these words. Speak, like the wind that bows the head of the crops in the scene in Mirror. The wind comes: all these words bow their heads. Day, fragment, you are that wind. Day, fragment, these words, bowing, speak of you.

A coffee, then a tea. Write something, I tell myself. Hadn’t I thought of something to write when I went to bed last night? Hadn’t I had an idea, or at least the beginning of one? But I’d been reading The Rings of Saturn, and was carried along by Sebald’s prose. Was it my idea? His? I opened the book again this morning, but it was no help. What should I write?

I thought again of Mirror, and the historical footage that comprises part of the narrative. What footage would I show, were I making a similar film?, I asked myself. And the passage where the boy reads from Pushkin’s letter to the ghost in another room, whose coffee cup leaves a ring on the polished wooden table which fades even after the ghost has disappeared – from what would I have the boy in my film read?

Sebald’s narrator, like Tarkovsky’s, does not disappear behind historical events. Their recounting is also his way of appearing. Have I been long enough away from Manchester to allow a narrative of the regeneration of that city to allow me to appear? Long enough away – five years. And in five years time, where will I be? Unemployed again? What story will I tell then? Perhaps another phase, a whole five year bloc, is rounding itself off. I’ve always been surprised that time moves forward, that there are events which complete themselves in the world. Or that surprise is the one which reveals itself only as I write – as I struggle to bring an act of writing to completion.

I am in the South. Radio 2 plays in the other room. Dido, Coldplay: these songs obliterate memory. Bridge Over Troubled Water: the theft of memory. Then to write against Radio 2, against the DJ whose afternoon show we used to hear on the schoolbus. Obliteration: how to remember otherwise? How to receive the counter-memories that would turn those afternoons inside out?

Is it a kind of revenge I want?, I ask myself. A kind of apocalypse – a retrospective apocalypse that will have revealed that things were never as they seemed? As though those relationships which bound me to what I took to be ordinary and familiar were refracted through the great strangeness of the world? Then write of that strangeness – from it, as though it was by way of an infinite detour that the world has always come to itself. Come to itself? No – failed to so come, missing its appointment. That is what should be remembered: the failure of the coherency of the world, the self-coincidence it was never able to achieve.

That is what I hear in a word as simple as today. Strange word that I find myself saying to myself now and again. As a ward? As a litany? As what turns the day from itself. As the self-division of the day, its unbinding. The world is not itself; the day will not finish happening. How to think of the past, the whole past, as a day that has never dawned, yet that is dawning?

Event, non-event: when will it happen, the incompletion of the day? When will it succeed, this failure to come to itself? When will it arrive in its non-arrival? When will you come, you who cannot come? The Messiah will not come until the last day, the very last – but how is it that what is last is also what has always happened, and that the word, today, is also the sound of great bells that seem to ring from the depths of time?

Was that the morning? Was that it, the morning? Was that it, promise of the day, beginning of the new day: the morning? What happened, then? Why did you get up so early, then? Why that urgency, why get up so early, then? What was it you were waiting for? For what were you looking forward? What was to arrive in the morning and by way of the morning? What were you hoping for in the dawning of the day, in the morning?

A cure – is that what you wanted? Lightness – is that what you wanted? But there was no cure, and no lightness. No cure – and the whole weight of the day, of what did not begin as the day, pinned you to the bed. Do not rise. Fail to rise. Nothing is coming; do not rise, give up on the hope of its rising. It will not come, there is nothing to begin; the future cannot be reached here – give up. Lie down, then; admit it: you’re ill, and there’s only illness. Admit it – there is illness and nothing but illness.

Give up – nothing’s coming. Give up, it is not coming, it will not come. The coming day – is that what you’re waiting for? It will not come. You’ll never get up. Lightness – is that what you want? But there’s only heaviness. The cure – is that what you want? But there is only the illness of the non-beginning, the oldest illness, the heaviest illness. Fail to rise. Give up.

Up early enough, ready to work, but the usual tiredness. Up early – before eight o’clock, and read for work, ready to write, ready to pull the chair to the desk to begin, but tiredness, the usual tiredness, and vagueness, the usual vagueness. I was up early, ready to begin, even as I knew I was too tired to begin, too tired and too vague, and there would be no beginning made, that today was not the day for beginnings, quite the opposite, today is the day of non-beginning, the day in which it returns as it has always returned, the non-beginning.

Up early, as I am always up early, ready to begin, as I am always ready to begin, but I was already vague, I was already tired, though nothing had happened, and the day was just beginning. Early – but already too late. Up early – but I’d got up too late; I missed the beginning, I’d lost hold on the beginning, and how was I now to begin? Up early, but already dazed – early, but the day was too much; I’d lost the beginning, I’d lost hold of the beginning, I’d failed to keep my appointment, or was it the beginning had failed to keep its appointment with me? – No matter, there was to be no beginning, not today.

Nothing would begin, on today of all days. Today, yes, the day of all days, the eternal non-beginning, the day that turns around the same impossibility of beginning. Today of all days! That was it – that’s the formulation! Today is the day no day can begin. Today – the non-beginning day, which turns around the same. Today – the eternal to-come of non-beginning; failed day, botched day, failure as the to-day, botching as its coming; advent without advent.

It will not begin, not today, today of all days. Not today – all the days that did not begin are here, all of them. All the days pressed and concentrated here, in this non-day. Up early – and for what? Ready to work – but for what? Pulling the chair to the table – but for what?

Today, what happened today? No books – or at least, no non-academic ones. No writing – or at least, no non-academic writing. The office, just as yesterday. A deadline – actually, one already passed. I’m too late, I found out. Too late, but I finished anyway. Cold February. I should remember there’s always a cold snap around this time. Cold, and the city seems to reduce itself to itself. What does it become? Only what it is, but it is more obvious now.

The same supermarket for the same salad. That was my lunch. A sandwich – the same sandwich. R.M. texts. She’s in Geneva, on a coach to the mountains. And what am I supposed to be doing? The deadline, oh yes, but I’ve missed the deadline. Tomorrow I’ll go begging to ask them to consider me. I was ill, I could tell them. The letter was lost, I could say. But why didn’t I finish? Because the days are full and the evenings are full – I’m busy. One day, another – busy. Where did the day go, I ask myself, because it is already evening? What happened to the day?

Meanwhile, W. is haranguing me by e-mail. Why aren’t you writing any philosophy? But I am, I tell him. Does he believe me? I’m working on a new book, in a completely new area. I’ve been seized by enthusiasm, drafted a first chapter, and thinking of a second. When will it complete itself? The whole book could be done by the end of the summer. But is that what I want to do with my summer? The deadline – it’s already passed. It’s already too late. The summer will be the time of the too-late, after the deadline, after everything should have been done. In fact, that is my life, it’s what happens after what should have happened. It’s extra-time, before the penalty shootout. Anything could happen; it could go either way.

No thoughts, though. No thinking. One hour a day – working intensely. One early hour, before the office: work time. I write, drawing on bits and pieces I’d begun last year. It’s pleasant enough; ideas coalesce. But there’s no thinking, not really. It’s automatic. I’m back doing what I do. It’s different this time, that’s true enough – a different topic, at least on the surface. But it’s an extension of the same thoughts. I am of my time, I tell myself. I am absolutely of my time, there’s nothing surprising about me. Of my time – a symptom – but of what? Of what disease?

As though I’d been hollowed out. Nothing inside. That’s the disease, and it afflicts everyone. We’re all dead, I tell myself, and especially today, when it’s so cold. What’s the point? What’s the point of all of this? Why isn’t it warm, that at least? Why isn’t the salad nice, today of all days? Why can’t the sandwich be nice and not half-stale? Why don’t I take the dead plant out to the bin? Took a year to die, that plant, leaf by leaf, and yesterday I knocked the last leaf off. There’s only a green tip atop the bole (is that the word – bole?) . A green shoot. Too late, though. The deadline has come and gone.

Today. What happened today? Nothing happened. The same happened – the same bowl of salad, the same sachet of dressing I cut with dirty scissors. Tuna and potatoes at the bottom of the bowl. With my plastic spoon I scoop up the tuna and potatoes. It’s a salad Nicoise. And later, a tuna sandwich. And today – a treat – fizzy water. In the cold office, with the fan heater on. In the office, piles of newspapers. Surf the net, wait for the caffeine to hit. It’s not hitting, though. Half a cup of tea that did not hit. Half a can of Irn-Bru that did not hit. When will it hit? Because the hours are passing, and I’m already late. Because I’m already too late. The deadline has passed.

Today. What was it that was to happen today? What was to have occurred? Dawn, 6.30: the world had turned from darkness into light. Dawn, and sunrise at 7.00 – light had come, spreading everywhere. Grey light! I leave for the office through the grey light. It’s all downhill. I take the bike into the office. It smells of oil. It’s early – before 8.00, and the shops are still closed. Nothing for it. Yes, that was the morning. And lunchtime? And the afternoon? The earth was turning in the light, but no one can see the sun. There is no sun. The sun has been scratched out. Instead, grey light, the whole day: grey. And cold, with cold wind, a little rain.

Out of the office to the streets. I was ill for 10 days, but now I’m better. Ill and too tired to make it to the bottom of the shopping street, but now it’s an easy trip. Concrete. The same shops. Go and get a salad, and a sandwich for later, because it will be closed later. Get a paper, even though you dislike papers. There’ll be empty hours to fill, you can count on that. Empty time, you know that. Today – how will you get through it? It’s easy enough. You are carried through it, after all. Borne – that’s what happens with time. It carries you, you don’t have to do anything. Do nothing then. But you want to know time is passing. You want to read to know time is passing. The papers. The net. You want to gauge and callibrate time. To measure it.

But you’ve already been measured by time. Measured and found wanting. You missed the deadline, didn’t you? You missed it – you were too busy, and it slipped past, didn’t it? You missed it, missed the appointment. The day is extra-time. Before the final reckoning. Before the shootout. The sun sets at 6.00. Sunday in the office. 3 more hours, and I will be done. 3 hours – and I was done. Triumph – I finished! It was all done! Too late, but all done! I came home. Banana beer in the fridge – whose idea was that? Tescos brought it, but why did I order it? A banana beer in my glass – horrible, really. And the TV on silent. And then a drama – you know it’s a drama, because no one speaks as people speak. Full of actors you’ve known for years. A drama, dealing with Big Themes.

So I turn on the computer. I type the words, ‘Today. What happened, today?’ No better words than those. Words to which any words could link themselves. Gregarious words, which seem to call for more words. But they are perfect as they are. Perfect, even as no other words have come, not yet. Suspended – words in which the day, today, seems to infinitise itself. What returns is eternity. What comes back is the whole of time. The same day is turning. But the deadline has passed. The deadline has receded and carried it with me. So who am I that outlived myself? Who am I that lives in the day which has outlived itself?

How tired are you? Too tired to write? Never too tired for that, but too tired still to complete something by way of writing. How tired? Write, yes, but you will not complete what you write, and that is it, isn’t it: incompletion, the rendering incomplete of the complete, unfinishing the finished.

You’d like to bring it to term, wouldn’t you, to finish, to complete a work, to round it off, to achieve by writing something finished and complete? Curse of tiredness, curse of the non-event: nothing can be finished, not here. Nothing will be finished, and you will discover nothing new. Rewriting of writing, the wearing away of writing, every day the same, the non-completion of the same. Or is that what it is, the same: non-completion, non-event, the ruination that asks anew to botch success?

Accompany it, the day, as it comes to ruination. Be with it, the day, as it wears away the day. Today: the return of the nothing-will-happen. Today: the wearing away of the day, of every day.

Today – the day has failed, it’s all over, nothing can begin. Today – over at once, botched, you’ll do nothing today. Did you think to make some advance here, to invent some new way of writing, some new way of saying the same? Did you think to make a success of failure, to find hope in recording the botched, in writing, in  a new way: the day is botched, and nothing can begin? To make a beginning of non-beginning, to lodge yourself in an event which will not come to term?

Botched – the day is ruined. No: the day is ruin; today is the ruin of all days, today is the ruination of all days, their coming apart, their failing. Today I will fail – but today you have always failed; this day is always the last day and the very last. The last day – but no new day is coming. No new day announces itself. Fail then. Your day is ruined. Fail again, fail as you have always failed. But succeed as you redouble this failure in writing. Succeed as you record what is botched, what cannot come to term.

Begin with the yard, end with the yard. Nothing to write? Write about the yard, open the curtains, there it is: the yard, as disappointing as ever, as mediocre as ever, but still there, still the yard enclosed by three walls and the back of the flat – still there, with the white sky above it and the wheelie bins in it, there with the rotting plants and the grime on the concrete and the algae on the concrete.

Write about the yard. Write about what is absolute about this yard, which sets it apart from other yards. The yard: nothing happens here. It’s the same, always the same. The same yard, the same enclosed space where nothing happens. Doubling that nothing is happening I carry in my heart, that nothing happens that is my hollowness. What has my life amounted to? Nothing. Where is it going? Nowhere. Nothing in particular, that’s what I call the yard. Nowhere in particular. Space enclosed by three walls and the back of the flat below (mine) and the flat above (the students’).

Nothing happens here. No one goes out in the yard, except to take the bin into the street. No one sits on the bench in the yard. Occasionally, cigarette butts are flicked from upstairs onto the surface of the yard, but that’s all. Once a workman came over the wall of the yard via his ladder. Up from the back street and then down into the yard. He was here to fix the pipe, upstairs’s pipe, which was leaking into my kitchen. Soil water soaking through the walls of my kitchen, mould up and down the wall, disgusting. And still the wound where he pulled the pipe from the wall, that workman. 

Sometimes a magpie in the yard pecking at the binbags when the bin lid is up. Otherwise nothing. Once or twice a blackbird poking around the drain. Looking for what? Only slugs here, slugs who find their way into the kitchen how I cannot discover. Looking for what? There’s nothing here. That’s why I’ve only seen them twice, the blackbirds, or is it a single blackbird that has visited twice. I keep the bin lid closed now, so no magpies. Blue slug pellets along the edge of the kitchen door. No slugs have come in recently, but I can’t see any dried up slug bodies by the door, either. Perhaps they turned back because of the slug pellets.

Nothing happens in the yard. Nothing is happening there. Vacancy within me where nothing happens. Event endured by no one: within me. Event, opening, where no one is present. What’s happened? Nothing. What is happening? Nothing in particular. Returning, that nothing in particular. Coming back, wearing out time. Returning – the non-happening that divides time from itself. An event? Rather a non-event. What does not happen, and keeps not happening.

It never began; nothing began here, nothing will end here, there’s nothing to end. The non-event cannot be brought to term. Nothing happened, nothing is happening, just the return of this nothing is happening. What happens? Nothing. What is happening? Nothing. The yard, open between three walls and the back of the house to nothing in particular. It’s my soul, I tell myself, that opening to what does not happen, to the non-actual. My soul, which is the return of the nothing-is-happening.

Today you are in idiot, says the day, and tomorrow you will also be an idiot. Today: idiocy and tomorrow, more idiocy. You are the yard, says the day, open and blank. Nothing is happening, says the day. Lie down, says the day, give up. We’re all disgusted with you, says the day, and above all, you should be disgusted with yourself. Lie down, says the day, and be ill. Admit it: you’re ill. Everyone’s ill, but you are iller than everyone. Ill. Lie down and be ill, says the day, I’ve won, you’ve lost, you’re finished and I’ve just begun as I’ve always just begun.

Between three walls and the back of the house that has been divided into two flats, one above and one below there is the yard. Nothing happens there. Everything is finished there. Every morning, the day dawns above the yard, the day comes, but nothing happens. The day highlights only the nothing is happening. The plants are dying, the concrete is streaked with green, nothing is happening, nothing is reducing everything to itself, to the same level. Mediocrity and disappointment, that’s what is shown by the way. Detritus: a brick, some rocks, some dying plants, the wheelie bin: nothing in particular.

What day is this? The first day, the supernumerary day. The page that has dropped out of the calender. What day is it?

Dawn, the head of the day. Why get up early? To catch the day’s arrival – to be there as it comes to itself. You will have at least seen it appear, you for whom later the day will come apart. But isn’t that also the day: dispersal, the stagnancy of time? Is that what is dawning today, in the return of the first day, not the beginning, now, but the day as interruption – the first day as the last day, as the coming apart of days?

‘When will you come?’ – ‘On the last day, the very last’. – ‘When will you come?’ – ‘When you have exhausted waiting, when no one waits for me’.

‘How long have you been unemployed?’ – ‘I’m not unemployed’. – ‘How long have you been unemployed?’ – ‘All my life. Today and tomorrow. – ‘What have you done with your life?’ – ‘I’ve got a job, a flat’. ‘What have you done with your life?’ – ‘Nothing. Nothing at all’.

Today, today – why does these words seem to toll like great bells? Today – the imperative. Today you must do something. Today, it must happen. And yet my today is only the nudity of the call. It says: you must act, you who know nothing of action. Urgency: act! Today is the day for …  But for what?

What is the question that is also a tearing apart? The question which dissolves the answers it seeks, and perpetuates only its answerless opening? The question – live in its space, its call. Live in its scepticism, in the ‘perhaps’ it inserts before every statement. Live in the perhaps, live and die –

Between its walls, you will have lived your life. The half-painted wall along the back, with two unopenable doors, then the diagonal brick walls which come down from the roofs – you can’t see over the fence. Absolute privacy here. That is a word for the yard: absolute. It relates to nothing but itself; all possibilities are contained here. How large is the yard? 20 foot by 12 foot of concrete, the back of the yard much higher than the front. It comes to a kind of wall behind which rainwater used to collect in a small lake.

When he came, dad drilled through the wall and inserted a plastic pipe so the water could drain. That’s what it does now, once you clear away the vegetation that accumulates at the top of the pipe. The water comes out of the pipe and into the kitchen drain. There are plants, too – ill looking, stripped of leaves on lower branches. I should’ve put some stones at the bottom of their pots, says a gardening friend. They need better drainage. No doubt. And for a long time, the upstairs drain ran out into the rainwater, and the concrete was covered in foamy washing up water. Now it is fixed. Now the concrete can be drained. Now it faces the sky, its grey-green surface facing upwards. Smooth stones from the beach on its surface. A brick. One of the bins – where is the other? On the other side of the back wall, out there in the street.

The yard. We’re never out there, my neighbours and I. Sometimes I’ll find cigarette butts flicked there from upstairs. And there is white kitchen towel I use to pick slugs from my wall and then throw them of the door. Mediocre sight! This is the yard of those who have not settled in life. Yard of the transitory, but of those nonetheless whose lives are kept within the walls of the yard. This morning, though it is still early, it is as if I’ve already lived and died in this yard. It’s over – everything’s finished. There’s no tomorrow, only the return of the day. Nothing in particular, that’s what this yard is called. The same nothing which returns each day. The nothing  in particular which reveals itself in the morning, bare, held up to the sky for the sky to inspect.

All of the world is like this, I tell myself. This is what the world is like in all its quarters. It ends here, I tell myself; it begins and ends here. Why leave it? Why leave this room which faces the yard, in which I sit at the same level as the back of the yard, for work and for the office? Everything that can happen will happen here. Everything will happen; the sky will brighten and then the sky will darken. For that is all that can happen – the day returns and then the day disappears. Nothing happens, nothing changes but that. What mediocrity! But this is an absolute mediocrity, it is the law of the world, of the world’s appearing. What day is it? Every day. Who am I? Anyone, everyone who passes beneath the day.

The day: white sky, light falls evenly; leafless branches, the white garage door. How ugly, the two wheelie bins, numbers painted on their sides! And why is the concrete floor on the yard always wet? All that fails to happen, happens now; the day triumphs in its blank enormity.

Then I see it: the yard is like those Roman temples to the sun and moon that were left open to the sky. And isn’t this writing, too, an offering to the sky, a way, for a moment, to hold itself back, to retrieve my measure so I can give to it as I have been given to? But then I know that my writing is a ruined temple and that it is the day that has come here to write of itself; the day that shimmers across a writing that is voided of content.

As supplicant, I would like to offer the garage door in sacrifice. I write, garage door – but the words do not reach what they name. How is it that sense suspends itself?

Brahma to Vishnu: ‘Without a sacrifice, nothing can received. To create a new world, what shall I sacrifice?’ Vishnu: ‘sacrifice me’. – ‘What shall I use as the sacrificial knife, the sacrificial altar and the sacrificial post?’ – ‘Use me’. – ‘Where do I find the sacred fire and the sacred chants?’ – ‘In me’. – ‘Who shall be the presiding deity?’ – ‘It will be me. I will also be the offering and the reward’.

So with the day, which is both sacrifice and supplicant. So the day that asks for writing to sacrifice writing. New day, when will you reach me? Sacrifice, when will you happen? I write, The leafless branches, the garage door; the two wheelie bins, the concrete floor, but it’s no good; they mean nothing. Who am I to think I can use language? The day is part of these words; it shimmers across them. It has already happened, event, non-event, in the blandness of the sky, in the blankness of writing.

7.30: dawn is coming. Purple light; the outline of the pipe that runs along the kitchen’s edge, the white wooden door to the road; the wheelie bin. Purple and black and white: those are the colours of this threshold. This morning – is it morning? – I feel as though I have kept vigil all night; that I have seen to it that the body of the departed was watched over. I watched; I was vigilant – but who was it that died?

I kept vigil over my own death; I was awake aside the corpse I am. You should not die alone and no one should be alone in their death. Of course, it is in the memories of others that you will live – your friends, your sisters and brothers give you a kind of life. As long as you remember, you will remain in limbo; neither in this world or the next. When will they release you into forgetting? When they, too, are forgotten. But when will that day come?

Last night, this night, which is becoming morning, I outlived myself. Upstairs I can hear my neighbours passing from one room to another. Water drips from their bathroom into mine: there are others around who are alive. But last night, was I alive? Who was I, who watched over my own death? Who was I, companion to the one who died?

Ulysses passes among the shades, but where do I pass? Alongside myself; among myself – but that is not right either. The body is a stone withdrawn into itself. The body has turned aside from the world; its attention is turned to its heart. That is sleep: the body is turned to the heart and the heart expands to become the whole night. And you who watch over your body? You, awoken, who watch over your own sleep?

I still remember how the night was altered. I remember it: altered night, hell spread across the world. When Sankara speaks of the witness it is by first evoking the self that sleeps. Who is the locus of deep sleep he asks – and then we are told to imagine a sleep deeper than sleep. Witness, vigilant one, who are you that withdraws from me now, at the shore of morning?

Light in the bathroom of the house opposite; the sky is light blue, and the colours of the world reveal themselves. It is 8.00 AM; two hands wrote this post. As night crossed into morning, so was there a crossing from death to life. The body has awoken; its attention is drawn into the world. The companion withdraws; no one is required to keep vigil.

Yesterday I had great plans to write here; what happened to them, those plans? Coming back up on the train, great plans – I would write this, and then that, and writing would be freedom, the free act I would have waited for all the time I’ve been away; but today? Perhaps it is that I had too much coffee yesterday. Too much coffee on the train coming up. Perhaps it is because I barely slept the night before last, and there is also the jet lag -. Or was it that yesterday I was borne too strongly on the wind of a strong book – that divine afflatus, not mine, that would allow me the reader to dream that I could become the strong writer.

But isn’t there a great deal to write? Haven’t I had experiences enough to narrate? It should be no effort at all, to write. No effort: make a beginning and then narration would bear me from one experience to another; I would be able to write and even experience the benediction of writing – the saying that, regardless of what is said, is writing’s beatitude, the gift it gives of itself and from itself like the emanation of the good in Plotinus. That’s what I would experience, spreading the page on which I would write open like the new year, and allowing that newness to bear what I wrote.

I am back at the flat after a couple of weeks away. Back, and the water drips through the bathroom ceiling from the shower upstairs. Back, and the same mediocre view through the window: the sewage is gone from the back yard, that is true, but there is still the soaked concrete, still the walls with flakes of paint missing. Mediocrity: it is dawn, but dawn comes late in winter. I should buy some paint and fill in the long scar left when they pulled the pipe away from the world – the pipe that had leaked dirty water into the walls of my kitchen and even into the kitchen itself, until blackened water ran along the tiled wall. They pulled it away, but there is still the long blackened scar, still the evidence of the damage done.

Out of the window: clothespegs on the washing line, an oval rock from the beach on the concrete. The backs of the flats opposite and above them the trees. This is what I see in the dawn. This is how the dawn is no new beginning, and the new year brings the return of the old, untransfigured and obdurate. Isn’t the yard the place where the beginning fails to begin? Isn’t the concrete yard the failure of the beginning and the failure of any beginning? Everything that begins also ends here. The end is here, where there should be beginning.

Of what could I have written that would not have ended here, where time does not advance and space is voided of itself? What saying could be borne by writing that would have spoken by way of the concrete that is saturated with rain water? Nothing begins here; everything that begins fails again. What would a narrative be that did not begin and end with concrete?

You would imagine, wouldn’t you, that to write of the yard would be merely a clearing of the throat, only the step into writing, writing’s occasion? You’d imagine, then, that the occasion of writing would then be absorbed by writing and lifted into it, as though the contingent would become necessary and mediocrity redeemed. But what if writing’s occasion becomes itself the saying of writing – a way in which writing speaks of itself, as if the concrete yard is an allegory of what leaves itself behind even as writing seeks to leap beyond the circumstances of its birth?

Concrete: mediocre substance, beginningless and endless. Concrete that closes the earth to the sky – crust across the dreaming earth that would answer the dreaming sky. Nothing begins here; there are no dreams. Nothing begins – there is nothing that can lift itself from what cannot begin. Over the last fortnight, I’ve travelled, I’ve read – I was overwhelmed by experience. So many thoughts! Marvellous conversations! So much drama! But today? Today – this perpetual first day on which writing begins only to fail to begin I know that what I have learnt is already covered by concrete. Today, the day did not begin. Today, writing did not release itself from itself.

Have I failed? Has writing failed? Or does saying let speak by disengaging the beginning from itself. Bataille will call himself the man of unemployed negativity. What will he do, he asks, with his dissatisfaction – what can he make, what can he affirm? He wants to know whether his unemployment is significant – what does it mean and what can it mean today, when everything is finished? Or is unemployment the experience of the endlessness of finishing, of the endlessness that voids time from within?

I cannot begin; I cannot advance. By this non-step does writing succeed in its failure. It’s true, I’ve failed and failed by writing. It’s true I’ve fallen behind the said. But by this lagging behind, by this division of writing, doesn’t writing let speak the saying that it bears by way of what it cannot achieve? A great deal has happened; I travelled, I read, I conversed. But today I know these adventures are only another way of living what does not begin.

I should have the strength of the morning, but I have no strength; where is the power to write, for I would like to write – where is it, the power that makes the incidents of my life, everything that has happened, only the fuel from which writing will burn? Until writing consumes everything but itself, solitary star. Yes, that’s what the morning should be for: the ardency of the star, the light absolute. And when it is impossible? When it’s impossible to write in the dream of the fire that would reach me from the other side of writing?

The drains have been unblocked; the yard is no longer filled with sewage. Two green wheelie bins and plants rotting because they have not been propped on bricks above the sludge; the long scar in the wall where the pipe was pulled away; the wall from which patches of paint have fallen: mediocrity, that’s what I see. The mediocre world, the backs of the houses opposite, and above them trees without leaves. The cold has returned, but the wet surface of the yard is not streaked with frost as it was a couple of days ago.

How stubborn and obdurate the world this morning! The yard: algae-covered stones, a couple of bricks, the rotting plants: everything that will not allow itself to be taken up in writing. The fire will not come; the world is a damp bonfire that will not ignite. What does it matter? This morning, the world won, not writing. Defeat is to be pressed up against those same things as would be dissolved by writing.

Isn’t that the struggle: to clear a space to live by way of writing? To clear a living space, a breathing space by a writing which folds the world back upon itself? But if it is freedom that is sought, it is not mine. It arrives, freedom, it is the event of that folding-back; it is the day no longer lived as necessity. Receive it again, the day, the mediocrity of the day. Receive it by way of writing and let it pass thus the test of the eternal return. It is the same returning; it is not the same. The same returns – and by returning it is not the same.

And if you cannot write? Receive nothing. Receive the same barren nothing that opens itself in the morning.