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Begin to write – really write – and you can’t stop. Begin – but to write what? Perhaps only to evoke the taste of madeleine on your tongue that first awoke your desire to write. But does that taste exist anymore outside the writing itself? Does it stand above writing in some vital way, as a mountain emerges rocky and snow-capped from the jungle?

The time before I wrote, you could say. The time before I disappeared into writing. Dim memory, but a memory now owed to writing; the mountain top the jungle has enclosed. Look back and you see a sea of words through which there runs a path of churning water – your story, the story you want to tell. But a story that is only a perturbation of the surface of the sea; a path of glistening light that will come to disappear. A path that you’re not sure is even a path, so transient is its appearance -light rocking on the waves.

Isn’t as if you’d written nothing before? As if, like Honda at the end of The Sea of Fertility, nothing that you remembered ever happened. A dry sea, a sea of dust on the surface of the moon – the story you told was nothing but that. And now it’s blowing away, one particle after another. Were you ever here? Did the events of which you wanted to write ever happen? The story wanted you; telling wanted you; but only to disturb the surface of language. Only to let a disturbance pass across the waves like a rumour

And then I think this kind of book comes after something, or before – that it is the dispersing of the path that a ship runs behind it in the water. The dispersal of literature, of everything that literature has been, of all ‘universal classics.’ In some way, writing has attained itself through literature. Has come to itself, but blindly and unknowing, forgetting everything and dispersing it all like the sower of Van Gogh’s great paintings.

All that was told will be untold, and the groove literature left in language will be smoothed over. Language will again be the shining sea across which no path passes. And now I think of Zarathustra’s last men, who have discovered happiness and blink. And of the way they reappear in Kojeve and Fukuyama: last men, capable of everything and of nothing in particular. Whose life is the life of termites and not human beings …

The deeds of the world are slowly disappearing. The suburbs will spread everywhere, and all writing henceforward will concern the ordinary, the everyday. There will be nothing of which to write but that. And language, meanwhile, will turn over like a sleeper. And all of literature will have been part of its dream. And everything we’ve done, likewise. And when it awakens, it will face us without a face and look at us with no eyes and speak in long words that will be our words unravelled.

The young Mishima felt words falling within him; he wrote. At sixteen, he was admitted into an elite literary club. His friend Kawabata – who eviscerated himself only a few months after Mishima (though he was Mishima’s senior, his advisor, and, unlike him, a Nobel laureate) – knew that such a writer only appeared every two hundred years.

No doubt – but Mishima also felt those falling words a sickness and sought to hone his body in the sun in recompense. No doubt he was right to fear those falling words, that made themselves, with him, into stories, essays, plays of all kinds, in but a single draft, knowing that as they were given to him, they were also turned away.

Opaque pebbles. Markers on what gameboard? He didn’t understand. They played him. They fell, indifferently, into the abyss they’d opened in his heart. No stalagmite in him could reach up to touch the source of their instreaming. For a long time, he bent his neck and words fell hard like rain across him. Then he raised his face, his eyes, and looked up through the words. High above, at the cave’s summit, the sun. And it was the sun that he would reach to him.

I think it was the dream of his death that allowed his words to flash. Death, that would join him to a sun above writing. A dream, for certain. There is no silence, only murmuring. Pythagoras was right: the universe is noisy. The planets turn in their gyres and a great roaring is heard. It is that we must stop hearing to hear. To speak with silence, and not words, if only to hear what will not be silenced.

What did Mishima hear as he died in the characters he let die by evisceration? The roaring of the sun, heard from within the sun. What did he see? Light, as it’s seen within the source of light. He knew what would come to befall him. It was the object of his erotic fantasies, and he staged his death over and again in his stories. He rehearsed for death – but death had already reached him. He wanted to silence the words, to make his body all surface without depth. There would be no dark, interior space within which words would fall, only brightness, as rain falls flashing in the sun.

But what does this mean? That it is my some kind of break that writing might be allowed to echo the ceaseless streaming of language. Some break, some block, as though there had to be a rack upon which the author is stretched. White sheets of agony – yes. But imagine an agony that is owned by no one and a rack upon which no one is stretched. Is it the body of the night that is pulled apart? Is it light that is torn into jagged flecks? Now I imagine it is all of language that turns there like a Chinese dragon. Turns, and is turned against us. Language seeks to attain itself. Molten language, words and sentences still, but running. Isn’t that what flashes in Mishima’s words?

What are their characters? Wicker men and women to be sacrificed. What are their stories? Offerings to be burned. What unfolds in the time of their narratives? The setting fire of time; the sacrifice that must always happen again.

How can we speak, when speech is worn down in our mouths? What words are ours, we who lack even an experience of ourselves? Besides, we have nothing to say – what is there to say, for us? – of what can we speak when we live outside time, and even our pasts do not sink into history?

Nothing has happened to us – or if it has happened, it is already forgotten. Or is it that everything has happened, that we’ve exhausted time, and live on in some afterworld? Is this paradise? Is it hell? But we are being neither exalted nor punished, and if the Messiah appeared amongst our number, we would not know him.

For in truth, we do not know that we are here, or that each of us is the one he is, or the one she is. We are all the same; our faces do not matter. Each the same, the one then the other, we form no group, no society. There may be many of us, or few: we do not know. There are no friendships – associations, perhaps, and even a kind of dim recognition (you were beside me earlier; I remember your voice – but not what you said), but nothing else. There are no relationships between us, no kith, no kin: we have worn them out, as we have worn out everything.

Still, we are not alone. We can say, ‘we’: this is a consolation. There is that: our sense of collectivity. The third person plural: we have that; it is ours: but is it ours? It is less firm than the first person, which we never use. Who would dare speak in their own name? To speak of me is only to speak of you; we are all in each other’s places, and who we are, singly, individually, does not matter. I am you – and you: aren’t you also where I am? Who of us has ever minded being no one in particular?

We are not sad. We are placid, simple; ours is a sweet dullness; I think we are smiling, I think we always smile. And sometimes we speak, just to try out speech, just to hear our voices. We could say anything – everything; there’s everything to be said, but without history, without a past – without even a present, let alone a future, there is nothing to relate.

Nothing has happened to us – that, or everything; it does not matter. Nothing – everything: is it that we live where nothing becomes everything, and the other way round. Nothing – everything: that is our threshold, the turning point of the world. We do not rest, but nor are still. We are not even silent, though our murmuring is hardly a sound, and rarely forms itself into a word.

Days pass, we know that. And nights. The passing of the day, the passing of night: soon forgotten. But what is there to remember? Who knows how many days, how many nights there have been? There are no chroniclers amongst us. No prophets. We do not detain time, but let it turn in place.

Time! We only know the incessant, the interminable. What need have we for this instant, or for that? In truth, there is only the return – we live for it – by which what fails to happen happens again. Or is it that we fail it, the event, by being too unprepared, too indifferent? Perhaps it is tired of waiting for us to act, or is our tiredness, our placidity, a sign of its approach?

There are no philosophers amongst us; we do not think, unless thinking is what happens in that same return, which breaks over us each time like the first day. Sweet evasion: is there a kind of thinking that does not ask for a thinker? An evasive thought that is evasion in each of us, our failure to be ourselves? We have always failed; we do not mind. But what would it mean to succeed?

Everything has happened – no doubt. Nothing has happened – without doubt. History has ended, having never begun. And what is time but its disjunctive return, the tearing of each instant from itself, that substitutes for the event the incessance of what does not happen. Do we live? I would say we are alive, but I would also say we are unable to be, just as we are unable not to be. We have no part in duration; time is what we do not endure. Or it is that same non-endurance; it is the unlivable, it is what life becomes when it is absolutely indifferent to itself.

Are we alive? We are not here, I would like to insist on that. Not here – or each of us lives in another’s place. I speak for all of us, and for none of us. No one is speaking in each of us and for all of us. No one speaks; everything that is said is superfluous. Speak to us, and you will here superfluity eroding every word we say.

That is why we smile. We can do nothing; we do not suffer, none of us is sad; we have no words of our own. Were we born too early or too late? I do not know if we are old or young. Did we resign ourselves, long ago, to the incessant, or were we born of that same incessance, as though we were its way of knowing itself? I am not sure, and besides, there is no one here to know.

Unless that ‘no one’ is the locus of another knowledge, and incessance knows itself in our place as each is substituted for another. Still, nothing is kept; knowledge does not settle into itself. Sometimes I think we stand at the beginning of everything, sometimes, at the end. How is it that everything seems possible and impossible, both at once?

We never were: I would like to say that. And we never will be. And in this divided instant, the return of the disjunction of time: we are not here, either. We do not suffer from time; in truth, we do not occupy it, and our vacancy is our liberation. But for what are we free? There is nothing we want; desire is alien to us, or it belongs to no one.

Freedom: sometimes I imagine it as a wind that tousles our hair. But does it know that freedom, for us, is only the wind that bows the heads of corn: it happens, yes, but it does not concern us. Freedom: we can move, there are degrees of movement; each of us, from time to time, stands, or moves about, or lies down: we are not automatons. But it matters not to us, that standing up, that moving about. There is no need for rest where there is no need for movement. Do we live at the end or at the beginning?

But I have said nothing at all. Or by writing, I have tried to tie the incessant to a story. We are outside all stories as we live untouched by time. What has happened? What has ever happened? Our chance is that words sink back into the page, saying nothing. Or that words, lightening themselves, form and disperse like great clouds.

No one suffers here. Time is kind to us. Our lives are sweet and placid. We are calm and languid. There are no words invented that could let us speak. We cannot be apprehended by thought. There is thinking – we know that (but what do we know?). We are with you when the wind from the impossible tousles your hair. With you – but that is not the expression. Unless I could write, with you and without you, or speak of what is outside, always outside, even as it is also our separate bodies.

Persistence without point. Sweet monotony. We interest no one, not even ourselves. We have withdrawn, and first of all from ourselves. Are we asleep? Awake? I do not know if we dream. We are fragments – but of what? From what have we been broken?

Hamsun’s hunger artist dreams of writing a three volume work that would be greater philosophical monument than Kant’s Critiques, but who can finish nothing but articles that the newspaper editor turns down. Ragged, emaciated, he refuses the loan the editor would offer him, and when a tramp, pitying him, refuses his charity, he becomes angry, just as he is angry at all those whom he passes in Kristiania, imagining that they were all recipients of his own charity. He is a man of potential who has achieved nothing so far; but he also lives from the sense that his achievements are already real; that this writer without works (but does that make him a writer?) is in awe of what he might be.

In his dreams, he is already an author, having substantialised himself as the author of mighty works, having already revealed that greatness as yet unknown to those who pass him in the street. One day, it will all have made sense; one day, his hunger and poverty will have been revealed as the royal road that led to his triumph; from the heights of his authorship, he will survey the difficult path that led him towards where he is now, and the still greater peaks before him rising in the distance.

But isn’t there a sense, too, that he will never seize upon the work of which he dreams; that they will flee ahead of him, known only to him in its fleeing, leading him on what is never quite a quest? Perhaps this is why he willfully denies himself the opportunities offered him. He knows that it remains what it is only as it flees – that the unfinishable and incompletable work rises far higher that the peaks across which he might imagine himself crossing. And his life will never be retrospectively justified; it must remain as it is: a failure.

But then, too, in its jerks and hesitancies, this would-be writer’s soul is still made of its relation to the work, to the impossible dream of a finished book? It is as if all his inadequacy has been pulled along in a single direction; that he is at least orientated towards what he lacks, as it is has taken the form of the book which would retrospectively make sense to others of everything he had suffered.

One day I will show you: this is what the adolescent says. One day – when I’m truly an adult – or, in this case of this hunger artist, an author. And then the plan will have been revealed; then the biographers will come swarming and the scholars will pore over my notebooks. One day: but only when I die; only when I die among those who must now admit that they knew nothing of what I was. This will be my charity, which is always in retrospect: mine was always the condition of one who lived ahead of his times.

And doesn’t he reveal, Hamsun’s narrator, the condition of the modern writer, who writes without criteria and even without authority? Who has emerged from the shelter of the church and the state, who runs up anew against the impossibility of writing? Which is only to say, that he can now confront writing in its impossibility, measured against the work to which it might give body?

But the work will not be made flesh; the sought after Word will not be spoken. What does this new kind of martyrdom witness? A dying for nothing – nothing, pure nihilism. But perhaps also another experience of the notion, and of nihilism. For by incarnating the experience of the impossibility of writing, of finding a place to begin the work, Hamsun lets us experience writing as impossibility – as a kind of test, a trial.

Why does the narrator starve? Because he cannot do otherwise; because he cannot find anything he wants to eat: so Kafka’s hunger artist. Hamsun’s narrator bites down on the stone he keeps in his mouth to satiate hunger. Bites down – such is his delusion. And likewise the narrative bites down upon another imaginary stone that would make substance where there can be none; that lets a book appear only where the work is not.

Hamsun finishes his book, even as the narrator does not finish his. He finishes the book – but what of the relation to the impossible work that takes his narrator as its subject? Impossible. And this is the comedy of Hunger. This is why its narrator is a self-deluding fool, biting down on what can give him no satiety. Upon what has Hamsun bitten?

To a correspondent he says, Hunger ‘is not a novel about marriages and coutnry picnics and dances up at the big house. I cannot go along with that kind of thing. What interests me is the infinite susceptibility of my soul, what little I have of it, the strange and peculiar life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a starving body.’ (via)

Hamsun’s narrative incarnates a new kind of mortification. A discipline that attempts to give itself rules. Strange bloom of a narrative that tells only of the impossibility of satiation. How to give flesh to the work? By showing what it is not, and that it runs ahead of everything. By giving flesh to this nothing, to the starvation that comes forward in our place when writing no longer has a model. 

Can the modern writer appear to be anything but stubborn, perverse and self-deluding? Can he fail to swell with an unearned pride? Sometimes his task will appear great, sometimes inconsequential. Sometimes he would like to turn back to the sunlight of the world. How foolish he was to sequester himself! How idiotic to turn from all human nourishment! But then he knows, too, that he has no choice: that, like Kafka’s hunger artist, he could find nothing to eat.

His stubbornness is all he has, and so he becomes proud of that. Tenacity, but without project: so he becomes proud of that, too. Discipline, but with nothing to which to devote itself: more pride. What do the others around him know? What have they sought for? What have they achieved. He closes his eyes. A great mountain range rises before him. One day he will ascend. One day, he will look back and down at them all, and they will look up at him, without comprehending. He lives on the mountain peaks, and they far below in the valleys.

Or is that he lives below everyone, far below? Is it that he is incapable of the simplest utterance, that he lives far below the surface of life, deprived of all that would make life simple. They put a panther in place of the hunger artist. The sister stretches her young body when the insect dies in Metamorphosis. Life is simple – surely that. Life is simple, for anyone but him.

The modern writer has a stone in his mouth. A stone that will give him no nourishment when he bites. But he bites. 

Pessoa’s heteronym, Alvaro Coehlo de Athayde, the 20th Baron of Tieve takes his life, leaving a manuscript in a desk drawer.

These pages are not my confession; they’re my definition. And I feel, as I began to write it, that I can write with some semblance of truth.

And who is the Baron more than what is defined, enacted by the text Pessoa has him write? A text that is, with respect to the Baron, posthumous – the remnant of that literary ambition burned up when he threw his other fragmentary manuscripts onto the fire.

In the past the loss of my manuscripts – of my life’s fragmentary but carefully wrought oeuvre – would have driven me mad, but now I viewed the prospect as a casual incident of my fate, not as a fatal blow that would annihilate my personality by annihilating its manifestations.

But the he still needs, does he not, the manifestation of The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive, as Pessoa subtitles it …? Burning up literature, he is still dependent upon it – upon its remnants, upon what still attests to its demand.

To think that I considered this incoherent leap of half written scraps a literary work! To think, in this decisive moment, that I believed myself capable of organising all these pieces into a finished, visible whole!

So now the Baron throws it all into the fire. Honour and silence, he says, are left to him; this is what his reason confirms, this ‘millimetric’ thinker. A thinker who also says that it is by thinking that he remains like Buridan’s ass ‘at the mathematical midpoint between the water of emotion and the hay of action’; and that ‘temperament is a philosophy’. Then thinking cannot think past temperament; the Baron’s character is his fate; what remains is the Stoic amor fati, that acceptance of the order of the world as it measures out our destinies. Whence, I suppose, the title The Education of a Stoic Pessoa gives these pages.

Amor fati? Was it the Baron’s fate to burn his manuscripts and take his own life? Or was his suicide a fatal leap towards action, his last chance, his rebellion? Ah, The Impossibility of Producing Superior Art (another of Pessoa’s subtitles) …! but it is impossible only for one who prefers, he says, to suffer alone ‘without metaphysics or sociology’ what led Leopardi, de Vigny and de Quental – ‘three great pessimistic poets’ to make ‘universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes’. Perhaps it is only the Baron’s discretion, his sense of honour that leads him to the impossibility of realising his works and – short step – to suicide.

Richard Zenith, editor of the volume, quotes an excerpt from another text by a Pessoa heteronym, Bernardo Soares:

I weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them, they will be more touched by my weeping than by any perfection I might have achieved, since perfection would have kept me from weeping and, therefore, from writing. Perfection never materialises.

Soares weeps, but the Baron does not. No consolation for him in readers who were touched sufficiently to forget the imperfection of his work. And yet there’s this book, The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive … How are we supposed to read it? We are not to be touched. It is a monument to the absence of weeping, to the Baron’s honour. He saved us, he says in these pages, from an oeuvre born of a sublimated suffering.

Compare Soares, author of The Book of Disquiet happy with his tears and happy to write of his suffering. Soares who produced a manuscript far larger than that left by the Baron of Teive. Neither author produced a book that was published in Pessoa’s lifetime. And yet I wonder whether The Education of the Stoic was a way of short circuiting Soares’ sprawling The Book of Disquiet – of delimiting that impulse that led Pessoa to produce so many fragments. To die honourably, discretely; to die like an aristocrat: was this what Pessoa wanted in the Baron of Teive? As, meanwhile, the bookkeeper Soares, prolix and weeping survived in him, and The Book of Disquiet grew longer and less manageable still …

I have a fierce, stupid love for Jean Genet; it’s always been there, even as I’ve given his books away, or bought them again. But is it Genet I love, I ask myself, reading Sinthome’s post – is it really Genet who interests me? Or his work, his life, a kind of rorschach – blots of ink that give themselves to be interpreted in various ways?

Or perhaps it is more than a matter of interpetation, and I find myself wanting, without having the book to hand, to ask myself what fascinates about the superhero Rorschach in Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Of course he is not quite a superhero – fierce and strong, yes, but he has no real powers.

Once, we get to see his ruddy, ordinary face. Only once, perhaps (I haven’t read the book for many years) – and it is indignant, even embarrassing. We prefer the smooth surface, the mask with changing blots of ink, and the detective’s jacket. He is a man alone, only uncertainly allied to the other superheroes (but are they heroes? – only one of them, perhaps, and what was his name, his skin coloured blue like a Hindu divinity?), and I admit I’ve always like to read of such solitary men, alone just as Jean Genet was alone, never keeping a permanent address and carrying with him only a nightcase with five books – poetry by Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Villon … and a couple of changes of clothes. Genet who says there is only truth when he is alone, and is writing: only then – and not in the interviews where he is half a person, or too much of one.

Solitude – and then to become – who? But now remember that Genet stopped writing when there appeared Sartre’s huge book that read his work and life together: Genet was now anointed: he was a saint. But who had canonised him thus? The philosopher who drew out the juice of his work: Sartre the master-writer, Sartre the canoniser – how was he, Genet, to write now?

Compare, decades later, a book written on him by another philosopher, whose multicolumned form recalls Genet’s own essay on Rembrandt: was Genet allowed to live in Derrida’s vast, risky text with its priestholes? Ah but Genet had forgotten writing by that time (1974); he was moving round the world, allying himself with the Black Panthers and then the Palestinians; it would be another decade before he drew together the manuscript of The Prisoner of Love, whose author has, it is clear, attained insubstantiality, letting himself be drawn into a form – as birds into a flock, as fish into a shoal – only as he is called by a cause greater than him.

But the young Genet, confronted by Saint Genet was a different person. He stopped writing. He was written out, he suggests, because he’d escaped prison, once and for all. Hadn’t he been facing a life sentence? Wasn’t it Cocteau and others who made a case for him as the great writer of a generation? But Genet wasn’t fooled. He repudiated Cocteau, too. He turned away from Sartre.

Later, he would declare Giacometti the most admirable man he’d met, and Greece his favourite country; I forget why. Genet was always escaping, and escaping himself. The books lay behind him. Blocked 5 years, he did not mourn. He lay back and let there come to him those idea-germs from which his work would be born again. He travelled, with his night case. He reread Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, and Villon, although he knew every line. He fell in love a hundred times.

Yes, this is the Genet of my delirium, a little like my delirious Godard – the one whose work sets me, too, to dreaming. And is it of myself I dream? Or rather, the one I might have been, who, in my dream, was latent in the 20 year old who first read Genet, Saint Genet; who first saw Godard. And shouldn’t I mention Mishima, too, the patron saint of 20 year olds?

Solitude. Fold open the bureau in your university room, I tell myself. Read those books again. But what do you read, would-be escaper? What do you promise yourself, you whose later travels would end in farce? You’d never go anywhere, would you, or you’d already travelled with Genet as far as you would go?

In Greece, having run out of books, you bought with your remaining money a ticket to leave today, thus ending your bid to escape into another life. Is it Genet I love? His voice? Or the idea that it is possible to speak thus, that the Law might part and you might be given the right to speech?

You – solitary, you – alone. ‘Alone as Franz Kafka’: didn’t Kafka write that? But isn’t it also to solicit the Law that you would write, to seduce its attention even as you are told off – what bliss! – even as it seems forbidden to write as you would allow yourself to write.

As alone as Jean Genet, telling truth. Alone, but not with the writer of those first 5 novels. Genet after Saint Genet; Genet after Sartre – not writing, but, I imagine, whispering into his lovers’ ears. Genet moving, travelling with his night bag: escaper who, with The Thief’s Journal let his name tremble with the name of those blue, wild flowers that flower along the border and, in my dream, all borders.

He crossed then in literature, in the pages of a book, but now, in my dream, he crosses for real, as he trains Abdullah to walk the tight-rope, as he passes through that country where I chose to live and from which I returned after less than a week, the sun being too bright, the sky too darkly blue.

Jean Genet, Bowie’s Jean Genie, I am folding open my bureau table fifteen years ago and today, and there is the black and white framed picture by Ernst I cut out from a book. Escaper, it was called. Did I escape? Did you? In Morocco I see you turning in your bed. You will not write today. Nor tomorrow. Because you have Abdullah to train. Abdullah for whom you hold a training tightrope five inches above the ground.

I wanted to escape, and reading and writing. Leave them behind; be translated into another life. In Greece, by the busstop I finished A Boy’s Own Story. Eight hours passed; the bus was late, so late, and then wound up through the bay: what beauty! In the town where we stopped, an old woman filled my cupped hands with pomegranate seeds. It was Sunday; strangers were to be fed. Then, later, the bus came down on the other side of the mountains, to another bay. Where to sail next? Anywhere, everywhere but what was I to read? A volume of Mandelstam, and that was all. And after that? Life, apparently. Real living – but what was that?

In his essay on Giacometti, Genet remembers sitting opposite a dirty old man in a train compartment. He wants to read, to avoid conversation. The man is ugly and mean. And then? ‘His gaze crossed mine … I suddenly knew the painful feeling that any man was exactly ‘worth’ any other man. ‘Anyone at all’, I told myself, ‘can be loved beyond his ugliness, his stupidity, his meanness.’ And then, ‘Giacometti’s gaze saw that a long time ago, and he restores it to us.’

To see thus, to be seen thus. In that town, in that bay, I drank ouzo with another traveller, a civil servant who came to the islands once a year, for the whole summer. We drank together, my spirits lifted. Where would we go? But suddenly I wanted to be alone. Just then, I wanted solitude, and I left him behind somewhere on the ferry. We came to our destination the next morning. I thought: but this is not where I want to be, either. To travel, I had thought, was to be worn down like a stone in a river. No more edges, no distinctness, and we would all be alike, us travellers.

In an Athens garden, I read from Mandelstam. It was over, I knew that, as I travelled 6 hours early to the airport to wait for my flight. No escape, no adventure; I was too much myself, or only lost what I was when reading. To be a stone on a river floor, a stone among stones, worth no more than anyone else: how to be worn down by escape? How to live like anyone else, and everyone else? Wasn’t that the question I asked into Genet as I read, and to Godard as I watched? Wasn’t it the question Mishima drew from me (it was the opposite of being stung. The sting – that I did not know was there – was drawn out by my reading)?

I went home; I studied, I read nothing but philosophy for 10 years. 10 years blocked. 2 times 5 years without another kind of reading. Perhaps I had written a kind of Saint Genet. Perhaps I had cursed my reading, my writing. I was no longer alone; others whispered in my ear. Was this life, was I now alive? How was it there seemed no escape, without those texts that moved like ink-blots? Write then, draw the mask over your head. Read and let others be masked. How to give everything away and travel, too, but without leaving your room?

Derrida writes in Glas of the dredgers he can see at work along the Seine and of what is lost by them as they scoop. For my part, from my window, there is my yard, and the scars along the wall, and new plants in new pots. Back in my student hall there was a cat like a remnant, who lived for a time with us for no particular reason. One night I drew her into my room and she transformed that space as she wandered, tail up, sniffing, curious.

What is there around me that is not being renovated, completely transformed? What falls? The leak which rotted the joists between my flat and the flat above; the second leak beneath the kitchen floor which makes the wall still wet. Then the mildew that grows in the new cupboards, and the stains left by rusting metal tins.

Remnants, fragments, that should be remembered as they fall, like the rustbelts that are still found in our New Europe. The cat disappeared, taken home by one of the cleaners. The water company is coming out to look at the leak, the builders to mend the soaked-through ceiling. What remains?

I am on the side of the remnant, I tell myself; I see myself from there, on the other side of the glass. The long scars along the wall; the cat; the rotting joists, the gaze of Giacometti’s statues: each time, a remnant of the past, and as what remains as the past. What returns? what is being sought here? and what will you find, reader for whom this cannot be interesting, and which interests you only because of that?

There are those whose presence changes the space around them, whose presence is a kind of command, or that it bears of itself a kind of commandment: to think. And this by way of their gestures, the tone of their voice or the length of their silences, the way they look or do not look at you. By way of them – not as though they were not important, but that they are as traces, as signs of an experience that is at one with thought.

Blanchot remembers Bataille’s long silences when he spoke in public. Long, intense silences. And there was the seriousness of his tone, which others recalled. But he was not solemn – or rather, it was thought that was solemn – it was thinking that commanded of him a kind of solemnity. Bataille was a thinker; he thought, he struggled with thought. No, better: thought struggled with him, thought kept him; this was his seriousness – but a kind of lightness, too, for doesn’t Blanchot remember what he calls the play of thought that was at stake between them?

The play of thought: this does not make thought trivial. It lightens them, the heaviest thoughts, by letting them be spoken and shared. Spoken – or written. Didn’t Blanchot write of Bataille’s friendship for thought? A friendship which, moreover, meant Bataille had to do without friends? Bataille, in the years of Inner Experience and the other books of The Atheological Summa was indeed insolated; he felt abandoned by allies who once joined him in his communal experiments. They turned from him, he felt, even as he began to write a section of Guilty entitled Friendship.

Friendship – could this be the name of a relation to thought, to thinking? The name of a relation – and one, now, that lays claim, in some, to the whole of a life: to the same gestures, voice tones and silences, to a way of taking up space or not taking it up. This laying claim would be the presence of thought in the thinker: the way thought keeps a life, even as the thinker supposes that it is thought that must be kept safe.

Thinking of them again – not as friends, but as those who are friends of thought – what communicates itself to me is not the content of a thought – not this, or that idea, but the ‘that there is’ of thinking, and in another such as him, another such as her. Thought: in person. But there only as a multiplicity of gestures, of tones and silences, as a way of moving or keeping still.

Thought, then as choreography; thinking as what demands all of life – and more than the life of any individual. For isn’t it that ‘more’ that reveals itself in multiplicity? Isn’t it that the thinker lives more than the life of an individual – or rather, such individuality is only a way thought has of folding itself up? The thinker lives a life – any life in particular. The thinker’s life is any life, and all life – or it is the ‘more’ of that ‘all’, and thought is what gives itself differently, each time.

Think. No: be thought, be the keeper of thought. Let thought claim you, and down to the most intimate details of your life. The thinker never stops thinking. The body thinks – the whole body in its movements and its stillnesses. Thought is there – in person. Thought relates itself to itself by passing through the body of the thinker.

A kind of tranquility is said to come to those afflicted with total paralysis; they who can only move their eyes are claimed to lack the input from their paralysed body that would disturb them. If they weep, this is not because of their mute isolation (they can only move their eyelids), but because of the sweetness of their solitude.

‘I, too, dreamed of you’. A greeting, at the beginning of Autumn from one stream of writing to another. A greeting, but only as the autumn sun flashes across our backs. Is it my sun? yours? Who flashes a signal, and to whom?

The sun glitters along the water. Today and tomorrow are the same. But from one channel to another, flashing, autumn speaks of itself.

My Visitor does not have a high opinion of Jandek; I heard her wince just now from the kitchen, where she’s waiting for rye bread to rise in the oven. Early on in her visit, we had the Jandek conversation. It’s about microtones, I told her. A non-tempered scale. A guitar detuned from Western tonality. And a voice that, if it seems gloomy, is in fact stretched and supple and explores an idiom, a mood, rather like a raag. And the lyrics, too, are interesting, I said. Oblique – fragmentary: don’t they belong alongside – say, late Scott Walker?

That’s what I said, and then I put on the music and she looked – horrified. But in the spirit of generosity, as she bakes she said to put it on again – she wouldn’t notice. But I heard her wince in the kitchen. The CDs are lined up on the shelf, her copy of Clarissa on top of them. Clarissa trumps Jandek, she says.

‘What music would you normally put on when you come home from work?’, she asked just now. ‘You don’t have to ask’, I said, and especially today. ‘Put some on then. I won’t notice’. I put some on. She winced. ‘It’s the reptile brain’, says W. – ‘it knows there’s something deeply wrong with this music. It protests’. And he reminded me of our passed out friend, dead to the world and our entreaties. We threw things at him; he hardly stirred. And then – my idea – Jandek. We played it and then his arm rose into the air. He wasn’t conscious, but – his arm. It’s his reptile brain, said W. His reptile brain protesting.

For his part, W. admires Jandek. He plays the CDs, but he can’t be in the same room as them. I either go up, or down, he says. Up to the bedroom and study, or down to the kitchen. It’s involuntary, says W. It’s his reptile brain, he says.

Congratulations to my good friends for putting together the inaugural edition of Radical Musicology, a web based journal with a comments facility after each paper.

The Ship of Death

A dream, rather than an argument.

Malte looks back to the death of his grandfather, surrounded by family and servants at the family home, and laments the fact that we are, today, too insubstantial to die … But for Malte, who lived in the substantiality of the literary past – of the unity of a culture – it was still possible to write and to as though gather the whole of your life into that writing. Sincerity – is that the word?: I think sincerity was possible then, as it is not now. As if it was the substantiality of culture, its omnipresence, that made a literary sincerity possible.

It is by now a commonplace: Rilke, like Heidegger, supposes that we have lost death – our relation to death. And I think of D.H. Lawrence, building with his last poems a ship of death … Something has been lost. Ours is an age of mass death; death is everywhere – but nowhere, for no one dies in the first person. Who can rise to their death when death – the power to die – has fallen away from us? Death is nothing; to die is insignificance itself. But that means storytelling is dead too, says Benjamin. Flies circle an empty room until they die, but the next year, it is the same flies that circle, mortal, but immortal, every one the same.

The Simulacrum

But what of writing, the relation of writing? I wonder whether that, too, is not also lost. As though the power of expression were likewise taken from us. As if no one were strong enough to say a word. As if no one could speak deeply enough, or impassionedly enough. As though there were no authority to speak and no one who might become an author through writing. Or that authority had already been usurped – that the speaker, the writer is always a simulacrum.

Then the writer is no longer a membrane that quivers between the past and the present, or like the spread sail full of the collected wisdom of the past. Tradition does not rise behind us like a plateau. The past has broken from us in some crucial sense; ours is an age that does not know itself as adrift, that lives in the eternal present with the last world war (repository of all nostalgia) a cut off point between history and the boom that seems in our ignorance and amnesia to have lasted forever …

A Voice From Elsewhere

But perhaps there is another side to all of this. That authority speaks in another voice; that sincerity is alive in a new way. It has become impersonal. It has retreated from authority, from authenticity. That it has fled as though to the back of speech, not to the throat or the chest; it is not a matter of a throat-voice or a chest-voice, but of what is there nevertheless in all voices. Something weak, something not quite personal. Something upon which we cannot make good.

Signs circulate. The roundplay of signifiers. Is it to indicate another order altogether … or rather to attend to the fact that there are currents in this drifting, and vectors: that something is moving, communicating, from one to the other. That speech is not simply a matter of pouring your utterances into the great sea of signs which slop indifferently against a thousand shores.

There is too much communication, says Deleuze. How to break the circuit of speech? How to interrupt speech? Another, similar question: how to reveal that communication is already something; that there is a thickness to speech, and more than that, that speech is directed; that one of us speaks to another, or writes to one, whence the optimism of the most pessimistic book as it places faith in the possibility of speaking, telling.

Flies circling, every one the same. But how to experience the same, and the same of the same? How to experience the everyday, the ordinary? What doubles up that same everyday, that same ordinariness is not the uncanny, which remains bound to an outmoded dramatics, to the ghosts of M.R. James, to adepts at a seance …

Nor, too, the horror film. Romeo’s films offer themselves too readily to allegory. And the zombies are never ordinary enough. Imagine for a zombie to look exactly like us – in the same way as Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym says the Knight of Faith resembles an ordinary individual in his Sunday best, only he dances rather than walks and sings instead of speaks (his walk, like any other’s is a dance; his speech, like any other’s is a song).

But this the Knight is too virtuosic; it is not a question of an expansion of power, but of power’s dimunition (the existentialist reverses Aristotle’s formulation: higher than possibility is actuality, until possibility is the highest of all). Isn’t it that same sense of possibility names Heidegger’s notion of the uncanny, of the self haunted by the indefiniteness of the future – or Sartre’s vertigo of freedom?

No, instead of this, think an impossibility that is lived and endured. An impossibility of possibility lived as the present; a choiceless action; the cry of an animal caught in a trap. This cry – absolute pain, the ‘to cry’ separating itself from any particular cry – shows how the moment itself is a trap, that being is disclosed (is that the word?) here, and not (as for the existentialist) in the future (in the relation to the future).

Power’s dimunition: why is unemployment included by Levinas among the list of horrors of the twentieth century? Because it is here the everyday seems to grant a mysterious density, a thickening of the air. Not a calamity, but the serenity of an afternoon that has absorbed everything into itself; that is actionless, purposeless; a dough that can be kneaded into nothing.

The Muted Voice

Then how to reach the everyday? Perhaps only by a kind of lightness, or neglect … Perhaps similar that to non-actors employed by directors so as not to distract by way of their star quality. I am not thinking of the ‘models’ of Bresson, who are so unactorly they also act, the ordinary escaping them, too (although it is close to them, very close). Perhaps Tarr’s drunkards come closest of all, The Werkmeister Harmornies opening on a scene in which people have lived. No one is more alive than Tarr’s ‘actors’ – they are his friends, he insists – and why do I think here of what Tarkovsky’s Stalker calls the writer and the scientist with whom he has journeyed through his films? They are, once again, his friends.

Here I would insert what has been recently called hauntology and all of dub. It is not a question of letting sound a lag in time – extraordinary effects, I’ve no question of that, but these are still special effects; unless your voice – my voice speaking now – were already to be understood a voice in dub, that is, deprived of itself, and subject to the most cavernous reverb.

Listening to The Drift, it is still that Walker’s voice is too dramatic, too trained (Whether or not it has, in fact, been trained). Listening to Sinatra’s Watertown – another favourite – I always think: his voice is not ordinary enough. Here, an interesting excursus on the late voice, a topic beloved of my friend R., where the voice, towards the end, becomes muted; unless this voice seemed to vanish to become something like a rock or a leaf: completely ordinary, a voice like any other.

Dub is not sufficient to set a lag into time, doubling one event upon another, as though the creation happened before the creation, and what we know now is only its echo …

The Most Ordinary

I am thinking of the ordinary, the most ordinary. Not a voice that is trained; but nor as it is roughly untrained.

What does it take to see a voice? I think of Bacon’s violent faces that allowed us to see a face. To return the face to the dramaturgy of painting, which reveals abstraction to have been a dreary escapism. And now, rather than a voice, a song – a song carried by a voice, or a voice carrying a song.

What kind of song is this? Once again, I wonder if something has occurred with the song. That folk music does not speak of a folk – although this is not to say the idiom of folk cannot be renewed (who can doubt that, said R. of Alisdair Roberts on his recent tour), but that renewal belongs to what is only an idiom – a language to learn and speak alongside other languages, and idioms of languages.

What, then, is the most ordinary song? I can’t answer this question. What is an ordinary voice? That, too, I think is impossible to answer. But here, as usual, I think Kafka was ahead of us. We remember the Josephine of his story, whose voice was the most ordinary of all. Nothing set her apart from the other mice, except for her voice. Except for what, then? For the doubling of her voice in her voice, the ordinary in the ordinary. The Same, as Heidegger would say, capitalising the word, so it can no longer be udnerstood in terms of identity – that is given each time. The Same: As it allows itself to be discovered as the ordinary.

The Ordinary Voice

I think I am drifting close to the thematics of the everyday in Lefebvre, or Certeau – or that I am remembering, more distantly, the investigations of the Surrealists or the new field discovered by Heidegger and Lukacs that lent to the everyday its consistency. Then it is not a question of the revolution of everyday life. For there is nothing upon which we might seize, or it is that the most ordinary seizes us …

It is a question of a voice, or of what a voice also is. What are its characteristics? It is indiscernable. It lets itself be known by a particular trait – by a quality of the voice, an accident, as philosophers would say. That is to say, it is not reached through another kind of experience, like the sound the planets and stars make for the Pythagoreans. All the same, no particular quality is essential to it …

We hear it in singing along with us, or in a song played in the radio on the other side of the house. We hear it – do we hear it? is it only ever half heard? – on the edges of our awareness, heard whenever we do not strain to hear it, when we neglect it just enough for it to make itself present …

It is not a lullaby; it does not lull us to sleep or into a kind of reverie like the sounds of the 40s we hear in the recreated rooms of Marlowe’s memory in The Singing Detective. No, rather, it awakens a kind of attention, keeping awake for us, keeping our place in some way not as this or that individual, but to pass the voice along and to be part of this passing …

Is it, then, like the singing that binds together family life in The Long Day Closes? Perhaps only like the wordless opening of the second movement of Vaughan Williams’ 3rd symphony, which Davies lets sound over black water, rippling with light. A wordless lament – for the dead of the first world war, as the symphonist intended? But also for the violences in the film itself. The drunken father breaking a window with his fists …

As I say: a dream, and not an argument.

Back Mid April. Buy this CD (UK, USA).

I am listening to Jandek and drinking Cava. So must you.

How is it that our idiocy still surprises us?, I ask W. Isn’t that we still harbour the hope of overcoming our idiocy? Above all, I tell W., we are not complacent idiots. In fact, we are very active. The tragedy is that our activity is what confirms us in our idiocy, since it attests to the fact that we struggle with all our might not to be idiots.

I say tragedy, I tell W., but I mean farce, because it is the great farce of our lives that it has not been sufficient that we’ve run up against the brick wall of our idiocy not once but countless times, and that we’re about to run up it again today just as we will do so tomorrow, and it will always be thus.

The idiot, I tell W., does not want to be an idiot. But isn’t that precisely his idiocy? Oliver Hardy is very serious; Vladimir and Estragon have their moments of pathos; Bouvard and Pecuchet have their great project: the idiot has the ambition of becoming something other than an idiot.

In our case, I tell W., although we know we’re idiots, that knowledge does not prevent our idiocy; in fact it encourages it, insofar as we act in order to overcome our idiocy. If only we could remain still, in our idiocy. If only we could pause … but then we would no longer be idiots.

The essence of idiocy is activity; the idiot is the one who runs up and down, endlessly, who is able to tolerate anything but his own idiocy, when in fact his idiocy was the fact that preceded him and that he can only confirm.

It is rather like the film Memento, I tell W., except that the protagonist, instead of forgetting everything that happens each day, remembers it, but still does nothing to dissuade him of undertaking the most idiotic course of action given his circumstances – he kills those who would help him, and falls willingly into the hands of what, for him, will entail the very worst.

Farce , I tell W., and not tragedy, for we can never be said to run up magnificently against our limits. We have no dignity; it is not the limits of fate that we test – the great confrontation with our finitude, but only the limitlessness of idle chatter, that great spinning of puns and innuendo that anyone at all could accomplish.

Heidegger was right, I tell W., the philosopher must avoid the fall into such chatter: what is worse than gossip and idle curiosity? But nor is the idiot ever entirely ignorant: isn’t it precisely the way he is caught between knowledge and ignorance that makes his life farcical?

But there are different ways of living this ‘between’: like Plato’s Eros, the idiot is a wanderer, the son of Poverty and Plentiude. Unlike, Eros, however, he has drunk himself into a stupor with Aristophanes and the others over whom Socrates steps in order to make his way back into the marketplace.

And isn’t he unlike, above all, Marx’s proletariat who alone can repeat and retake the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century into order to become the true subject of history? The idiot is lumpen, I tell W., no question of that. But still, I get the impression the lumpenproletariat enjoy themselves in the moment, there and then – the idiot must always defer gratification. Isn’t he too busy dressing up as a philosopher in order to know he is only trying on ideas that will never fit him?

At first, our role is to amuse others, but soon we will only bore them, and worse, they will resent us for wasting their time and the time allotted to us. In the end, I tell W., idiots come in pairs because only their double will be left, eventually, to amuse. An amusement that depends upon one idiot thinking himself slightly less idiotic than the other: which of us is really as modest as we pretend? And besides, our modesty is belied by our activity, which is always frenetic.   

You tell me I am happiest when I’m making plans, I tell W., but I could say the same of you. The idiot is always young for that he gives to the future the chance that he will not always be an idiot; possibility, he thinks, is his milieu. But in fact, the possible is so for everyone but him. How many brick walls will we run up against before we learn? But we are always too young to learn, awakening each morning into our idiocy.

Doesn’t Homer Simpson always have a madcap scheme? Aren’t Bouvard and Pecuchet perpetually beginning yet again to explore another branch of knowledge? It is always dawn for the idiot, who is too busy to notice the radiance of the morning, I tell W. Perhaps this is what tempted Dostoevsky to create a holy idiot, I continue, but Prince Mishkin is a solitary, and hence not a genuine idiot.

Brad Pitt’s character asks the serial killer at the end of Seven whether he knows he’s insane. I think it’s immaterial whether the idiot knows what he is or not; knowledge, for the idiot, has been dissevered from action: he knows what he is, but does it anyway, not with the resignation of a hero towards his fate, but in the eternal hope of one for whom the future remains open.

In Blanchot’s essay ‘The Experience of Proust’, says Steve at This Space, literary criticism and great art become simultaneous. Doesn’t something similar happen in Steve’s essay on Richard Ford, now up at Ready Steady Book?

Comes a time in your life when you stand as out on a plateau, at some elevation, and with the sky spread about you and the wind buffeting you: there you are, exposed, seeing all around you, but also being seen, for isn’t the sky also an eye turned upon you? a blind eye, though, one that sees without seeing, and it is as though you see yourself with that eye, yourself, and also the whole of your life, what it has been and will be. Isn’t it that you are as though already dead? You’ve died, but died in life to life, but that has made you the god who can look at all with perfect equanimity: what will happen must happen, but you have seen all and know its law.

I am always on the lookout for such plateau moments in the books I read. Handke’s later work (I’ve no interest in anything before The Left Handed Woman) is almost all plateau, or struggles to let its narrator wander along the roof of the world. On A Dark Night I Left My Silent House: you left it after a blow to the head. You’d forgotten everything, and then where did you find yourself? On the roof of the world, on the plateau, wandering: how could it be otherwise? Yes, Handke’s books deliver us there, to where the plateau spreads and the sky swirls around you and you know your life as though you watched all from a still point in the swirling clouds.

And this marvellous scene from Debord:

I have even stayed in an inaccessible house surrounded by woods, far from any village, in an extremely barren, exhausted mountainous region…. The house seemed to open directly onto the Milky Way. At night, the stars, so close, would shine brilliantly one moment, and the next be extinguished by the passing mist. And so too our conversations and revels, our meetings and tenacious passions.

And then, a little further on:

I saw lightning strike near me outside: you could not even see where it had struck; the whole landscape was equally illuminated for one startling instant. Nothing in art has ever given me this impression of an irrevocable brilliance, except for the prose Lautreamont employed in the programmatic exposition he called Poesies. But nothing else: neither Mallarme’s blank page, nor Malevich’s white square on a white background …

Comes a time when, on the plateau, beneath the flashing stars you know absolute books from all the others, which separate themselves and lift themselves into the sky. On the plateau: in your youth, you might do anything; possibility was your milieu; your future was open. Then, later on, the time of accomplishment; you worked, you gave yourself body: what kind of person had you become? And then, later still, the time of falling, when you knew your work was nothing, and you had become nothing; when all excuses fell away.

Lear lost on the Moor. The desert which opens around Hamlet. The sacred space that is separation, the time of the nudity of the crime. Footage of the man who survived the suicide leap in which his son was killed. He is a murderer but also a survivor; he is drenched with guilt. But he is also a sacred man, a man apart. The blinded Oedipus wanders led by his niece, looking only for a place to die. What else is there to do on the plateau but wander?

But I should say Debord was not lost – or that if he was, he lost himself, happily stranded in obscurity as the world gradually caught up with his ideas. But then, too, on the plateau, those ideas do not matter, or what matters is only the great source to which they’re joined: to revolution and the regathering of revolution that is more than any one of us.

Then Debord’s voice, sovereign, is also triumphal: it spreads itself as the stars are spread above the wind. It sees all and knows all, even Debord’s own passing. And mustn’t he die so that revolution can be lifted back towards itself, as light to the source of light? There are many ways of being sacred, but to all of them belongs that solitude which knows the end is close.

With sovereign neglect, knowing the time for action is already passed – or that it must be given to others to act, to follow his example, Debord, the old revolutionary sets the following quotation at the beginning of his book:

Why ask me of my lineage? Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees. Those of autumn the wind sheds upon the ground, but when the season of spring returns the forest buds forth with fresh vines. Even so is it with the generations of humankind, the new spring up as the old are passing away.

That from the Iliad, book VI. And above it, from a dictionary:

Panegyric expresses more than eulogy. Eulogy no doubt includes praise of the person, but it does not exclude a certain criticism, a certain blame. Panegyric entails neither blame nor criticism.

So Panegyric, the book. With what sovereign neglect is it written! How close to death, pressed up against it! A serene book – a neglectful one, sovereignly seizing upon this or that detail to let speak the whole. Why that detail, that episode? Why write of that? But with it the whole shines forward. As though the book were riding forward and we readers looked out ahead over the open sea. Open: a book that looks back as it looks forward. From volume 2, part 2, this unattributed quotation:

All revolutions run into history, yet history is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers of revolution come, thither they return again.

But I should say, reading both volumes, that there are barely even episodes, barely details – only a general telling, a great swelling of the narrative voice, even if what is told is done so briefly, swiftly, as in an ancient epic.

Among the small number of things that I have liked and known how to do well, what I have assuredly known how to do best is drink. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk a lot more. I have written much less than most people who write, but I have drunk much more than most people who drink.

I would like to quote the whole of this famous chapter, but it will suffice to note here that it was perhaps drinking that carried Debord forward, that held him out ahead of the others, over the open sea. The drinker becomes interplanetary, writes Duras somewhere. Drink until neglect claims you, and you are a God. Drink until you sovereignly stand ahead of your time, at its prow. Doesn’t Debord say elsewhere that his ideas did not have to catch up with time, but that time had to catch up with them? In Panegyric, he is ahead of us still. Ahead – but also at the head of all waters, there where revolution gathers itself, regathers itself.

Debord’s scripts. In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consummur Igni: We Turn In The Night Consumed By Fire. I like these texts that are made after a life lived, that are retrospective, looking back, even as they know, with great serenity, that there is only looking back. The future has come; it is already here, and it is one without Debord:

Here was the abode of the ancient king of Wu. Grass now grows peacefully on its ruins. There, the vast palace of the Tsin, once so splendid and so dreaded. All this is gone forever – events, people, everything constantly slips away, like the ceaseless waves of the Yangtze that vanish into the sea.

And so he writes from the perspective of one at the end, or from after the end. Has he died? How else has he managed to write from a time in which he has disappeared and his memory been forgotten? How beautiful to write from that time! How beautiful to write when you’ve already vanished, a wave in the sea.

What is writing? The guardian of history…. What is man? A slave of death, a passing traveller, a guest on earth….

Beautiful, beautiful. But still, something hard, adamantine, in Debord remembers (and this is his own voice):

Considering the overpowering forces of habit and the law, which continually pressured us to disperse, none of us could be sure we would still be there at the end of the week. Yet everything we would ever love was there. Time burned more intensely than elsewhere, and would soon run out.

And I want to remember one last paragraph, the thought of which, remembered from my first reading of these scripts, but when was that?:

The sensation of the passing of time has always been vivid for me, and I have been attracted by it just as others are allured by dizzying heights or by water. In this sense I have loved my era, which has seen the end of all existing security and the dissolution of everything that was socially ordained. These are pleasures that the practice of the greatest art would not have given me.

Passing time: I imagine Debord writes after his death, surviving in some way, still alive, and knowing now only the purity of time’s passing. ‘… passing through all those years as if with a knife in my hand’ – but now, there is no knife. He writes; writing neglects itself in his writing. Lies down and looks upward, to say: it’s all done, finished; the page has already turned.

Pinget writes of the pain of being between novels: how to find a voice? He thrashes about – first this voice, then that, but where is the one that will impose itself upon him like a destiny? When will it come, the voice-seed of a new novel, that will lead him forward by itself through sentences and paragraps, and through page after page?

But when you have no novel, and have no intention of writing one? When you’ve fallen from all projects, all schemes of writing, and there is just the trying out of voices, first one and then another, but absent the voice that will give you your destiny as a writer? Only chance, and a swerving each time, and without pattern. No progress, no moving forward, but only the melee of voices, as they inhabit you, as they turn you from yourself and show that what you are is only this turning?

to Agata Lenczewska-Madsen for the image above, which she, told me in correspondence, she titled after Handke’s The Left-Handed Woman. See her website at www.inthecities.net.

A relationship ends, and what interwove your lives no longer interweaves them; what was held together is held apart, and this is the discipline: to keep the decision enforced, to let the past be the past and to put it behind you. I suppose the degree of upset depends upon who instigated the breakup; that is obvious enough – for one, perhaps, there was closure, whereas for the other, an irruption from nowhere.

Sovereign is the one who can decide the state of exception; sovereign, too, is the one who breaks up with the other – who is outside the law of the relationship. (But there are other possible perturbations of sovereignty here: how would you read from this perspective, the relationship of Cordelia and Johannes in Either/Or?)

Best of all, of course, is a mutual breakup: closure for both, and you both knew it was coming. The End, then. Let the past fall away – you are both sovereign, and the state of exception is that open space which precedes the beginning of new relationships.

And now that past is separated from the forward-streaming of your life like an ox-bow lake from a river’s meander. The water does not move, and slowly it will silt up, and more slowly still, will close up, and close up the scar that evidenced its presence. A closed-up past like a closed-up house: who lived there? who shared jokes, and friends, and ways of speaking? Closed up – and from you who lived there, for you cannot discover alone the life that made sense only as it was shared.

Now, for you, a different life, and the chance of a different set of singularities that will be caught in the memory of a relationship. But now wonder about a relationship that never began such that it could end, that teetered on the edge of a beginning into which it never fell, mourning in advance what it never was. No End – because there was no beginning.

How to date the beginning of a relationship? Perhaps only the future anterior that allows what happened to make sense only retrospectively; before then, there was only a kind of speech before speech.

And for you who have only what failed to complete itself? You are not the lovers who rejoice in the fact of their love, and can recount its story: ‘that was when we met’; ‘that was when I caught your eye.’ What, then do you have? Perhaps the dream that one day you can speak of it together, and what did not happen can be called to account. ‘Why didn’t we speak about it before?’: now ‘it’ has a consistency, a substance: it has come together like love’s future anterior. The non-event is at last born as an event.

It happened – not then, but now, and can be called a failure by the measure of loving. ‘It couldn’t have worked out for us’; ‘it could never have begun, not then’. Imagined scene: the two of your talking, at last, about what did not happen. Together, at last, and talking about it, and happy in their speech.

To thicken the past into an event: isn’t this to exert a retrospective control of an event that would have otherwise fallen into obscurity. Time is ours, the past ours, and now we will affirm it so that it may truly pass. Now it can pass, as all time passes, and it will fade away like an ox-bow lake fades into nothing.

But imagine this, instead (the novels of Sarraute): the non-event that remains non-event, that refuses the measure of love, and what is called a relationship. Now it is a relationship without relationship, one whose terms are not symmetrical, and in which neither will ever have been a lover.

Who am I, then? – and who are you? Who were we, then – and who now? I imagine a succession of ‘whos’ sounding out without answer. The ‘who’ that returns as your heart, that speaks there. How to be loyal to what you are quite sure might have happened? For what kind of fidelity does it call, the non-event?

Non-sovereign is the one who cannot decide. Non-sovereign is the anteriority that is never joined to the future.

1. Higher than actuality stands possibility: the argument depends on a philosophy of action that allows the tasks and projects of the human being to make sense of its present. Today leans forward into a succession of days; this week falls into the next one. Time is an arrow that was shot from the past; your present makes sense as ecstasis; the future is the leap your plans and projects have taken ahead of you.

Tasks, projects – these must be understood against the backdrop of projection itself, the forward leap that is human temporalisation, and projection in terms of the ability to be, a freedom no one possesses, but that possesses each of us. An ability to be – this is what opens the milieu of possibility, in terms of which impossibility is to be understood. I may be said to be possessed by my freedom to which I am summoned by being – this imperative that, in advance, elects each of us to our mineness (Jemeinigkeit). Being becomes my own – I am obligated to be; in this way I am free.

From the first, Levinas questions the priority of the givenness of the self, seeing the ego as coalescing out of a prior field. Being gives way to a being; existence in general to an existent: against Heidegger, Levinas implies that being can be thought without the human being; that the latter coalesces or hypostatises from the prior field of the former. Or is this only, as I suspect, a way of speaking?

If, like Heidegger, Levinas allows the self a minimal ipseity, a minimal self-relation, it is one interwoven with a relation to a past in which the self has not yet come to itself. Isn’t Levinas trying to indicate another way of thinking the genesis of the self, such that it does not come to itself all at once – that something hangs back even as it might return in the manner of the deferred action, Nachtraglichkeit, of which Freud writes – unbidden, and awakening a disturbing sense of what has gone before. An unassimilable experience that has never quite begin – the repetition of an event that never seems to have rounded itself off.

This is what returns, Levinas argues, in an experience as simple as ordinary pain. Slam your finger in the cupboard door and you have undergone an experience from which you cannot flee into the future. True, you can try to distract yourself from the pain, but the pain is still there, drawing you back to itself. The instant thickens, the present congeals in such a way that it draws you back from the leap into the future as it is premissed on the ability to be that defines human existence, according to Heidegger.

Even the slightest degree of suffering vouchsafes what he calls dying, according to Levinas. Possibility, premised on the ability to be, falls into impossibility, the withdrawal of this measure. Dying is given in the impossibility of possibility, the inability to be able. Rather than a limit that can be situated in the future, to which the human being can relate so as to retrieve itself from its fallen existence as for Heidegger, dying is now, it is already here; the limit has congealed.

Then it is not the ability to be that is the measure of human existence. Like Moses, it stutters, it stammers interrupting itself so as to fold the past of existence in general into the present. The ego is always threatened with dissolution; the impossibility of possibility, like Freud’s death drive, threatens to tear the human being from its relations to the world.

2. Then this is nihilism; there’s no act by which death can be assumed and life can be made whole. But might there be a way of affirming the death drive, the eternal return of dying?

Hegel’s account of the ‘spiritual animal kingdom’ takes aim at those individual creators who are not content to self-effacingly serve the interests of Truth (like the scholar) or Justice (like the civil servant), but insist on creating something for themselves. In the ‘bourgeois zoo’, as one commentator nicknames this form of life, each is set apart from the others, attempting to create what will confirm them once and for all as creators. The trouble is, the ‘task at hand’ with which each is obsessed collapses as soon as something is made. The writer is never content with realising this book; in order to remain a writer, she will have to begin another, ad nauseum. What bad faith!

And yet something interesting reveals itself in Hegel’s analysis. For is it not by dint of her failure, her perpetual attempt to complete the ‘task at hand’ that the artist is able to affirm a relationship to the materiality of the artwork and, thereby, the eternal return of suffering? Does the repetition of her failure coincide with the eternal return of the past and ultimately allow it to be affirmed, changing its apparent polarity?

Continue reading “The World Unjoined”

The following are a set of rules for the giving of academic papers in philosophy (especially continental philosophy). The rules recall those of the Danish film movement, Dogme 95, or even Oulipo. A primary aim is to break with the veneration of master thinkers not because it isn’t worthwhile studying a philosopher in great depth and over a number of years, but that this, by itself, is not philosophy.

1. Dogma is relevant. Your paper must be written for the occasion in which you are presenting it. It must not be part of an ongoing project or a larger work. It must stand on two feet, or, if it is written in collaboration, which Dogma encourages, it must stand alongside the work of the other paper giver on your panel. If you collaborate, your work must  stand or fall together, and your work must be genuinely co-written, being born from friendship.

2. Dogma is clear. Your paper must be written to read out, to be comprehensible to an audience of ordinary intelligence. It must carry them along from point to point.

3. Dogma is spartan. Only one proper name. No quotations. Problems, not names – and above all no names. (And I know how difficult this distinction is to make in continental philosophy: problems/ names. But who hasn’t had enough of names?)

4. Dogma is impassioned. You must stand behind every sentence you write. It must be clear to the audience that the issues you are exploring is of the utmost importance to you.

5. Dogma is personal. You must use personal anecdotes, as many as you like. Everything in the paper must bear upon what is of significance to you. Use the word ‘I’; anecdotalise; speak of your life and its intersection with your thought. Speak of your friends. Speak of your passions and your misfortunes.

6. Dogma borrows. You can plagiarise any part of your paper from any source. But no names, remember. No names at all.

7. Dogma is reticent. You must never try to publish a Dogma paper. What is spoken is not for reading an vice versa.

8. Dogma is studious. You must work very hard indeed on your paper. Nothing last minute, nothing slapdash.

9. Dogma is full of pathos. Weep, and let your audience weep.

10. Dogma is elective. Do not tell your audience the constraints you have accepted. If you are asked, afterwards, about your presentation, you may speak of it then.

W. and I formulated the rules of Dogma one frustrated night at a conference in April 2005. Flusser’s Writings were a major inspiration.

I’ve given several Dogma papers with W. We’ve spoken on our favourite literature and our favourite music; this year, we also spoke on friendship as a condition for thinking. Each time, we spent about a month working on our papers, constantly discussing our work. Our friend L. gave a ‘Lady Dogma’ paper this year, after hearing about Dogma from W. and I. It should be emphasised that collaboration – friendship – really is the heart of Dogma. An of course that no one at all owns Dogma, least of all us.

Of course, Dogma rules can be varied from subject to subject. What is urgent, say, in continental philosophy, that is, the grip of the proper name, the imitation of the master etc. is less so in other fields. Note, too, that not everyone has the luxury of following Dogma: the postgraduate student looking for work is in a very different position to a full-time employee.

W. and I often supplement our rules. Here are some additions to the main rules of Dogma:

11. Dogma is apocalyptic. Dogma accepts that these are the last days. Catastrophe is impending. Bear this in mind as you write. Write only on what matters most.

12. Dogma is forgiving. Dogma is an ideal; it may be your paper is only partially dogmatic. This is at least something. You can also take the ultra-Dogmatic route, and mention no names at all.

13. Dogma is a friend to religion. We underwent a spiritual turn earlier this year; we speak of such matters without embarassment.

14. Dogma is on the side of the suffering. Bela Tarr films are an important reminder of the omnipresence of suffering, of ontological shit and cosmological shit.

15. Dogma is communal. Respond, in your writing, to the work of a friend. Mention, in discussion, the inspiration that your friends are for you.

16. Dogma is peripheral. It avoids famous names; it is shy of fashionable topics.

17. Dogma is affirmative. Do not engage those with whom you disagree. Dogma is advocative: speak of those of whom others should hear.

W. wrote to me to suggest that I add the following: ‘Dogma is experimental. More rules can be added, but only through the experience of Dogma.’ And doesn’t this add something wonderful: the experience of Dogma: as if it began, first of all, in complete dissatisfaction, but gave way to an excited liberation?

Moved by this post at The Church of Me. He will turn to a private writing now, Marcello writes, or at least one not as public as a weblog. What is the sense of that obscure happiness I feel as I turn over the thought of two decades of a private writing before, and now the decades of a private writing that will begin five years after? A writing for —–. And who were we, who read these five years in the meantime? Who were we, readers of a writing that is now turning away from us to another source of light?

New posts at Red Thread(s) arrive by way of the long silences that lie between them. By way of them, trailing silence behind them like a comet’s tail, I know they have travelled an enormous distance.

How can ineloquence let itself be said? Bear the fragmentary at the heart of writing, not merely as its form. Fragmentary demand: eloquence torn apart from inside, writing voided of its heart. Or writing turns around the void at its centre, turns, and by the opposite of a centripedal force. But how to hold together what spins itself apart?

Interview at Bloggasm.

And now you understand: Stalker is part of the Zone, and his whole life belongs to it. Until the life he leads outside the Zone was also lived within it; until the items on his nightstand in his room are there because they were first of all in the Zone. And when he lies down to dream, it is the Zone that wakes up inside him. And when he guides the others through its traps and temptations, it is the Zone that would like to know itself, to find its way back to the event by which it came to birth.

Stalker will speak of his friendship for the ones he guided. Friendship: he steered them, as the Zone steers him. It is the Zone that burns between them. It is the Zone, blind and unconscious, that returns between them. Returns – but without coming to itself. For there is no ‘itself’; the Zone is not the Zone. Or in that ‘not’ it is also everything; it is what gives itself in the world that would lie outside it. Gives itself, and by way of its withdrawal, as what it is not.

The Zone is not the Zone: and who is Stalker? The one who goes by not-knowing, and whose unknowing is the way the Zone comes to itself. Comes – as it does not come. As it stands outside itself: Zone, will you have been anything but the incidental? Will you have ever been otherwise than what is seen from the corner of the eye? Then what is a friendship that passes thus, by way of the incidental? What is a friendship that lives by way of the rebirth of the Zone, its infinition?

The ordinary is not the ordinary, or in that tautology, the ordinary is the ordinary, it lives already as what it is not. As though it were disjoined from itself, and fire burns along the breaks of its articulation. The extraordinary: I will not speak of the depths of the ordinary, but of its infinite surface, its infinition. As though it were the ice sheet across which the aurora borealis flashes, and the bright stars. Everything, it is everything. Or it is what interrupts itself in everything and shows the world as what is torn apart.

The Zone is the world. No: the world is also what the Zone is. The world is its crust, its ashes. How deep is the wound? The wound is the world; it does not heal, and its suffering is the Zone. Is it possible to say: I suffer myself? Is it possible to say: I suffer everything? The Zone suffers itself. No: the world is the suffering of the Zone. The Zone would become itself, but there is still the world.

And isn’t that the way friendship would pass? And love? By way of the incidental; by way of that detour-interruption that breaks the joints of the present world. That unjoins them, or shows they were forever unjoined, and that fire burns along the sutures. You cauterise a wound to close it, but is there another fire that burns around a wound forever unclosed? Is it possible to say: I am dying? Is it possible to say, I am young in my death, and in my dying?

There is a kind of youth that subtracts itself from the world, and draws the world after it. A youth unpossessed, or whose happening is dispossession. To be young again – how old am I, and how is it I have already come to the end of my life? Youth accuses. Youth says: what you have lived is false; the ordinary is not the ordinary. Youth says: turn around, turn, lose yourself in the incidental. How to cross the world at another angle?

Youth suffers itself in you. Or: what you suffer is always your youth, that blazing moment that seems to detach itself from the possible. Until you suffer the impossible, you suffer the place you cannot occupy. Is that way youth passes by way of the other person, and by way of friendship? Isn’t it the other who would be young in your place?

The Zone is nothing for Stalker on his own. He is a guide; he steers the ones who will become his friends. But that friendship is not his – or it is that it is first of all a friendship with the Zone, and a way in which the Zone comes to live a life. Friendship, by way of the others, and for the Zone.

Dream of that friendship in the world that affirms the incidental, that is friendship for the incidental. Give the world to me; let it give itself to be, and by way of the incidental, by way of what gives itself through you. Gives itself, gives and forgets itself; gives and lets its youth, its eternal return, burn in your place as it leaps across to burn in mine.

‘I would like to live, and to live by dying. I would like to die to life and into life.’ The Zone has awoken; Stalker is asleep.

Suddenly, on the white rectangle of the page, the shadow of a bird, moving quickly. What happened? Did it happen? Behind me, large windows, a sunny courtyard. Then I remember Tarkovsky’s Solaris, and the interrogation of Berton. Suddenly, through a window in the cold, white room, a bird is seen to alight on a branch. And then, in Stalker, there is the bird that flies across a room filled with sand dunes, and disappears in mid air.

The incidental, in each case. They do not call attention to themselves, these birds (unlike the bird that alights on the cap of the boy in Mirror), but a part of the whole of a shot. Then I think of the Zone, with its strange laws, its secrets, all of which lie open and apparently ordinary in the light of day, or which, if they are enclosed, are only ordinarily so, in a space as ordinary as any other, even if, mysteriously, its rooms are full of sand, or of water.

The Zone, I tell myself, is only the incidental, but the incidental that presses forward to be noticed. It is the space of the fleeting, but where the fleeting is no longer fleeting, but essential, and the incidental happens imperiously, as though, as soon as it occurred, it always would have occurred thus, as though it had been planned in that way by the gods.

Who is Stalker himself, the guide to the Zone? The one who would abide in what cannot be understood. Who holds himself there. To abide – but does he abide? The items on his nightstand are also beneath the pools in the Zone. A phonecall reaches him there, in an abandoned room: is it that the Zone is only the place of the incidental, of what happened only in the corner of Stalker’s eye?

This is a dream, not a post. Or if it is a post, it is one that remains in the Zone, or a kind of zone, wherein everything incidental that has happened to me comes forward again. The other night, returning from Germany, I bought a book at the airport, which I began to read on the plane. Carried along by the reading, I dreamt of what I would like to write, and in the same strong style. I wanted to be carried forward by strong, calm prose. By that strong prose that would spread like a wave of surf over the sand.

I wanted to seize the incidental and make it essential, to live from what happened without reason. I wanted to write a prose that leapt from incident to incident, disclosing their hidden necessity (is that the word?). By that prose I would have willed everything that had happened. Willed it, demanded it: how could life have been lived otherwise?

Yes, everything seemed possible; I could write of everything, and plot my course through the incidental. I admit, I had felt lost for most part of a whole week. What was incidental and what was not? The word, adrift, had kept returning to me. Write with that word, I had thought to myself. But I was adrift only because I could separate the essential from the incidental: could not find that written path, that critique which would set the two apart.

Then to write – or to write after the example of the book – would be to be able to abide in the incidental, to hold oneself there. And then to be held by what gives a life its shape, and binds it to a style. I read, as the plane flew north above the clouds, and as I saw the whole city from high above the river’s mouth – the whole city in the sun, on both banks of the river. I read, but I fell from my reading-dream; the narrative, which had now encompassed the doings of so many characters, had fanned out too broadly: it seemed anything at all was in the novelist’s grasp – that the incidental had been mastered, rather than being allowed to live and giving life in turn.

There was too much plot, and the novelist insisted on introducing too many characters and too many themes; how I longed, after I finished the first fifty pages of the book, for the prose of Handke, or of Sebald: for a concentrated, single minded prose, for the narrative of a single life.

But the first fifty pages! Everything was there! The narrative demanded nothing; it fell open like a flower, what happened could only have happened; the tale followed what told itself in the world and in the opening of the world. And I, reading, thought I could speak of my life in that way, could speak fluently and without hesitation, and trace a path through all that had happened.

This afternoon, back in my office, I remembered the closing pages of ‘continuity shots’ of Duras’s The North China Lover. ‘A blue sky bursting with light’; ‘Naked sky’; ‘The dark river very close up. Its surface. Its skin. In the nakedness of a clear night (relative night)’: short paragraphs which could have been inserted at any point in the narrative. Paragraphs that are printed at the end of Duras’s book, one after another, each of which – as I am sure was the intention – could be inserted anywhere.

I thought, but what I suffer from are shots of discontinuity – that fragmentation that seems to tear life from itself, scattering it in a dozen directions. To be adrift – to live diffusely, and in every direction at once: it is only with a strong book with me that I can steer my life in a single direction, can fool myself that the opening of its prose is also my world as it opens, and in accordance with a single law.

And without such a book? Without a Stalker to guide me through the Zone? What does it mean to live adrift, lost in vagueness? I will take no decision, there where nothing can be decided. I will be lived, there where I do not live. Life will have happened to me – but what will that have meant?

Stalker lies down, and a dog passes behind him. Two children, whom we will not see again, greet one another in Solaris. Then there are the horses, that exit the shot to the left and reappear from the right. The children, the horses, the dogs: how to look at the world from the corner of my eye? How to learn to live so that the incidental greets me, and in that necessary vagueness that breaks all laws?

Dream of the telling that affirms the incidental – of that practice of recounting that saves the incidental. Saves it – but by sending the narrative off course, steering it, not by what collects the incident and lays it end to end (the strong narrative), but by attesting to the law that is broken each time. But what kind of telling is this?

Speak by indirection. Write and know that what is written is carried by the incidental, and the detour of the incidental. Nothing you report is essential – or what is told, its details is only an example of the way the incidental can might carry your telling away. An example – which means one incident weighs the same as any other. What is said does not matter; telling must follow a path, a particular path, but it must be affirmed that this path is one of many, and telling now stands apart from what is told.

We live diffusely, and in every direction at once. The strong book gathers the incidental into a narrative, that is its relief. But is there a weak book, a weak writing, that is gathered by the incidental each time, such that it can never bind narrative into linear continuity? The discontinuous, the fragmentary: speak of the diffuse, of the vague. Let speak the telling that is like the heat haze over a summer road.

All stories are here; I will speak of everything. I will tell, and tell everything – and first of all by telling what tells itself each time. Be gathered, do not gather. Wait; telling will reach you. Telling will speak of the incidental and affirm the incidental. This is a dream, not a post. Stand at the beginning place, where telling has barely given itself form. Stand where the aurora borealis flashes above the earth.

What flashes thus? The beginning of the story. No: what returns in the telling of the story, and in the telling of the incidental. ‘A blue sky bursting with light’; ‘Naked sky’; ‘The dark river very close up. Its surface. Its skin.’ Stalker is passing through the Zone. His passage changes it. He lies down; he dreams, and the items on the nightstand are strewn in a pool of water beside him. The Zone says: I will speak of your life. I will speak of everything. The Zone says: lie down, dream, and I will tell you everything.

The incidental never settles into an incident, I know that. Or it is that the incident is only the incidental that has become fixed and determined, a stone in a series of stepping stones. Write with a weak prose; write so that the incident is ready to shimmer into the incidental. The day is ordinary; the day is extraordinary; in its ordinary depth is already the Zone that shimmers in the corner of your eye.

Life will have happened to you. No: you are what life gave to itself; you are what is stretched along the incidental; you lie down, fall, as Otto the postman falls in The Sacrifice. I am at the beginning place, the incidental. Or what begins is what will never settle itself into an incident, or that burns around the incident, its fiery nimbus.

The incidental: is this why, for all its longeurs, I love My Year In No Man’s Bay? Is it why I love Vertigo? Books made of discontinuity. Books that burn around their edges, and in which – across which – telling obsesses itself with the incidental. What happened, what is happening? Why set down this detail, and not another? Why these accounts of a great passage through the world?

Because it is a passage, each time, that does not set its course in relation to the stars of incident, but is lost beneath the flashing of the incidental. Lost – and where this loss is the stake of what is told. Errant speech, speech of indirection: not the single flower that falls open, not the world as gives itself to the flower of narrative, but as hedge flowers are strewn along the path, each of which is a perspective on the whole.

Telling that does not bear, but sets adrift.  I fell asleep; I fell asleep in the telling. Lie down. Stalker is lying down. The Zone shimmers around him.

What happened to you? What will have happened, there where the incidental fails to complete itself? Every path begins here; every path has already begun. Weak prose, fallen prose: decide nothing, determine nothing, there where the incidental greets you.

Thought of exhaustion, exhausted thought. I would like to come to the end of thinking; would like for thinking to leap up in my place. I will give myself to thought. I will let thought come to itself. Come with me. Meet me there where you have no strength to think; let us meet there where we have fallen. Then will thought take place, and take our place. Then will it hold us in its own arms.

Otto the Postman in Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice falls. He lies on the wooden floor, laughing. He speaks, from the floor. Glorious to see a man stretched out full on his belly, praying. I’ve seen it – a man, otherwise powerful, lying full stretched on the floor. He would give himself to God. But Otto lies on his back; he has fallen into the arms of chance. No one has caught him; the ground holds him.

Like Andrei Rublev when he walks out into the mud. Like Stalker when he lies down on the low island in the stream. Behind him appears an Anubian Alsation, like a spirit guide. Fall down: no one will catch you but the earth. But to fall thus is to be scattered across the earth like dice. You have fallen; the world knows you as blessed. You are a saint of chance.

The face of God is worn out. You do not pray. Or prayer is thought, the whole of thought, as it is present in you. Come with me. Follow me there, to where we will fall together. There where thought needs our weakness to come to itself. Where thought desires only to hold itself, to touch itself as I would touch you. But thought will not be kept. Thought keeps us. It would keep us, the exhausted ones, who have fallen from everything but thinking.

‘I would like to learn how to fall.’ – ‘But you cannot learn.’ – ‘I would like to fall.’ – ‘But falling must be what you do not want.’

We are exhausted, the sacred ones. Thought crowns us. Thought is joined to itself in our exhaustion, and there it unjoins the world. For that is what thought demands, impossible gift: you will think as no one; nothing will think in your place.

I will think, says thought, by taking your place, and all places. To take place – to take time, too. Both are taken, space and time; both interrupted. Thought is always a block, a break; it is the impossibility of thinking. And you can see it, like a holy idiocy, in those who have thought. It has marked them, deep in their eyes. They laugh with thought; they pass amongst us, but thought laughs with them.

How can they endure us, who are still not thinking? How, who exist all too much, who are adequate with respect to themselves. For thought demands failure, inadequatio. Inadequation: thought fails; thought is exhausted. But that exhaustion is thought; thinking arrives then, when you have collapsed. At last you are unemployed. At last you have been delivered into the errancy of thinking.

‘I cannot bear it.’ – ‘It is the unbearable. Thought cannot be thought, but only borne, and to the point of the unbearable.’ – ‘I cannot bear it.’ – ‘Then you must come with me, we must both fall, and thought will be there between us.’

Break the world from itself. Think as fragment, and the world as fragment. Thought: the inadequate. Inadequacy that meets the inadequation of the world. Become with it, then. With the whole world. That is what is meant by truth. It is the way truth comes, and by way of thought. You must contain what you cannot contain. Fall, and roll the dice across the earth.

‘Fall.’ – The arms of chance cannot hold me.’ – ‘Fall.’ – ‘Nothing will hold me.’

You knew it then, cycling, didn’t you? Knew it as you cycled around the new estates, didn’t you? The sky, the whole day watched you in its blindness. No one saw you. Was that you first fall? Had you fallen before? In truth, you fell as a child, you were always fallen, you who was never himself. But how to affirm what revealed itself then? How to will your own unemployment?

I am unemployed. I would not have it otherwise. I have been dropped by the world. I would not want it otherwise. I have fallen as Otto has fallen. I speak as Otto spoke. I think. Thought is with me. Join me here, where thought is present. Come, to where failure is absolute. You have no chance. You have no hope. Or: there is hope, but not for you. There is a future, but not for you.

Despair without object. Despair that is the whole world in its blindness. The world looks at you. It says: ‘again? One more time?’ And you must say, ‘again.’

‘I am praying.’ – ‘You are thinking.’ – ‘I lie on my back.’ – ‘Thought is thinking.’