Category: Writing

Perhaps there is a kind of speech different to that which adds noise to the world. That subtracts silence from that noise, as you would draw with your finger on a condensated window.

To speak by subtraction – to let silence sound and speak thereby … is there a kind of writing that unwrites the written? A white writing, a writing blanched; or is it the other way round: a black page slipped beneath black ink?

I do not keep the last word, but writing keeps it for me. The last word? No: the one which erodes all words from within – which attenuates, by stretching each beyond its limits and beyond all limits, the possibility of preserving anything by writing.

Plato was wrong: it is not immortality that is sought in the creation of a book, but the sweetness of obscurity. Not immortality – not the fame of a name that spreads from generation to generation, but the oblivion of a name, the St. Andrew’s cross that is placed across it.

Moses spoke with a too-thick tongue; he stammered, which meant his speech was doubled by the impossibility of speaking. And wasn’t that, too, his prophecy: not of liberation, but of the impossibility of liberation; not of the promised land, but of what fails to promise itself in every land?

How to stammer in writing? How let it double itself, such that it fails and succeeds each time in failure? It is language itself that must thicken itself in your mouth. Language itself – and that doubles what is said with the impossibility of saying it.

The only story – how the telling of the story was possible. The only one: that tells of the strength that it drew on to begin, the ‘merciful surplus’ of which Kafka writes. There are those in whom words fall like rain; they think with words, ordinary, innocent words, and do not know their interruption. But when the words, for the most part, do not come? Or when they bring with them a trail of silence, a kind of residue of the interruption that allowed them to arrive?

The Persians, according to Herodotus, made every important decision twice: once drunk and once sober. Is there a kind of decision that belongs to silence, to that murmuring prior to speech and from which speech cannot awaken? It must be followed by a second decision that breaks from that murmuring, and wakes up. The second cannot decide against the first, but rides it. And that is the story you might decide to tell: how the strength to begin was given to you, a decision flowering within a decision.

The strength to tell is borrowed. And the strength to decide? A fold of telling within non-telling, of writing within its impossibility. It is writing that is drunk, not you. But it is also writing that is sober, and not you.

Late afternoon. The windows show smears when the light catches them, and the mirror. Once it was wiped in round circles – but by whom? And the windows – who wiped them?

Late afternoon, and the whole world gives itself like one of Ozu’s ‘pillow shots’: as a pause between scenes; between events and themselves. Nothing happens – and that’s what happens. Like a cat licking its paw in the sun: nothing at all. Like the droop of a washing line, plastic clothes pegs, green and white beaded with rain: nothing.

Why is it important, this non-importance? Why do you seek to keep it, to write it down? Because it is a condition I would like for writing. A writing like any other, just like a day is like any other. Common, ordinary, and more than that. The ordinary deepening in the ordinary; the droop of the day discovering itself in the droop of writing.

(Pillow shots: what happens when writing is not yet writing? When it is seen only from the corner of your eye? Someone is writing, there in the other room. Someone, far away from you, behind the smeared mirror.)

All men, says Socrates in the Symposium, want a kind of immortality. To leave a child, a work – to let your name resound from one generation to another, and then down all the ages: this is the dream; this is what drives desire.

But then, with Christianity, a new kind of desire, already known in the East: to be forgotten in the future; to lose your name. A monk takes the name of a dead monk, known for his deeds – Cyprian, say, after Cyprian the devout, who fasted in a cave. And now this new Cyprian will also fast – fast in the name of his predecessor, and whose name is his.

The second name unravels in the first; it dissipates, like night mists in the morning. How beautiful to desire oblivion. To live and die as the shadow of another, as his echo.

I would like to call myself Duras, and live and die under her name. I would like to call myself Green. Laughter … For the monks strengthen their names, hardening them into history. That is how saints are made, I imagine: as the new Cyprian lives up to his predecessor; as newer Cyprians will come, each of whom will fast, and for longer and longer periods.

And I, what will I do? Write? Not write, rather, and know writing by its absence, by the fact I am not Duras, I am not Green.

Say the same, the usual. Register it. Make a mark here to show – what? that you were here?

Over opposite, on the first floor, the bamboo sphere of a lampshade, half hidden by a curtain. Write it down, write that detail down. By witnessing it you witness yourself, your capacity to see, to know. But first of all your capacity to write, as it grants you the power of seeing, of knowing.

Write it down – how else to give yourself substance? How to let the world double itself here? But in the end it is nothing. An empty doubling. Of what does it provide evidence? That you would like to be here. That you would have liked to have been here.

Is a single detail enough? What more should there be? Evidence. That’s what you want. To have left a mark. But for whom? For others? For yourself? Or is it for the archive no one reads; that great waterfall of prose that scrolls down every page on the internet?

Prose for no one: that, then. Prose for indifference, for neglect. Say the same, the usual. Provide evidence – but for whom? For yourself? But you’ll never read these words. By tomorrow, you’ll have forgotten them. For others, then? But who reads, and why?

But somewhere else, from another angle, the archive is reading. Somewhere else, reading, not reading; not looking down at me as the couple in the room do not look down. But the sphere of the lampshade nevertheless. The half-drawn curtain nonetheless. Evidence.

Dusk, the yard. The kitchen window open at a right angle to me slanting out. Blue light. The washing line; the empty bird feeder. And now my own image in the window with the dusk showing through. A kind of boredom. What to write, what to do? But I am already writing this; that’s something.

But what is it? A kind of reliance on the voice. As though, in one of the trust exercises they make drama students do, I fell back into the arms of the voice. Only it was not I who fell back; or I knew myself only after I’d fallen and was caught, the voice also being the condition of my speaking of myself in the first person.

Blue light and the tree, still with its leaves, moving as reeds in water do – sinuating along each branch. Shaking very slowly. It’s windy tonight, and there’ll be rain. And in this room, as it seems to fall through space?

What’s the opposite of a spotlight? I feel that it’s shining on me, and doing the opposite of picking me out. A beam of darkness to be lost in.And I begin to fall from that capacity that let me write here.

There are those who know no gaps in their fluency; I’ve spoken with them, or I’ve listened to them speak without interruption. I feel comfortable thus – to say nothing; to listen. In truth, I envy them. To be able to speak. To write – and with no gaps, no drifting, as I am able to listen.

Dusk, turning to night. To long for an action to gather me up, all of me: what does that mean? And to long here, on the page – on this virtual page, and in public? An event like writing that would take place in the world, outside here, outside this room.

What time is it? I look. Late enough. The evening is a threshold; what will happen tonight is not decided. And in this indecision – this gap? My image on the window, with dusk showing through it. A room falling through space. And trust, trust in writing.

Not to have written. Not a line. And this by way of writing, by means of it. Not silence, but a kind of murmuring. That says: everything you have written has been written before. Everything you write will be written again.

To be no one at all. The opposite of all the names in history (Nietzsche). To have been no one; to be no one once again.

Do you guard writing, is that it? Do you watch over it? Only as it guards and watches over me. Only as it stands over me, the angel behind the angel with the sword.

I don’t want to be judged. Or it is another kind of judgement I want. Writing’s non-sword. The peace of writing.

Amongst writing: write that. Amongst writing, with it, as you would wade through a cornfield. To be with writing, on its side, wading through it, with it. To say, this is where I live, out here. This is where I live, out here with writing. 

To leave a trace, is that it? To mark where you’ve been? Rather to unmark that place, to expose it. To open the trace to the wind, the air. To say, I don’t want to have been here. I wasn’t here. To say, no one wrote here, and least of all me.

I don’t want to be known for what I’ve written. Or I want to be unknown by it, all that I have written.

What might it mean to keep by gathering? What does it mean to lose?

Exposed writing. Writing to the elements. Let them read, with their neglectful reading. Let them read and not-read, both at once.

Imagine them, the archives. Imagine a waterfall so high, its waters blow away before they reach the ground. Imagine clouds melting into the air (Gide, in Fruits of the Earth). An archive of wood, of trees. Let the trees read. Let the wind turn the pages and light fall on them, and the rain.

Imagine it: the archives that lose everything, that keeps nothing. That is the place where things are lost. ‘You’ll never see them again, all the things you’ve written’. – ‘I know’. – ‘Never read them’. – ‘I know’.

Say to yourself, I’m lost with them. I want to lose myself with them.

‘Don’t read it’. – ‘Why not?’ – ‘Because by not doing so you give it back to the neglect from which it would have liked it to come.

‘Don’t read, not a line.’ – ‘Why?’ – Because as you do not do so you give writing to read itself’. – ‘But writing can’t read’. – ‘But by not reading, it reads. By not being read, it gives itself to be read by neglect, the non-power of neglect’.

Writing says: I want to read myself. To scroll through my own archives. Writing says: I want no readers. ‘Off the scroll’ it says at the bottom of wood s lot‘s page. Post links disappear into the archive.

But now imagine writing bent over itself, reading itself. Writing whispering to itself as it reads. And now dream of writing reading your own archives (its own archives).

A million words, written for whom? For what? Can you remember what you wrote? But writing remembers. What do you remember? Writing remembers for me. But what does it keep?

Is there a way of keeping that is also a releasing? A way writing sets itself free? Imagine this: a reading as marvellously neglectful as the sun on the receipt on the car park tarmac. A reading that benignly forgets, that lets disperse what is read, and frees it.

That’s the kind of reading I wait for. That’s what they wait for, these words, written to be forgotten.

Now imagine this: a writing that reads itself. That closes the lid of its own eye like a blind to read, then, in private. A writing that reads aloud, whispering to itself, staying up late, too late.

Writing that archives itself. That reads and whispers, turning over pages. Letting pages turn themselves. In the wind. In fate.

A writing that, like fate, travels across its own pages. That reads itself as it writes and lets itself withdraw into a secret archive, the lid closed over the eye.

Asleep? No, under the lid I am reading. I, writing am reading.

Why write about writing? Why that – the pause, the hesitation in a step that does not allow writing to complete itself as writing? I think of James Wood’s impatient aside in his appreciation of The Waves: the book, he says ‘is too often tediously involved in its own procedures (almost every character has something to say about the difficulty of language)’.

An aside and nothing more – but why does it come to me that The Waves is a book where the notion of character wears wonderfully thin, that beneath each supposed narrator there is another kind of narration, a narrative voice that seems to expose itself only in its final pages, in the great hymn that ends in ‘O death!’, and that that is the point: character has worn too thin as character, and each in turn is a way language, streaming without centre, has folded itself in order to speak (to write) with a human voice?

Five posts a day, I always thought that was right. Five posts – like the five prayer-times of Islam, and for what? To write? Quote from who knows where in Duras: ‘To write is an attempt to know what we would write were we to write’. Were we to write, yes exactly that. Were I to write: but what would I write?

I’ve think italics are a way of setting fire to words, not of burning them up, but softening their edges. To burn, to soften – what kind of fire is that? Italicised words (the ones above) seem to lean forward, as if by the pressure of a breeze. Where is the wind blowing? Forward, across the words. Across them – these words, as they lean into what I would write were I to write.

Morning. Take a deep breath on words; words come, you breathe them out like mist from a warm mouth. Words, then, and one after another. You’ve strength enough to make a bridge from breath; a voice carries you. The strength of a voice and the rhythms that belongs to it – from where do they come, with their measure? From where the strength of rhythms that carry the voice and demand words of it?

The difficulty’s always the same: you have to find something to write; the voice wants words, even though it came before them. Even though it arrived only as the intimation of a structure, as the skeleton, say, of a boat, that was not yet seaworthy. A frame without words that needs them and is nothing without them.

Is it difficult? More difficult still the sense of being without it, that rhythm that rises words up like a swell. More difficult that lack of imperative, of forward movement, waiting for a voice but in lieu of it, remembering what it might have been but no longer able to go forward.

I think there is always something in me that is suspended in that way: something to be gathered up, swollen and arrived at by writing. And perhaps not even then. The ancients painted eyes on each side of the prow of their boats. Eyes looking forward at – what? At nothing, just forward, and with painted eyes that could not close.

Writing that solicits writing. Writing that asks others to write. Barthes’ Incidents seems like that. Casually written, and important for that. Important that it records ordinary life, lived day to day. Ordinary life and lusts (after a lifetime of discretion). As though it was writing that led Barthes to speak of himself thus. That writing drew discretion from him; that it led it out. ‘I didn’t mean to say that. I didn’t mean to say it’.

And isn’t such writing that calls writing from you? That says: I will confess in your place, speak everything. Or that: your life doesn’t matter because it lets me live. Imagine it: a confession that begins because it does not matter. That can speak of everything because it cares about nothing. Is that the wave that spreads at the end of Barthes’ life (though he did not know it was about to end)? Is that what reaches us in these posthumous texts?

Indulgent writing. Writing swirled and warmed up about like brandy in a glass. A writing treated before it is used, like one of Cage’s pianos. Or rather, that treats itself, thickens itself and indulges its own wanting to say, language without user, language that speaks and hums and mutters to itself. What does writing do when your back is turned? What words form on the page? Rather that the heads of written words bow like barley in a sudden wind. A wind across the words. Through them – and that blows in your absence, when you’ve turned away.

Writing falling, released from itself. Writing like a drop falling through space, and what is written like a succession of drops, a stalagmite. ‘What have you made?’ – ‘Nothing’. – ‘What have you made?’ – ‘Writing made it. Writing fell inside me’. (Mishima writes of the rain of words that fell inside him. Mazzy Star’s cover of ‘Drop’ by The Jesus and Mary Chain. Nietzsche’s superman as a drop from a coming storm.)

A writing without qualities. Anyone’s writing. A writing without interiority. As though it wrote only on its own surface. As though it had folded itself back as a medium to write on itself, across itself. As though it had made its own surface, made a page out of ink, and wrote upon it in ink, its sense lost straightaway. ‘What are you writing?’ – ‘Nothing, nothing at all’.

Nothing to say. Writing when nothing concerns you, nothing presses forward to be said. In a kind of equanimity. And neglectfully, as though writing did not matter. With a nib that touches the page lightly. With a keystroke that barely indents the page (a mecnhical typewriter). Or that imprints the page dark black on black (a wordprocessor). -‘What are you writing?’ – ‘Oh, nothing in particular’.

To overwrite – to write like a painting whose impasto no longer lets you see what was painted. The thickness of paint; overpainting. And overwriting as its correlate – writing that says nothing, conveys nothing but itself, even as it is barely itself. The crust of writing. The shell of what said itself long ago. The nova husk of meaning, that does not mean.

Mannered writing. A writing that has retreated into itself, that has become overly idiomatic. A poem turned away from its readers, looking into itself. A poem sealed like a pebble, and that does not ask for attention. That says: disregard me, or, I am a stone among other stones. A poem that, thing-like, seals itself from meaning, from interpretation has become the least important thing of all. That says, in its closedness: I am a thing. That says nothing.

To neglect an oevure into life. ‘When did you begin?’ – ‘I can’t remember’. To write as though it didn’t matter. ‘It means nothing to me’. ‘I’m not trying to say anything’. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m not interested in it’. Or to begin to write only at that point, after a life time, when it began no longer to matter. ‘Only now, when it means nothing to me, can I begin to write’.

Trying to get something published – isn’t that an odd task, a presumptious one? Who would presume to be wanted to be read? Imagine instead a writing that neglects itself into existence, that grows, strange byproduct in the obscurest corner of a life. ‘What are you writing?’ – ‘I’m not sure’.

Writing that, epiphenomenal, has no intention behind it, and certainly not publication. That grows by itself – or rather that accretes, strange stalagmite, in the caves of interiority. ‘What are you doing?’ – ‘I’m not sure’.

The presumption of published poetry, say, and especially when it’s arranged carefully on the page. A few lines, then white space, a few more lines. Too purposeful. The presumption of drafted writing, written over and again. Rather that writing that could be found only as you might gather mushrooms: hidden growths, whole oeuvres beneath leaves and confusable with them. ‘What are you writing?’ – ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter’.

Are you ever a reader, only? Or is it that you write, too, as you read, or that what you read is concealed by that – by another writing, by your desire to write? Imagine it: the banker who gave up dreams of writing for finance, but who reads to know it again – writing, the desire to write. Who reads and writes, but without pen or paper. In another life, when writing would not give her up.

She reads – but does she read? Lacan says no one is interested in another’s symptom. And likewise, I think sometimes, with those readers who write when they read, but in another life. Thus, reading Handke, I dream of another book I would like to write, and my reading is that dreaming. And what I write here? So many emails from creative writers and musicians – what are they reading? Of what do they dream as they read?