Category: Writing

Hearing oneself sing, reading oneself write: a simple task – to listen, to read, but for those moments when you are carried away, inspired. And at that time, the listening, the reading, may seem to follow what you say, or write; that singing and writing have run far ahead, that they do not need you, or that they will lead you there only later like a scout.

You are the shell of what was said, and written. You fell behind yourself. Fell into that suspension of time upon which you cannot make good, that cannot double itself into a work. Somewhere, ahead of you, there is song, there is writing. Somewhere you were capable of what is greater than you are. Somewhere and somehow – but by what assistance? By that of speaking, of writing, gifts that seem to give themselves through you and despite you. That leave you beached as they ride ahead, far out to sea.

Who are you, left behind by yourself? Who – beached by what has escaped and left you, but that is still, in some way, you? As though to speak, to write, was not to do so by oneself. Or that singing and writing took from you what gave them substance, what let them speak and write of something. So that they were born from your own life, from your flesh. So that they made themselves from your experience and went ahead of you like avatars. As if you died, as Basho says, and your dreams wandered on without you.

But these dreams are more real than you; this avatar concentrates your strengths; you lag behind what you could be. You’ve fallen behind what you could make, or by what is made – song, writing – by way of you. Once, I sang, I wrote – say that. Once – but also now – I could sing, I could write. Or: I am singing, but somewhere else. Or: I am writing, but someplace else. Or: writing and song have lifted themselves from me. Have gone away, playing elsewhere, the children I had but of whom I let go.

Didn’t it seem I was born with them? That their birth allowed me to be born again? But they are ahead of me, away from me; my children are also not my own. The deeds outstrip me, and who am I who lag behind? A miserable shell of a man. Who cannot speak, or write. Who laps back to himself as this non-speaker, as this non-writer. Who knows himself by what he is not.

Once, you sang, you wrote. Or somewhere far ahead, where you are not who you are, there is singing, there is writing. But not for you, in the present. Not for you or such as you in the lag of the present.

This, as I imagine it, the experience of the writer, the singer in lieu of writing, of singing. This the day-to-day of a writer left behind by that wave of writing that passes through him, or the everyday of the singer, left behind by the song.

Obscure pain: I am not who I am. Pain: I am not a writer; I am no singer. Pain because to be is to do and to be incapable of doing is to be no one at all. A non-writer; a non-singer; incapacity; the inability to be able: this is the pain of the one left behind by his works, which are not his. Pain: not to be the one you are. Not to be able to become with becoming.

Then what can you do? What is open to you? To reclaim your works as your own, to say: I am the author, the singer of these; I am born of my own achievement; I gave birth to myself, a result, an outcome. And with each new work, I consolidate my presence; I am more of a writer, or more of a singer; I am surer, my contours firmer, and when I look in the mirror, a writer is all I am; a singer. And you seek to close up, thereby, what sets you in lieu of yourself. You make real the ghosts that ran ahead of you; you claim your children are only yourself. That speaking, writing, are personalised, yours; that the infinitive is tied to the particularities of your life.

This is a becoming-perceptible, a flight from the anonymous. You would be sure, and certain, and close up that terrible lag that is the afternoon of a writer, a singer. That lag in which Handke’s novelist wanders in his cold town. That no-time, the lag which Sterling R. Smith of Jandek fills with his day job.

The writer faces eternity or the lack of it each day, says Hemingway. Eternity – writing, the to write, ranging ahead. Or the eternal lack of writing – that non-writing which sends writers to drink, and it is the reason they drink. The alcohol-soaked writer seeks to avoid writing’s lack, to close up that lag that makes the present – the afternoon of a writer – the infinite falling short of a full existence.

And the drinking singer sings because he is not yet a singer; because he’s fallen short, and the day is too long, and the afternoon is all of time. Drink, then. Drink yourself to forget that moment’s lag that divides you from yourself. Drink – but there’s another possibility – work. Work your way through the day; chart the uncertain time of the afternoon by working. This is the relief of administration, the need to be absorbed by what can distract you from the horror of the void of time, of the time without eternity that is your experience of writing, of singing.

For writing, singing, you are not yet yourself. Or rather, you experience, by your vocation, what you are not, and in a way different from those who work in the work. For a job is not yet a vocation; it is a measly substitute for what it might be to write, to sing. Your relation to your job is innocent; it is not you; it does not capture who you are.

You are more than your job, put it that way; you may have hobbies, or a family to look after, or a partner to return to after work; you can let it go, your job. But to write, to sing? It is solitude. It can only be endured in solitude, out over 70,000 fathoms and alone.

And another temptation: to think God is with you. That it is God who is close, and with you in your solitude. That God accompanies you, and makes your solitude less lonely. But there is still your solitude. Still that, for God is never close enough, never with you. Unless God is another name for solitude. Alone then, and in the lag of time.

Drink; take a job; pray. But still that lag. Still the experience of what you are not – your lack. Still the break with who you are as you write, you sing. But who are you then? Not you. The one ahead of you. The child, eternally reborn in the work. And the child who dies in the work, and whose living is only dying, light motes on water.

Duras is drinking. Because she is not Duras, or because she falls short of herself in that name, Duras, on the covers of her books. She drinks, then, because she is not quite herself, because her vocation has opened her too wide, because she is exposed to the whole sky, to interplanetary space and it is too much. Too much, the lag which opens wider than everything. Too great then the void at Neauphle.

Drink the days away, and the nights. Drink because the horizon is too wide. Because your vocation is too great. Because what you want is the whole, everything, and to coincide with everything. Just write, that would be enough. Oh you write, you scratch words on a pad. But to WRITE: what would that mean? Terrible question. Drink, then. Drink away the days and nights.

Handke wanders, and lets his protagonist wander in his place. He will send his narrator in The Afternoon of a Writer wandering into the suburban cold. How banal the suburbs! And how banal the white light of the day, falling everywhere, democratic! The everyday without incident. That is outside, the light outside, in which you can wander, you can drink, and episodes happen, but without meaning.

The same everyday in which Blanchot is photographed with his shopping. Blanchot, photographed for the first time, and in a supermarket carpark. Orpheus in the carpark – isn’t that the headline? Isn’t that what is printed?

And the same everyday in which Katy Vine, the journalist, knocks at the door of Sterling R. Smith, and meets a spiffily dressed man who resembles the one on the album covers. Can you tell me about Corwood Industries?, she asks. An innocent question. A question of the everyday, in which the everyday attempts to render account. In which it reckons with artists and writers and singers. He sweats. His jaw shifts. He looks amused, but also uncomfortable. A pause. And then he asks her, ‘Do you drink beer?’

Eternity, or the lack of it: which one? Hemingway shot himself. Kafka took up carpentry and dreamt of emigrating to Palestine. Handek, by writing The Afternoon of a Writer, sought to redeem the afternoon. Duras drank, and wrote about drinking (Practicalities is a book about the everyday). But then, too, she acceeded to the cult of personality that formed around her. She became la Duras. (She becomes perceptible; but of course you cannot become perceptible. It is to turn your back upon becoming.)

And I think this is the greatest temptation: to pretend the lag doesn’t exist. That you coincide with yourself, and by way of what you’ve done. That you substantialise and render yourself present in your relation to your works. To say: I am these, I am a writer, I am a singer. Forgetting that the words writer, singer are honorifics. That to write or to sing is nothing of which you are capable.

And hence the saints among writers and singers are those who know they belong to obscurity. Who gives no interviews, or from whom interviews have to be forced. Who control the means by which their photographs appear (Jandek), or do not consent to be photographed at all (Blanchot). And who exist, in relation to their works, as though already dead.

Treat my work as though I were already dead, Blanchot writes to a filmmaker who wants to direct a version of Thomas the Obscure. Use whatever of the music and lyrics you want, say Corwood Industries, of the recordings that appear on their label; Jandek does not charge for playing live, or claim expenses. Music, lyrics and performance belong to everyone, already. And to everyone as much as to Jandek.

And I think this is the final sign: the writer, the singer relinquishes all claim over what has been made. Lets it go. And affirms very simply, as Sterling R. Smith says to Katy Vine, that ‘there’s nothing to get.’ Nothing: and no insights that knowing the writer, the singer would bring.

Is that Blanchot over there in the carpark? And Handke’s double locking his front door behind him as he steps out on a walk? And is that Duras and Yann Andrea with a half a bottle of whiskey, wandering down by the sea? And Sterling R. Smith opening his garage door and standing, sweating in the sun? Ask them nothing; leave them alone. Because the afternoon is stretching, and they’re all afraid.

‘Tell that story, then.’ – ‘What story?’ – ‘The story of stories, the story that tells itself in every story, and that untells those stories as it speaks. For isn’t every story told by language as it turns over in its sleep? Every story the dream of that sleeper who has never yet awoken, and can only come to itself by unravelling the stories we tell and the words we use?

‘Strange deity who is always asleep. Strange god asleep beneath the surface of the sea and the land, and who has us tell stories only to awaken a little in what we tell of our lives. To awaken – to open its eyes, but these are only the eyes of a sleeper.’

Curious that you can only approach the story crabwise, and never head on. That you have to feed it details, like a handful of grass to a horse, until it becomes nothing other than those details strung together. But sometimes you can sense it, a strange necessity that runs beneath what is told. That there is a story beneath all stories like those rivers that are said to run beneath Antarctic ice. Of what does it tell, and by way of details, plots and characters? Of what does it speak, even if it does so like a fleeting touch on your arm, or the silent pressure of that column of air that reaches right up through the atmosphere?

When I let my mind drift, mornings when I am not at work, it is of the same thing that I dream: to make a work, to break off a piece of me by writing and to let it become, broken, something indifferent to me, to my life. A work – a piece of my life narrated – that now stares upward, transfixed by another vision. To have been survived by what you’ve written: isn’t that enough? But only, in my dream, as the written has broken itself entirely from my life.

And when I was younger, wandering up the road as I never wander now, a dream which begins with a title – North, I think, was one of them – around which a book would crystallise. A book, fragments of narrative, around the title that seemed to bear with it a fatality. Could I write it? Would I be worthy of it? As I wandered, it seemed eminently possible. And my life would be drawn into the work that broke from it. A basket under a balloon sent wandering into the sky.

I never wander about now. Never through the streets with no particular purpose. Then writing could be left indeterminate; the work was only a fresh breeze blowing in from the future. Life hadn’t begun – was that it? There was a sense that it would begin elsewhere, around the corner. That what you had written had only to go halfway to reach it, and it would come. Life was elsewhere, and right here was the ‘not yet’ in which you could dream of anything.

A great deal has happened, that’s for sure, between then and now. Everything – a whole life. And now I tell myself you cannot write until you lived that – a whole life. That like the god reborn into the life of a human being in order to experience birth and death, you cannot write, you have no right to writing until at the end.

So many writers passed very close to death. As if going to death, or surviving it, with death close behind you, is to have reached the flat plains by the ocean that were once its bed. Plains like an open page ready to be touched by the lightest touch of writing. Brushed by a dying hand, or a hand close to dying. Written then, close to the end, which was pushed back – the miracle – so it was no longer the end.

Necessity, urgency: how to find that in your writing? How to let it lean back into what will drive it forward like fate? The second part of Blanchot’s Death Sentence: the miracle is in the movement from episode to episode. Why did that happen, and then that? No answer. Or the answer is only in the imperative to write of which the narrator speaks in the opening lines of the récit.

Another thought: what if it’s out of some kind of neglect that writing could begin? Sovereign neglect, as in Bataille, where it begins because making a book is the less important than anything … Wander again, but in writing and with no thought of a book. Go by going. Everything begins right here, right now …

Neglect and necessity, from one to the other. A law of writing you’ll have to fall back to find.

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.

A half-friend of mine married a woman who became a witch and left him. A man visiting our house became a kleptomaniac and proudly displayed in his house the items he had stolen from ours. A lad burnt his nipples away after pouring petrol on his chest and lighting a match. The headless stone saint in the garden, and you and I sitting beside it, a ‘cigarette break’, though I never smoked …

Reading Richard Ford, I remember that great dream I had as a child to narrate a whole day, every part of it. To remember, by narration, what everyone said and did and what I said and did, all of it part of that great indifferent murmuring of the everyday that spread everywhere, from home to home and school to school.

To keep a diary – later: wasn’t it to discover the way language loomed behind everything, obvious, omnipresent? That just as sure as the everyday that seemed to disperse everything – nothing had any weight; as a child I imagined a million children as a thousand times the thousand who sat in assembly – language would lose memory rather than keep it.

Writing was not the prayer that held what happened as between its praying palms. Open palms instead, dandelion clocks blowing off into the afternoon.

Richard Ford. The American page is as wide as the sky, I tell myself. As wide as the whole of American life. You need a book this big not to contain it, but to show it in its dispersal. To let memory, telling sacrifice itself to language telling itself. For isn’t that what returns in these books despite everything else?

Language tells of itself. Language murmurs and laughs by itself, despite everything told, despite everything the story it’s supposed to tell. And that despite or because of its great excess of detail. That because and despite of the concreteness of the details The Sportswriter and the other books remember. The great profusion, the American page where details gives unto detail, where plot is incidental, where things happen like life happens – contingently and without plan.

300 pages into The Lay of the Land, there is old Wade again. We’d met him hundreds of pages ago in another book, in the first of the trilogy. Why does he pop up again now? No why here. Because of some reason or another. His son, says the narrator, had given him a ticket for speeding. And now Wade and he meet up to go to watch demolitions.

Sometimes, as I read I remember what J.G. Ballard said recently: there have been no universal literary classics since Catch-22; no absolute must-reads. The time of literature is over. He’s probably right, and I always wonder who could have a taste for Richard Ford except me, who likes books in which nothing in particular happens, and the prose just rolls on without reason.

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 the life of us all will be written on the American page. 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 great long words that will be our words unravelled.

Again? Yes, here again, in a post I should put in parentheses, for what is there to write now that I didn’t set down hours earlier? what, in this part of the day, evening moving towards night that is not the same as morning? The same LP – I Trawl The Megahertz, the same wind outside, the same bottle of Cava on my desk, though it is unstopped now, and empty (I only drank half – two fizzy glasses – last night).

The same -but to be here again, to write again, is necessary if I am to enjoy what Sinthome has called my Sainthood – and shouldn’t I ask, rereading his posts, whether he is not also a saint? – but then perhaps he knows that, with his punning Lacanian name. Sinthome, Saint homme: isn’t he also traversing the fantasy (supposing I myself am doing the same)? isn’t writing over again that small jouissance left in the wake of the big Other’s collapse?

Ruins all around us, but writing still, freshly beginning, and no nostalgia. Begin again, write again, and this surplus is what is left of the fantasy. A post in brackets, then, and nothing to say but everything: for to say it again is to say it anew. To say it, and worn all the way down to saying: that address, that first time which is the repeated act of faith that seems to stitch together my life.

An act – hardly an act, for it is never yet complete, or never complete enough, but there is enough jouissance here, for all that it stays unfinished. The interminable, the incessant: writing to no one in particular, for no one: a few lines in excess, a few lines unasked for, here as daylight fades to darkness.

And shouldn’t I close the curtains of the blog right now? Shouldn’t I shut off the light that lets those outside know what happens in here, in my life, between these walls? But it matters that what is written is public. Matters, then, that the act of publishing calls to a public, however phantasmal. That way I can turn from my life, or so I think. Or my whole life turns and takes aim in an act that simplifies it and pares it down.

To write at the your own edge: what would that mean? To write by leaning forward into the future: but what is that? One day passes, another. I marvel at the dried pink plaster in the bathroom, very smooth, and according to the meter of the man from the drying company, the damp course is holding. Dry, smooth walls: miraculous.

And I watch for the leak from the bathroom upstairs, and it seems that that, too, is fixed, and there is only the thinnest slither of water damage – only that trace of those great indoor showers through my ceiling. And the great plane of sanded wooden floors calmly spreads the way from room to room, even though it tilts down to the middle, both sides, to where I imagine the flat is collapsing (there was a mineshaft right outside the doorway once, I saw it on the mining survey; is that why a faint crack runs along the doorstep?).

And peace: my neighbours, very quiet, seem to be away. Peace: as wide and pleasing as the floor. Peace all around me, preparatory. Couldn’t something begin here? Couldn’t a step be taken? And I dream of that great breath I might take, to draw in all the world, and then to breathe it out again, and for the first time. Anew: but isn’t this what writing is: expiration, and not its opposite: an attempt to breathe the world alive again?

Eight thirty. At the threshold between evening and night. At the threshold, the watershed, there where two rivers might divide on either side of a ridge, or where two corries let their glaciers surge downwards, divided by an arrete.

How many times can you say it? How many times to find the words to say? But it is the words that come to the act, and not the other way around. Words that seem to belong to it, to fit – words that come, I think, because of the hour that it is, and because of the day. And because of me, too – I know that. Because the act gathers me to the edge of itself and asks, as its price, that I give it something of my life for it to consume.

And so must the curtains remain open: so this house does not hide itself from the passerby. To be published, even in this way, is necessary. To show – but to show what? You’ve worn away all welcome, I tell myself, and the pleasure is only your own.

But I am also on the outside, looking in (this wall of prose is blank to me, too). Words, streaming – whose? Whose life is being written? But it is no one’s life that matters, not now. Blackness behind your reflection in the window. Blackness: there, bottomless, you are no one at all.

Look back over the days, the weeks. Look through the categories. What have you traversed? What’s been broken through? But nothing’s been accomplished, not now, not once and for all. Again, and isn’t this the effort? To be here, and leaning into the future?

Again: whisper it: and behind your life, it is spread like a reflection on a night window, black and bottomless. The void that calls writing forward; the object cause it also is, divided in itself between the saying and the said.

As authors become famous – but it is the same for any artist – their lives must become more cluttered, and the way back to the solitude of the work more difficult. How to find your way back to what called you then, when you were young? Youth calls to youth inside you: how to call yourself back?

I am never young enough, say that. I have never been young enough, say that. But doesn’t youth dream of itself in you? Doesn’t it call itself to itself, and spread the shore before you, in its spreading simplicity? And then you are young again. Then, and for the first time: young, when youth burned ardently inside you, and resolve was pure, adamantine.

But this is a youth that has to be won. The origin is difficult to reach; how to leap upstream? How to struggle your way back? I would like to speak, say that. Now, for the first time, I know what it is to speak, say that. Youth – at last. Youth – at the end of life, not the beginning.

How to train yourself to write at a stroke, at a single stroke, like a Zen calligrapher? How to live and die in the purity of an act that gathers all of you up, all your life, all experience, and sets it aflame by the light caught on the sword that flashes out in the dawn. Aflame – as if all that you lived was fuel for the fire by which you will burn.

The period of asceticism, in India, follows a life as a householder: you must have lived, married and had children before you can wander out as a sanyasin. Shiva, the ascetic god, was accused by the other gods of never having lived in the world. In an eyeblink, Shiva caused himself to be born; he lived, married, brought up his children and then died. He opened his eyes to the gods who bowed and asked for his blessing.

And writing, too, can only die to a life already lived. Isn’t this the meaning of writing from experience? You must have lived, but must, too, be ready to sacrifice that life by writing, must heap it up on the funerary pyre and leap into it as it burns.

Perhaps. But there is also the substantiality of that life, and of the living relationships that bind you to others. Did I really think, when I was young, I could sacrifice what I had not yet gathered – that there was a shortcut to the life of the sanyasin? In truth, I was not yet sufficiently young – or I did not know as youth what could only be achieved if I lived in the world among others.

Perhaps it is necessary to think the sanyasin alongside the householder: that both lives might be entwined together, and need one another. For of course, nothing is sacrificed by writing, not really. And isn’t it the greatest of joys to meet one’s friends, to eat with them, as I did last night? And wasn’t that why this dark morning was so much the more alive for me, when, in lieu of writing – as I am always without writing – I could at least know and write of what is impossible?

Sometimes I wonder if it was only writing that Yukio Mishima sought by his coup, his seppuku. Writing, or youth – those young men he loved (he would receive prostitutes dressed in the uniform of the Peers’ School that he attended) – could be given only by death (seppuku was also a sexual fantasy, for him, performed each night, and driving his lovers to leave him).

Three times, in The Sea of Fertility, a young man is reborn. Three times, youth is to come to youth. The fourth volume of the tetralogy is sent to the publishers on the day of Mishima’s death. The fourth, The Decay of the Angel, where the youth did not die, but lives on, aging, in blindness. Unbearable! So Mishima, in whom, he said, words fell like rain, Mishima who barely needed to revise his prose, had to give himself death in order to find youth.

What does the West mean for Mishima? Substantial life, his house furnished in a European style. And the East? Death, just that, and the vanished life of action (the sword, and not the chrysantheum). But perhaps there is no action – not even writing – that does not rest upon substantial life. No flashing swordstroke whose sense is given immanently in action.

Shiva closed his eyes, and had lived a life by the time he opened them. The gods asked for his blessing, and retreated. But remember, too, Shiva had a consort – first Sati, who caused herself to be consumed by flames when she saw her husband snubbed by her father, and then, after a long period, Parvathi, who seemed, in the comics I used to read, so real a person.

My favourite scene, from my favourite comic (Sati and Shiva: on the cover, they are both garlanded, and riding Nanda the bull): Shiva after the death of his first wife, meditating alone on the mountain, purple skinned, long haired, the river Ganges flowing from his matted locks. But Shiva had already lived a life, and he meditates alone until his second wife will come to him.

Tired, with a cold coming on, I know in some sense I’m getting in my own way, and that this will only get worse with age, and the morning will carry with it a reminder of my own heaviness, of the reluctance of my body to let me write.

By what kind of training is it possible to rise, and write? How can the phrases which allow the beginning come to arise? How to find that silence that is their backdrop, the sense of the sea that comes forward to sweep the beach clean?

I get in my own way; I stumble over myself – for how long can coffee, which I drink only in the morning, alone, and at the head of the day, give me the confidence in beginning? Only slightly ill, and it’s impossible. Tired, and it’s impossible – but then, by what chance is it sometimes eminently possible, the seemingly highest act?

Of course I am not speaking of what is actually written: that doesn’t matter. Reading back, as I do rarely, the same disappointment. Not even a beginning, I tell myself. Not the barest of beginnings. But still, in the day that began with writing, and that seems borne along by what began there, before dawn, there seems a beginning, a way of being braced against what happens, a few sentences being set against silence, arising against it, as, I imagine in my delusion, a calligraphic sign, drawn at a stroke, arises against the whiteness of the page.

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

But writing has faith enough in me. Writing, as I wake calls to be written. But even that is not true: it is just what I wish were the case. I wish it now, slightly ill, but not ill, writing – but not really writing – in the darkness. Writing in lieu, writing of what is lost by writing, and wishing the wind from the impossible would tousle my hair: perhaps.

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

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

How young you have to be to write!, I exclaim in my stupidity. How young so that you no longer get in your own way! But perhaps this is a youth that can only be achieved with age, and that a great clearing away is necessary so that the shore is revealed in its spreading simplicity. 

‘I am quoting from memory’: Blanchot says this in his essay on Levinas, the tenderest of gestures, though doesn’t it also allow what is quoted to go amiss? How tenderly I got you wrong. How tenderly I forgot, though I was trying to remember. But what kind of tenderness does not look for accuracy?

I think there may be a writing that neglects, and is given over to the vagaries of memory. As though it were like the large glass of Duchamp’s artwork that would slow light down as it passed. To slow light, to slow sense, or the exchange of sense: I only half remember what you said. Remember it like light at the end of a summer’s day: fading, almost twilit, just before the bats come out. What did you say then? What did you want me to hear, or were you only talking to yourself?

You were ill and I took you to the old country to recover. It was winter, very cold, but I still pressed you for anecdotes: I wanted to know something of your private memories. And what did you say? Should I remember here?

Another memory instead, but still one of yours: the end of a summer’s day and you and a friend beneath a tree, the one with flashcards and the other guessing the shapes on those flashcards without seeing. ‘We were so tired. I think that’s why we were receptive.’ Wearily receptive, as the light failed, guessing the shapes right. But I am quoting from memory – when did you tell me that? twenty years ago – more? and when was that summer of which you spoke? – and no doubt I’ve got it wrong. I think you have to be tired, very tired, to write with the right amount of neglect, to let distance enter time and slow it.

Curious that memories like that can hollow out a space in you – that they ask to be kept, and that something of you is kept with them. But how to keep fidelity with a memory? How to remember, except by way of that forgetting that, like the Japanese aesthetic category of sabi lends the charm of a patina of age to that which is recalled?

As though it were a slightly damaged antique, or book pages that are sun-yellowed, or old yellowed photographs from the 70s, smaller than they are now, and with colours softer than they are now – that fading lets a distance speak; now it is time that is those pictures’ element. They bear the trace of the memories they would carry, but don’t they carry a trace of the neglect that they know will meet them? Who are those people? Who were they? Photographs remaining when all are dead and gone, when no one is alive.

We drove out to see you in your student halls, and walked out along one river that was a tributary to another. I have photos from that time – there, with the college behind us, and in the college cloisters themselves, and then with you standing on the semi-circle of bridge near to the houses where the boats are kept. And it was not long ago I stood on that same bridge, and a picture of me was taken there. That day, we quoted from Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy, laughingly, and of course inaccurately: what can such a poem mean to us now? what can poetry mean? No doubt it was the setting of the poem I recalled, for speaker, and choir and orchestra, and not the poem itself.

‘Now I will give my grief it’s hour’; ‘The festal light from Christchurch Hall’: poetry sings of what it was and is not now, or perhaps that was the way those old lines sounded as they were marked by my forgetting. Aged by our lives. Listened to, that setting, half a life ago and now as we spoke half-remembered lines with a patina that carried it beyond that half a life and spoke of the lovely fading of poetry, of the neglect that must meet it if it is to be alive.

And then you fell ill, and our families arranged that I took you to the old country, staying with my uncle in his cottage, a room each upstairs. How many photos did you take, film after film? The dog with snow in a little pyramid on his nose. The dog inside, lying on the underheated floor. The dog running out into the water. And then a picture of the ice on the water, like a crust, nearly breaking where the waves lapped up, but still all one, a single sheet.

I remember pressing you for anecdotes, remembering those stories recounted of the Greek philosophers by Diogenes Laertius in which the thought of a thinker was to reveal itself by an appropriate incident from their life. As though the whole of their thought were there, as the general shape of a tree is found in the angle between twig and branch. You told me something; but I will not tell of what you said. Two stories, I think, one of life and one of death.

And when I think of you, and of our lives and deaths, isn’t it with those stories first in mind: first of all, those anecdotes in which something came alive of which I did not know before. Your life, beyond mine, and different from it. I felt a pleasant neglect, I felt pushed back a little and this was happiness: to have been present when memories returned, and with great force. Yes, to have been there, then as they came to break the surface.

It is early now – or very late – and I cannot sleep. I wake up and come into this room, with the aim of picking up this thread, bearing with me my reading for the day: on the Stoics, on the notion of harmony, a little of Henry Green’s Nothing, and still the Jean Genet I remember from the other day: The Declared Enemy. And a more distant sense of mourning in advance, for when I saw that Robert Altman was dead, I thought of old Ingmar Bergman, and how that morning when you took a photograph of the frozen sea, we were told it was once possible to walk across the ice the five miles to Sweden.

It is on the other side of Sweden he lives still, Bergman, on his island, alone. Writing still – and he is the old man of Ullman’s Faithless, who assists when it comes to remembering the past. Not a narrator, but a kind of god who watches over narration, and blesses it. A god of neglect, and who comes to you by way of distance, bringing it.

How old he is, Bergman! And how late it is, as I take up writing this post again. As late as the night which seems never to end in Fanny and Alexander, and wouldn’t I like to speak as they were able to speak, the old woman and her friend the old Jew. Neglect carried their words, and she, in particular, let what she said be borne on that current which arrives from the past. Spoke, and let her speech be carried by that divine neglect that broke its words upon its surface, like funerary flowers carried apart on a river.

And now I remember, how nearly one year ago, the ashes of my father were carried into the Bay of Bengal and lowered there, in the city that used to be called Madras. Were their flowers? No place for a grave, but this is welcome. The sea to which all rivers are tributaries: that great river that runs through our lives, scattering what we say and what we remember.

Divine neglect: isn’t it of that, too I should remember, recalling little stories in which his memory comes alive? It is very late; it’s early. No dawn – not for a few hours. I hear the rushing of water from the kitchen – somewhere a pipe has broken. Somewhere it is leaking still, for all that the water company came out yesterday. I hear the heating coming on and then turning off again, and the crack of the water bottle from which I drank snapping back into shape.

I took a decongestant and a paracetamol: should I go to bed? But something is awake in me and I tell myself it is the god of neglect. But there is no god, only a river – the same one, I imagine that runs through the album by Smog, whose name is again free of parentheses.

And didn’t we (a different ‘we’, this time) watch Bill Callahan and Joanna Newsom performing ‘Rock Bottom Riser’ on Youtube, she sitting playing piano and he standing singing into a mic and say to each other, they’re really in love? We thought them both very handsome. We saw love when he turned to look at her, and love in her looking at him. We liked her dress, and his uprightness. We liked the piano that accompanied the song. A River Ain’t Too Much to Love: but what does that mean?

I am awake now, as only writing can awaken me. Who writes? The river seeks to find itself – to return flowing to flowing, breaking apart the funerary flowers, and carrying the ashes of the dead. To return to itself: as though writing wanted only to complete a circuit, to come back to itself by writing of a life, and of the ancedotes that speak of that life, the part of the whole. To return: as though writing had a nostalgia for what is lost to memory, for the distance that divides us from old photos and old memories.

Nostalgia – but not, now, of a lost place, of the homeland of memory, but of the river that runs through all places, returning, always returning, as the flower petals scatter. ‘I will give my grief it’s hour’. Grief – and joy – and death – and life. I am quoting from memory. No: memory is quoting me. No: memory quotes itself by way of neglect. How weary were you, that day, when you guessed the shapes, and thoughts seemed to pass from one weary head to another?

A writer faces eternity or the lack of it every day: is that the quote? Eternity, then would be a passage of writing – to take that, at least from the day. And the lack of it? No writing; nothing done. What misery! But here I remember a passage often quoted at Red Thread(s); it’s from Duras:

There should be a writing of non-writing. Someday it will come. A brief writing, without grammar, a writing of words alone. Words without supporting grammar. Lost. Written, there. And immediately left behind.

Of words alone? As though there were a word for each thing, for everything. And to place words a certain way would be as to paint a still life. Those words – there; perfectly placed, perfectly connected to one another, like Cezanne’s apples.

But then of course there cannot be a word for everything – or rather, what names everything is what denies the indefinite multiplicity of everything, the great sprawl of the singular. To write a still life must be to make a poem that would avoid, in its operation, the idealisation of the world it would lay before us. Can the poem become itself a thing; can it thicken itself into a still life of words, ideal words, it is true, but composed so that they have, in their arrangement, the semblance of singularity?

So would language be reborn; so would it give birth to itself and as though for the first time: words, now, like things, and arranged into a thing; language roves in the world as anything roves; it speaks like a fallen branch or a leafy stump; it speaks like a rockpool or the spreading surf: how did it make the leap out of abstraction?

A writing of non-writing, a language of non-language, that will come, beaching words without grammar. Words, just words – arranged, placed like sea shells on the sand at dusk. Sea shells placed, unplaced by the sea. Lost – and then left behind.

By what divine neglect would such a poem be born! Words lost as the items in a Zen garden – lost, placed, unplaced – by what skill to aspire to a divine neglect – to that indifference that lets a word be lost? It is a god who writes, or the poet is a god. The words placed themselves thus. The words asked to be placed thus; they stranded themselves here; they asked to be lost here.

Or: it was language that asked. Language weary from signifying; language tired of transporting sense. That said: I would like to lie down. I would like to lay down in words that lay down. Eternity – or the lack of it, each day: but doesn’t this still bind the author too strongly to what falls away from the divine? Doesn’t it make writing a matter of will, of the deliberate placing of words?

Only a god can neglect. Only a god can turn away from you as she faces you. I think that’s what the ancients knew in their sacred groves. I think that was what was known when names were invented for the gods of the earth and the sea and the sky. What was named thus – what gave itself to name a god – were words unplaced – lost words, words content to lose themselves, and asked to be lost.

Eternity, the lack of it: there is a writing, a non-writing that dissolves this alternative. Words lost, and left to be found in their loss: eternity and uneternal, ordinary words that seem to call out to the farthest parts of the universe, but for all that they are ordinary.

A writing of non-writing, a non-writing writing: is this what is at issue in a book called In Pieces that I received from the post? The fragment, here, is the gathering of words to be neglected. Often, they are dated as in a diary (the same is true of Red Thread(s)); but doesn’t the date only recall the unlimiting of the day, its blossoming?

Saturday evening, with Cava. Should I pour another glass? A whole day in with a cold, in the refurbished flat – new kitchen, new bathroom, electricity working again, heating working again, only the great hole in the ceiling I opened to find the source of the damp that, I found out, has rotted away the load bearing joists, along with staining brown the newly replastered walls.

But no, someone says inside of me, you cannot write in this way. Or, write away, but soon it is writing that thickens itself into a glutinous double of what you meant to say. Writing, then, as what interposes itself – as interposition itself, that kind of mediation which refuses its mediacy.

No loquacity. No chatter. Unless it is the chatter of writing itself, of the ‘itself’ of writing, speaking as it withdraws from sense, and to carry sense along in its withdrawal. Then writing becomes a kind of parody of writing, the fruitless repetition of sense and its withdrawal.

Sense given and taken; sense interrupting sense: how stupidly simple it is, this sense that what gives itself by way of writing is withdrawn by the same stroke: that the written is the body loss gives to itself. But a gift that is lost as it carries away its body, as it becomes parody, overwriting, that grotesque doubling that offends the good sense of the communicator for whom language, in some degree, must offer itself as mediator.

The experience of language: a simple, stupid phrase. Experience – trial, suffering, endurance – and of language: as language reaches its limit and is trapped there. As the limit is the sticky foam in which an insect traps its prey. The limit becomes limitless, you wander along the edge of sense. But as you pass, the limit clings to you and you are gradually immobilised by what wants to write with writing.

Are your trapped? Dying? A last chance remains to you. Begin a fiction; send the spool of writing ahead of you and let it return. Fiction: the writer’s fort-da. Characters who live and act, mirrors of the living and dying of others in the world.

Tolstoy only knew his mother by a preserved silhouette; he made Nathalia in the image of the this absence of image. He loved her, and we love her, too. Coetzee’s suicided son becomes the dead son of Dostoevsky. Travel very far, write a great deal, but like Kelvin in Solaris, it is your father you will embrace, there on the surface of a faraway planet.

But what happens when you know it is not your father whom you hold but some ghost of writing? Not your suicided son, but the undead one who supplants the living and will supplant everyone?

Now the truth of all characters, of all characterisation returns, like another version of Hamlet’s father, to prophesise the dying of the author who created him. Or to say to him: I am your dying gone bad, the corpse of Lazarus with his winding sheets and stench. Even your mother, Tolstoy, is death given life, and she will come apart, dust lost in the wind.

Write not to preserve something from death, but to give yourself more thoroughly to it. Write to die not once, but over and again. Writer, prophet: isn’t it the experience of language you touch as you dream of the farthest future? A dream that is the cause of your writing as it belongs to what is always to come?

Then what you have made by your novel is a ghost-ship; the Marie Celeste that everyone has deserted. What you have written, but also what gave you to think you have made it yourself, is part of the fort-da of writing; it is writing’s game that lives with you and lets itself die again with your death. It is writing that gave you life, and will withdraw it. Given and taken, and through everything you write and have written.

But then you, too are a character, the persona writing gives itself into order to send itself out into the world. Proxy, your substance is borrowed; the author is in search of his authority even before the characters come looking. And what would they find if they found you? Another character, not an author, and one already engaged on his own quest: to stand face to face with what called him, and to call it to account.

In truth, writing only writes of itself. Language lives by a great reflexivity. Your life is lived in the return of writing to itself, writing’s death-drive. An ‘itself’ that thickens itself into a counter-world, into the spider’s web of writing, on which everything you lived was allowed to catch itself. There it is, your flat, your open ceiling and its joists; there is your yard, with the pots of grasses and heathers, but covered in a thick, strange substance, like the spit from a spider’s mouth.

This world is already Solaris; it is already the Zone of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. And who are you, proxy, writing’s idiot? Who are you, born into a life that was never yours? A character in the fiction by which writing lives. The narrator who is lent writing only to have writing withdraw, turning his books into a quivering indication whose every element is magnetised by what is to come.

Why does it need you? To give itself substance. To let you rise like an avatar, and live a life in the world. But then to fall back, with your death, into its own deathlessness.

Could you pity it, then, language, for this desire to give itself flesh, to go out into the world, in order to return? Might you pity it for its dependency, its love of the first creation it immediately overlays with destruction? More terrifying: there is no one to pity. Writing is not itself, or its ‘not’ is also what it is.

Language’s experience – living, dying, and unfolding the game of life and death in its own recurrence. Sense given and taken, fictions made and unmade, but everything pointing to what is still to come, not because it will save and redeem what has gone before, not because it will complete it, but because it is from there it will come again, the necessity of writing’s fort-da, the freedom it gives by way of its return.

Mark it here, that which will not be arrested by a mark. Let it speak itself here, that which will not bring itself to speech, and has no ‘itself’, unless this indicates a wandering without cease, the darkness on the other side of the mirror. ‘Itself’ – infinite detour. Passage into passage, without a promised land.

Unless the wandering is itself promise, and the incessant is a kind of freedom into which writing would set itself. To reach writing’s desire, not your own. Or to let your desire catch fire with the desire of writing, cold flame that does not burn. Are you alive?

Blind Oedipus is led by Antigone, looking for a place to die. But now imagine that place withholds itself, and that they wander without cease, this blind man and his daughter. How is it that what appeared as fate allows itself to become freedom?

What are you trying to finish, to bring to term? Or is blogging, for you, to accompany the whole of your life, as though it were already beyond it, or before, or that it ran along another track, parallel to what you accomplish in the course of time?

Nothing finishes itself here. Strange mirror that recalls you to the interval that sometimes opens, as fatigue, as indifference, such that your time is  unfolded and exposed. Mirror in which it is only the weary one who sees himself, without knowing what he sees, and lacking even that capacity: the gift of sight.

Isn’t it it that his vision coagulates in that space between what he tries to reach by sight and sight itself? Itself: but now vision passes by way of a detour, it sees what it cannot see, it sets itself as though in the earth and opens to a sky without stars.

Nothing will finish here. Nothing begins. What is it you want to achieve? What do you desire? I want the interval to be lost in me. I desire time to turn me over to eternity. ‘I’: but this word, now, is cited by another speech. ‘I’ echoing in vain, having never discovered itself. The laughter of streaming words: you are no one. Laughter of what writes in my place: no one writes here.

A day waiting for a delivery. Waiting, until waiting falls from itself. No longer is it a matter of the time I might have spent doing something else – of what I have lost by waiting. That still presumes a time in which tasks orientate me towards the future, and behind them, the projection that is my relation to time. A relation that withers as waiting falls from waiting, and time is no longer lost, nor gained.

Errant time, time unemployed: I pass from one room to another, boredly lying on the bed and watch The Simpsons on my laptop, and then up again to check my downloads. And there is the yard, no longer disappointing, though there is still the big tear in the wall that will soon be repaired. And the day – white, blank, in which nothing at all can happen. Or the day is that non-happening, the passing of time wiped out.

Time without project, time that does not live from the future: the day spreads out indifferently beneath the sky. Stagnancy: time is going nowhere. I’m waiting – but for what? Waiting without object. Superfluous time, that lacks its sense. Do I ever wait for waiting, wondering when time will return to its course?

Eventually, waiting draws itself back to itself, the day, stretched, begins to stretch back to itself. I think to myself, I should write something. Think: I should at least mark the moment when the time began to flow again, and waiting no longer waited for itself.

Now the day is spread before me like a plateau. What is to happen? The delivery will come – now that event exists on the same plane as me. Yes, I am certain of that. And I can write, too – I’m certain of that. But how to bear without betrayal that waiting that no goal could alleviate? How to write of what loses itself before it is found?

Sometimes, I want to awaken in myself a sense of urgency. How old am I?, I ask myself. And then: What ought I have done? But this ‘ought’, which used to awaken me, leaves me indifferent. How old am I, anyway? This is the plateau, the long afternoon that opens out into middle age. A decline so gentle it can hardly be felt. The long afternoon – I know how I’ll pass it; my world is secure enough, stable enough; it turns steadily on its axis.

A delivery is coming: even that is enough. To wait as a customer, to have afforded to buy what is arriving. To wait as one to whom things are owed: yes that is already a great deal; I know it, as it can only be known from the perspective of one to whom this chance might not have been granted.

Wasn’t there a time, after all, when all the doors were shut? A time – scarcely a time. Waiting fallen from waiting, waiting lost from itself: unemployment, illness, the one turning into the other. Illness, unemployment, and a great weariness that crossed out the sky.

That’s what returned today, when waiting fell from itself. Returned – as it also returned then, the first time (was their a first time?) Strange autobiography that would have to include long tracts where moment unjoined itself from moment. Strange testimony that would keep fidelity with what failed to occur.

Before, one task gave itself into another; there was a struggle, a series of struggles – to find a job, to keep it; and now? Tasks are worn away from themselves; projects fail before they begin, and this is happiness. Adrift in life – life, completely adrift, with no desire to leave my name behind when night comes after the long afternoon and the evening.

But the act of writing has caught me out. The faith that carries all acts as they belong to time carries the words in which I would answer to waiting as it falls away from waiting. How then to attenuate this faith, to wear it away? Let it wander without course. Set it adrift; give it to chance. Write without thought, or without forethought.

Nothing is to happen here; nothing is to gather itself into an event. Blanched writing, etiolated writing – worn away until the act falters, until the step forward is also a step away. How old am I?, I ask myself that. What am I doing here?: I ask myself that. No answer – today is any day, and I am anyone.

1. Why does it seem, as I try to write again, that I’ve never written before? ‘Begin.’ – ‘But I can’t begin.’ – ‘Begin, drag the non-beginning into the beginning, let writing make itself from its own impossibility.’

Isn’t this what tiredness reveals, and by way of its impossibility: the leap that writing must be – the leap that lets writing become a kind of fate? Pass through impossibility, traverse it; experience what cannot lift itself into the beginning. And then – strange chance – there is a beginning amidst the non-beginning, and what is written now marks itself with the memory of what it could not accomplish.

It is this trial that lets writing be writing – that allows it to appear as itself at its own limits, there where it shimmers before you as the impossible. That’s when it begins: then when it cannot begin, and it has no future.

2. But how does this trial mark writing? How does it leave its trace such that what is written turns around it? I don’t know the answer, except that I sometimes know that what I read has passed through that tiredness that has come to the end of itself. No: that passes through tiredness and continues to pass there, that never has done with the unlimiting of the limit.

Then writing is also lost in writing – or there is another current that bears what is written away from what signifies by way of the text. Bears it away – and brings it back, returning, as the trial of a writing that tears itself away from reference, from signification.

‘Itself’: but what does that mean? Slave of sense, slave of reference, language could only arrive at itself only as came to its limit. But the limit is undone. The limit undoes itself and the end is not the end, and nothing can begin.

Then it is brought back and by way of writing: the end that never arrives. And it is recalled to the present and by way of writing: the beginning that never lifts itself from what does not begin. Future and past are joined there, in the present of writing. Joined? But only as they void that present. Only by turning it aside, thickening it, and casting it outside the succession of moments that pass.

The present of tiredness – the future that does not come; or the past that is never left behind. So is writing anticipated. So does writing wait for itself, ahead of itself, and dream of itself before it begins. ‘And do you wait, too, writer? Do you dream?’ – ‘Something in me is waiting. Something in me is dreaming.’ – ‘But waiting for what? Dreaming of what?’

Waiting relinquishes itself in waiting, and dreaming within dreaming. Waiting unlimited, and the dream unfolding, at its heart, what turns it aside from anyone in particular.

The bloom of dreaming, the bloom of waiting, writing comes as memory is forgotten, and anticipation loses its hold on the future. Comes to itself, from the forgotten past, from the unknown future: this is the miracle of writing, its mercy, its surplus.

Dream: a writing in retreat, a writing that empties itself as it moves, as the people of old Russia retreated as Napoleon’s armies marched toward them. Retreated and opened the land they left as a terrifying, aching absence. The advancing troops died of Russia’s space and its people’s patience (but this a dream, and nothing to do with what might have been the case).

Absence: Napoleon’s troops passed through empty towns and along the empty roads, lost in a country that was indifferent to them. Or that lives its own life, and now I think of Stalker’s Zone: what resists? What comes forward as resistance? The deserted country – the objects on the nightstand reappear under water. It is not Stalker who dreams, as he lies down among the puddles, but the Zone itself. Then it is only the Zone that is real; only the empty space of Russia in its massive absence.

Writing’s remove: allow absence to dream of itself. Of itself – and across pages covered in writing.

2. What does writing, in its retreat, open behind it? Simone Weil’s God opened the universe as he fled; he is always turned in the other direction. And doesn’t he flee from himself? Isn’t his fleeing first of all that? The protagonist of Blanchot’s Death Sentence rents a series of rooms all at once in which to enjoy his absence. He is not there – and how offended he is when he knows a child has been looking into one those rooms, as though it had caught out his absence, seen it, instead of allowing absence to absent itself in darkness. 

How to let writing be? How to turn your back upon writing by writing? And how to read such that writing does not give up its indifference?

3. Sometimes, foolishly, I think to myself: music without a voice is nothing, art without a face is nothing, even if the voice is torn up, even if the face is burned away. To drive away the face – to deafen yourself to the voice, but by way of the face, and by way of the voice. And then: writing needs plot, needs character; it needs an orientation, even if it is to point only to what tears plot and character from themselves, even if it is to allow writing to absent itself from itself.

Kafka’s skill: immense precision of writing. No detail is extraneous. But every detail (Klamm’s pince-nez, the peasant’s faces in the snow) seems to retreat from my reading, leaving that remove that is indifferent to my attempt to discover meaning. The eye passes along a glazed page. Sense refuses itself to sense, or meaning carries with it the retreat of meaning. What does the book say? What does it not say?

I discover something of the same in the best of Appelfeld. Not Badenheim, but The Iron Tracks, or The Healer; not The Story Of My Life, but For Every Sin, or Tzili. Could I say that it is writing’s retreat that fascinates me in Appelfeld, that lays claim to my reading? Then this would be a response (but an unsubstantiated and oblique one – a project for a response rather than a response) to Ellis Sharp’s post at Barbaric Document.

With some books, reading is drawn over a threshold, and, as Steve, from the first. ‘There are some books whose first lines, whose opening lines are enough’, he writes more recently. As though the fictions that follow them are gathered up into a threshold. Cross over. Pass. But you pass into nothing. Reading is only passage; the space opened by writing is already in retreat.

1. Post titles? Unnecessary. No titles, no signature. And a date – do you need one of those?

You would like to write, no one knows where I am. You would write, remembering Joubert, to forget is to follow the course of time; to remember is to resist it. But how to write and to keep nothing by writing? How to live in the space of names without meaning, where no word weighs more than any other?

Where do thoughts go?, Joubert asks. And answers: into the memory of God. Cross out the word, God, or let it stand in for an impersonal memory, the great archive of the world, the memory of stones and of birds. Now thoughts drift like pollen, falling here and there. Words have fallen across the world; thought wanders without thinkers.

2. Balthus: ‘I wanted to paint a dreaming young girl and what passes through her, not the dream itself. The passing therefore, not the dream.’

I wanted to write of a thinking that passes, not the thinkers themselves, nor the content of their thoughts. As though it were possible to think and not to hold – to receive thought as I, this morning, am received by the dawn.

Early morning, the head of the day, and I know I have been seen. I know that a kind of seeing has seized my own eyes, and that I hear what I have been given to hear. A thinking that is too light for thoughts. Thinking without content, as open as the dawn. And that claims your thoughts and lets them rise like fire balloons.

3. Dawn. Gently, the hours praise time, and know its measure. Hours pass. The passing, and not their content. Becoming, and not things that become. Is it enough to surround writing with a border of white space? To cross out titles and signatures? How to carry passage into writing itself? How to become with writing?

Nothing is identical to itself. The world is doubled. Hours pass – and time is doubled. Close your eyes and you will see, writes Joubert. Or let another seeing open in your own. Let the flow of writing seize your writing. Lighten speech.

The wheelie bins, the straggly plants: always begin with the yard, I told myself once, and then you’ll always have something to write. As though the yard worked a kind of reduction on the one who, on the other side of the window, would write of what it contained. Write of the yard, and you’ll at least be writing of something. You’ll always have that, the north-facing yard, in its open mediocity.

Baron Munchausen was able to pull himself out of the ocean by his bootstraps. To bootstrap writing is to as though lift writing out of the details it is made to record. As though you could separate writing from writing. As though there were a pure ‘to write’ that sought to free itself from what is said.

And isn’t this a beautiful thought, that that writing would lift itself through everything you write of your life? That it would set fire your entire life in order to rise, phoenix-like, from the flames. Unless there is a way of living that is like that burning, and life is separable from life as writing is from writing. ‘To live’: but what would that mean?

Mediocre life, open on all sides. Who is that leans over me, offering me a mirror for my perfect nothingness? I am the host of the one who is mirrored thus, who lives in me and by way of me. A life, a writing: at the heart of my mediocrity I burst into flame.

Introspection? No, not even that, for nothing is seen here, and nothing belongs to the inside. By writing of them, events become lighter. Write of them, and they begin to rise into the air. But nothing is seen. Writing, just writing – the sound of words, the rhythm of prose, and the play of concepts. It barely interests me.

Write, half-attentive. Write, after writing several posts, and only then might you attain that writing-indifference, that writing-disinterestedness that lifts itself from the particularity of your life. I want to write nothing special. To write nothing in particular, to join my prose to the great streaming of prose.

My prose? But it is not mine, and that is what I want: to relinquish what is mine, my life and my memories; to lighten them, and let themselves drift into the air.

A sharp pencil and a new notebook (I must have lost the old one), but what is there to write? The dream: to return writing to writing, to allow writing to relate to itself and accomplish its tautology while I – who am I? – become no one at all. No one – no, not quite. Or that it is I am joined to the endless lapping of writing, the undoing of anything that is said. Say nothing; say it again, and by means of what you would write. Write of your life, and of everything that has happened to you, but say nothing; let nothing say itself again.

Who would you like to be? Who would you like to be today? A new notebook. The water supply cut off; workmen from the water company on the other side of the yard wall. The yard outside, plants left unwatered for a week. Plastic bags overspill from the wheelie bin. New clothespegs on the line. Nothing at all, no one at all.

I read in bed, in the other room. The slats that hold up the mattress have fallen from the rim; the mattress tilts. A sharpened pencil. A new notebook – not yet ‘the notebook’, not yet owned. I drank two cups of coffee, but I couldn’t make a beginning. What would you like to say? Nothing at all, nothing in particular. Until what you say is what is written on the way of writing, of the tautology of writing.

One day – when? – writing will complete itself. One day, the tautology of writing will be complete, and writing will be there where I am not. Immortality? No: the page will be where I am already dead. The surface of the page will be testimony to that death which continues to return inside me. Serene pages, without me. Serene for that absence, which lifts itself from the yard, from the new clothes pegs and the straggly plants.

Not, then, I want to live forever, but I want never to have lived. Never to have lived, and from that death that reaches into my past, that cancels what was lived. – ‘You took a wrong turn; the whole of your life was that turn.’ – ‘Yes, that is true.’ – ‘You lost yourself; you were lost.’ – ‘Yes, it is true.’

And isn’t writing a way to undo that loss? Let it come to itself, let it come, the tautology. Until it speaks of nothing but itself; until it speaks everything but its exhibition. Writing that is not yet. Writing that is the life of the future without me. How to offer everything I have lived to its sacrificial flame?

Tautology: it will complete itself, there where I am not. It will come to birth, wings opening in the sun. Then will it act, writing, and without me. Then it will complete itself in a single gesture. Impossible day. Writing comes to itself; it does not come. That coming non-coming is the blank page of a notebook; it is a sharpened pencil.

Voiceover of an imaginary film – or, better, voiceover without a film, or that could be spoken over all films, any of them. Speech that wanders: errant speech that speaks for its own sake, which speaks only to keep itself speaking. That which is said is irrelevant; that it is said is everything.

I speak. Who speaks? No one speaks. Language that is no longer a sign of absent things, but a sign of itself. I would like to attain that indifference, the indifference of a language which no longer refers, but sinks into itself. That continues to be born from itself, out of itself. I am spoken. No: there is language, and by way of everything I say, I write.

Reading back over the last posts, I think: but I am not even close. I am not near attaining it. When will it be as though all the details I relate, all the elements of a story, no longer occupy background or foreground. When, by way of those details, will the dispersal of a story let speak itself?

Speech that gives itself, of itself. I dream of a profound continuity, of a speaking pursued by itself, doubled, that is caught at the threshold before it signifies. Speak of yourself, language. Speak of what you are, even as I speak. Speak of your indifference.

I do not want to be ‘inspired’, or ravished by this other speech, just as I do not want to control it. I would like no longer to be interested in writing, and by way of writing. How to speak like the most committed gossip – how to attain an infinitely idle chatter, that speaks of everything, letting rumours pass indifferently from one to the other?

We speak, but not of us possesses speech. We speak, and speech’s indifference bursts across us. What does it matter what we say? Language is our habit. We speak, so as not not to speak. There is speech and so does language seem to double itself, becoming a play of simulacra. Language speaks of itself. Language lies down, stretches and yawns, and speaks of itself in this lassitude. Language says: ‘I am nothing at all’, or ‘I am everything’ – what does it matter?

But I write too heavily – always the same. Language doubled is light – as is the voiceover of my imaginary film. Too light to narrate, or to draw together the strands of an argument. Nothing concludes. Speech speaks for the light joy of speaking.

Reading Muriel Spark, I discover the lightness of speech I’ve missed. Language, now divided between the voices of the girls of slender means, that is purely inconsequential. What does it matter what is said? Nothing is important, or everything is; there’s a war on. And language is as light and sinuous as Selina (with whom I am mildly in love), who looks at the world from under her lashes and cares nothing of the Important.

‘You are too heavy’. – ‘Yes, I know that.’ – ‘You emburden words, you do not free them.’ – ‘Yes I know.’ Laughter: ‘why must you discover lightness in such a heavy way?’

Pressure of writing not yet written. Steady pressure, like rain in fine droplets. What would you like to do? To round off – to make in a single written gesture? No more drafts, no more rewritings – unless writing is always that, a rewriting, and what would complete itself needs again to be completed. ‘Begin again’ – ‘But I never began’. Then is all of writing that repetition of which Kierkegaard wrote and everything is received anew and as for the first time.

If only I could gather myself up, all of me, into a single urgent sentence. How to attain that plane on which sentence succeeds sentence as by a kind of fate? Then writing would be as simple as falling. It would be a matter, simply, of following writing through the days and nights. Following, falling, and you would catch fire as you fell.

Donna and Laura in Fire Walk With Me: ‘Do you think that if you were falling in space you would slow down after a while or go faster and faster?’ – ‘Faster and faster. For a long time you wouldn’t feel anything. Then you would burst into fire … forever.’

Morning. Freedom to write whatever I please. But to write what? It pleases me to write, that is true – to form a phrase and then a sentence – to complete a paragraph, but what to write? The old dream: to mark nothing by writing except writing. To mark only the advent of writing, the ‘I was here’ scratched into the wall of the day. Then, when I look back, it is as though I left my scrawl on every day that led me here. Only it is not my scrawl I want to find, but a signature that trembles because it cannot mark the one who writes. The trembling signature: the name I write in order to sacrifice the name. I would not have been the one I am, and isn’t that the task: to mark the one I’m not, the one I have not been, these days and weeks and months?

Write, says the day. It’s bright, the air’s fresh and clean. There’s something of the North in the wind: it reaches me from keen Arctic places, from blue glaciers and the frozen-over sea. Were it possible to write with the same ice-clarity, the same precision!

A single sentence would be enough. A single sharp sentence, and not the usual fug. How is it nothing keen can announce itself here? How is it I cannot write in a single gesture, ice scratching on ice? Not the usual disappointment with each phrase. Not the botched sentences and muddled paragraphs.

Precision: to write what is essential, to uncover the Word, to let it speak. But what if the Word is the undoing of words? What if it turns all words from themselves? Behind this day, the keen day, there is another. Apocalypse: what reveals itself is muddle. The world will dissolve back into the mire, the great stagnancy to which my life is linked. The day turns in itself without issue, writing and unwriting itself.

Is this what Cy Twombly has painted? Words obscured; part-sentences and broken phrases. It makes no sense, or rather, sense brings with it a cloud of non-sense. To the sharp and keen the simple stroke of the calligrapher, who writes in a single gesture. And to the muddle, the great fug of the day?

Stunted writing; deformed sentences. Paragraphs like the swamplands that open when Spring comes to the far North. And always the haze, like the haze of mosquitos. Nothing settles; nothing completes itself. Ruined writing, because it bears the trail of non-writing like ectoplasm.

In the beginning was the Word, the non-Word. In the beginning, the non-beginning, from which no action will separate itself. Mishima, is this what you tried to resolve with your suicide? Did you dream of opening your insides to the sun? But our insides are infinite, and our intenstines the labyrinth in which we all wander as through the rooms of the house of memory.

Death is clouded with dying, writing with non-writing. In the beginning was the Word; but in the beginning, too, was what drew it back to the non-Word that allows nothing to begin.

I open a book I bought R.M. I read the second section, not the first, the second one, where the narrator begins to write of himself in the third person. Almost immediately, the desire to write something. No internet connection at the flat, so coat on, out the door, along the street – but I’ve forgotten my phone. Back again, open the door, close the door, back out on the street, back to the internet cafe.

How many times have I been here today? This is the third time. The first, early on, was to check my email. The second time, slightly later, was to write about what I’d found on my walk (but I wrote nothing about walking). And this, the third time? This morning, through the streets. This afternoon, through the streets. Then, at last, to the flat, where I got out the red hardback, opened it to the first page, and then to the second section, where the narrator moves from the ‘I’ to the ‘he’.

I close the book, and put my coat on to go out. It’s clouding over. The flat is cool. Out and then back for the phone, then out again. The feeling of urgency is subsiding. What would I have written, had I got to the cafe in time? What did I want to write? I wanted only that writing keep its appointment with the desire to write, to mark that desire. But why? Sometimes I tell myself that what I write here is in ascesis. Purge yourself. Pare yourself down. But to find what? And in the name of – what?

Peter Handke wanders out with a pencil and a notepad. For a long time, he relied on a typewriter: he thought he had to be inside to write. But a notepad’s no good for me. A pencil’s no good. I could have stayed in the flat and written. I have a stub of a pencil and my reporter’s notebook: why didn’t I stay in to write? Why didn’t I write there, in the cool flat?

Out. It was necessary to travel – to walk. I needed to walk, just as I walked this morning and this afternoon. Earlier, I was remembering the last of the stories Gene Wolfe tells or retells in Peace. Tells or retells: this phrase came to me as I walked. I thought: that’s important, remember that. The last story: I’ve told it before. When I think to myself, the last story in Peace, I do not need to retell it to myself. I know it too well. But, strangely, that knowing is also a kind of forgetting. As though it is the book itself that keeps the story for me – and not, now the real book, with its yellow pages, my second copy, I think, or my third, in the office back up North. The book in my memory – the book that is sealed in my memory.

Do I need to tell the story? It’s a sentimental story. Remembering it – or remembering the way it is archived within me, that it is sealed in itself like the holy of holies, that it is as though forgotten as well as remembered and to remember it is also to bring forgetting to the edge of memory – I also remember the friend to whom I lent the first copy of the book. She knew what it meant, the story – but what did it mean? I thought of her as I read it, and then I lent it to her, and she told me she thought of me, and of us. But what does it matter? That was many years ago.

Later, I remembered the book of Tarkovsky’s polaroids I received last week. In the last pages, black and white pictures of his mother sitting on a fence looking out and his father in an army uniform. Then a picture of the well. How well I know these photographs, though I have not seen them before. I remember them through Mirror; it is as though I remember them with Tarkovsky through Mirror. Peace and Mirror: both, I think, are stories of dead men. Or both are stories of men sentenced to die. And wasn’t the patient in bed in Mirror played by Tarkovsky himself? And wasn’t the bird perched on his hand a premonition of that bird which would visit him every day when he was dying of cancer in Paris?

On the street, as I made my way to the cafe for the third time, a phonecall from my sister. I thought it was – them (I can’t say who, not yet); I thought: they’re calling me, at last, and will they give me news? I’ve rehearsed it again and again: we’re sorry, or, I’m really sorry, that’s how I think it will begin. And what will I say? My sister had phoned to ask whether I’d heard yet. I said I’d heard nothing, and speculated with her as to what might be going on.

Just now, I thought: what if they ring me as I write this post? What then? Will I lose the thread? Once, when I lived in Manchester, burglars broke in the house as I was typing a letter to a friend. Was I writing of Peace? Of Mirror? And was it because I was in the middle of something that I barricaded myself in my room and saved the day by my shouting. I was thinking of my letter: I was thinking, I want to finish. I want at least that, I who asked for little from the day, who requires very little.

Peace, Mirror: nothing to conclude, here; nothing to round off. The post does not complete itself. I am not writing to her, anyway – the friend who read Peace and to whom I was writing that day more than ten years ago. To whom, then? As a way of keeping memory for myself? Of recording, as in a diary, the events of my life? I remember I once had that ambition: to write, to record. Only later did I realise I remembered nothing by writing; that it was by writing I was freed from memory, or, better, freed memory from itself.

Strange this past year releasing memories into forgetting, setting the past free, givingit back to itself. Back to itself: yes, that’s what I’ve done: the past has been given back to itself, and I’ve received the past anew, not, now, as it happened, nor even as it might have happened (this has nothing to do with possibility, with the measure of the possible). The past: what is given in the same way as speech is given to the stutterer who is cured right at the opening of Mirror. Do you remember what he said, straight to camera? Do you remember what the boy (the son) hears him say in a steady, determined voice: I can speak now. Yes: I can speak now.

But I cannot speak. Or rather, I speak along the edge of forgetting. If I want writing and the desire to write to coincide it is, I think, to let the other speak, the ‘he’. I want him to speak – or, better, to become him, the narrator who can refers to himself as ‘he’. He: like Coeztee’s narrator who works in Bracknell. He: to move from the first person to the third: wasn’t that what Kafka celebrated as the great movement of literature?

I am in the cafe for the third time. I feel alert, awake, but I don’t know why. The caffeine died down in my bloodstream hours ago. R.M. will be back at the flat in an hour. Why now? The clouds have parted; sun on the pavement. I am in the cafe, here again, for the third time. The cafe: where, last year, I remember writing of Handke’s Across. And hadn’t I promised myself, some time ago, to write a post with the title, Across Time?

In truth, the questions I ask myself in these paragraphs, the questions that are asked here, are Handkean questions. They come from Handke; I found them first in the longest of his books, the ones he wrote outside, pencil on notepad. Across – that was earlier, wasn’t it? Strange book that is all climax. Strange book that is like the endless coda to a novel, rather than a novel. And wasn’t it in here, in this cafe, that I found Across had a code, that there were a few more pages of that novel to read. Unexpected gift!

I’ve heard nothing as I’ve been typing. But today is the second day after -. Shouldn’t I have heard by now? Won’t it be tonight? To have heard – what will change, after that? What will have been changed? In the meantime – waiting. Across time, waiting. Or is it that waiting attenuates time in time, that it seems to pull each event apart without breaking it. Nothing is happening – there is waiting. Nothing happens, but time voids itself of time; time lives outside of itself.

Today, I thought again of those long afternoons, years ago, when my future was more uncertain that it is now. I remember them, those afternoons, in which to write was to hold up a great sail into the air. How was I to catch a wind? I was becalmed then, and perhaps it is the same now. What is to happen? Suspense: wasn’t that her word, for those times we met when there was no wind. There was never any wind, she said. Suspense: through the field, and over the railway bridge to that last patch of countryside. From that same bridge, now, you can see the new Tescos, which presses up against the fields. Yes, that’s what I’d see, if I went there.

Five o’clock. Is it time to stop? Should I stop writing? Or should I continue until I hear, should I write all the way until I hear? Enough. Without rounding it off, without making sure every motif has been taken up and transformed, I’m going to pay and go back down the street.

Work – there’s nothing to distract you. Work: but there’s the whole weekend to distract me, hours in which nothing need happen; I’ve no appointments, but for all that time is too full, too present with itself. How is it that I seem to have fallen beneath its passing, that time, now, is only concerned with itself? Unwritten book, unwritten articles – now that unwriting has become active; it is the very work of time as it passes without me.

What’s happened? What’s happening? The new book is unwriting itself; my new chapters are coming apart and the pages are turning backwards as line after line is erased. Who am I to hold on to what it was, this book? Who am I to resist its unravelling? Once upon a time, I wrote; once, there was writing. A long time ago. All of time ago. And now? The unwriting of the book streams above me. It is there, like the clouds that disappear as they ascend, and I am here. But where am I?

In the flat. In the quiet flat. The office is for later; now, the flat. I pass from one room to the other, there, on the other side of the bevelled glass, to the bedroom, and then back here, to the desk that is up against the window, and at the level of most of the yard, which raises itself to the backstreet on the other side of the wall. I should be writing, that’s true enough. Clear and well-structured prose, that’s what’s wanted. And instead?

Work: there’s nothing to distract you. Work – but nothing happens but distraction. All of time moves forward, but not here. Long sunday without monday. Day that cannot complete itself.

What was it you were supposed to do? What was it you had time to do? Where was it going, this weekend? Where was it directed? Unto what Great Monday was it pointed like an arrow? Laughter: your hardbacked notebook is open on the pillow in the other room. Laughter: a word document is open in another window. Not a line written. Nothing done. And you have all the time in the world – all the opportunity. All of time, which is to say, too much. All – but already too much; time’s already turned from itself. Laughter: time says: every day is Sunday. Time says: every day is like Sunday.

‘Extreme tiredness.’ – ‘Extreme, how extreme – you can write can’t you?’ – ‘Only because tiredness has gathered itself up; only because it’s folded itself into one who can write of tiredness. Of tiredness? No: tiredness writes. Tiredness speaks of itself, of its coming to itself.’ – ‘But you’re still writing.’ – ‘As the avatar of tiredness. As its proxy, one born in the instant to be unravelled in the instant. Born to write and then to fade. I will not last – do you think I will last?’

Today, what shall I write today? A question that looks for no answer. To attain writing itself, to leave a mark – that’s enough. But what is it? Isn’t there writing already on the other side, in the other world? Why does it need to double itself here?

To write clearly, to construct an argument, to appeal to a reader – that is the writing on the other side of the mirror. And on this side? That I can even contrast writing in the world with what is here is sign of demise. There is no division – if the word ‘I’ comes apart here, if this is an ascetic writing, written to drive away each day the face of God, it is because it is always dispersed; and if it appears gathered there, in the book I am writing in the world, this is a lie and dissimulation.

But then how to make a mark here? How to draw writing into its advent when that requires, first of all, the dispersal of the writer? Writing marks itself; writing, the to-write, binds what is written to dispersal. Binds? Disperses it in turn, rather; relation without relation, leap without leaper.

How is it that as I feel I come closer to what there is to be said, there is less and less to say, or rather, that what I write, however much that is written, seems yet more inadequate? Write, erase writing. Write, and find by erasure what requires first of all to be written. So is writing a kind of sacrifice, so writing burns up without anything being destroyed. The words remain, the same as before, but they are blazing. But nothing is blazing. There are words, only words, and nothing besides. Write less; pare writing away. Be more economical; limit yourself. Do not write of this, not of that. Then will you find writing itself? Then will you run it to ground, what there is to be said?

Everything to write, of course. And indeed, I write it, or I begin to write, but then, just as quickly, I delete what I’ve written, the cursor goes backwards over the words and there is nothing again. Why this need to write, and the need to erase? There is a great deal to write. Much to report, but still, I don’t want to report anything, to say anything, but rather to write and then delete what I have written, to write and then to sacrifice writing until it is no more, until the Post Introduction is empty again, and there is waiting again. What is being waited for? What is being sought? What is to be lost, and what found?