Lars Iyer's Blog

To write close to writing. To keep close. But this means, too, that you will have to write of something other than writing; a detour is required, for writing is nothing in itself. A detour: write of yourself, write stories, narrative fragments, write of this, of that – but how to let what you write come close, nonetheless to writing? How to let writing reverberate in what is written?

I am guilty, say that. I am innocent, say that. I am judged, everything written has been judged; white light falls indifferently over all of us. And white light, too, burns upwards from the page; a white writing writes within my own.

How to unwrite every word I have written? How to erase my footprints, and leave the snow pristine, trackless? Wait, wait for writing. Fall down, sleep, and send your dreams ahead. Die in the snow of writing’s indifference. Expire in the indifference of writing, its white snow-banks all around you.

Writing is what looks away from you; it shows no interest. Its perspective is given from elsewhere; it sees from an angle you cannot access. Is it watching? Are its eyes open? It sees all; its eyes are open in all that is written, like light that flashes back the sky from the sea. It sees – but what does it see? What sees itself in the tide of words as it flashes light upwards and away?

The parent watches the child, but writing does not watch you. The lover’s gaze rests upon the beloved, but writing watches no one, and watches where no one has his place. I will take your place, says writing. I’m going to take your place. And so does it watch from you, by taking your place. So does it open its eyes in your own, and your eyes reflect back the sky; so do they become voided of what you might see.

Vision minus itself. Light subtracted from light. ‘I can’t see you’. – ‘But I, seer, see in you’. – ‘I can’t see you’. – ‘But I, seeing, have voided your sight’.

To learn from what writing, from what you have written; to follow your own tracks in the snow. Until – no tracks, and no way forward. Snow without tracks, unmarked pages.

‘Was it here I disappeared?’ – ‘It was here you stopped disappearing. Here when your absence could no longer be hidden. – ‘Was it here I lost the ability to write?’ – ‘Rather that that inability spoke of writing’s own inability; that your malaise became the malaise of writing, and it spoke, rather than you’.

Writing without writing. The suspension, the droop of writing. And you fall from yourself, too. Who are you, non-writer? Who are you, unable to mark the page? But the days go forward nonetheless. Writing, without writing, continues to go forward.

‘I would like to write’. – ‘You cannot write’. – ‘I would like to begin’. – ‘But writing has already begun’.

Rise early each morning, prepare to write. Rise early, clear your desk and your thoughts, and begin, begin to write. But what when writing fails you? What when you cannot write a line, and the white page seems to press up against you? What when sense refuses you, and the measure of sense? But it is also writing that you meet, albeit without being able to write. It is also writing that burns beside you now, white fountain, the page within the page.

Isn’t it now that you can learn what writing is? Isn’t this the moment, the apocalypse, in which it is revealed disrobed? The page, the white page on which nothing can be written. The page without writing, and that allows no writing. What speaks, and by way of this absence? What, and by way of the absence of sense, of sense’s erosion, of writing cored out from within?

The whiteness is intolerable. The page’s white in white burns intolerably. Its indifference. Its withdrawal. A bank of snow on which you can make no impression. A pristine cloud-bank rising in the distance. You cannot mark it. Ink will not touch it.

Intolerable: have you gone snowblind? Sky-blind? What can you see except whiteness? What but the light that burned behind everything, and all along. For the page is also the sky. It is also light, light gone mad in itself, lost in itself. The page is the condition of meaning, of the opening of the world. And the going-mad of meaning, the opening that is also a closure, the too-much of bright light.

‘I can’t see’ – ‘But only now can you begin to see’. – ‘I can’t see a thing’. – ‘But only now do you see everything’. – ‘Why couldn’t I see it before?’- ‘You could see too much’. – ‘Why can I only see it now? – ‘Because you’ve given up on sight, or sight has given up on itself in you’.

To write, to make a mark: why is that impossible? A single line – why can’t you achieve that? Because writing is incapacity; writing the failure to write. It is the page-apocalypse, the pristine beginning upon which you can make no impression. And the return of that beginning, which is your non-beginning, your failure. And the billowing return of your non-beginning, the white sails that nonetheless bear writing forward.

‘I can’t begin’. – ‘But it is already beginning’. – ‘I can’t make a mark’. – ‘But writing has begun without you’.

The inability to write – how to endure it? A writer faces eternity or the lack of it each day, says Hemmingway – but how to endure it, the lack of eternity? How to endure the withdrawal of writing? ‘I’m blocked’, says the writer, ‘I can’t write a line’. So he removes himself from writing; he reads awhile, he travels. Everything but the page, the white rectangle of the page. But eventually, he’ll have to face it again.

‘I was waiting for you’, it says. ‘I lay here, waiting’. White page, the distant sky: one and the same. The absence of writing, the absence of sense that is the sky: one and the same. The same sky that watches over famine and wealth; the same that passes across battles and feastdays. The same page that is indifferent to what is written upon it, be it good or bad. The page, white rectangle, that glows with its own kind of light, that seems to illuminate itself.

‘I can’t reach you. I can’t find you’. – ‘But I’m here before you, the page’. – ‘I’ve lost you. I’m looking for you’. – ‘But I’m here right in front of you: the page’. And I know for every page I’ve written, the page is waiting. And for every page I’ve read, there will be another that refuses reading, in which I’ve lived my reader’s life. The page waits; its whiteness invades every page; its waiting aches without significance on every page.

And when I’ve tried to write? I forgot it, that’s true. Perhaps you have to forget it in order to write. The page, the absence of sense – how can you know it except via the impossibility of writing? And I think this, in the end, is why writer’s block is propitious, why it joins you to what withholds itself in writing, and not only because you cannot rise to meet it, not only because your strength has failed.

‘Stop writing. Do not try to write’. – ‘But I want to find you. I want to write.’ – ‘But you will find me only by ceasing to write. By putting your pen down. Stop writing, stop trying, and I will come close to you. Stop, and the page, the double of the day, will burn beside you’. – ‘I can’t write’. – ‘But it’s only then, in your incapacity, that writing can come close to you’. – ‘I’m blocked, I can’t write’. – ‘But it is only thus that writing rises and wraps itself around you like the day’.

Writer’s block – what is that? The retreat of writing, writing concentratedly held back in itself. How to reach it? How to draw upon the vanished strength to write? Writer’s block – but isn’t this a relation to writing, to writing itself?

You can’t face writing head on, I know that. Can’t demand writing to write, as if it were reposed in itself, waiting for a call. Writing is nothing in itself – there is nothing to writing, nothing that belongs to it; it has no subject of which to speak. But that is to say its substance is borrowed; the cloak of incident and character clothes nothing, hides nothing.

Writing can be nothing other than what is told. And yet it also other to that telling; it is what is borne in it, what suspends itself as the story rolls on. Perhaps it is the fact of a story, the surprise that it is. But what is it? Nothing other than the story. Writing itself: borrowed substance, garments clothing nothing.

On the page, writing by means of character, by means of incident, writing fails to come to itself. The approach, the non-approach: how to tell of telling itself? How to summon the failure to come? Writing is not here yet; and that is the story the tale untells. Writing cannot come close: and that is the untelling of the tale, its artifice, its imposture which, I think, allows something else to be heard.

Writing fails – is that it? But with reference to what? To what task? Nothing belongs to writing; its demand is hollow. Nothing belongs to it – but writing also hollows out writing; writing seeks also to core itself out, until, denucleated, there is nothing left but words (ringed around an absent centre). Nothing – and by way of a story that also tells of its unravelling.

Writing that is not – and never yet. Writing incapable of itself, of attaining itself, that is perpetually ‘to come’, but as what? bringing what? Its absence, its dissimulation, appearing in every other guise but its own. ‘I don’t recognise you. I can’t see you as you are’.

Writer’s block – what is it? The withdrawal of writing in writing; the telling that untells the tale. How to reach it? How to draw upon the ability to write? By drawing yourself into relation with the incapacity to write, to writing’s failure to attain itself. By passing by way of the ‘to come’ of writing, which can never arrive. ‘I’m looking for you’. – ‘You will not find me’. – ‘I want to come close to you’. – ‘But I am far away from you, in a past that has never happened, and a future that will not arrive’.

In my foolishness, it is of a kind of prose that I dream. Prose, writing, as it launched from itself, out of itself, like a magician’s string of scarves. From where did it come? From where, arising of itself, and according to what law? How to surprise writing in writing? How to let it arise, giving itself, and giving itself as giving?

Abandonment: I think that’s how writing arrives. I think it abandons itself to life, and gives itself as it is lost, and as it loses its writer. I want to be abandoned, and by writing, I tell myelf. I want that: to be abandoned, to be left behind by what I’ve written. A magician’s string of scarves; a dove conjured from nowhere: the miracle is abandonment, casualness, writing not minding itself, writing singing to itself like a lost child in the wood.

What kind of hunter are you?, says writing. What are you looking for? And I dream of a hunting that is also a becoming one with the hunted. A hunter who aims arrows at his own heart. A hunter who discovers himself as quarry. And by what bliss would you let the arrow pierce your own heart?

I think there is a self-abandonment necessary to writing. I think there is a kind of relinquishment. I want to be abandoned, and by myself, I tell myself. I want that: to be left behind by what I made, to let it go forward without me. To go forward – to search far ahead of me. To search far ahead, having lost me. How to lose myself, then? How, in writing, to forget that I am writing?

To have faith in writing, what might that mean? To have faith in words written blindly, without forethought – what is that? As though I might surprise writing in writing. As though I could come across it, surprising it, but by means of writing, by means of what it is. What kind of hunter am I who would hunt with the very thing he is seeking?

And now I think of the Zen archer whose target is himself. Aim for yourself. Aim writing – where? To where you are not. To what you cannot say, and of yourself. To what, in writing, has nothing to do with you. But what kind of faith is that? To have faith in writing – but perhaps it is only when faith is lost that it is gained. That it’s when you want nothing by way of writing, that it is the least important, that it might come close to you.

You have to fall, I tell myself. You have to fall from writing. Writing must become nothing at all. A wrong turn; an accident – it must be as though you accidentally brushed the page with your pen; that you accidentally began to type.

‘I had nothing better to do’. ‘I had a spare hour, and nothing to do’. Casually, happening of itself, dropping from itself, there is writing: there it is. Dropping from – what? An empty sky? A stalactite that drips down from what ceiling? You have to fall, I tell myself, and from the desire to write. To fall – just that, and without wanting to fall. But when will it be possible? When will I surprise writing by writing?

One reads a biography of an artist with a happy kind of hindsight: in the early chapters, about struggle and despair, I want to reassure the artist, it will be okay; everything will come right. You’re already pressing towards the work. And then, in later ones, when the first works appear, when the writer, say, begins to emerge as an artistic force, I want to say, be patient; your great works lie ahead of you. Your early works are juvenilia; they are worthless, really; the dust of words.

And then the years of triumph; having read a few hundred pages, I feel I’ve earned the right to revel in the reception that greets the masterpieces that stream forth from his pen. I’ve suffered with him, struggled with him, watched as the early works came out, and now the masterpieces that have given him immortality: there would be no biography without them. He would have been but a minor writer, one of the forgotten.

But now? Even the years of decline and fall mean nothing. Even the marriages and divorces, even the fallings out with old friends are insignificant; for the masterpieces survive him; it is upon them that his fame will rest. Does he know his own greatness? Somewhere, it knows itself in him. He rests, somewhere, in what he has done; in what was worked by way of him.

And later, when he can write no longer – when he can no longer ascend the plateau on which he once wrote, day after day as beneath an open sky? Ah, but he has done his work. One part of him is satisfied; his life has already been rounded off. What is he but the ghost of his own authorship? In the mirror, he sees a crumpled version of that middle aged man posed seriously on the dust jackets of his books. Crumpled: you can still see it, that assurance, that fire that licked up flames behind him. Still a remnant of a writer’s confidence, of the trust writing placed in him.

But who is he but a ghost of what was one possible by his pen, by his typing fingers? He goes from room to room in the house that he earnt from his royalties; he sits in an armchair overlooking his garden. Leaves on the grass. It’s autumn, he thinks. And tomorrow a journalist is coming to photograph his work room, in which he no longer works, not really. He is a potterer; a wanderer from room to room. 17 books – isn’t that enough? Hasn’t he written enough?

And now I wonder whether there might be a biography of this wandering, of a writer who’s written enough. A biography of the aftermath, of the one beached as after a life of writing. A writer in retirement, whose workroom is only a place where dust drifts in the afternoon air, and the house that his royalties bought is a receptacle for his drifting, for mild discontent.

Outside, the everyday. Outside, and through the window, the everyday world that he fears, obscurely. He’s earned himself time; he gave up his day job long ago. He found a kind of fame, an immortality. The newspapers phone him for his year end book recommendations; his agent secures deals for memoirs and volumes of occasional writings; isn’t it time he open the old folder in which he kept his verse?

Fame and immortality; his name is trustworthy; perhaps it will coin an adjective that will join it to a sensibility. His name crowns him, but it rides above him, and when a young writer, who’s discovered his address knocks at his door to meet him, he knows he has failed his name, and he is not prepared for the world that meets him there at the doorstep. He reaches to shake the hand of his admirer; he closes the door without admitting him.

And meanwhile, outside, the everyday. Meanwhile, the street, the cars parked under the trees. He’s escaped a workaday life, that’s true. He no longer needs to make a living, that’s true. But isn’t it now that an obscure worry can reach him, a vague fear? Doesn’t it reach him now, when he’s a little weak, as though a little ill, that same world he now feels he has written against?

He supposes he could drink. He could make a whiskey and soda, or open a bottle of wine. He could drink to allay his worries, which niggle at him, which come at him from all sides. His worries: what are those? He struggled once. He had to learn his craft, to learn to write. Writing is easy to him now. He knows how to write according to the adjective that his name has formed. He can lean on his own name, and the sensibility that drifts like a fog through his writings.

He has long since substantialised himself as an author; he stands on two strong legs. He writes; he can write, and what comes out is recognisably by him. All he has to do is pull the string that miraculously pulls up the ship in a bottle of a book. How easy it is for him to write! How easy, and for that reason, how difficult! He needs something to work against, he tells himself. To struggle again.

Life’s too easy, he thinks to himself. He should uproot himself. Go and live somewhere else. To France, perhaps. To a villa. He could live in a villa in the middle of France. But this is a dream. Still there is the outside. Still the everyday, out there on the street: mothers with three wheeled push chairs; leaves on the pavements; car after car parked along the street, wheels turned in to stop them rolling down the hill.

And now I dream of the narrative that might begin now, the narrative of the everyday. I imagine what he might write, who has the gift of writing, but nothing in particular to right. The light on a windshield. The crack on a paving stone. The trees half stripped of leaves, branches and twigs upraised to the sky. What would speak itself by way of these details? What, as it seems to wear the world away, as it seems to speak of a world worn away and murmuring to itself like a softly running stream?

I imagine him in the front room, where light falls aslant on his notebook. I imagine the whiteness of the page, and his hand as he runs it across there. And the tub of sharpened pencils he keeps by him as the light falls evenly across the page. What will he write, he who has already written enough? What to write, he who now feels only the most obscure and niggling of imperatives?

Not a story, but the wearing away of stories. Not a narrative, but its absence, its absenting, like rivers in the desert that run into the sand. A hundred beginnings; a hundred endings, his is now a work that unworks itself, a way for writing to unravel itself in writing.

He writes of the least important, the negligible. He writes by way of details, and of negligible feelings. What does he feel? He feels okay. What does he see? The world, just the world. And of what is he attempting to write? Of nothing in particular. In the end, he tells himself, writing is not important. Writing, the doubling of the day, is the least important thing of all.

His is a journal of neglect, he tells himself. It relates nothing; it bears upon nothing. Except the day; except the hours of the day which the others on the street miss because their days are filled with tasks, because they divide up time. What does it mean to have been given time thus? To let writing on the page develop like a photograph from the gentle pressure of light?

He will make an impression of time. Of the neglect of time. Of time’s malaise, the way it seems to sag from itself over the course of a long afternoon. Of time as it lengthens the afternoon into all of time, as dust motes drift and moments do not seem to last, but obscurely prolong themselves. As they might have done once when when he was a real writer, when he wrote novels with plots and characters; when it seemed those characters lived a life independently of him; when they didn’t do what he wanted. As they might have done, but what did he know of it, the gentle turning of time, the moments that seemed lost in themselves?

What could he know of it then, he who stretched out time according to his projects; who marked the days in his calender according to how far along he was with the work? Only now it is as if every errant moment returned in the steady light of the afternoon. As if he knew now what had never begun in all his days, and was still not about to settle itself into a beginning. Wasn’t it this against which he struggled all along?, he wonders. Wasn’t it from this errancy that he sought to protect himself?, he thinks to himself.

For in some sense, it is unbearable. In some sense, he cannot bear it, that nothing begins in his long afternoon, that all he can do is sit in an armchair with a notebook on his knees, and a tub of pencils. Is this how he should meet it, this nothing in particular? Is this the way to experience its demand, so that the day, the everyday, insignificant but undelimitable can spread itself onto the insignificance of what he writes?

He’s begun a journal, of a kind. He’s writing, in a way. But this is an unpublishable writing, a writing without point. This a writing that leads nowhere and leads him nowhere. It beaches him just as he is beached, in the long afternoon. It runs away from him as a river disappearing into the sand, or a cloud that evaporates over the desert.

It is not real life that waited for him on the other side of writing, but the unreality of life. Not action – a life in the world – but the impossibility of living thus in the world. The erosion of time, his own erosion. The obscurity of his own name, as it seems to unravel itself. A writing that unravels itself in writing. Might he now begin the most important of his works? Might he begin it now, as he senses, obscurely, what has obsessed him all his life?

But it begins only in his absence; it reveals itself by way of the least significant of his writings. What does it matter, what he writes now? For what does it count, when it will lead to no publication? Writing adrift; errant writing. Writing that wanders along the edge of everything. That murmurs to itself, echoing with what it is not. That speaks its own nothingness, its unimportance. Is it writing he has attained? Has he come across writing, as some animal in a woodland glade that does not know it’s being watched?

He remembers the deer he saw once at dawn, crossing a field. They didn’t see him. They hadn’t sniffed him out; the wind was blowing from them to him. He saw them and they didn’t see him, and so now with writing. Writing, at last, is allowed to ignore him. To write itself by way of him, but by ignoring him. And isn’t this what he wanted? Wasn’t that what he wanted all along: to be the way of its freedom, a way of releasing writing into the distance that belongs to it?

It doesn’t matter, he tells himself, and that’s why it matters. But who will know it but him? Who will know, from the scattered notebooks that will emerge among his papers after he has gone? A few pages written in pencil; not typed. A few yellowed pages, among all the others. Not a draft of something, not something unfinished, unless it shows that everything he wrote was a draft, or something unfinished. How will they know, his readers, perhaps his executors, who will go through his papers to assemble a posthumous volume?

I don’t think writing’s very important, he says to himself, and remembers, when he was young, debating with others what a novel was for. I don’t think it matters, and recalls the despair of a correspondent, for whom the marginalisation of fiction in favour of films and videogames was something to lament. Now is the time for an insignificant writing, he murmurs to himself. For a neglected writing that streams without meaning. It doesn’t matter, he thinks, and that’s not why it matters. In the end, it is insignificance itself, even as it cannot end. Insignificance, a kind of doubling of the world. A doubling of what does not round itself off into an event. A kind of erosion instead. A kind of withering, a wearing away.

It will not become a book he tells himself. It is not part of a project, a writing project. It’s a way for the day to know itself. A way the day can read, indifferent light on the page. Can read and not read, both at once.

What kind of biography could narrate such a project? What as its unimportance joins itself to every unimportant event in the life of a writer (in anyone’s life; in the writer as anyone)? Whose life might it recount, and with what kind of recounting?