Lars Iyer's Blog

He is writing now, his ghostly hand within mine. And when he speaks, I hear his murmuring in my voice. Sometimes I want to confront him, my vestigal twin, and ask him who he is. But from what angle might I see him, he who is also me? How can I turn so as to meet what also gives me the power to turn? In the end, I have to look for him in my own face.

But what mirror will show him? I wonder whether writing is the mirror in which he seeks to find me, and that I will see beneath this page, as a body that passes beneath a frozen river. But his drowning is my life, and my living is his drowning; we are joined but we are divided by time.

‘Is that me in the mirror?’ – ‘It is and it is not’ – ‘Is it me?’ – You cannot see what allows you to see’.

‘Who are you?’, I ask, and though he does not answer, the corners of his mouth turn upwards.

I saw you, writing. No: you saw yourself in me. Saw and said, I will rejoin myself by this seeing. Said, I wll return to myself and through you, hinge, point of articulation. For where you are the door is open.

To have the attitude of a great author, who guards his privacy, quarrels with friends who don’t understand him, disappears into the life of a recluse, drinks shots in a house with closed shutters – yes, to have that life, critical favour followed by critical neglect, then visiting from admiring young writers and critical rebirth … but without having written a line.

You say you are tired, but there are tirednesses which are propitious, exhaustions from which it is possible to assemble a few words. But then isn’t that to say you have never reached the limit of tiredness? Or that tiredness bears you in the direction of a particular kind of writing, which begins only after you declare tiredness is too much and, in that declaration, attests to the fact that tiredness is too little?

Beneath any narrative you write, the counter-narrative of writing. Beneath and behind the narrative, but also touching it at each moment, the narrative against narrative. How can it be brought closer to the surface, as a drowned body to the surface of ice? How can it be made to pass close to the surface but beneath it, moving away from you, but there?

Again: whisper it: it spreads your life like a reflection on a night window, black and bottomless. The void that calls writing forward; the black blood that surges before the beginning.

How to make a mark? How to draw writing into its advent when that demands, first of all, the dispersal of the writer? Writing lacks itself – or that ‘itself’ is already lack and truthlessness. How to catch it out, then, the ‘itself’ into which writing seems to withdraw?

How close I’ve come to it, writing – but to what am I close? Only to the event where it seems to become possible exactly as it moves out of reach.

Writing, non-beginning, isn’t it thus that you let speak the void you are? Emptiness: is that your call, the saying, now, that reveals itself in everything that is said?

I am not close to you, or if it is so, then it is another in me who is close. A stranger writes in my place. Does he write? Or is it only that he stops me writing even as I write, and that it is because of him I cannot begin? I think he endures non-beginning in my place. I think it is the companion who erases my words as I write them.

To write of the same and the same of the same. But this is only because it is the same struggle that is necesssary to clear a space in order to begin. To begin what? To write, which is to say, to mark in writing the capacity to begin.

But the strength to write withers; the mark, forgotten on the page will have to achieved again. Tiredness: I’ve forgotten what I wrote. No: I know that what I’ve written has forgotten me.

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. But it has no ‘itself’, unless this indicates a wandering without cease, the darkness on the other side of time. ‘Itself’ – infinite detour; passage into passage, without a promised land.

Unless the wandering is itself promise, and the incessant 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.

Nothing will begin here. Nothing finishes. What do 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.

‘What are you working on?’ – ‘Nothing, nothing at all’.

‘My work’: citation that lets each work speak as though separated from its meaning. ‘My work …’: the interval between words stretched to the infinite. And a stretching that pulls these words apart, too; that lets them speak without reference and without the chance of truth.

Writing lacks itself – or that ‘itself’ is already lack and truthlessness. Errancy, then; a daily failure. To write of the failure of writing – to catch it out, the ‘itself’ into which writing seems to withdraw. But it is you who are caught thus, and writing was the trap that was lying in wait for you before you ever began to write.

You can’t escape writing by writing. Or if you escape, the path of that escape is legible, and any reader can follow you.

Writing sacrifices writing by way of writing. Futility: writing cannot unwrite itself.

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.

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? 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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