writing ii

writing is prayer. i am self-effaced before the infinite, confronted with the injustice of myself, slowed to the speed of waiting. writing is waiting – for the uncontrollable moments when syzygies come to presence and words appear. but when i talk, i think, act, when i will, desire – all these are waiting.

writing is vision made flesh made air.

in maintaining writing as one’s life, language loses its power, even its primacy as vehicle, and writing itself becomes less the orientation of one’s life than placing oneself in a space in which writing might find one. as this space is always shifting – writing likes to play hide and seek – i become more familiar with lostness, homelessness, separation than with writing, seeking to be found.

one can of course simply sit and write, but then it’s a career, an occupation, a means …

so writing becomes something else, and this something else becomes the nothing that is.

i wanted to write serenely, capriciously, peacefully, comfortably, from the broad plateau of middle class pleasures and scholarly privilege. but instead i was manufactured to write in struggle, discomfort, offense, disregard. every environment needs its labourers.

a certain kind of writing simulates a nomadic life on earth – wandering from place to place scavenging for words. how could i write a novel, anything resembling what is typically called a book, with such a lifestyle? my forms reflect vagaries, uncertainties, impoverishments. i write in fragments, with few things complete, in vulgarities and ugliness – this is the milieu in which i scavenge.

i know i am now writing because to place myself in spaces of writing is to place myself in spaces of obliterated pain.

when we achieve our goals they become beyond us. i strove for 20 years to become solitary, desolate, hapless … now – these states having become me – i see, like all non-trivial goals, they’re unachievable. like community, love, justice, they occur, but in moments, and i had them as much 20 years ago as i do now; the only difference is that now i know i have them in the manner of not-having, and that they aren’t goals.

bodies are not living and text dead, text is not the corpse of a living body any more than a body is the corpse of a text. my text is my body and my body a breath of unknown words.

if i should live in vision and poetry rather than analysis and politics, have i removed myself from the world more than a president or scholar? no. or rather i have removed myself differently and engage differently. in writing i breathe my body’s far-near.

it’s not that i write or am written. the movement from the active to passive necessitates its return and circularity. if there were a mode that expressed agency and non-agency, volition and waiting, activity and passivity and the absence and subversion of both, it might be that mode that is writing in the i. yet not just in. here too a circularity.

i am innocent in writing. all guilt i leave behind in the world. my body becomes pure, like air before consciousness, and text eats me, in desire and love. eating and purity are briefly one.

no longer do i believe that writing is a technology. writing is a god that has lost its way.

in writing i amputate myself in love and grow new limbs, i generously behead myself and – there! – new brains.

this violence to myself is not something i do alone but is an active collaboration with the world. i call it violence but this is a necessary mask, for what it is hides behind every name.

writing

what do i ask from writing?

in this age of language rather than that age of god, the writer loses itself in fragments of writing rather than fragments of the godhead. language offers this modern losing and this offering is what i ask.

as before, there are the sprawling apparati of the age – the priests and penitents of yesterday, the communicators and analysts of tomorrow – but the writer sidesteps these intermediaries, required to experience the age not from the outside with its sparkling accoutrements but the inside with its desolations and solitudes. the appeals of success, while inevitably puncta of struggle, omnipresent and voracious, mean, little, and the writer confronts the whiteness of the virtualized page like a sand city without horizon or sky, from the simulated cave of its nothingness.

nothing compels me to do or be anything and i remain undefined. nevertheless, in the necessary accumulations of time, society’s trade, i grow in definition, a definition primarily negating. this growing gap between remaining in undefinition and accumulating negative definition is an experience of writing.

i remain in poverty. poverty of knowledge, circumstance, time, flesh. then i experience the absence of words that have never found themselves, tundras of freedom.

having once found hallucination in externals (food, drugs, sex, activity, money, status), using them as fuel for language, now i migrate to internals (silence, pain, tedium, anonymity, poverty). each is sufficient, for language is indifferent to its sustenance and simply requires fuel. only we in our immaturity experience them as different.

i didn’t realize it at the time but it was around 49 that i began to die. i die slowly, like a cloud. there are so many births in death. and in each death, a new word.

humanity has never particularly impressed me and so i’ve blindly sought humanity’s margins – primarily in art, occasionally in people. not those misanthropically bitter or ruefully accepting people – while on the margins wanting to be in the middle: buying lottery tickets, grumbling about politicians – not the marginalized but those whose homes are margins, for whom margins are centers, for whom there is no issue, person, or structure that is a particular problem but only the order of existence.

so i’ve always made a fool of myself in conventional society, not simply because the seriousness and criminality of it are foolish to me and to conform to it requires acting foolishly, but as a technique to auto-exile – to seek spaces where foolishness and convention can experience alternative and emerging choreographies.

living away from the tumbling crowds all there is is body; its language deconstructs the city.

i don’t distinguish between experiences. loss i call loss and gain gain but gaining always involves losing and losing gaining – everything is equal when it comes to language, this subversive and transpolitical democracy.

as i become incapable of language – either through death or those many deaths when language is absent – language remains, and i am but one of its myriad lovers whom it embraces and ignores for synaptic time. who am i to complain of my situation – is it different from others, equally subject to brevity and vicissitude? that i am a rabbit in language’s claws? if i am limited and cowardly … of course i am limited and cowardly. we are all woven from such things.

i go to excess and past to get diseased, to debase myself, to feel pain, for then i can write about beauty. when i am whirling and stuffing myself with desirable things, there’s only sickness to write about. i write about what i am not for what i am is already here.