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.