writing iii

letting go, if it actually is letting go, is letting go of nothing – that is, to truly let go, there are no objects to one’s letting go. one simply lets go. such is the path of writing.

immense vats of writing exist. and now large tracts of writing about writing. writing in voids is to write about writing about writing, paralleling writing about god (goding about god) in the middle ages, that ostensible birth (rebirth) of mysticism …

writing has seen itself and – vain, treacherous, and promiscuous beauty – cannot help but explore and proclaim its wonders. to write about writing about writing, then – could it not mean adding not simply another mirror, in which writing begins to blur into what it is not, and – then – endless mirrors, from which writing dies, but shattering these, down to the very first, through which writing lives but, again, without knowing itself?

i do not analyze when i write. i don't proclaim, persuade, entice, deride, construct, praise, deconstruct, inform. i write. that is all. writing to be writing is as free from object or plan as breathing. when i am dead i no longer breathe. when i am dead i no longer write. the two are the same statement. writing is simply breath made visible; in writing language appears in the cold air-voids of consciousness, brief memory-vapours – beyond consolation – of our having been in the realms of sensuous wandering.

writing begins with death. only the dead write. what do the living know that they could share any wisdom with us? the living are fuel for the chthonic industries of art, the living are writing’s pens.

gods are in words as they once were in trees and rivers. i do not know much about words; but i think that river is a strong brown word.

all writing is trying to do – at least any writing aside from that necessary to transact, gather, propagate – is nurture and develop a language of the unconscious.

            prosaically we can say the spaces of these nurturings and developings are spaces of madness. but this is the sort of madness that is of the free discipline of sufis, poets, mystics – creators in voided wedges of civilization.

what writer cannot help but to keep running hard if it is not to be overtaken by the hungry languages of fact?

once we are writing about writing about writing we are not only no longer writing about writing – we are not even writing.

to write i forget, forget that i can remember. this is not to negate that i have memories but rather to affirm that i am memory and to write is to give myself so fully over to my being memory that there is direct sublimation between that being and this writing. in this process – a movement between gas and plasma: the solidity of memories of expectation, convention forgotten; the liquidity of memories of hopes and despairs set aside – i write, and history, time, i, ambition, death have become words on the democratic stage of words, a script forming as i am abdicated to giving.

once everyone is a writer – a consequence of literacy’s ostensible success and corollary re-oralization of culture – literature has to find new paths of sensation, untried ways of ecstasy and pain, to prepare voids for words. to give oneself over to writing now means refusing identification as a writer, this substantive – dried, shrivelled – hiding in the catacombs of soul, yet in love with language, melancholic with the fleshy knowledge of unrequitedness, stumbling in metallic undergrounds seeking ancestors of the names of dead fires in ashed genealogies.