The losing of dreams

There’s this game of cat-and-mouse we play with memory. I know I, for one, wake up sometimes after having dreamed the perfect sentence, the perfect combination of words. There’s this mist enveloping my head, this feeling of elation, from which I don’t want to depart but which I will have to destroy soon. Very, very fragile, this ecstasy. So fragile, it comes to me in fragments, not as a full-bodied article.

Light, the destroyer

Before my eyes open for good and light returns to rule over my world, there’s this state of in-betweenness, where things are still happening without a program, and where I find the texts I might be able to write – I find them perfectly formed, perfectly written. Only not on my page, not on my screen. They are there, in me, and yet not exactly there. I encounter them the way I encounter the accidents of my life, and I rejoice at seeing them (or rather feeling them) the way I rejoice at the sight of pregnant newness. Oh my god, I say. Oh my god, I've got it. I've nailed my best one ever. The words and everything – lined up in a beautiful string like beads queuing patiently after one another, everything making sense, everything making more sense than anything else. The thoughts – their hard surfaces and their soft malleability – their fragile being materialized in a state between states. The genial embrace of the muse through the blanket covering me head to toe. The feeling, the good feeling, covering me like a blanket too – I am it.

And then – damn, I wake up. And every time I ask: Why do I have to wake up? Why do I have to ruin this wonderful moment? Wakefulness brings about its own monsters – darker than the monsters of the night, harder – if not impossible – to push away. The stubborn monsters of reality, the menaces of daylight. They come and steal away my best sentences. They eat them up like they were slices of cake. The worst thing about these monsters of daylight is that they steal away my brilliant ideas, with that rapacious gluttony of ravenous ogres.

Source: Deviant Art

I find this in a poem by Tomas Tranströmer, and I know he means exactly what I’ve been saying so far.

“A dizzying commedia that is inscribed

inside the eyelids’ monastery walls.

A sole exemplar. There it is right now!

It is, in the morning, altogether erased.

The mystery of that great extravagance!

Obliteration… As when the tourist is stopped

by suspicious men in uniform –

they open his camera, unroll his film

and allow the sun to kill the pictures:

so dreams are blackened out by the light of day.”

And they say daylight is good… It may be for plants, but the photosynthesis of thoughts is different. Unlike plants, they grow well in darkness as well as in full light. Maybe better, sometimes.

The threshold

Tranströmer’s example is one that calls for some thinking.

You think: when there’s no way out for thought, one way will have to be invented. Take the gift of speech away, and you’re left with the gift of telling. Because speaking and telling are not the same thing – no way. The turning of one into the other is not a taken-for-granted metamorphosis. The pronunciation of words does not make the thought apparent. But telling – telling can be achieved without words. You can tell with your hands, with your eyebrows, with the color in your cheeks, with the trembling of Adam’s apple.

And so, the passing of speech into telling requires a threshold of its own. This threshold may be speech’s own progression into meaning, and at the same time its state of uncertainty: the point where it’s not yet clear if what you’re saying will be understood, if it will be made apparent in the form of something told. What is clear, though, is that not everything will pass through. The threshold is not only a passage but also a filter. Like a sieve that allows the water to leave while keeping the solids in place, it is a termination of something and an inception of something else. This is where speech loses its inarticulateness and where it starts to take the forms of meaning – where it becomes articulated.

The threshold. So many good moments died at the threshold between my nights and my days that I’m thinking: isn't it unfair that we depend so much on this state of conscious wakefulness to create things that are mostly irrational? Poetry comes from where reason gives up in embarrassment. Writing in general comes from the same regions, although there must be a secret potion somewhere that transforms writing-in-general into poems. It needs to pierce through all this barrage of reason, this unbearable daylight, in order to get back to where it is possible – to where poetry is not poetry but a dream, an event that hasn't occurred yet but which is about to take place.

Source: portland.net

At the threshold, there are no certainties. There are the things behind and the things ahead, none of which shine true. Behind and ahead are mere coordinates, not to be relied on. Since the ground is shaking, the only things I am left with are questions. Where is my muse now? Where is her promise to deliver the Idea? Is she hidden? Is she forbidden to cross the threshold? Am I left alone? Should I be worried?

If there’s a muse out there, she must be worried by the threshold, because this is where her mirage becomes apparent, where it is exposed as hallucination.

The archive

The situation in which I find myself when I forget this way and try to bring the forgotten back from the recesses of a memory that is not exactly memory (since, as I still believe, dreams come from a region that’s independent from mundane experiences, if often caused by them), this situation in which I try to bring to the surface something that lurked underground, i.e. under the ground of my conscience, is a writing situation. It is a writing situation insofar as it presents precisely the possibility of a recollection; but a recollection that is remembrance in the sense in which putting members together, when a body has been pulled apart, will not create the original body, but something else: something more monstrous, like a mere collection of members. Remembrance is recollection, no doubt.

When I wake up and realize that my words and my thoughts have flown away from me, that they are broken apart, I timidly formulate the hope that writing might be a salvation for me, because I've been taught (by whom? I can’t recall) to think of writing as an aid to memory. But also because (as I've learnt by myself) writing is more likely to be a storage system. If I could use this potential of writing to store, I would never be worried again about my thoughts slipping away. If only.

But as things stand, writing is nigh impossible at that threshold between the conscious state and the state of slumber. When I manage to cross this threshold what I am faced with is a series of sorry recollections. I see improbability and incompleteness when I try to view what’s happening at the threshold. I see my thoughts trying to take shape and failing. I see, therefore, the need for a system of recording; for an archive of sorts.

Source: Matrix

Writing, as a system of notation, is this rescue I am hoping to get from somewhere. But writing, I need to remind myself, is not a means of producing copies. Writing is not a copy of the thought, of the real, of the World. Writing is creation of worlds, of thought, of realities. So it cannot be the rescue I am hoping for. Even when I take pen and paper immediately after I wake up (the way some psychiatrists advise their patients in order to monitor their flow of dreams and the significance of recurrences), what I write on the paper never sounds complete. It does not have the same weight as the words/the thoughts I encountered in my sleep. Not even when I’m sure that I've put down the exact same words I heard/sensed in my dream, with the same inflection, with the same logical succession.

But can I ever be completely sure? With thoughts, as with texts, certainty is a risky enterprise. They can be anything and nothing at the switch of a button; at the crossing of a threshold.

The work of writing

“If a doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I’d type a little faster.”

(Isaac Asimov)

There’s nowhere to hide when the task of writing comes about. It often comes as a blessing. When it does so, there’s no reason to fear it. But there are other moments (many more, in fact), when having to write is possibly equal to having to strangle oneself with one’s own hands. Not only equally terrifying, but also equally difficult (or laborious).

A writer is one who writes, and there’s no way known to man to argue against that. There’s no additional option, no middle ground, no escape route – except, of course, the one expressed in the form of a refusal. But refusing to write means choosing not to be a writer; and so it is not exactly a choice at all for the one who dreams of embracing the writing profession. In order for a text to come to light a gesture of literal inscription needs to have been made. Those who think about writing are thinkers. Some of them quite excellent: geniuses of orality, champions of the spoken word. But they will never graduate from their oral state. They will never be writers. This is so odiously simple, so blatantly evident, it’s hardly worth saying. But still...

Writing relies not only on this decision to take up the task of writing but also on the motivation to stay put. In other words, with writing comes the status as well as the work. But mostly the work.

Source: Writinghood

Work is eternity

What lies in the tenacious task of writing is sweat. Once this is acknowledged, it is easier to accept failure; which is, in essence, the short-circuiting of work’s capacity to go on forever. Failed projects are projects in which, in theory, the work could have continued ad infinitum. If it weren't for the barrier, for the enforced halt.

But what is this stop-that-comes-from-outside-work, and which imposes itself upon writing?

Well, work of all type is, by definition, a manifestation of the infinite. Writing, which is a form of work, is also a manifestation of the infinite progression towards no objective other than the perpetuation of the process itself.

Work is continuous. Work is becoming. Work entails no real beginning and no real end. This is best illustrated by the logic of hitchhiking: you hop on at some point while the vehicle is in motion and hop off to look at its slow, irreversible departure. It's really the vehicle that matter, or rather – its velocity. And this makes it necessary for us to distinguish between work and worker. Work is never-ending. Like all ideal situations (Platonic ideas, metaphysical perfections), it resides in a region where there are no limits and no categories. It is a form of perpetuity and limitlessness. The worker, however, is the well-known human being, with his limitations, with his dependence on biology, with his death. Work exists after the worker died, just as it existed before he was born. It’s within this vessel that the worker carries out his task, and within this perimeter that he finds, once more, the confirmation of his mortality. And so he carries work out knowing that nobody is irreplaceable in the workforce: the harshest, most unfair thing we learn when we are employed for the first time, on which occasion we realize that our employment was another’s end-of-contract. Saying that one’s life is another’s death would be very accurate in this context, as would be to note that this realization places work itself in an ecosystem of its own, with its own logic of sustainability: in order for one to work, another must stop working (and so on).

Source: Walls Pick

The still-born

The finished work, as I suggested last week, is not finished in a natural way. It is work stopped in its becoming. A book, a document, a project of any kind is, in truth, an unnatural death, insofar as Work is concerned. It is, at the same time, itself a form of failure: the work's failure to impose itself as continuous. Finished projects make work seem fragmentary. An author’s books are his/her fits and starts, his/her re-engagement with the eternity of work – not in the hope of containing work, but in an attempt at giving work its due. And work’s due is its lack of history. Work is without history in the sense of not being made of moments strung together, but being a progression without interruptions; a continuum.

Failure is a tricky thing. The writer who writes and writes and writes and writes in order to eliminate errors (thinking they’re doing it in order to make their work perfect, or as close to perfection as possible) is, presumably, a creature thriving on the termination of failures. However, this termination is not equivalent to the achievement of success. To a writer, the book just published, the document just printed, the recipe just handed over, are, really, failures of Failure (by which I mean, as above, the affirmation of the worker’s limits – his virtual death). Failing to fail is equal to failing to die. Hence the immortality we hope to acquire thought the books we write, through the texts we produce.

Workers who perform their task as if it were the pill that made them eternal work in order to vanquish Failure as a principle, by struggling to eliminate every particular calamity while it's still unborn. And this is why writers almost always boast about the fact of their dealing in mistakes and fiascos. To quote Margaret Atwood again (from the same text quoted last week):

"A ratio of failure is built into the process of writing. The waste-basket has evolved for a reason. Think of it as the altar of the Muse Oblivion, to whom you sacrifice your botched first drafts, the tokens of your human imperfection. She is the tenth Muse, the one without whom none of the others can function. The gift she offers you is the freedom of the second chance. Or as many chances as you'll like."

Error comes with work – that's the message here. (Miscarriage, the Tenth Muse – I need to retain this association.) This is not only a warning; it is also a promise. A promise that failure cannot be avoided, since beginnings, as initiations of new projects, are failures in-the-making.

Source: The Guardian

No-work

And because writing is so much a withdrawal from life, it appears (in spite of its exclusive definition as work) to be no-work. Leisure. Pass time. Elegance and uselessness. Aristocratic affordability to waste one's time and to bring no good (or little good) to those who live around. "Why do you write?" appears, to Atwood, as a subtle rewording of another, more proletarian, question: "Why not do something useful instead?"

"If you were a doctor, you could tell some acceptable moral tale about how you put Band-Aids on your cats as a child, how you've always longed to cure suffering. No one can argue with that: But writing? What is it for?"

Yes, writing, unfortunately, has to happen as an attempt at answering this impossible question. And every time somebody thinks they've found an answer, that answer is harshly, emphatically, pragmatically, rejected. There's no way you can accept writing, especially writing that's never acquired the (partial, never-sufficient) confirmation of a book cover. Writing, if it has to be considered significant, will have to take place in one's spare time. (Nota Bene: One's own, not the time of others.) Professional writers are in fact writers whose writing doesn't appear as profession but as hobby.

So when the question comes, when it is thrown at the writer with the force with which a spear is thrust towards an enemy, the only safety guard is the forget-about-it argument:

"If at a loss, perfect the shrug. Or say: It's better than working in a bank. Or say: For fun. If you say this, you won't be believed, or else you'll be dismissed as trivial. Either way, you'll have avoided the question."

And so, under the protection of one's own techniques of avoidance, writing can return to its lair. It can evolve the way it has been evolving all along: apart from the world, into the wilderness of one's own isolation, into the rage of one's soliloquies; i.e. into one's precondition as a writer.

Working towards the Muse

I spoke of work last week, and somehow, at some point, I bumped into the Muse issue. For most of my post, I dealt with writing in its professionalized form. But now I want to start by saying a few things about the other forms of writing, the ones that are not so glorious - the non-professional ones.

Source: DVO

I return to my favourite example: the shopping list. Let's think about it. What is there, in the shopping list, that may be said to enable writing? A couple of weeks ago I suggested that this may be the disappearance of the body. And I do believe the same now. But I need to stress that the disappearance of a body (that anonymity of the author of a shopping list which makes it impossible to anybody else to recognize who he or she is) is doubled by the appearance of a self. It is the self that we perceive when we read that list, since the body is invisible to us. And that self is the metadata that gives us a wealth of information about the author: about his choice of words, the page he's picked up, the pen he used, but mostly about the mental energy that made it possible for the list itself to come to light. Before the list there was darkness. And the darkness could only be dispelled with effort.
What do I need? What do I lack? What do I have to replenish in my cupboard? What have I run out of? All these questions are prompts. They facilitate the coming into the world of the shopping list I am now confidently composing, knowing exactly what I am in need for, and more importantly, knowing perfectly well the words I need in order to express that lack on the piece of paper I have chosen as my canvas.

Of work (again)

In order to do all this I need to put myself to the task. I need to toil in an effort to clear the ground and to make things possible. It is only in the void (in that state of blindness I mentioned last week) that the appearance of objects is noticeable. In a fertile field full of bloom and growth (which is what all efforts of clearing aim for), the blooming of one flower or the rising of one plant from seed is not a noticeable event. There are too many similar events that compete for supremacy there, and because of this they all end up invisible. But make that field blank; make it a field of potentialities. Now the Muse can come. Now there's room for her to feel good, to feel cherished, to feel useful. And the Muse will come as soon as all that is acquired. It will come easily. Her coming will be made easier and easier, as the toil extends, as the effort intensifies.

Source: Anatoly Karlin

This is how I like to contradict the myth of the benevolent Muse, who comes to impregnate the writer's mind. I believe it is the other way round: it is the writer that impregnates the Muse. That's why the Greeks made Muses into feminine creatures: because they presuppose, these Muses, the potential to carry. Good Muses are pregnant Muses. Good Muses are carriers of a writers' own efforts.

Working towards the Muse

So when someone says you need to be in your Muse's good graces to be able to write, I say no way. In order to be able to write you need to work. In order to write you need to have already written. Not in the sense of being familiar (from accumulated experience) with what the act of writing implies, but in the sense of having paved your way towards the real moment of writing (the one that produces the real satisfaction), by means of a working-towards-the-Muse.

It takes work to write and it takes determination. To return to the writing profession, i.e. to the writers called "writers" in dictionaries and encyclopedias (read the Wikipedia entry for the word and you'll be edified), let's say without work there won't be a name on a cover. There won't be a cover, there won't be a name.

And working some more

When asked to write about her writing, Margaret Atwood admitted she was in an impasse. Writing, her own writing, did not appear clearly to her. The only thing that she appeared to be clear about was the idea that there had been work involved. Work and other peripheries of writing (location, events, circumstances), but not writing itself. That may very well be because writing is almost exclusively work. And we have this strange tendency of remembering little about our work.

Source: This Recording

We only seem able to remember the end product – which is a silly thing to say, of course, because it's self-apparent that the final product is the one that stays (in memory or elsewhere), since it is the only thing finished. Work itself is not finished; it is a process, and a process that doesn't end. It requires fortitude insofar as it presents itself not as a possible end but as a sure continuation. The final product is only an end to the work: to the work that came with the task, but an end that will be posed anew with the next task, and the next, and the next. Work is only struggle. It is masochism at its best. It is pure extraction from life's easy moments.

Margaret Atwood:

"You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river. The horse throws you and you get back on the horse. I learned to swim by being dropped into the water. You need to know you can sink, and survive it."

***

As an end note: Atwood's piece, called "Nine Beginnings," is the 15th essay in Curious Pursuits. Occasional Writing, a collection of essays published by Virago in 2005. It appeared initially in The Writer and Her Work 1, a book edited by Janet Sternburg (New York: Norton, 1990, 2000). "Nine Beginnings" is a series of nine attempts at answering the question "Why do you write?" A self-imposed question that gets no full answer, only a litany of incomplete attempts, of failures to define what proves to be, in essence, impossible to define: Writing.

Works and days

Writing starts in a state of blindness from which you gradually recover. This is the blindness of not knowing where to start, of not having anything to hold on to. This impasse is fundamental to writing. Without it, projects, plans, and efforts would not be possible. Nobody would ever write if there wasn’t this state of chaos, this emptiness full of potential, where everything is present in principle but nothing is materially present. Not yet!

It is in this blindness that, at some point, things start to happen. This is also a recurring blindness, one to which the person who writes returns every time they have reached a finish line. Every time an assignment is finalized, a new one peeks from beyond the line of horizon. And thus, with a text finalized comes another text-to-be.

Source: Pen Again

It happens this way. You don't see. You strain your eyes, you strain your mind in an effort to see what has to be seen in order for writing to commence. What needs to be seen is the step forward, with which the project is given a kick start. This is the hardest part, because there’s no precedent. So many options, the work appears impossible. The only thing known by the writer at this stage is the task.

The chore

So the act of writing finds its origins in an assignment. There is a task to which I subject myself, a task that oppresses me, gives me nausea, restlessness, itchiness, insomnia. There is a task that I inflict upon myself like a wound. I must write this text, I must compose this document. There’s no if, there’s no but.

A task imposed from the outside is nonsense. Take the case of a school assignment. There, the immediate impression is that the task has been forced upon the subject, because it has been uttered by another subjected, vested with more authority. But there is, really, no external imposition. As in Sartre’s formulation of absolute freedom, I can always opt out; I can always say no to the task, I can always choose not to write that assignment. So the choice is, really, mine. It’s easy to say otherwise, because then accountabilities too are taken away from me. And what a peaceful life that one is! Another axiom of Sartre’s philosophy is that freedom entails responsibility.

And so, in relation to writing, I always find myself bound to make a painful decision. Painful – why? Painful because, in order to write, I need to extract myself from the reel of unwriterlike events that make up my life. Writing becomes something special, something out of ordinary, when I start forcing myself to do it in spite of my daily life.

In an essay called “Nine Beginnings,” Margaret Atwood wrote a lengthy ending paragraph I would like to quote in full, because it describes beautifully the process of writing. It goes like this:

"There's the blank page, and the thing that obsesses you. There's the story that wants to take you over and there's your resistance to it. There's a longing to get out of this, this servitude, to play hooky, to do anything else: wash the laundry, see a movie. There are words and their inertias, their biases, their insufficiencies, their glories. There are the risks you take and your loss of nerve, and the help that comes when you're least expecting it. There's the laborious revision, the scrawled-over, crumpled-up pages that drift across the floor like spilled litter. There's the one sentence you know you will save.
Next day there's the blank page. You give yourself up to it like a sleepwalker. Something goes on that you can't remember afterwards. You look at what you've done. It's hopeless.
You begin again. It never gets any easier."

There are obstacles – there are always grand obstacles that life erects before the writing subject. And I don't mean (for now) the financial obstacles. I mean a lot more than that. Take a look around yourselves and you’ll see them everywhere. For those who still have difficulty seeing, here’s an aid: these obstacles are sometimes called procrastination.

The spark and the aggregate

So writing starts from blindness. You don't see, you don't see, you don't see – for a long, long time, everything is dark, nebulous, invisible. Then there's a twinkle of light. An idea, a word, a sentence, a tiny photonic explosion. That is all it takes for the machinery to start, with huffs and puffs; this is how it starts assembling itself. One spark after another, the whole fire becomes alive.

Yes, I think writing is (apart from the many other things I have so far discovered, in or out of this blog) a form of assemblage. Writing is an ars combinatoria. Writing is the craft of putting things together. If there's a place where the idea of a collage never fails, that's gotta be the fief of writing.

So there's that little moment, right? The moment when the darkness that oppressed my mind is slashed through by the tiny lightning of an idea showing itself. It is showing itself not only as a potential, but also as an isolated sequence: a nod.

Source: Vimeo

And now we’re talking. Because, as with nods in networks, this one too, in order to exist, has to grow branches. My idea branches off as soon as the first flicker has become apparent. In other words, this idea attracts other ideas. In the blinding darkness that used to surround me, and which was suddenly illuminated by a single idea, more sparks emerge here and there. In similar ways, other ideas come to light. But these ones are not independent. They are related to my first victor, to that first avenger of light. Everything that follows is triggered by it. That tiny particle of mental dust, which in the beginning appeared to be nothing but an isolated instance, now proves to be the centre of a system; its point of origin. I therefore end up experiencing writing as a networked and networking thing, in its most material form: the form of its coming into being.

Whatever inspires us

Yes, that tiny particle, that initial blast, is what some used to call (and others are still calling) the Muse. It is a kind of secret visitation, if you look at it from a reductive perspective. (Reductive of the writing self, is what I mean.) But the way I prefer to think about writing is not through this comforting, and at the same time frightening, myth of the rebellious Muse, which puts an unflattering light onto the writing subject. On the contrary, I want the subject to shine.

The question is: what causes the Muse to show itself? What allows that initial photonic explosion to take place? Is there anything prior to it? Is there world before revelation? To a writer, the answer is yes: before the Muse there is something. Before the Muse there is a calling for the Muse. The writer who experiences writing as an obligation, as a task, doesn't rely on the visitation to take place. If they do, they fail. Young poets are usually inclined towards this detrimental approach to writing, because they believe there’s no such thing as a predecessor.

Without the task, without the obligation, without the awareness that there are other writers who have already done it before, one cannot understand that it is truly their own subjectivity making room for the Muse, setting the table for her, pouring the wine, cooking the meal, arranging for the waiters, and so on. There's a lot of work before the Muse shows her face, and it is this work that makes the appearance possible. What this means is very simple: every writer is his/her own Muse. Anybody is capable of musing about. It doesn't take preordained talent, it doesn't take a writ in the stars. What it takes is work.

When Hemingway said he was striving to write that single honest sentence that would truly make his day, this is what he meant: to work his butt off in order not to write pure and simple, but in order to allow the Muse to alight on his plot of land. When Joyce was declaring his satisfaction at the production of two lines after a whole day of work, he meant the same thing. Tedious as it may be, writing is, first and foremost, an affirmation of the writing subject. Just as withdrawals of the ascetic type are affirmations of the anchorite’s ability to distil himself into a non-societal being, to work himself out in the hope of receiving the visitation. It should not come as a surprise that monastic life requires isolation, which is not isolation meant to help the subject to avoid temptations, but isolation meant to allow the same subject to work. Revelation is not a given. Revelation requires pain, blood, sweat, humiliation, failure after failure, distress, doubt. All the trainings, all the prayers, all the acts of self-purification, all the renunciations, all the trials and errors of the anchorite are preparations: they are his way of enabling writing to take place.

Writing in order to be

Let me return once again to Michel Foucault’s interview from 1968. It’s in order to see (once again) what he meant by the obligation to write. Perhaps the most important, the most intriguing angle from which this obligation can be regarded, is this one, where we encounter the body that writes.

 

Where there’s writing there’s a body. Here’s a syllogism with good chances at appearing too obvious to be taken seriously. But the relationship between writing and body is far more complex than what this syllogism is about to recommend.

 

I disappear, therefore I am

It’s not in the presence of the body that one is likely to find the impetus to write, but in its disappearance. Now, of course, there are ways and ways of coming to terms with this disappearance of one’s own body through the embodiment of the text that is one’s only possible future. For a start, one could realize that this disappearance is not death; not exactly death. When I say my body has disappeared in the process of writing I am not uttering that Romantic ideal of the genius who lives for and through himself: that perfect mind, that perfect consciousness, that superhuman presence that fared so well in the nineteenth century and seems to have died (or maybe not yet) with Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Flame, ominously published on the cusp between centuries, in 1900, or better still, with his Charter of Carnaro, from 1920. (The genius dies in relation to his kind; he lives only insofar as he is misanthropically placed on a cliff overlooking humankind with aloofness).
No. What I mean by the disappearance of the body is that almost mundane oblivion that overtakes every writer when their scribbling is in action: even the person who puts his culinary desires into words on a shopping list, even the person who writes the ticket to punish me for my wrongly parked car.
In the process of writing, one needs to get rid of one’s body, so to speak, to put a distance between their selves and their words. It is only in this disappearance that writing can take place without the writer worrying about consequences. Otherwise, there’s too much fear, too much reflection, too much distraction; too much of the world and too little of the text. So, when writing, one is really hiding oneself in order to allow the text to come to life. It's a situation that resembles hunting. In hunting, the animal is lured by an invisible body. The animal is afraid, obviously – it is worried for its life. But the hunter is afraid too – worried that the hunt will not get to its expected outcome; that there will be no game to take home; that – if you like – the scenario of the hunt will not be materialized. A disappearing body is the guarantee of the game's appearance. An immaterialized body expecting the materialization of a text – this seems to be the right formula for the understanding of writing as an action performed through/with the body.

 

Foucault

This is my take. Foucault’s goes, obviously, a little further. To him, writing appears as an obligation to please this disappearing body by offering it the chance to stay away from the society that builds walls and constraints around it. When writing, the body disappears not only in relation to the text and the page on which that text is being laid down, but also in relation to the external pressures of the world. Writing is, at its core, a form of fantasy. It starts from an impulse to liberate the self and goes so far as to affirm that self to the obliteration of the world. This is why writing is different from speaking, as Foucault insists in the interview: because the former evades the world, while the latter addresses it, lives with the world, embraces it as a place for communication. The body is torn between the two, since speech needs it in order to materialize itself in the world, while writing rejects it precisely in order to come to life.

“Another reason why writing is different from speaking is that we write to hide our face, to bury ourselves in our own writing. We write so that the life around us, alongside us, outside, far from the sheet of paper, this life that’s not very funny but tiresome and filled with worry, exposed to others, is absorbed in that small rectangle of paper before our eyes and which we control. Writing is a way of trying to evacuate, through the mysterious channels of pen and ink, the substance, not just of existence, but of the body, in those minuscule marks we make on paper. To be nothing more, in terms of life, than this dead and jabbering scribbling that we’ve put on the white sheet of paper is what we dream about when we write. But we never succeed in absorbing all that teeming life in the motionless swarm of letters. Life always goes on outside the sheet of paper, continues to proliferate, keeps going, and is never pinned down to that small rectangle; the heavy volume of the body never succeeds in spreading itself across the surface of the paper, we can never pass into that two-dimensional universe, that pure line of speech; we never succeed in becoming thin enough or adroit enough to be nothing more than the linearity of a text, and yet that’s what we hope to achieve. So we keep trying, we continue to restrain ourselves, to take control of ourselves, to slip into the funnel of pen and ink, an infinite task, but the task to which we’ve dedicated ourselves.”

 

Putting the body together

Indeed, “we write to hide our face.” The writer, even when he/she is an author with a photograph proudly printed on the back cover of a book, is an entity without a face. His/her text is to a certain extent a reconstructive procedure: an attempt to form a face. This is because an author’s identity is not the identity of their face, but the identity of their work. Their name too is, in fact, nothing but a form of ID. So the creation of a text is, really, the creation of an identity. And this identity keeps forming, keeps coming to light, with every text written, with every word taken out of its linguistic context and placed in the context of its newly acquired text.

The problem is that we’ve come to identify writing almost exclusively with authors of books, and that’s why we can’t see this reconstructive nature of writing, this obligation to write in order to form a face and a body. But take once again the example of someone who’s writing a shopping list. Where is that person’s face? Where is their body? What can we say about that person if we found their shopping list (as we often do) fallen onto the ground, left to disappear once the work has been finished (once shopping has taken place)? Nothing. Nothing about their body, that is. But there is an identity right there, on that little piece of paper, and that identity comes to life as the result of writing. That's how that “dead and jabbering scribbling” is a guarantee for the person who wrote the list that he/she will be remembered – if such might one day be their desire. Remembered, obviously, in the sense of re-membering, of putting that person back together from the little scribbling on that paper.

 

We cannot write forever

But what’s really painful to see is, as Foucault points out, the failure of this process of self-disembodiment. Yes, we’ve acquired, through writing, a sense of standing apart from the world. But the world doesn’t die when we push it aside. We realize that, instead of being apart from it, we are a part of it.

Writing cannot happen forever, i.e. we cannot be forever in the process of scribbling. In contrast, the world never ends. It is. It exists on the outside of our selves and awaits, patiently, for us to switch off the fantasy we are fantasising about. We’re never going to be like the geometrical figures in Abbott’s Flatland. True, complete, irreversible disappearance from the world would be, indeed, a form of imprisonment on the page, a transformation into a character, into a diagram, into a geometrical material. I don’t know if that would be better. I don’t know if Foucault really meant it that way. (Him, the critic of imprisonments?) But one thing is certain: he saw the impossibility of such a project. As a consequence, he sees writing as a temporary transfer at best. We leave the world to live in a fantasy, but at some point we will be obliged to return. And when that happens, we find that the world is there. It has never left. The world is where we return; it is where we’ve never departed. This is the pain and the pleasure that come with writing. Whoever thought it would be easy!

Writing, aka arrogance

More often than not, the thing we call Writing is associated with some form of humility. Listen to people who tell you how they've grown into writers. They will produce stories about humble beginnings, about shyness, indecision and the whole gamut of self-deprecating sentiments. (I generalize here, of course. Not all writers talk about writing in these terms; but try the exercise on a handful of them and you'll see).

I'd like to think about writing in a different way: not as humility but as arrogance. And once again, I start by making use of Foucault's interview, mentioned last week.

Endless work

Foucault imagined the obligation of writing as a promise; as a kind of prize one sets up for oneself, so as to reach the end of the process basking in the glory of having succeeded. But at a more careful reading, one may find that this promise is in fact a certainty. One sets out on the journey towards the end of one's work knowing that the end will be reached. But reached in a peculiar way. The completion of the task, the writing of the page, the finishing of the manuscript - all these are forms of work that start anew as soon as the finish line has been crossed. A writer knows that the present task is not the Task. That the sentence, the paragraph, the page, the manuscript, don't represent the Race of all races. When one writes with a conviction that the present work is the only work ever produced (that once this assignment is done there will be no more assignments) one sets oneself up to fail as a writer.

Source: Huffington Post

Listen to Foucault:

"Ultimately, we always write not only to write the last book we will write, but, in some truly frenzied way – and this frenzy is present even in the most minimal gesture of writing – to write the last book in the world. In truth, what we write at the moment of writing, the final sentence of the work we’re completing, is also the final sentence of the world, in that, afterward, there’s nothing more to say. There’s a paroxysmal intent to exhaust language in the most insignificant sentence."

Now if this doesn't sound arrogant I don't know what does. Notice that Foucault speaks of writing as an attempt at reaching an ultimate end. That appears to contradict what I've said so far. But now comes the trick; because the truth is different. Yes, the task is there; yes, the hope to produce the ultimate text is the very fuel that keeps writers active in their jobs. But language has always already indicated to the writer that exhaustion is impossible insofar as it (language) is concerned.

In order to contain language, we would need to overpower it. And that, of course, is absurd. Absurd because, in reality, it's the other way round. Whatever use we make of language, we're only tasting samples. Language, in its totality, is too vast to be defeated. We never see its limits, so how could we even hope to advance towards the end of language?

Let's not despair, though

But Foucault's proposition is full of optimism. He doesn't see writing as a cause for depression. But that's because his writing is perpetual discovery. He uses it as a tool in the quest towards knowledge. To Foucault, writing is not solid representation but temporary construction. It is not a system of notation but an epistemic prop. It is not dwelling but moving about.

Source: Pleruduriel

As Michel Butor said in an essay published in the 1990's, writing resembles nomadism. The success of the nomad is not in the choosing of a place to stay, but in the consideration of all places as probable, yet impossible, settlements. In other words, there's more pleasure in moving on than in stopping to enjoy the view. There's more to be found in acceleration than in stasis.

It is within this kind of approach that writing appears as a promise of success. Having reached one end is no cause for celebration. The novelist in Stephen King's Misery, mentioned last week, smokes his cigar and drinks his champagne not because he's decided to retire after this book, but because he is setting himself up for the next glass and the next smoke. He is setting himself up for the experience of writing as a progression towards an impossible End.

Writing, seen from this angle, is more akin to the story of the prince, in Dino Buzzati's "Seven Messengers." There, a young prince sets out on a journey to reach the ends of his father's empire. He travels and travels, in the company of his messengers, hoping to find that final frontier. But the more he advances, the more he is struck by the truth of his endeavor: there is no end. There is no pause for his search. He has one option alone: to move forward, to produce traces of his journey, encountering new territory every step of the way, leaving the old behind, advancing towards a continuous confirmation of the limitlessness of his father's empire; and, ultimately, towards the only possible end: his own death.

The arrogant creator

Erica Jong says: "No one asks for a new book, but you need to write it." Herein lies another truth about writing, another revelation significant to the condition of the one who writes. The world is already full of texts. It is already busy coping with its own immensity. So writing really originates in a need that belongs in the writer; it is, as it appears, a gesture meant to satisfy an individual need for success: the author's desire to see his own text elbowing its way through a world already choked full of texts.

This is also an act of irreverence. At the end of the day, by forcing his own text into a world inhabited by the texts of his predecessors, the writer implies that the predecessors were insufficient; that they came about with important gaps in their bibliography. Gaps that need to be filled by the writer; gaps that only the writer is capable of filling. And so, the world should be thankful to the writer (this writer), to the fact that his existence makes possible the completion of a work left incomplete by the predecessors.

Source: Big Think

The history of writing is the history of arrogance. Not only established writers do it. Authors of love letters do it too. Had there been a perfect love letter in the world, wouldn't it be easier to copy it? Wouldn't it be easier to multiply the archetype instead of adapting (i.e. destroying) it? The author of love letters knows that if such an archetype did exist, it would forever be devoid of an important component: the author's biography; his/her alterity. Love letters, like other forms of writing, are not centered on the text but on the fulfillment personal wish. Because at the end of the day, as Erica Jong observed, nobody has asked for a text to be written. As with creation, so with procreation. Nobody has asked for any particular child to be born either. And yet texts are written, babies are brought into the world.

Human arrogance is what this is. We need to be ashamed of it. We need to be thankful to it. Without it, we would never offend tradition. Without it, we would never move on.

From threat to treat

I'd like to take a look at the question of writing through a few things Michel Foucault said in an interview given in 1968, but published only recently. In this interview, Foucault speaks about writing as an obligation. And that’s what I’m on about this week.

In order to produce a text, in order to sit at a table at all, one needs to feel the itch to do so. We've seen this already: it's been said by all writers, the respectable ones as well as the mediocre ones. This urge, this necessity, is necessary to anyone who believes in writing as a career or as a self-healing mantra. But unlike Cioran, Kafka, or Doris Lessing, Foucault chooses to see this compulsion to write from its luminous end, i.e. from its point of arrival, from the last page, as it were. Although he doesn't exclude the pain that comes with writing, Foucault sees the practice through the lens of the pleasure that follows. And so, he manages to write off everything that's Romantic, gloomy, obsessive, suicidal in writing, and as a consequence produces an image that bursts with optimism.

Source: www.michel-foucault.com

Obligation à la Foucault

What's important, though, is that - true to Foucault's general view on writing - this obligation is not a given. Not a given in the sense of something received like a punishment that cannot be escaped. This obligation isn't written the way destiny appears in some tales in the Arabian Nights, marked in the corner of one's eye, so as to be known from the very beginning. To Foucault, the obligation to write comes gradually. It stretches like an organ that grows and grows in order to incorporate the newer, more soliciting, functions that keep arising as the practice of writing is being perfected.

"This obligation to write, I don’t really know where it comes from. As long as we haven’t started writing, it seems to be the most gratuitous, the most improbable thing, almost the most impossible, and one to which, in any case, we’ll never feel bound. Then, at some point – is it the first page, the thousandth, the middle of the book or later? I have no idea – we realize that we’re absolutely obligated to write."

Foucault's uncertainty, the fact that he keeps repeating "I don't know" (he does it through the interview a number of times), is an indication of this process. One never knows what is happening until everything has happened.

Source: Jamie Sheffield

One never knows what the first step brings with it until one has taken the first step and seen its consequences. It's only at the end of the track that the runner realizes the extent of his victory. In the beginning - before the starter pistol has shot its caps, before the pen has left the first marks on the page - the only thing that's known is that there's a race to be run; that there's a page to be written. Nothing else. Blankness all over - that's what looks the runner and the writer in the face in that state of a race-to-come.

Moving forward

The knowledge that there's a race to be run is what gives the writer the impulse to go further and further. The anxiety that comes with the whiteness of the yet-unwritten page becomes the promise of its being filled sooner or later. One still has that anxiety rushing through one's blood. One needs the next fix in order to make oneself functional for the rest of one's day, for the rest of one's life. Writing experienced like a drug, like a medicine, like a panacea. And all starts with the promise that exists in writing: the promise of a success.
Every written page is a success, even if one will feel the urge to remove it later, to be done with it, to even hate it to the point where one wants to see it destroyed. There is a sense of success even in the certainty of the doubt. Even in Hemingway's anticlimactic axiom, "The first draft of anything is shit." What counts is the production of that first draft, the running of that race. Mario Vargas Llosa too said somewhere that he writes in the hope of reaching the stage of rewriting/editing, i.e. bearing in mind the pleasure to be experienced on the other side of the finish line. For Vargas Llosa, the truly pleasurable facts of writing come after the groundwork: after he's covered the track and crossed the line. Work first, party later. But party, nonetheless!

Foucault:

"By writing that page, you give yourself, you give to your existence, a form of absolution. That absolution is essential to the day’s happiness. It’s not the writing that’s happy, it’s the joy of existing that’s attached to writing, which is slightly different. This is very paradoxical, very enigmatic, because how is it that the gesture – so vain, so fictive, so narcissistic, so self-involved – of sitting down at a table in the morning and covering a certain number of blank pages can have this effect of benediction for the remainder of the day? How is the reality of things – our concerns, hunger, desire, love, sexuality, work – transfigured because we did that in the morning, or because we were able to do it during the day? That’s very enigmatic. For me, in any case, it’s one of the ways the obligation to write is manifested.”

Pleasure belongs in the end

So if writing is, in this scheme of things, an obligation, it is an obligation to please the self. In the other examples I discussed in my previous posts - in the embarrassing weakness deplored by Cioran, in the neurotic need of Kafka, in the self-scolding of Doris Lessing - this obligation to write was one meant to reveal writing as a way of constantly hurting oneself; of taking aim at one's self so as to punish it for its incapacity to reach conclusion (the dream, perhaps, of being able to write the Book of all books). Foucault, however, who aimed for clarity but, more than anything else, for closure (the philosopher's hope to facilitate understanding by reaching the point where clarification has been achieved), regarded writing almost as a treat. Not the process itself, of course, but the end of it: the moment when, like Paul Sheldon, the novelist in Stephen King's Misery, the writer enjoys a glass of champagne and an expensive cigar every time he finishes a new book.

This type of thinking about writing concentrates on the finish line. It is only concerned with the beginning insofar as beginnings are the necessary first steps towards satisfaction.

Source: Kerry Drumm

Foucault doesn't talk much about his failures, and neither does he say much about his pain. That's because his process of writing is peppered with well-placed re-fueling stations.

At some other point in the interview, he declared his conviction that writing was a way of making light in things that appeared, in the beginning, devoid of luminous finality. So since writing is discovery, the pleasure of having written is equal to the pleasure of having discovered something new. And as long as there's new text, there are new pleasures to be found at every turn. The pleasure principle is refuelled, and writing can go on, in the expectation of finding new stations along the way.

If, as it's often suggested to students in Writing classes, a text needs signposts in order to give readers the pleasure of visiting familiar places, one discovers in Foucault's take on writing a similar jocular principle: a game with promises made to himself.

Through writing, Foucault discovered what he wanted to say. He made light in his own mind by moving forward in his own text. Things were not (could not) be clear in the beginning. Remember? At the start, the race is only a virtuality. It hasn't even begun, it hasn't yet presented itself to the writer as a process at all. At the start, before the pistol has been shot, there's only a darkness that awaits illumination. Only the end clarifies. Only in the end one sees, looking backwards, one's own work, one's own progression. Finis coronat opus. And so, there is champagne beyond the crossing line, and an ocean of laughter. The day is over; long live next day!

Panics and salvations

To the question “Why do we write?” Cioran offered one answer: it’s because we can’t stand the pressure building up inside us. He blamed those who gave in to the power of lyricism, not exactly calling them cowards, but pitying them for the little strength they seem to have. There's something special going on insofar as impulses are concerned, especially when they're related to writing.

When read with the eye of a biographer, Franz Kafka's artistic life appears to be an illustration of Cioran's theories. He stands as a specimen of the weakness that characterizes the lyrical spirit. In his diaries, Kafka complained about not being able to live without writing. Kafka, one of the most lyrical writers, bled words on the page because he could not contain the extreme pressure of his will to write. He wrote cursively, he wrote fragmentarily, he wrote short and long, he almost wrote with the exactness of a clerk. He did not take breaks. He did not write in fits and starts (à la Nietzsche, for instance), but like a daily letting of blood. And yet he still complained, at the end of it all. He still protest that “all language is but a poor translation.” Translation of his inner wilderness, is what he meant, for sure. There’s an insufficiency in the turning of the inside into outside, of feeling into signs: the disastrous evidence of the language surrounding us, encapsulating us - the never-enough of our words.

Source: The Village Voice

Compulsions

Translating is cheating. Conversion is misappropriation. Transfiguration is deceit. All this because expression misrepresents the death towards which we’re driven by excessive interiority. “A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die,” Kafka said somewhere. A thought heavily injected with existentialism, this is. Not unlike that of Cioran, who discovered in the interior architecture of his soul a complexity so great, it could only cause the death of his (social) self. Kafka too is overwhelmed by what he sees on the inside:

“This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.”

Little surprise, then, that he felt the itch to write constantly, neurotically. A drive towards writing. In the psychiatric condition known as bipolar disorder, hypergraphia is a manifestation of this compulsion to produce written signs. They don’t have to be intelligible letters or words, these signs. Not always, but apparently they quite often end up having certain artistic qualities – like literary works. Like Kafka, perhaps? Like other compulsive writers?

Doris Lessing, in a 2003 interview, admitted suffering from a similar coercive pressure.

“This terrible feeling that I am just wasting my life, I’m useless, I’m no good.”

The interview makes apparent the point I’m trying to make here: that through this compulsion, through this terrible yielding to the power of the text that knocks at the door demanding to be born into the world, behind all this is salvation. It’s not in the quantity that this salvation is to be acquired. I can't say I'm saved because I've written a lot. It’s not in the quality either, since the artistic worth of my work won't give me the satisfaction I need in order to put a stop to this never-ending process. It’s rather in the outpour itself. There’s salvation in this, but a tricky, demonic salvation – because it doesn't just happen with a bang and then poof, that’s it, no more pain, henceforth no liberating necessary. No. This kind of salvation happens in the wild rhythms of a nerve-consuming repetition. It comes, and comes, and comes, and comes. “Writing a novel,” said Lessing, referring to the time she started writing, at the age of seventeen, “seemed to be a way out. But you see, I was too young.” She was ‘too young’ in the sense of being at the beginning of her compulsion. There was more to come, and she couldn't have known this at the age of seventeen.

Never any end to pain

And then of course, the revelatory statement in Kafka's The Metamorphosis, the poetic testimony of a writer who, followed by the curse later articulated by Cioran, could never be satisfied by the lyrical outpour that haunted him from within:

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”

There’s a panic that seems to come with writing. A panic that one can recognize in the dread of the deadline, for instance. It’s what terrorizes every student, what brings existentialist anguish to every end of every semester. But also a deeper panic, born from the awareness that language itself (the vehicle used by the writer - the only vehicle at his disposal) is impossible to stop. Language is so multidimensional, so multimodal, so multilingual (if I'm permitted the pleonasm), it presents itself to the writer like an enormous challenge. Following the leaps of language, its twists and glides, its sweeps and plunges, is like following an animal that keeps escaping; one that keeps disappearing from the viewfinder precisely when we're about to pull the trigger. There may be pleasure in the hunt (otherwise we wouldn't agree to do it in the first place), but there's also pain. Jouissance, as defined by Jacques Lacan, is a thing we never get. It is not a fact but a promise. A promise we make to ourselves that one day we'll attain that state of total satisfaction that will put all satisfaction to shame, that orgasm that will end all orgasms.

It sounds like the perspective of lyricism, whether it’s about pickling one’s soul or putting it on a plate, so that everyone can see it (in the form of books, of poems), leads to a paradox. One takes pleasure in being a writer, but is required to endure writing. Where there's pleasure, there's also pain. And this is what writers have to deal with. Here, in this constant fight with the impossible-to-control, they flex their muscles, they decorate themselves and their texts, they strut about - all in the hope that the Absolute will give them a taste of what it's made of. What a thought!

Ingesting 'till you can no more

The flaw in Cioran’s theory of lyricism? He doesn't account for the inexpressible. He, who considered himself a specialist in matters of death at the age of 20, saw dying possible only through externalization. As if we only died if we were extracted from ourselves. Let the world fall to pieces. Who cares? The self is forever alive. Eternity of the one awaits us if we repudiate the outside.

Cioran’s generalisation is exaggerated, of course, because writing (or lyricism) gives embodiment only to that which contains in itself the potential to be embodied. I eat what's edible. I drink what's drinkable. I breathe what's breathable. I touch what's touchable. And, logically now, I embody what's embody-able. But that's not everything there is in the World. Apart from the expressible, there is that which escapes all forms of human signification – that which doesn’t give a dead rat for our existence and exists in spite of our determination to manufacture meanings. This rest, this indescribable quantity that stands at the edge of signs without giving itself to the power of signification, this rest is what will not be spoiled by writing (if spoiling is what we fear the result of writing will be). It's in this rest that Cioran's theory doesn't hold water. It's exactly here that it fails to fulfil its own prophecy: the promise to give shape to an interior intensity.

A short digression on inelasticity

Cioran would have liked expandable I's; egos like elastic vessels, capable of holding gallons and gallons of consciousness; never to burst. That would have been the ideal for him.

Source: Design Squad Nation

Obviously, the great irony (impossible to overlook) is that Cioran himself produced books. Quite a few of them, in fact. He was the child of his own expressivity, verbose and talented like all the great writers who failed at being saints. But hey, we don't have to do what the priest does. Only what the priest preaches matters. Cioran (son of a priest – here's another irony) did not do what he himself preached. Or preached something that didn't come up in his doing. One of the two. He must have known that what he was professing had a great deal of hypocrisy in it. But truth is no deterrent. It didn't obstruct Cioran’s attempt to imagine the ideal. The Ideal (as in Plato) is a toy we can play with at our heart's content; we won't know if the game we're playing is the right game (we won't even know if what we're playing with is the Ideal!), since nothing can provide us with that confirmation. And so with Cioran: he could afford being a little naughty around the edges, imagining, like Nietzsche, a subjectivity that could transgress the world and become the World.

Accumulations

What would it be like to swallow everything and give nothing back? To ingest without letting out? To eat without excreting. This Cioranian ideal, this accumulation, would make us look very much like writing in its pure form, which consists of a unique storing capacity. We would carry along the baggage of our own consciousness like an archive. The way Borges' Funes carried with him the memory of the entire universe, archived so as to fit inside a single mind. But this is an archive which, sooner or later, will be read, whether we like it or not. Because reading, unfortunately(?), happens regardless of the effort we invest in writing; it happens in spite of us.
How rude! Yet how impossible to avoid!

Source: Fast Company

But let's face it: we are discourteous too. Relying exclusively on our capacity to store is harmfully narcissistic of us. O, how we'd like to enjoy the pleasure of looming large over life! As large as Being itself! But in hoping so we only confirm the true weakness that characterises us: our patronising attitude towards Being ("You, there, you're only what fits inside my brain. You are my neurons.") And also our semiotic mistake of believing that the totality of Being is the totality of us ("There's nothing else out there apart from me. In fact, there's no out-there at all".)

The Outburst

Of course, Cioran's philosophy is centred on the individual. Indeed, when faced with the outside-as-threat, we crave the isolation of our selves, where we can find the peace of mind we lack in the society of others: the peace of our mind. At contact with the complex World we could do pretty well with a mysticism of the simple I. But that's just one way (the simplest and the laziest) of dealing with the problem. The other one (in which writing is an important, if often overlooked, element) is the Outburst. In it, we take an active stance; we attack the complexity we think we're capable of by placing it vis-à-vis Being. Rather than trivialising the World, we trivialise ourselves. It's better this way (because we put ourselves in perspective and we takes away the godly burden weighing down on our shoulders), but also harder (because this relativisation translates as self-criticism, self-examination, and self-chastising).

Walking out of one's carapace comports the obvious risk of death (death which, like a microbe, comes from the outside - always from beyond us). But being out also gives us the chance to contemplate life. And BTW, we're not immortals. Life is progression; Being is Becoming. We live to die; we write to be absorbed by writing.

(Mis)reading and the refusal to write

So writing preserves in the writer an intensity and a joy that's not lost with the output. Proof? We don't always 'get' the writer's intention. We misread because we sometimes don't have a clue as to what has been put into the text. And there's something incredibly fulfilling in not having been understood; in the failure of others to read the writer's text (the text that the writer writes, as well as the text that the writer is). Even when the writer declares to be offended by this lack of understanding he observes in his readers, he is in fact pleased by it. He must be. And if he's not, he should think twice. With ignorance, he preserves intact the special status of being a writer. When you are understood, you can also be imitated, laid bare. Trivialised. But when you're looked at with suspicion and uncertainty, you're still the one who's holding the reins.

Source: Write on Target

Cioran redux

The reason Cioran is so vilified by some is because he doesn't find glory in writers. On the contrary, what he finds in them is weakness. The ones who write are, to him, the ones who want to tell the world they're fucking Claudia Schiffer. They cannot hold the breath of singularity, the subjective intensity that hurts and devastates their minds. They needs outputs. As such, writers are only big mouths. That's what they are. Expressive, wonderful, mesmerising, mind-blowing bigmouths. And when this is the case, writing appears to be an activity in need for literacy. Once out in the open, it needs institutions. It needs institutions as backups. It longs for the regularity of offices, because this regularity is where affirmation takes place. There's an office where the signing of the Mephistophelian pact is certified, and Cioran doesn't want to be a witness to this certification. Painful as it may be, it's better inside oneself than it is out, among office-workers.
But Cioran is onto something I would like to agree with. Writing/expression, once produced, takes writers out of their souls. It takes them out and puts them into a world where conducts are defined by rules. As a response to this legalistic tyranny, creativity turns inwards. It becomes turmoil in the sense of a boiling-up that is not of the world's but of the individual's. The world rejects this tension because the tension is the Truth. So not-writing is really rebellion. Refusing literacy is a pay-back. Any revolution is first and foremost an exercise in illiteracy, since the revolutionary repudiates the taken-for-granted.

In this regard, I want to agree with Cioran. But I don't know if I can keep close to him for long.