she asks, “what is the work?”
blanchot had this idea of the writer erasing himself in the act of writing. that the writer in essence disappears as a person, as a living thing, thrown into a cavalcade of history and memory and desire and culture in the act of writing, that the writer is no longer there. and i found that appealing as all these french ideas were and are to me, something romantic about disappearance most likely, but i understood and still understand it as well, the disassociation between the self and the act, the giving over, where you become not-you, the confusion ceasing to be an issue between the self and the act. this is not to say writing becomes impersonal, no impossible that, stupid to think it actually, but becomes other, as jabes writes in The Book of Questions, writing as the desert, as exile, or as i had echoed in “Restoration”:
in the desert one becomes other…
far from excluding us, the desert devours us,
swallows our being entirely,
and consumes us whole.
to be consumed by writing, to be devoured. how many times have been i shaken by what i found before me on the page, on the screen, that came from me, so surprised, how did i write that? did i really write that? some metamorphosis, some transmutation, some transubstantiation, some translation of you to not-you and thwarted back again amongst the living. it was also blanchot who intimated that it was only through writing we understood our mortality, we write because we know we will forget, we will be forgotten, we will die and the act of writing, as michaels points out in Fugitive Pieces, is to throw a “brick into the future.”
ah, to bruise the future, smack a brick into its face over and again, a million times, to make it scamper. that is the work.