personal

This morning I arrived at a site, previously unknown to me, in the ‘journal’ tradition; it wove, with tight accent, vocabulary and grammar, a sad lacerating tale of love lost, infidelity, the painful ordeal of the withdrawal of the loved-being, of soul-destroying oblivion, of astonishment, of suspicion, of dedication, of demons, of clouds, of night—the lover’s discourse—nothing new for the journal you might say, and the subject of many (I can dig up several irksome examples of my own work, and no less tender). In the biographic blurb, I fished out the author’s phrase: “Everything I write here is true.” I didn't understand, true for whom? Is this to be understood as implying a privileged access to the mind of the writer, and how does this affect what she has written? The one truth that we can be sure of is: “Everything I write here I write”, and that should be good enough. The truth never resides in the writing; it is during the moment of our reading that we create it.

I noticed one of the posted comments, following a particular fragment of this fatigue: “I haven't been commenting much recently because I haven’t wanted to intrude on what are obviously very personal posts”. Yet again we see the reader Creating (in this case, the blank fatality of silence). The personal nature of these posts is unveiled not in their content, nor their admission, nor their self-doubt, but in the knowledge that they were posted for us, posted for readers (incidentally, the lover’s discourse is precisely that, it’s not a monologue) and in this sense, can never be personal, can never represent anything other than the self that created the work, not the self of daily life. We read alone, and it is this reading that is personal. The writer will always remain a kind of theoretical fiction, not the subject of a pseudo-psychological language of interpretation.

Our writing becomes truly personal, edgy, at the moment we press the pause button, just prior to clicking ‘publish’.

you

In a bar near Smithfiled Market,

Whitewashed walls "fucking beautiful" no carpet,

You sweep across our conversation

Like a slide in an old school projector

An image darts across the screen

The clunking mechanical selector

Replacing the first with its successor

echo

In reading, it seems, we cannot find the writer, we cannot hear the author’s voice. If, like a hound digging frantically for bones, front paws churning the earth into showering clods, we toss words asunder, neurotically broadcasting text in all directions whilst conducting our search; if, like a blackbird, head cocked to one side listening for the worm,

hop, hop, stop, cock, hop, hop,

we listen for the scratch of words as they assemble into text, listen for the rustle of language, ache like an infant for the nursing tone we seek in the mother’s calming voice, how will we know when we’ve found it? What does the writer sound like? Thirsty for meaning we bend to drink from the stream, and like Narcissus, we fall in love with what we see there, we fall in love not with the writer (of course he is never there, so why bother looking?), we fall in love with our own reflection, we watch it glisten in links, we watch it unfold and shimmer in comments, and like those tracks crunched through the snow in the wild wood, we look back longingly at where we’ve trod. Like Echo, her love for narcissus spurned, pining for that which she never knew, until only her voice remained in the lonely glen; like Narcissus himself, too afraid to touch the water for fear of damaging what he saw there, our reader eventually dies of thirst, staring at his own reflection.

Keep reading, the writing will look after itself.

foreclosure

Idly clicking tonight or last night, from site to site, skimming ranks of links, I find routes on other writers sites that lead me back here, to where I started, links which, in many cases, I have never seen.

It’s true, I too have created these ranks which become a bibliography, a ragged route as traceable as footprints crunched through snow in the wintry wood. These lists, these rolling credits of readership, these plaudits awarded by those writing in tandem, provide a kind of contrite audit, a shepherding of posts & home pages tabulated by you, who’s words have warmed and fired my imaginings, whose texts have shimmered in the gloom, who’s lexical persistence has been the twinkling model of perseverance against which I measure my own misfirings...

Today I came upon a link to flummery on a site suspended, frozen, perhaps in the way that Dickens froze the fractured world of Mrs Haversham, on 16th April 2007. The author committed his goodbyes, typed out a reason or two for leaving, then ‘poof’ in a cloud of smoke, like the gene, he’s gone, pressed “send” for the last time, put away his Platignum, hung up his, what? Funny, unlike the book, who’s author vacated the scene upon unfurling the last line (once upon a time, in the long, long ago) who’s author is never “there”, who’s author does not “come”, or “go”, for whom there is no hello, no goodbye, the author of that blog announced his inability to push on. He deemed his project incomplete; we note his posts are a dated journal, a diary, and the diary foresees its own closure through death alone. The death of the author. But what is the death of the author? Is not the moment of our author’s vanishment the moment his text is born, freed from the clammy clinging hands of creation, from the unspeakable attributes of its writing, when meaning is wrung out once and for all from a text dripping with its writer’s intentions? Like textiles, our text is a woven fabric, a tissue of quotations drawn from culture, not a tableau of our writer’s tastes, dreams and passions.

Hoorah – the writer has fucked off - his text is alive, it has direction; its interest lies in its destination, in its audience; its rigour lies not in its origin but in its direction; watch its trajectory; watch it go! It is eternally written in the here and now and lives on forever without fear of foreclosure.

You are its author, over and over and over again.

Keep writing, it's your duty!

I'm

Somehow still alive.

I'm flumoxed

I’ve realised again that I can’t tell the difference between writing and reading, the punctuation of silence. I pause, with head cocked to one side, discerning, from whence comes a sound indistinct, who authors? I stumbled, flirting, crying, still listening, yet absent, flummoxed, writing.

Ah, could this be the moment the reader writes, or the moment the author dies?

I'm absent

Without words there is no text; without meaning we find absence; without punctuation where is rhythm? Yet as these emerging words, rested for so many months, jostle as they slip across your screen, they seem to murmur to each other, with uplifted glance, in a language we shall never learn.

I'm listening

This morning the radio plays piano, McCoy Tyner, accompanied on vibes by Bobby Hutchinson. It occurs to me that the piano is a muddy, ranging sludge which only takes form when the oscillating bars of the vibraphone sound their resonant vibrato call, and like a limitless line of type without comma, ellipsis or stop, the vibraphone offers a kind of punctuation that adds rhythm to text and thus meaning.

I'm crying

It seemed, for a moment, that I was to reach out and touch, assembled, all the joys the world had ever known. To feel your sweet and tender breath skimming my lips, to hear your blessed words nourish and sustain me; but as the pain grew worse through listening, I realised that I was deaf.

I'm dallying

Having flirted with so many; not having had a dream for a long time; having slumped off and left you for what seemed the riches, haut and affectations of the demimonde, I return in sweet humility.

I'm stumbling

I stumbled into flummeryblog; a day or two ago, a week ago, a month ago. I thought it was a lonely place. The pretty type all set in pink and grey, the entries unfolding, with vigour for a time, had concluded in an uncertain concoction of reflexive verse.

prick

When you returned from Prick, the tattooist
With that massive carp inked across your soft bicep
Wrapped in damp clingfilm like sweaty hung meat,
I could smell a whiff of your BO.

During four hours of pain
You'd dripped sweat half grimace half grin
As you gained a new emblem,
And when I touched you—a sexy wince.