jouissance

And so once again I turn my attention from almost anything to almost nothing and start to write, but write what? It occurs to me that there is a stock of themes here from which I may draw my scripts trajectory, templates if you will, with plots and characters waiting to be directed and named. Here is the mother of all templates of course, the journal. If this is blogging then ostensibly it’s in the fashion of a journal, but with what protagonists and plots will I spin my script, provide my hook? What images, gestures or encounters plucked from the bottomless pit of daily life can I assume robust enough for you, docile reader, to resonate with, be ravished by, dip into, share? But of course you don't know me, perhaps I have provided no clues. Were we old friends perhaps you would be hugging your ribs anticipating a script of almost intolerable comedy, asking yourself on this as on other similar occasions, how you will cope with the gut-wrenching pain of uncontrollable laughter in the face of such comic torment. You might say to yourself, oh, that one, he is as funny as ever, he makes me roar. But you don’t. You know nothing of me, to be reduced to tears by my tragic prattlings, saying to yourself, oh that one, he's so reflective, he always trawls my secret depths with his knowing, searching prose. Oh, that is so him, he's so wan. Alas, these longed for warm recognitions, anticipations, or responses, do not form the texture of my unfettered mutterings.

The very fact of my writing, of my searching out and locating this space for text, for wringing out my jitterings before you, rustles-up an anxiety in me of a prolific response: who does he think he is, writing these things here, in this space? This place of all places which we baptized with our words, this place where we were just getting comfortable when he trolled along, poking his words around in our eeks, our familiar things twinkling reassuringly in the half-light. Really! Putting his words here, words which trip us up, distract us, as we tread our path through the deep dark wood. His words cause us to veer from the path. What does he want to tell us and more to the point, why does he want to tell us? Why has he waited this long and why has he chosen this as the time for his irritating outburst?

And of course, it seems, after all my blatherings, my lexical coughings and farts, it seems that I am capable of telling you nothing. I seem to spin a fabric, a whispery web of something-but-nothing, barely knitted together. But nothing holds still for long enough. Everything seems to slide. Slippage seems to be my thing then, glissage, as the French would say.

Perhaps it turns out that I haven’t actually got anything to say at all. I don’t have a story to tell you. No, there is no catalogue of links waiting to be posted echoing my hobbies, no mappings, no postings, no photo-sets story-boarding my weekend reveries. Here you will not find me unfolding lewd sketches of tender moonlit entanglements under the disused signal boxes of London's over-ground railways stations. You will not find my drawn-out tales of dining experiences with friends and colleagues cataloging the significant restaurant openings of 2007. You will not find mindless aphorisms or pendulous dragging narratives detailing the inconsequential meandering thoughts that plague us all when sleazing in the dark zone. And you will certainly not find the churlish comic-tragic posturing doused with rhyming couplets and folksy popular songs so overused by the amateur auteur.

And so you don't know me at all. And why would you want to bother?

And so once again I turn my attention from almost anything to almost nothing and I start to write. Write for who? It occurs to me that there is a stock of basic readers here for whom I may draw my scripts trajectory, blank canvases if you will, waiting to be directed and named. Thus in order to connect, in order to unfurl this text (we've already observed it forming a trajectory in an earlier passage) I must address it, and I address it to you. Taking refuge in the reassuring knowledge that we must have met, I write this to you, I write this for you, for in order to write, I must have already invented you. Your charms and foibles, your fay approach to reading, glossing the text, grasping a phrase here, a word there, looking up, your head cocked to one side, staring out to space. I do not expect that your reading should be devotional; it is this cut-up reading that excites me. Ah yes, you are looking down again, you are reading on some more, good. Sliding, slipping, skidding through the words, lovely!

What can it matter how much you take in, what you sieve out, what remains? For without you, I am nothing.
Thank God I found you.
I think I love you.