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!