A punishing faith

Larval Subjects wishes to rediscover his conviction that writing ‘makes any damned difference at all’… How pointless to try and find a point to writing. What difference does it make if writing makes a difference or not? Writing is a form of faith, I now realise, and true faith involves great risk. How many times have I stopped myself in the middle of writing, asking myself what I’m doing with my life, wondering how many more years I can waste away before regret catches up with me. For that’s what life seems to consist of – a continual warding off of guilt and regret. Amor fati has served me well so far, though I fear at times that I have not yet had good reason for it. When the time comes, will I stand the test? The prospect of great regret terrifies me. It’s this fear which petrifies me, freezes me in my place and drains me of all my faith. I’ve been weak, I’ve not been stern enough in my faith; I can never give myself over wholeheartedly to anything, that much I realise. Always a “What if? What if?...” I would’ve made a lousy Christian. I’m inspired by the story of Kafka writing The Judgment in eight hours straight, without leaving his desk once. Such faith! An exemplary believer. Whenever I write I find myself asking –‘What if this is wrong? What if it’s shit? It is shit! Where is this going? I’ve been writing for two hours when I could be doing something practical, something important’. This disease of practicality pervades us all from one time to another, usually most of the time. And so I go, time and time again, and time and time again I find myself called back into writing, by god knows what, and I don’t want to know about it. Yet over the years I’ve found that each time I write the experience becomes more intense. I remember Nietzsche talking of those exalted sensations that can last for hours or even days in the noble individual until one has become a mood incarnate. I thought I understood Nietzsche as I read those lines for the first time. What a joke! I’m only now beginning to have an inkling of what he must have meant, though that inkling is enough to show me that I can never understand completely, but always begin to understand anew. If I only understand one thing, then it is this: these sensations cannot be subjected to the will of the world. They have neither goal nor justification. They are not practical. They don’t put food on the table or help old women cross the road. They are good to no-one; in fact, in terms of benefit to mankind and practicality they may even be harmful. Most of all (and here I must contradict everything I’ve said so far), we can’t even say that writing isn’t good for anything, as the Blanchotian writer, by ‘definition’, does not know what lies at the end of writing. As such, he has no knowledge of what isn’t there either, nor can we be certain of its having or not having an end. Recall that in The Gift Of Death Derrida criticises Christians for not being true givers and not having true faith, as they believe in a reward to be reaped after death. True faith, we suspect, is impossible. Yet it is also ‘barely possible’, as Derrida would say, in that it may occur only unexpectedly, unbeknownst even to the believer. Then can we say that true faith would depend on our giving away our own death, making the gift of death, so to speak, and thus giving up the very possibility of an afterlife. But how can the writer give away that which is not even in is power to give? (This is but another interpretation of the term ‘the gift of death’, a term for which Derrida himself offers numerous interpretations, so that we may continue to speculate ceaselessly) The writer alone strives for death. Striving only to achieve glimpses of it when he finds himself removed from the scene of acting.

What happened to Rimbaud? Maybe he gave up, realising early on that he could never bring his writing to an end. Maybe he didn’t have the patience, the patience Blanchot speaks of each time one becomes the il. A patience imbued with impatience, a continual struggle between the two. He gave up. And perhaps he was right to do so? Wise and strong beyond his years. It is we who are weak, we who keep writing and can’t bring ourselves to stop, who can do nothing but say ‘yes’, even when at the end of each experience we vow ‘never again!’.

In the wake of my poor performance on the degree I’ve decided to become more disciplined at any cost. I’ve set up a schedule for each day from which I’m forbidden to veer. 8-9 am – Shower and breakfast. 9-13 – read, etc, etc. But every time I sit down on my trusty rocking chair with the best of intentions I get the urge to write! It’s hard to read anything without getting ideas. This workless demand of writing is ruining everything for me. Writing, if I may be poetic, is like a fart. You can only hold it in for so long before it remains painfully trapped inside, only to come out eventually with considerable discomfort and in unsatisfying intervals, or it forces itself out at an inopportune moment (beautiful, I know). Writing tears up all plans and calculations. As Derrida says, to truly respond to something is to relinquish all calculations. It must be an event occurring beyond all intentions. Writing is always intention plus a little extra, always n+1. That ‘little extra’ lying forever at an infinite distance from me, even as it appears to happen.

Ibitsu told me the other day how in an interview, after being asked how he knows when a song is finished, Maynard from Tool replied that a song is never finished. There comes a point where one simply has to say –‘this is enough’. And here lies our weakness, both Maynard’s and mine, or anyone else’s who ever tried to write or compose; we cannot finish writing, only leave it indefinitely. Like Ibitsu said in his last post, ‘the weakness of suicide belongs to one’s strength to commit it’. Our very setting down to write is each time attempted suicide, and each time a failed attempt. A powerlessness to bring about our own end. Such horror; at least until Blanchot one could take comfort in death as the end of existence. And now? We can’t even die. All that’s left is this never-ending dying, an incessant failure to die – a dying stronger than death.

Writing is and forever will be a matter of faith. To keep writing, to return to writing time and time again, to keep returning to such punishment knowing that it is only ever an interruption, requires the strongest faith. That faith is forever our strength and our weakness. I hear of these people who lock themselves away from the world in a small room for years, perhaps decades, and dedicate their whole time to writing and to reading philosophy. And for what? to get nearer to the space of literature? But don’t they harbour, in the deepest and most secret crevices of their hearts, a desire to bring back something of it with them? To bring back some proof, a piece of evidence to show that magical place really does exist? Yet anything from that place would dissolve in the air of our world, and vice versa, for the world and writing are mutually exclusive. It’s precisely this constant failure to bring back proof of the slain giant, except in the form of traces, which keeps us writing.