6.11.2012 (a note taken at work while I should be working)

A tired start to the day. Perhaps I already know that writing will not take place today. After all, what is it that has permitted thought - and therefore, writing - to come forth from me of late? That I have been feeling refreshed? That I have slept well? No, that cannot be it. If anything, the opposite has usually been true. I have been using states of tiredness to my advantage, hangovers, sleep deprivation - states undesired by our society, unproductive states, detrimental to 'good health'. Why do I find these states so conducive to writing? It feels as though, in such states, all of the thoughts that usually roam around my head erratically, without the calm and focus necessary to make them intelligible - petty worries, anxieties about day to day life, administration, work, what I'm doing with my life - slow down and grind to a halt. If allowed an attempt at conversation during such a state, as I had with H. the other night, I find that my thought is left with no alternative but to pour forth slowly and calculatedly; it simply isn't allowed the speed to lose itself in the act of speech. Thought is always lagging behind speech in these states, rather than speech lagging behind thought, as is so often the case. It becomes a speech that lags behind itself.

 Could the best writing be slow, painful writing? Unexcited, unagitated writing. Calm, slow, a drudging crawl through thick mud, but a stoic crawl, one that's not annoyed, not angry or cursing its lot. Nor is it hopeful - it doesn't expend itself in anticipation of the future. It cannot imagine an end result, let alone be concerned with it. In this state alone do I truly allow myself to write, allowing myself to pick up on the tiniest urges to write, even when it feels as though I haven't much to say, and I am rewarded with unexpected insights that only reveal themselves to me as they unfold in the process of writing. It cares not for utility, all that matters is movement - as slow as possible.

“Self-criticism [is] clearly only the refusal of criticism by the other, a way to be self-sufficient while reserving for oneself the right to insufficiency, a self-abasement that is a self-heightening."

Blanchot - The Unavowable Community

Blanchot - The Unavowable Community (extract)

I repeat, for Bataille, the question: Why "community"? The answer he gives us is rather clear: "There exists a principle of insufficiency at the root of each being..." (the principle of incompleteness). Let us take note that what commands and organizes the possibility of a being is a principle. It follows that this lack on principle does not go hand in hand with a necessity for completion. A being, insufficient as it is, does not attempt to associate itself with another being to make up a substance of integrity. The awareness of the insufficiency arises from the fact that it puts itself in question, which question needs the other or another to be enacted. Left on its own, a being closes itself, falls asleep and calms down.

Kafka

Again I’m struck by the notion that mankind is completely insignificant. Reading Kafka’s diaries must have something to do with it. There is something glorious, a feeling of the world’s meticulously epic nature, unembellished, completely lacking in grandeur, when reading Kafka. Kafka always feels to me as one whose writing is to be read as that of a dead writer, but that this sensation was there even when he was still alive, even when he was writing it. In my life, at this moment in time, Kafka is to be read while listening to John Maus, to Ariel Pink, to Popol Vuh. Death, death, death is in them all. These musics, though so much more than just this, nevertheless always point to death. They point to lost times, lost worlds, and the cosmic. Yes, that’s what Kafka reads like to me. He makes man kind so strange, so fairy tale-like, that one feels as though this is a different species being documented here, with defunct behaviours and customs. But no, this is mankind and it is still the same. The attention Kafka gives to customs, to social etiquette and to systems is never incidental. He is fascinated by them – legal documents, enumerated tables, lists, manners, the lot. But he seems to always struggle with these systems. Struggling, it seems, not against them, as it may at first seem. The longer I read Kafka I come to realise that what I’m witnessing is not a man raging against confinement but, rather, truly fascinated and perplexed by this confinement – these endless confinements – and trying to understand them and their workings, not simply free himself from them. One gets the impression that Kafka engages with these systems not as his restrictors but as the very prism through which he may reflect upon his own consciousness at all.

Looking at things in such a way, the insignificance, the insectness of mankind, doesn’t seem to sweep everyone along with it. If anything, the meagreness of the multitudes seems to give the individual even more significance. I don’t know why I’m saying this, it just seems to make sense right now. Perhaps this is because in its complete form the above sentence would read: ‘the meagreness, the insignificance of mankind seems to me to give the individual even more significance, because this individual is me. And it is always “me”’.