Writing
Sleep can look so much like death, Barthes might have recommended to put the author to sleep instead of to death. Sleep only has the surface appearance of death.
In order to begin I speak. I have finished my work today, I am in my chair. I don’t say a word and or barely think a thought. I look straight ahead at motes in the air between my chair and the outside my window. And outside of this staring and around it or beside it I think about my staring out my window and wonder what it is to look through and at and through all at once. And I see my thoughts begin to fold over and over. Each thought acts out it’s role with each other, and each is a different character. Anxiety fights ambition, love humility, evil hunger, and asceticism fights reluctance. An indistinct sense of time flows and ebbs, and it is hard to return to a previous thought without losing my place looking back for some notion I passed on from. I seize on some sounds of the thoughts and begin to rhyme these thoughts into sounds. The tiny phrase I make from this sound back to thought is my seed for a thought with a language. I write the thought out, and begin to be ready to write. Only with silence can writing begin.
Sleep can look so much like death, Barthes might have recommended to put the author to sleep instead of to death. Sleep only has the surface appearance of death.
In order to begin I speak. I have finished my work today, I am in my chair. I don’t say a word and or barely think a thought. I look straight ahead at motes in the air between my chair and the outside my window. And outside of this staring and around it or beside it I think about my staring out my window and wonder what it is to look through and at and through all at once. And I see my thoughts begin to fold over and over. Each thought acts out it’s role with each other, and each is a different character. Anxiety fights ambition, love humility, evil hunger, and asceticism fights reluctance. An indistinct sense of time flows and ebbs, and it is hard to return to a previous thought without losing my place looking back for some notion I passed on from. I seize on some sounds of the thoughts and begin to rhyme these thoughts into sounds. The tiny phrase I make from this sound back to thought is my seed for a thought with a language. I write the thought out, and begin to be ready to write. Only with silence can writing begin.
I put my I to sleep, and myself is falling into self is my fall to sleep. My eyes
although wide don’t see ahead, I see inside thoughts crossing over to words and
whole sentences glide in from a hidden place and meet me in my sleep. My
sleep is here before I sleep, it caught up to me. I couldn’t have written awake, so
with I. In myself with myself questioning ceases, writing begins. The ink flows freely
in my book on my knee in my chair. I am writing in the only way I ever do, I am
writing about writing. Each sentence is self conscious, but also not conscious of
itself. Just as in sleep I cannot say that I sleep, I disappears in sleep, self in self is
the state of affairs. Self in sleep is interior, and everything is self, exterior waking life
permits the I to be aware amongst all the other I's. Everything is in myself as writing
goes on, I am every character if there were any, every thought.
Already dreaming begins. Somehow there is a shift into other bodies while mine remains at home, somehow I can look at myself standing next to myself and be both selves at once. It is easy to forget here that all of this is my own creation, yet I have no hand in making this, my I is up to his chin in sleep and only vaguely knows that he is sleeping. He is I, but he doesn’t know himself here in this night sleep has pulled over him. He doesn’t write, he can barely even speak, if he used words at all they would be of the order of that which comes before speech. I write, I write what my sleeping self says, and must translate from the language that comes before language, the language that can recognize itself but can not articulate itself into that waking language with words, grammar, and syntax. And I am awake now, which is to say my writing is finished.
Already dreaming begins. Somehow there is a shift into other bodies while mine remains at home, somehow I can look at myself standing next to myself and be both selves at once. It is easy to forget here that all of this is my own creation, yet I have no hand in making this, my I is up to his chin in sleep and only vaguely knows that he is sleeping. He is I, but he doesn’t know himself here in this night sleep has pulled over him. He doesn’t write, he can barely even speak, if he used words at all they would be of the order of that which comes before speech. I write, I write what my sleeping self says, and must translate from the language that comes before language, the language that can recognize itself but can not articulate itself into that waking language with words, grammar, and syntax. And I am awake now, which is to say my writing is finished.
