WE'RE NOT HERE

Facing the terror of the blank, white screen this morning, I thought of the following passage from the “Preface” of Gilles Deleuze’s Difference & Repetition (trans. by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) xxi:

[…] How else can one write but of those things which one doesn’t know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write. […]

And I think about the necessity of writing and I wonder who this blog, who these books are for. Is this for you, reader, my haphazard electronic shadow? Is this for me, the writer? The I, the me, is not in here. This is not my voice.

This is an object in the ghost world. It is external. Once can see its shape, its flaws.

Form is necessary. Necessary but not static. A channel through time. A translucent window. A perpetually repeating moment of coalescence. But neither of us are here, nor should we want to be, nor should we want us to be. Simply the here and we look on coldly.

We are united in the gaze at this spinning. It is nice to see you again, but neither of us is here. Just this spinning, the void, ever dilating. Nice to see you again.

I am motivated by a strong desire to write, to make books. I have nothing to express, nothing to say. This is not my voice. This is a desire to make external, to see, manipulate, and understand. This is a desire for, a rage for, a reptilian interest in, the reptilian function of thought. This is a desire to see what this can do.

It snakes.

Ghosts of Old Sam. All that fall. Not my voice.

It snakes. The fingerprints on the window.