By Prerna Munshi
To write, is to begin with this original sin of capturing the ineffable and yet writing is not sinful. It is wonderment, something that dazes the author herself, a sort of a revelation that she cannot fathom.
The writer is tied to this wonderment eternally. She writes because she is in wonder, yet striving to know the source. Writing is a transgression but the writer is always on the edge, never transgressing, eternally tied to this sense of wonderment and bereavement.
We are not talking about writers of calculations. Theirs is a linear path. Begins from somewhere. Ends somewhere. We are writing about writers of no ends. Ends are closed in themselves, cyclical. We are writing about the writers who have no beginnings, no ends, who constantly borrow from the other side of the edge in amazement, eternally indebted to it, and attempting to clear their debts through a bad currency of words.
The writer asks if she apes her predecessors. Tries finding an alterity to what her predecessors have already established. They have established the same finitude of the writing that she now confronts.
Every writer perhaps tries to write what has been never written. But how can every writer write the not written? I read Hélène Cixous' 'Firstdays of the year'. Firstdays is a word, amalgamated so. The unique of the first, the unparalleled of the first, the never before of the first pours its discontent into every day...contaminates every day with a never before. Every day, they say, is a first in itself. So first is as well a recurrence, a recurring contamination. I don't ascribe any quality to this contamination. It is beyond good and evil.
Hélène is herself besotted of her predecessors. She writes about a pang called writing where she is both the matador and the bull, striving against herself in an arena. An arena that always hungers for a conclusion. That is what arenas are for. A conclusion. A purpose. There has to be a close.
I have been trying relentlessly to not write what I have read. I have been reading about an Other, an other who has an immaculate existence, always violated thus totalized. The other who cannot be known. When I sit to write, I traverse on this edge, having an uncontainable urge to transgress this very limit, to charter into the unknown. I know that it’s unknown...that’s the only knowledge I have about it.
How does Limit maintain herself? She contains a knowledge that revels in its illusive grandeur of being Absolute, heaves and foams like a surging sea but can never cross its shore. Limit is this firm insipid boundary that knows its origin and its death. Limit is a death but it is also an origin to a limitless. The limitless that surrounds it, holds it. And the work of the limitless is not limited to that. The limitless is impersonal and disinterested.
As I write this, a cosmic image forms in my mind.
When I read Cixous, she writes beautifully and what appears as unstructured, is perhaps governed by a very firm structure, by a strict coherence. Like many writers, the writer in her disarms and sacrifices herself at the altar of writing, the writer who believes that she is being written, is being devastated, is burning in front of the will of writing, that the book is already inside her and that she adopts it once she is all burnt, once she is all ash. But has she never effaced what she felt to be rudimentary in her writing? She must have. Though reading her gives a sense of this book being drawn from this Other, this Other who has impregnated her with this book, the book that is not hers , the book giving birth to which, she dies. But perhaps this Other is not the Other and is her own Being's synthesis, a concept of an other.
Reading at the limit is an apocalypse. I have been digging my own grave. Then comes a moment, I suffocate in this grave and writing is the mouthful of air, I tear at in utter asphyxiation. Are we not more concerned about our expressions than our ideas? As writers don’t we have this obligation to be more concerned about what we write than how we write. So many ideas have already been avowed, in so many ways. Beautiful ideas. Beautiful thoughts. I am bereft of thoughts and yet there is this compulsion, this urge within to write. Writing is a profit product of thoughtfulness. How does one write when one is thoughtless? How does one write this surging nothingness? Or are all the writings that the world has witnessed since the beginning of time, a mere facade to this nothingness, an illusive attempt to not slip into this nothingness, an armor against this nothingness? Or are all the writings one or the other forms of expressing this very nothingness, this unknown force that subsumes our very existence, a force that is beyond history, beyond time. Has the Universe not written herself out of this harrowing nothingness? Is nothingness not the force that binds this Universe together, that ‘allows’ it to be written? It is this eternal tension between nothing and meaning, that creates.
Writing is a repressive way to contain the anarchy of this nothingness and yet it’s futile. Imagination is to give multiple faces to this nothingness. Nothingness is otherwise without face, without name, without any attribute. We lend it an attribute in an illusive grandeur of generosity. Nothingness is content being attribute-less. It is our discontent that is nothingness’s attribute. We cannot bear facelessness. It is a terrible thought to our reasonable minds. We are in this mire, in this labyrinth of constantly lending meanings while nothingness is free, free of every urge, every toil, every ambition, every meaning and every form.
I image the Abyssal in my mind. It is like an abrupt gorge to a dizzying never ending bottomlessness. An eternal horrid looking vent. When Nietzsche implores to ‘live dangerously’, it is not to confine oneself in the conventional risks. Risks could be conventional too. Living dangerously means to live at this very edge of the Abyss where everything loses its meaning, even the Subject burns in this Abyssal furnace herself. To live dangerously is to live like this ash…ash which is unreasonable to the ground, of no significance, of no value to this work of meaning. Ash that has witnessed the Truth of the Abyss but never internalized it. Ash that does not know that it’s witnessing the Truth, which in its non-knowledge is devastated.
Who says writing is cathartic? It never is. It’s a vortex. One who writes is driven to madness, gets a glimpse of that Abyss. Just a glimpse because if it reached the Abyss, the writer could never write, could never remain a writer. Writing is an eternal return to that very glimpse of the Abyss.
I read a lot about Love and love is known to attribute meanings to our lives. So, if we love can we not glimpse the abyss? Love keeps rendering and altering its own meanings. What it constructs, it deconstructs. Love takes one to the limit of the abyss, to the very affirmation of this tragic joy but Love is not abyssal simply because Love is a meaning. It keeps one right at the edge. On the other side of this edge, is the abyss. My writing might have rendered a monstrosity to this abyss. But let me remind that Abyss is formless.
So, what does one do at the limit? Her body is outstretched from form to the formless. She is in transit but never transgresses this limit. This very limit that demarcates itself from the Abyss. Her torso is sucked up in the limitless while meaning still holds her limbs, pulling her towards itself. She is mad. That’s the most Language could define. This outstretched woman is the epoch of love, denuding values, denuding moralities, creating new meanings and immoderate paradoxes. This tension, this stark loneliness where she is alone releases a cry from her gut, a bare cry, the magnitude of which Language can’t bear, language can’t speak, language can’t hear. She loses her subjectivity. She has half vanished into the abyss.
She can never leave the limit. She lives decapitated, her head swallowed in by the abyss. The sight of her is horrendous, its gut wrenching and finds resort in love. Love that is known to shelter the beheaded, the shipwrecked, the excessive, the tragic. Love is the affirmation of what sense may term her: the Destitute.
I am still trying not to repeat my predecessors. But I am afraid, I am. Has what ‘will be written’ already been written? What is left for me? I try to search the recesses, the tiny interstices in between what has already been written. All the writing in the past is History, a linear chronicle.
If I find an interstice in this History, I will just be chronicling the interstice what History inadvertently missed. How does one go beyond History, beyond what already has been written, beyond what History shall want me to write. I don’t wish to write a Future already foresighted by History, I want to break this linear chronicle of time. I want to render Time and History totally dysfunctional, outside the space that they force me into. Perhaps, that is what every writer aspires for.
By Prerna Munshi
Comments