“the writer must expose himself to his exteriority”
-William Brogan-
In the process of inscription, I am neutral. Ambiguously being. Neutered.
Existing via language that has not yet been written opens a sort of potential – possible becomings, as yet unknown, unidentified – possible positings of the impossible – WRITING enaction. I am unspecified before the letters which commence demonstrating what / who / how as It (this human) encounters them – imagines, recalls, learns, selects, experiments and undoes, chooses and deletes. Engaging with the sea. With hearsay and learning, words read or perceived, borrowing, borrowing, sifting and hybridizing.
From wherever, therefore, whomever, toward knows-not-what…IN THE MIDST…WRITING: activity, action, attempt…Everything trying.
A human. A person. Acting. Toward what ends? Perhaps to say. To express. To communicate. To discover. Invent. Investigate. Imagine. To play. To die. Not to die. Becoming / evincing / composing / traversing ‘knows-not-what.’ Anything. Nothing. Living…to Death.
This is why. This is why my own ‘need-to-write.’ To become. To try. To live on. To keep going. Living toward, forward, into… perhaps.
Not-knowing I do not know. At the edge, or a limit. Searching a way. To say. To discover. To hear. To emerge. Wanting to express, to find out, to dialogue – capable of expressing “Very little…almost nothing,” I “try again. Fail again,” and hopefully (but “no matter”) “fail better.”
The internal urgency to write rather than speak, or to speak writing or even write speaking arising when I don’t know the words with which to.
‘The need to write is linked to the point at which nothing can be done with words.”
-Maurice Blanchot-
Selecting the pen, scribbling into the paper when there are no words (that I know) for that which (before words) I experience an urgency toward.
Therefore…working and playing – experiment and effort – name-changing and changeling – It commences. Exploring. Expeditions into letters and language. Into sounds, mouths and breaths. Into indeterminate dreams and dubious memories. Desires and wishes and hopes. To connect or converge. To speak or hear back. To know by finding out. WRITING: to learn by failing.
“becom[ing] the empty place where the impersonal affirmation emerges”
-Maurice Blanchot-
Melancholy (Lispector, Pessoa, Beckett, Jabes, Kafka, Blanchot?) and ecstatic (Rilke, Mallarme?, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Cixous?) human activity/task/capacity. “Need.”
“That there is language.”
Begin. Again.
at the point at which nothing can be done with words
***************************
I attempt to express the extent of my experience of love…
Endeavor to language particular beauty…
Strive to tell you how I… try to say…
Make effort to describe my children, the cheek/lip/ankle/voice/presence of my beloved, the eye contact and thought-contact of a friend, paw of a kitten, core of a concept, element of a scent, a breeze, a trace, a view…
Venture some new construction, a world, characters, possibilities…directions and directives…
Ache to communicate…
Will to connect…
Crave to continue…
WRITING: TO LEARN (something?) BY FAILING
perhaps
“the attempt to open a space for the unsayable”
-maurice blanchot-
to fail…
Polysemic Stupor 
Yes !.. Please imagine grateful smiles and applause…
Thank you!
Reading this, all I can think: “I imagine in words. I think in words. Even when I’m not trying to figure out something to say. Words appear in my mind before imagery. Words are the image. They are the senses. They are that which I experience internally before ‘proper’ things seen or heard inside. And yet, when it comes time to speak, or translate the language which flows so readily in me, it plugs up. A mere trickle out, and somehow the molecules themselves are muddled, and ceases to be a liquid and becomes gaseous, and un-containable.”
Okay, so some of that came to mind while I wrote this, but the whole “imagining in words” thing was on a loop in my head while I read this piece. xxx
Thank you so much…yes speaking and writing are distinct in us…languaging…languaging… i’d love to hear more about “imagining in words” for you…
I’m not sure how to describe it. Does that count as irony?
Sometimes, when I listen to music, the aural inspires the visual, and from their language of story comes. Other times it’s the words that come first. Seeing in words, I wish…apart from taking photos of my inner workings I’m not sure how else to describe it…a flannelgraph where words fall and are then picked up and moved about, and the more they come together the more a backdrop develops of the sense-filled lives both real and imagined…