Monthly Archives: January 2011

You’re too much in your own head, I tell X, and you’re dragging me in there with you. Why do you think I hate you? I wouldn’t care if it was just you, but no way I’m ending up like you. Why don’t you open up a bit, I say, what are you afraid of? You think you don’t need to? You think you’re better than the rest of us? They all know you’re not, I say, they’ve told me. Man up, I say, get serious! Hypocrite, he says.

All my efforts to understand were doomed from the start, I tell X. My words are corpses, cadavers! At last you talk sense, says X. All I do is kill when I should be living! I say. This scribbling I do, this tapping, it’s like a kind of grieving for what I’m killing. No you lost me there, he says. You were right the first time, you’re doomed, we both are, they got us and your scribbling is nothing, literally nothing, just something they let you do until they can be bothered to come for us. It’s about time you faced the facts. Right now they’re probably on their lunch break, he says, or sitting at their CCTV screens laughing at us, or shaking their heads wondering why they’re wasting their time with us. If they’re even there, he says, there’s probably not even anyone there, that would be the biggest joke of all, he says.

Writing: no going back, no going forward. At the end and beginning of your tether.

In the field of writing before I can identify myself. I’ve fallen into some kind of error. Begin again, head for the limit of error.

The surrender to writing: to let nothing speak through your words like wind through leaves. Only in this way to approach the world.

You wrote: writing enclosed you outside yourself. You wrote: you got nowhere.

The days run into each other, X tells me. I can’t keep track of them anymore. Is that normal? No, I say, it just happened, I don’t know how. That’s what I’ve been telling you, we need to get a grip, we need to work together. Don’t kid yourself, he says, you just want me to do all the work. Why do we still have that calendar? he asks, pointing at the wall. When did you last turn the page?

When I began writing I’d get distracted by the movements of the pen in my hand and the ink marks on the page. Sometimes the hand of writing gripped mine, but the beginning never really got off to a start. Instead it doubled up as an ending, making writing both beginning and end.

I’ll never give in, X tells me. Never! I don’t care what you or they do to me. You’ve learned more from me than from them, and you know it, he says. If you’re not careful I’ll get up and leave, and then where will you be? You’d kill yourself! So would you, I say.