What topic do I want to write about?
I don’t want to write “about” anything.
Writing “about” something is not what I want. When I write “about” something, I create an object by writing. I take a topic and treat it like an object. I treat it like an object, which I then somehow push around on paper, drifting through the lines from left to right. Writing “about” something is: mastering something, putting myself above something, not letting something speak, tormenting something with the right hand.
To read what has been written “about” something is unpleasant, it is torturous. Yesterday evening I read a chapter in Tomas Espedal’s “Tramp” which goes “about” hiking the Black Forest in Germany. It was about the fact that the first-person narrator visits the wooden hut in the Black Forest where the German philosopher Martin Heidegger worked during his lifetime. This is so boring to read. Then it is a banal description of a banal event in a banal place. The author passes a hut in the Black Forest. And so what?
This has nothing to do with me. It probably has nothing to do even with the author. It was simply written to fill the pages. And presumably it was also written because somehow the name Heidegger sounds interesting.
The way he wrote it, however, it is uninteresting.
Well, now I know that there are some descendants of Martin Heidegger who still use the hut. Thanks to this text, this completely nonsensical and worthless information is now stored in me, in my memory. And perhaps nothing in this book will have such a good memory as this chapter.
Horrible idea.
Text that are written “about” something litters my memories. What someone wrote “about” something doesn’t interest me.
When I write myself, I want to put myself on paper. I don’t want to treat myself like an object, like something foreign. But I want to put myself on paper as a living and acting person. By writing.
I might as well draw or paint. But I can’t do that, I don’t have the technical knowledge. I don’t know how to do that: drawing or painting.
I know how to write. That’s why I write.
And because I can’t sleep.
I can’t sleep if I don’t bring out of myself what’s inside me. And I bring out, I express myself by writing. Writing is: Myself, put on paper.
If I wrote “about” anything, it would not help against insomnia.
This morning my problem is rather that I — again? — can sleep.
The insomnia is no longer there. I wake up at 7:00am. Not at 5:00am.
The need is gone.
Why am I still writing? Because I want to. Because it’s good for me. Because it helps me. In life. Even if I sleep longer now, I am far from having arrived to know myself.
I want to come to myself. That’s why I write.
I want to know, and I want to feel who I am. I want to perceive that I am. And I want to make that visible.
After decades of invisibility, I want to become visible.
Like the character played by Mads Mikkelsen in “Another Round”, of which his wife says in one scene: You were invisible.
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How could you bear to live with an invisible man for years, for decades? A few times we were close to the border, from which it would not have gone on. Close to the border, which was marked by my speechlessness, by my silence.
I remember one scene, an argument in Warren, NJ, another in 63rd street. There were scenes in which you yelled at me — in despair because I didn’t say anything, because I was silent. And I remember my feeling of speechlessness, helplessness. I didn’t know what to say. I was switched off. The circuit between my feelings and my speech was broken. There was no way of feelings coming to the outside. There was not even a path of feelings within myself, no way of feelings to come into my own perception. I searched for words. I was looking for feelings. And I didn’t find them.
I must have had feelings.
And I had developed mechanisms to push these feelings, all feelings away. Not to let them come to the surface. Not to express them.
It was as if I felt nothing.
Absolute cold. Absolute silence.
Be silent.
Silence when things got serious, when it was — apparently — no longer possible to continue a discussion with “if-then sentences”.
I always had a good suggestion to say something that “one” should do. And I treated myself as “someone”, as an object, as something that could be controlled solely by knowledge, experience, intellectual skills.
I was an object that pushed itself through life as an object. No subject was there. The subject was invisible to himself and to the world.
Terrible!
That’s why I just want to be a subject in what I write. I enjoy feeling myself, recognizing myself in my feelings. And to put myself on paper in my feelings and in my memories and in my perceptions.
At some point in the future, when I know myself a little better, maybe I can also write what I am in relation to the world, what I am in relation to things, to topics. That would not be either: write “about” a topic. But it would be to put myself on paper regarding this topic. This would also include describing the topic, the thing. But it was not about writing “about” the topic, the thing, the event, the person. Rather, it would be about writing what this has to do with me. The text should show what the words, the sentences have to do with me. Then the word “I” no longer has to appear.
Just as Patrick Modiano puts himself on paper in his novels without using the word “I”.
Or how a scientist puts his “I” on paper in writing about her or his topic without using the word “I”. Although it is nice, isn’t it, when the scientist makes herself a little recognizable in a text.
And what about the texts of Roland Barthes and Annie Ernaux, who write about themselves, put themselves on paper with great accuracy, always using the word “he” or “she”? It is as if they are writing “about” themselves. As if they were pushing an object, something strange, from left to right through the lines. But it’s not. Because the subject remains visible. Although it seems as if it will never be named, as if it will never name itself with the word “I”. Yet it is there.
I get up, go to the room next door, looking for “L´usage de la photo” by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie. I want to make sure it’s true. That the word “I” does not appear. But it does: “Comme j ́ai presque tout oublié.” As if I had forgotten almost everything. Or is it just the text passages that Marc Marie wrote, in which the “I” was written, is part of the text, is contained in the text? I try to verify this and leaf through the book. Can I find passages that I can clearly assign to him or her? Yes, there is a first-person narrator. She uses the first person often, maybe even continuously. In other texts, books, she uses only the third person when she puts herself on paper when writing. Maybe she doesn’t put herself on paper, never. Maybe she writes into the computer. Presumably, that’s the case. I imagine that most writers and authors use computers. By the way — because I just used the word: The word “author” contains the “I”, isn’t it? The “self”, “auto”, the self that writes. The “self” refers to an “I.” Without “I” it cannot write. — Maybe this is all a bit far-fetched.
It’s interesting.
Only now I don’t want to pursue it.
It would be “about” writing something.
I take a photo of “L ́usage de la photo”.
Then I will put the notebook aside, get up, go to the kitchen, make breakfast. It is now 8:30am. The freedom of my morning writing is beset by “things”, by working for my job.
I was also invisible in my job. And every day anew there is the danger that I will lock myself up again in invisibility. The fact that I close myself off, that I interrupt the path from feelings into language. The whole drama in France came from the fact that I did not speak of myself, but only “about” things.
Fear rises in me. I breathe shallowly. I’m hot and cold. I don’t know what to do. Can I anesthetize this somehow? Since yesterday I have an infection. I’m going to the bathroom now and looking for a
Mads Mikkelsen in Tomas Vinterberg´s movie Another Round: https://medium.com/@endurance0691/october-8e9dbfee2697
