on non-Writing: a brief phenomenology of Self-Betrayal
You must bear with me… the middle of night is hushing and this one tune haunts all the ticking out of Time itself… Teru by Wayne Shorter. Ah finally, I feel less pendular and ready to spill myself over the verge. I want to catch like a beam of sunlight in the windowpane the moment that shows me up most: that essential experience of writing pen to pad. Mine is the habit of tearing a leaf out from underneath the leaf of the pad on which I am writing and being only able to continue by writing on that underleaf. I suspect that every moment of this act is an admission of what I really am like. Follow me closely.
The whole matter begins most generously. I mean that I am already in the flow of writing. There I am. Giving myself to the full weight of my own song, so to speak. But what comes inevitably is the tearing of that underleaf. How does it come? All of a sudden one finds oneself in the midst of Hesitancy. For ease sake I need not approach that moment in so linear nor so causal a fashion. In my hesitancy comes about many things. An exhaustion of spiritedness. Yes, I am inclined to admit it. Certainly a loss of touch with what is meaningful and, in fact, what is so sudden about that hesitancy is that there is either too great a surplus of meaning or else no meaning at all. In the midst of hesitancy comes about my being out of Meaning’s reach in one way or the other. And, just as suddenly, topples the toppling weight of a preciousness about what of me has come right before.
But then my ‘flow’ is not writing alone but writing that cumulates in a preciousness and concern for self-preservation. Is that not the truth of coming to a halt? That I must halt before my Self runs on unsupervised. And why? Because I fear losing everything of the meaning that has come before. Only if I hover on that very moment do such mechanics of fear surface. They are obscured from me in that moment of hesitation by a very loud and empty crying out that ‘I DO NOT KNOW WHAT COMES NEXT!’. But is this not the ultimate deception? If I think back to the immediately prior moment of flow then I can see that my ‘knowing what comes next’ is precisely a felt freedom from forethought. And yet, in the moment of hesitation, do I not seek for myself every means of protection from the absence of forethought. I stir myself up against myself in the hopes of preserving myself! Let the absurdity of that sentence settle in: it is my absurdity. It is not humorous so much as an utterly perilous condition. In the turn of freedom from forethought to absence of forethought does panic set in. I am no longer in commune with myself as two friendly minds taking turns in the local square might be. I am watched. And the fear of one who feels themselves watched can only work the mind up to an act of self-betrayal.
Self-betrayal is what comes about in diverting myself from what I was becoming. Starting in on the underleaf is no embrace of hesitancy but a frightened flight of ‘new thought’. “But surely it gets you going?” Yes, indeed it does and by the full cunning of ‘Fire is fire no matter the means of achieving it!’ But precisely the intimacy of writing by hand is that I am my own means. Only the writer who comes to know his means begins to know himself. All of me turns on what is in the mix of my beginnings on that underleaf. It is a writing that mixes self-reprimand for a failing nerve with complacency at just how disposable is whatever comes of this further non-effort, the underleaf. And if a fire is lit again then it can only let off a light in which preciousness accrues once more. This is not writing as freedom but rather freedom sullen by a non-writing of self-reprimand and complacency. The self-betrayal of underleaf heaped upon leaf.
#writing #Teru #WayneShorter
