Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 09:30:24 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Re: MB: Re: inside, etc.


Thanks Claire,

As you understand, everything in my post was provisional, understated or
overstated, not open to debate and not intended to argue anything.
Especially the "something real, something worthwhile..."  As you say of
yourself, I was "voicing".  What is happening in writing is not the real or
the worthwhile but the "something", or someone.  It is not that I want to
write something real but that something is coming or someone is coming when
I write.  This is the end of words and this is passivity.  Without this
sense, that there is something, someone, and moreover, coming--imminent,
virtually here--words would bore me to death.  Because of this sense,
however, I am, as I write (because there is nothing else I can do about it,
and so I love the words left to me) deprived of words, astonished, stupid.
In one way, writing is very easy, in another way, it is impossible. It is
not something I want.  (This is what Hill was getting at in his post, I'm
guessing).  Blanchot will say that writing is more ethical than aesthetic
(Hill cites the quote in his book) and what I am wondering about is this
sense of the someone, coming--or something (the 'holy'?)('world'?)--and the
discretion/indiscretion of this approach.  That's all I'm doing.

Tom