Sacrifice

Spurious again, with more vibrant words:

And isn't this the oldest definition of inspiration: breath, received from outside? Divine exhalation? Breathed into the nostrils of the creator, who always creates with, and not alone. Whence figures of inspiration: muses, gods, goddesses, intermediary beings like angels or daemons - a whole bestiary, a whole angelology, a pantheon.

Breathed - or whispered, or sang - or written. Written with, so that writing is active and passive, both at once. What perfomer does not know this? What writer? And that, further, it can never be a question of self-expression.

Easier to see with fiction. The line is crossed. Easier to see with singing. The performance begins. But understand performance everywhere, a priori, from the first. Not your performance, understand. Or that outperforms what you perform, that lets you become actor or dummy. And isn't there a writing that writes with you as you write? Writes with you, but sets itself back from you; it is not in your power.

It is the angel who writes. It is your forebears. It is your race that sings inside me; your people: all this a figuration of what sets itself into a past that cannot be lived and sets itself into a future, which is why a people is always to come, even as its prototype existed in the murky past.

It is why God is waiting for what you write even as he launched you on the path of writing. And isn't the devil waiting, too? A host of angels and a crowd of Muses? To see what you write? In a sense. To see what is written by you, and by way of you.

There is writing, there is blogging - but what does that mean? In the past you did not live and the future that is ever to come. Time displaced, time out of phase: write from what does not meet itself in your present. Write from the present disjoined. No narcissism where what is written will not return. No fort-da where what is lost will not come back to you. [...]

To write is to die, always. To be sacrificed - to live, now, only as figure, as silhouette. You are not preserved. No fame - nothing lasts. No one will speak of you. Or you are the object of rumour, of a gossip that dispenses with its object, passing the word along. Torn apart, now like Orpheus, it is not your song that sings from your disembodied head. Drowned like Narcissus, but it is not you who drowns.