I don’t know why I note down everything. Everything? It cannot be otherwise. Everything that I am apt to note down: everything that happens every day to one of us and that I can translate. Everything that is woven between us, and everything that is in preparation. Sometimes I am tired. For example for dreams. A voice whispers: don’t note it. I am tempted. I note it anyway. I obey. The notebook. It’s not fine work. I paint crudely. I follow the trail. (Cixous)

Writers are on holiday, but their Muse is awake, and gives birth non-stop (Barthes)

When writing, Derrida suggests, there is ‘a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself … Nothing intimidates me when I write’. Yet when he is just falling asleep – in the midst of a dreamscape - a panic of the subconscious sets in, “You’re Crazy to write this!”. Characteristically, Derrida then attempts to deconstruct this moment: ‘…in a certain way,’ he remarks, ‘I am more unconscious [when awake] than in my half sleep. When I am in that half sleep there’s a kind of vigilance that tells me the truth … when I’m awake and working this vigilance is actually asleep’. Yet, in noting everything down, when (in) writing, Cixous refers to a tiredness, ‘[f]or example for dreams’. What does she mean and how does this relate to the ‘truth’ of one’s half-sleep? Cixous would seem to be looking the other way. In obeying the whispering voices she seems to be responding directly to that same certain vigilance: just as Derrida’s subsconsious panic is like being scolded, Cixous is weighed down by all the dreams she writes…

I had been saying to you how I just couldn’t write here at the moment. I have lost my ‘voice’ I said. And we had been saying whether I was going to do anything ‘interesting’ with this afternoon of my own. I think I got it right when I said I can’t plan to do anything interesting, it will simply take me by surprise. I was going to tidy my desk and complete the correspondences sitting in my inbox, but in doing so… I happened to look at my copy of Seneca’s ‘On the Shortness of Life’, the one that was going to appear at the very end (beginning) of that article about blogging (about being a virtual scholar) and I just found myself opening up the various books I think link together (across the gulf of time, like that grand arc of time in Woolf’s Orlando). Although, underneath it all, it was your prompt that set it all off. So…

You can go to Technorati.com to see ‘what’s percolating in blogs now’ – all and sundry are at it and writing writing about everything and nothing (at the time of writing this blog is apparently ranked 4,696,975 – whatever that means!). According to eMarketer (May 2008), there were 94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users) and 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%). Worldwide, Universal McCann (March 2008) report that 184 million peope have started a blog and 346 million people read blogs, estimating 77% of active Internet users read blogs. Fitting with Benjamin’s seminal essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ the potential is for ‘the public’ to be the ‘examiner’ – for all of us to become the resident critics and experts.  But of course, as we know from the ‘Artwork’ essay, that comes with the admonition that this ‘examiner’ is generally ‘an absent-minded one’. Nevertheless, as Zoe Corbyn reports for the Times Higher Education, in her article ‘By the blog: academics tread carefully‘ 9 October 2008, UK scholars too are slowly but surely contributing to these statistics – adding no doubt to the state of absent-mindness. Are we all now potential writers? And what does that mean anyway?

…which leads me to think back to Roland Barthes’ piece ‘The Writer on Holiday’ in Mythologies, which opens with the line: ‘Gide was reading Bossuet while going down the Congo. This posture sums up rather well the ideal of our writers ‘on holiday”. Perhaps there is a similar sort of posture we might idenitfy with all those that write blogs – whilst ‘going down the Congo’ or at least some form of being on the move, all these millions of ’writers’ are ‘on holiday’ – everyday is a potential holiday from the mundane. For Barthes, the point was to uncover a certain myth residing in the activity of the writer on holiday – the idea of being on holiday means that writing is then just another form of work (from which you need or deserve to take a break): ‘To assert that this phenomenon can henceforth concern writers, that the specialists of the human soul are also subjected to the common status of contemporary labour, is a way of convincing our bourgeois readers that they are indeed in step with the times’. So, if we turn this around, if we suggest the holiday is no longer a reified thing, but actually a constant possibility – we’re all on holiday, or certainly on leisure time, we’re all ‘in step with the times’ - we come to the point in which all of us as holiday-makers are writers (…with a few clicks of the mouse: welcome to your blog). So, instead of the writer being on holiday, it is the holidays (offered through hypertext) which make us all writers (should we choose to be).

But, for Barthes there always was a delicate twist:

What proves the wonderful singularity of the writer, is that during the holiday in question, which he takes alongside factory workers and shop assistants, he [must it be he?] unlike them does not stop, if not actually working, at least producing. So that he is a false worker, a false holiday-maker as well. One is writing his memoirs, another is correcting proofs, yet another is preparing his next book. And he who does nothing confesses it as truly paradoxical behaviour, an avant-garde exploit (Barthes)

…but, as we trace through our day by partly being at work, yet equally finding ourself on the phone to a loved one, or at home, but catching up on the work mail, we all seem to be false workers, false holiday-makers and perhaps also false-writers (after all anyone can write a blog)… yet we keep writing (to one another) and reading, maybe because we don’t want to be on holiday, because being on holiday is only ever a temporary location. 

So what do we write about, now that there is all this time upon our hands? As Cixous might suggest, ‘everything that happens every day to one of us and that I can translate. Everything that is woven between us…’. But it is this need to translate that can lead us astray, or can be make for a thread, weaving between us, so that the translation becomes the original. We are writing our own trail. Equally the translation can simply get in the way – where do I start? No longer a blank sheet, but a blank screen. …yet if the words breathe life into ‘everything that happens every day to one of us’, then I suppose it makes sense we try to find ways around the white void of words.  

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labour.

[...]

If this myh is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, the proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition; it is what he thinks of duing his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. (Camus)

In locating my copy of Camus’ book to write out this quote, I am thrown back some 13 years by a hand written message. To anyone else it is simply a birthday greeting, but to me it evokes all those (dark) whispering voices that were present even then – encircling me like thieves. I never knew how to note them down (and I suppose I still don’t). The temptations remain (some now much lighter, though no less engulfing): ’I note it anyway. I obey. The notebook. It’s not fine work. I paint crudely. I follow the trail’. I probably do need to make that trip by plane to see the person who wrote the note back then.

I always wondered why the rules were added in with pencil. I never did ask at the time (and the reason by now is surely forgotten). It always read like a inserted quotation and that is how it remains. Like everything ‘that is woven between us, and everything that is in preparation’…

Apparently, whilst I could never have discovered this with such ‘wikipedia ease’ back when I was given my copy of The Myth of Sisyphus, Pascal Pia (1903 - 1979), a French writer, journalist, illustrator and scholar (and close friend of Camus) is said to have expressed absurdist and nihilistic sentiments. At the end of his life, he claimed the ‘right to nothingness’, prohibiting others from writing about him after his death. Which would have worked had we all not had this compulsion, however crudely, to note everything down.