I’m fully aware that these exercises are becoming less calligraphical and more literary as time goes on; there’s a discourse—a style, a form, more than an idea—that won’t leave me alone, and it’s getting the better of me. The blank page is like a big chocolate pudding; I’m not allowed to eat it because I’m on a diet, but I can’t resist. And although technically nothing and no one is stopping me from writing whatever I want, however I want, and although I have reams of blank paper I could use for one sort of writing and the other, there’s a strange factor at play, which it would be too easy to label the “time factor” (it’s more of an “anxiety factor,” and even if anxiety and time have always been closely related, they’re different things). There is, I was saying, a strange factor in all this that’s pushing me to superimpose one kind of writing onto the other, which means I don’t succeed at either because the result is stuck somewhere between the two. But this strange factor that I’m calling anxiety: where does it come from? The first explanation that occurs to me, which I therefore suspect of being superficial, is that I feel the handwriting exercises are “allowed” in a way the narrative ones aren’t. So the discourse emerges, struggling against its own suppression, and the result of this face-off between writer and superego is as frustrating as any other transaction you can’t control, like an erotic dream that ends in veiled, symbolic images, gaps in the story line, and infinite delay.

There you have it: for years I’ve been delaying the free narrative act indefinitely, with one excuse or another. And it’s not that I find it hard to let go of the idea of writing; most of the time I’m not even conscious of wanting to write, but then I feel driven to as soon as I pick up my pen and face the blank page.

Part Two: The Empty Discourse

Part Two: The Empty Discourse

The Discourse

November 25, 1990

There’s a flow, a rhythm, a seemingly empty form; the discourse could end up addressing any topic, image, or idea. This indifference makes me suspicious. I suspect there are all kinds of things—too many—lurking behind the apparent emptiness. I’ve never found emptiness particularly frightening; sometimes it’s even been a place of refuge. What I find frightening is not being able to escape this rhythm, this form that flows onward without revealing its contents. That’s why I’ve decided to write this, beginning with the form, with the flow itself, and introducing the problem of emptiness as its subject matter. I hope that this way I’ll gradually discover the real subject matter, which for now is disguised as emptiness.