Consent

“Writing is to surrender to the ordeal of loss. The one who writes accepts not to retain what was nevertheless lived with the greatest intensity. The work does not preserve the experience; it marks its absence. It does not restore what was; it indicates its distance. Thus writing is not the safeguarding of an intact meaning, but the welcoming of an irreducible lack. What has been lived does not pass into language without being lost there, and this loss is not accidental. It is the very condition of what can be said. To wish to write without consenting to this dispossession would be to wish to speak without distance, without interval, without silence. Yet it is in this interval that the work takes place, and it is by holding to it that the writer remains faithful to what exceeds him.”

 

Maurice Blanchot, The Essential Solitude

 

 

Journal of Anatole

 

I often remain silent. This withdrawal is not a refusal. It comes from an overload. Speaking demands an effort of simplification that costs me dearly. I watch. I listen. I let the world pass through me without trying immediately to convert it into words. This posture deepens the misunderstanding. I am taken for simple-minded, naïve, almost incapable. The dunce’s cap becomes a symbolic possibility, silent yet persistent.

And yet something is at work beneath this appearance. Sentences form nonetheless, below the threshold of utterance. They seek a slower path. Writing offers me another rhythm. It authorizes detour. It allows me to approach language without demanding immediate adequation. I can lay down fragments, attempts, incomplete gestures.

Gradually, an understanding takes shape. I will never carry everything across. This excess cannot be transported intact. One must consent to loss, not as defeat, but as condition. Writing becomes an art of imperfect translation, a way of remaining faithful without laying claim to exactitude.

I thus remain in an intermediate space. What I live exceeds what I can say. What I say indicates more than it explains. Writing does not resolve the misunderstanding. It gives it a habitable form. It keeps open the distance between inner richness and the common world, and it is within this distance that I now stand.