I confess I was nervous, even pre-emptively embarrassed, when I wrote in January about what I call the murmur and how it stands as the source of the imperative to write. It seemed too abstract, too wishy-washy, too plainly preposterous to be taken seriously, and all the more so when I came around to using the loaded language of morality and ethical immediacy to describe my response to the imperative to write. Then, via @Twitchelmore, there came to my attention a video of a captivating conversation between Gabriel Josipovici and Lars Iyer, and one of their early exchanges particularly piqued my interest:
Iyer: You’ve said that writing begins with a kind of prompt. I’m quoting you here: “One tries to catch an elusive something that will not let one rest until one has had a stab at turning it into a narrative of sorts. That something can be a rhythm, a character, an incident, or a combination of all these. One’s responsibility is to the elusive thing, and to that alone.” I was very interested in this word “responsibility.” I wanted to ask you, what does it mean to face up to this responsibility honestly?
Josipovici: Well, for me there isn’t an alternative. I mean, it has to be honest because this is your life. You’re not fooling anyone except yourself. But I suppose what it means is you’ve got to go on until you find the form that will be adequate to it, or at least until you have gone as far as you can. … I mean, responsibility? Well, maybe that’s a wrong sort of term. It sort of won’t let you alone, won’t let me alone, until I have found a shape for it, found a way in which something which is… I think… It has to start by being wordless. … I think there has to be this sense of the terrible need to find words, a shape, for something, a feeling, whatever, and words or things aren’t there. So what you’ve got to do is find a form that will allow the words at least to hint at it, or to move towards it.
Iyer: But it’s very interesting, this idea of responsibility. You express reservations about this word, but the reason I like it is because of this ethical register. The idea that you owe something to something or other. So you owe something to this prompt, to this inspiration, to this wordlessness… [and yet] there’s a tension between being able to write, and then, when you’re called or summoned and you respond in this ethically responsible way to what you’re called or summoned by, you feel, at that moment, unable to write.
Experience, not intellect, tells me that’s exactly how it is.
Infinite Patience 