I have written before in the Burning Archive of the metaphor for writing, and its eternal companion, reading, that I have prised from the title of Blanchot’s work, The Infinite Conversation.
I have written here of how writing secures our rare and precious fragments of understanding against loss and destruction, and bequeathed them in their frail forms to those who wish to take part in the infinite conversation.
And I have written here, in more cryptic and plangent terms of how for me writing is my chosen method of going sane and staying sane. To chant the songlines of human heritage, regardless of audience and social esteem, is my path. As I wrote in 2015, surprising myself with this record of my thoughts preserved from the flames:
“it is only the lonely tenacity of single sane souls that invests in the harmless runes of prophecy. But from those chance meanings, spread like disorder across time and space, will emerge the infinite conversation.”
The infinite conversation emerged as a guiding metaphor from a dialogue with my psychotherapist. She posed the question what values are important to you when you write. For me fame is not the spur, nor wealth, nor even impossible immortality. But a kind of survival through braiding my gentle voice with the threads without end of literature.
I do not have ready access to Blanchot’s text to deepen my imagination of the meaning of a mere title to his work. The best I could do was to find the text of a brief tribute by Jean-Luc Nancy on the occasion of Blanchot’s still living centenary.
This existence is not life as immediate affection and self-perpetuation, nor is it its death. The ‘dying’ [‘mourir’] of which Blanchot speaks—which is in no way to be confused with the cessation of life, and which is, quite on the contrary, the living, or ‘living-on’, or ‘sur-viving’ invoked by Derrida when he was at his closest to Blanchot -forms the movement of the ceaseless approach to absenting as true sense, destroying in it all trace of nihilism.
Such is the movement that, being written, can ‘give to nothing, in its form of nothing, the form of something.
It is this form of survival that I cherish in writing. This survival of ghostly incantations and keener sounds comes from the borderlands of the mind, and a solitary wanderer’s habit of paying loving attention to the voices in his head. This survival promises renewal from isolation. It promises dream from the injuries of the day. And it makes from our evanescent words fragments of beauty that may wander the earth forever.
The Burning Archive 