Not Writing

I have not written anything for a month. Is this bad? Should I always be writing? Perhaps. To write regularly maintains some semblance of robust, creative productivity. But this is not how I work. Not when it is precisely the question of work that is at question. I work hard enough in my ordinary academic job. If I reduce this blog to the same dismal necessity of daily output, if I don’t allow it the liberty of long stretches of silence and occasional bursts of writing, then it becomes just another pattern of methodical, necessary activity. It neurotically stakes its claim to existence, but existence – the risking of existence and non-existence; the risking of the contours of this relation, its tensions and rhythms – is precisely neglected. There is a need to at times say nothing. This takes shape for me less as a deliberate strategy than as a confusing lapse, a fall away from the possibility of any kind of lucid expression. And then within this lapse – only within this lapse – lucidity, the temptation and uncertainty of lucidity, re-emerges.