Carnets (extraits) By Roger Laporte

Textes choisis par Jacqueline Laporte.

Alex Obrigewitsch

When writing is bound centrally to life, decentering life from its "living" - when life is unlivable without writing, and not just any writing, but the life of writing itself, lived in, through, and by writing - the journal or notebook becomes a lifeline. And not in the sense of a means of maintaining an external life, a life outside of writing, while still in contact with writing as it were; as Blanchot noted as far back as the 50's, the journal is a subterfuge for keeping a life without writing open to the writer, as a memory and thus a possibility of their own life - for in the writing of the journal that life is lost, the memories are alienated and estranged, committed to forgetting. The lines dividing life and death, inscribed in and through writing, begin to blur, to efface themselves.

Rather, the journal or notebook allows the writer to write, and thus to live, even when they are unable to write in tracing the infinite withdrawal of "the work." A substitution, if you will - a means to carry on, to but sustain, nothing more than a breath alone. To continue the pursuit, as one must, at another time, at a later date. These writings, essential as they are, are but the whiling, the waiting, for the ability to broach the impossible once again. A necessary supplement, but no substitution, however. Not a double, then, but a shadow of a work. But every wanderer needs his shadow - Nietzsche certainly knew this...