THE BLACK BLOCK - M. DURAS

"What you're going to write is already there in the darkness. It's as if writing were something outside you, in a tangle of senses: between writing and having written, having written and having to go on writing; between knowing and not knowing what it's all about; starting from complete meaning, being submerged by it, and ending up in meaninglessness. The image of a black lock in the middle of the world isn't far out. 

It isn't the transition Aristotle speaks of, from potential to actual being. It isn't a translation. It's not a matter of passing from one state to another. It's a matter of deciphering something already there, something you've already done in the sleep of your life, in its organic rumination, unbeknown to you. It isn't something 'transferred' -- that's not it. It might be that the instinct I referred to is the power of reading before it's written something that's still illegible to everyone else. I could put it differently. I could say it's the ability to read your own writing, the first stage of your own writing, while it's still indecipherable to others. It's as if you have to regress, condescend towards other people's writing for the book to become legible to them. This could be said in other words again, but it would still amount to the same thing. You have in front of you a mass suspended between life and death and entirely dependent upon you. I've often had this feeling, of a confrontation between something that was already there and something that was about to take its place. I'm in the middle, and I seize the mass that's already there, move it about, smash it up -- it's almost a question of muscles, of physical dexterity. You have to move faster than the non-writing part of you, which is always up there on the plane of thought, always threatening to fade out, to disappear into limbo as far as the future story is concerned; the part which will never descend to the level of writing; which refuses all drudgery. But you have the feeling that sometimes the non-writing part of you is asleep, and thereby yields itself up and enters completely into the ordinary aspect of writing that will constitute the book. But between these two states there are many intermediate ones, of differing degrees of felicity. Sometimes you could almost use the word happiness. 

Writing isn't just telling stories. It's exactly the opposite. It's telling everything at once. It's the telling of a story, and the absence of the story It's telling a story through its absence."