ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

I’ve been re-reading Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. This is one of those things that happens every couple of years. If you don’t understand the appeal of Barthes, go read Matt Ortile’s Why I ended A Perfectly Fine Relationship, which is cogent and gorgeous and perfectly captures the comfort that settles over me every time I read this book. This post is more a half-formed set of thoughts, as tends to happen every time I engage with a text on semiotics and literary theory. Especially this book. But god, I love it. Adore it. And it fucks me up every time I read it. In a good way. And a bad way. Look, it’s complicated. But I dog-ear the fuck out of my copy every time I read the book, tagging new favourite passages, and yet there’s always something new to be drawn from the experience.There is no book I’ve ever come across that quite captures the feeling of infatuation in quite the sam eway, breaking the experience of wanting down into its component parts, the how and why of what is said and done. What fascinates me about Barthes’ breakdown of desire is his precision in recognising the duality of conversing with the desired other. The act of focusing language on the individual with twin intent: what it said, and the constant subtext of I desire you. Or, more often, I desire you and do not wish you to know. I wish to speak, and be hidden. The task of language becomes

Some days I reach for words and they’re just…not there. That’s it, I think, no writing today. But generally, that’s just a lie I tell myself in an effort to feel better. What I really mean by there are no words is that I do not have it in me to deliver words the way that I think they should be delivered. That there’s something I want to say that I cannot render adequately. There is something I want to say that is at odds with what I’m trying to say. Often, it is because I am scared of a scene, of a sequence, of a sentence. And that’s cool. When that happens, I don’t need to write a sentence. I can start with a word. Just one goddamn word. And, most days, if I’m willing to risk that much, everything else follows along. Not perfect, and not in the way I was thinking in the beginning, but there are words. There are always words, when I look for them. I really should stop using fear as an excuse to avoid deploying words.

I have sixty minutes to write and edit this blog post. Fifty-nine minutes and twenty-seconds now. Even less, by the time you hit this sentence. I have sixty minutes because today is unexpected clear of distractions. The farewell I was meant to be attending this evening has been rescheduled. My usual Friday write-club buddy is currently interstate. I am on my own, in my apartment, trying to get shit done with no distractions, and that is bad for me. If there’s one thing I’m generally pretty good at, it’s getting shit done around other obligations. Give me an eight hour work day followed by three hours of gaming at a friend’s place, and I will bust out my minimum daily pages in record time then squeeze in a blog post for good measure. Give me twelve uninterrupted hours, and I will binge-watch shit on Netflix and watch interviews with wrestlers on Youtube. I can hold to schedules built around social obligation, but I am terrible at the obligations where the only person I can disappoint is myself or a professional colleague. And so, the stopwatch is running. Fifty-five minutes and eleven seconds to go. When it’s done, I get a one-hour break, followed by ninety minutes of working on the first draft of a story. Another hour’s break, another ninety-minute burst. The stopwatch creating edges for the work, because it tells me when to start and stop. Today is all about the intense, controlled burst of productivity followed by a mandatory fallow