Writing without 'I'

Not in the sense of that oh-so-charming French novel written a decade ago without the use of the letter 'e'. Nor, mind-numbingly, the English translation. Rather, almost all of my writing tends to two extremes: writing with semi-colons (read: academic prose), or 'i'-text, which is essentially overly self-indulgent musings, babblings - variations on the narcissistic. Thus this is an attempt to stop writing about myself, or strictu sensu academically.

A friend of mine emailed me earlier today, asking if I could identify the meaning behind Tsvetaeva's description, in a letter to Rilke, of him as 'the fifth element'. Google, understandably enough, has a single opinion on the matter. But it did lead to intriguing musing on the phrase, ranging from understanding it as time, or spirituality/metaphysicality, to things more theoretically inflected. Taken historically, the four elements are, of course, meant to represent the constitutent building blocks of the entirety of the physical world. A fifth element both emphasises the totality of the four whilst simultaneously undermining the possibility of completeness - very Goedelian, in some ways. That is, a fifth element suggests an instability in the bases of reality in the four-element model, being at once supernumerous and yet participating in the paradigm. A destructive overtone, even, encapsulating the incompleteness of precisely that which it (implicitly) completes. Derridas' abuse of Plato's pharmakon works nicely on the idea, a supplement that is at once poison and cure, completing the quaternion by exceeding it. Excess, complement, supplement. I should incorporate something appropriate Pauline here, to be au courant. "Saul, shmaul, I'm Paul already." But my Badiou is infantile, and my Zizek rusty, as I've been taking time out to re-read Proust.

What Tsvetaeva meant? Poets writing letters are still poets. It could have meant a fifth column, for all I know. But it intrigues sufficiently that I'll take this as a starting point for eliminating the almost everpresent gaze of the 'I'...