[…]
*
Please forgive me, it’s raining.
*
I would like to write you the letter of that duration, but I am so stunned that I can only imagine the letter, tossed about as I am by these sorrows sometimes a strange euphoria. Tonight it is a sorrow that is as vast as this city and installed at my center. I can only look around me at these boxes and crawl across this floor before surrendering to the day ending. // I look at the horizon and I cannot distinguish the sky from the ground.
*
The tear is in stead, but I won’t make an equation out of it.
*
Today I am unspeakable, that’s not right, but I’ll say it anyway, language has no need for me.
*
…Dreams, vaguely, very faint, abominable, an immense airport of course, my bag rolls along without me, I lose the person with whom I am travelling, a friend hangs up on me, the shower is outside, suspended from the wall of the building, I can’t seem to get it to work, my mother emerges through a door on a lower level, far below, and explains the shower, the friend is in bed, I don’t hear but sense his discontent, in the airport there is running, an emergency, identified, none of these things indicate a cataclysm, but this is what it is and that by which I wake…
*
…and yet yes, a body, there is a body, carried with difficulty by two people, a dead body, first through one door then another, they disappear with the body, they leave, they are gone, after they are there again, it is the same body, I confirm, dead, he wasn’t dead to begin with, first there is a person, then a dead body, the carriers of the dead don’t know it either, they think they are saving a person, I watch as they do, he enters, he goes out, the dead body is so big, so heavy, a leg drags, the carriers are incapable, they pass through the door, the other one, his glasses askew…
*
On ne peut pas aimer le théâtre si on n’aime pas l’ennui. (Brigitte Salino)[1]
*
A person, the dead.
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The swinging door.
*
…now I am hurtling down a hill, but by what mode of transportation, I don’t know, a horse climbs the hill, he shows me his teeth, I should be afraid but he doesn’t hurt me when I extend a hand to stroke his face, a woman in an alley, a countryside, we are in front of a little window, we are in a barn or a bunker, cement walls, underground, there are stairs to get us out of there, but we stop before a small window dug into the wall, the sill is stuffed full of garbage, with my sister, we remove the garbage in order to insinuate ourselves, there is a field, a field between the sick room and the toppling city…
*
I am torn from it by a will greater than the dream but it’s the same guilt, the same fear, the same day begun, and I don’t know where it is, urgently, I don’t know.
*
Photography is the epitome of disavowal. I mean that it is the epitaph. It disavows the line and draws a line. Your face, for example. I don’t cry over you but over the summary drawn by the photograph of proximities. The face, say, driven into its pain. And the sense I have of leaving you by my disavowed and disavowing eyes. As though the sense of the eyes rested there were that of a desistance. Mine first, because I am the one looking, and then the one who doesn’t reach.
*
I don’t speak your name.
*
The photograph: an assumption.
*
No, the sum of the assumption is precisely that in which it does not respond. Its mechanism is the strike. Its wager is numeral. If I make you into an example, I am failing at my fervor and your discretion. Words like dignity or courage are terrifyingly imprecise; there is not, in the error of vitality, anything besides stupefied idiocy. Admit that that is what pain is made of. It has no morality. It is abject. It remains to be seen upon what surface one must lie, into what hand one must vomit, in what mouth one must fail. It is no longer a dream but a sterile gaze that falls faltering.
*
Howling, besides.
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Together, now we are together, without.
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Thank you for these books which will help me to move through the door.
*
Yesterday, for example, as I left the apartment on Chabot, the Berber bakery was closed and I could see the mountain (which isn’t really a mountain) in the distance, and there was mist and the trees were in bloom at the back balcony and now I think that’s all there is. This end-of-the-world, this sky, this nothing and this horror gathered into me. Does this make of me the repository?
*
I thought it in French, or in some approximation of that language.
*
…for I am not convinced I write in any language, nor even that this language is capable of expressing both my disorientation and my effusion. I must be half asleep, but not dreaming, please, not that.
*
Because the sommes is as much the exigency of the collective, relational being—nous sommes—as it is the imperative that calls us to the affective order of language—nous sommes sommés, sommées. To be attentive to the surf that founds and founders being, in other words the eventuality of its ex-istere, its situation.
*
Not death, but agony.
*
I draw the curtain. I draw the curtain and I think: I am drawing the curtain. I make this proposition. We lived here for a time. The sum of the living-here is not calculable. Sooner or later we lie down. There are blinds or a curtain or nothing, for example, no covering. We lie down uncovered, the window there. I am not in time anymore. I demand the abrogation of the time in which we are. It wasn’t for reasons of citizenship or installation. The formal demand is made naturally, in other words in the time in which it is agreed upon. If we howled, together or apart, the howl is presently enclosed in our voices. I say we because I am mistaking myself for someone. A howl that undoes a face.
*
Of course I am incapable of looking, touching. I feel responsible for this thing, and thus, refutable. Astounded. That I did this. Because the doing consolidates something that probably frightens me. It is in this that generosity disappears. I did this. You did it too and now we are complicit in this doing. You gave me something, how awkward it all is.
*
The lowest of the low is the count undone. Is the irrefutable summary whose sum is incalculable.
*
However much one attempts to calculate all the cells in the body, it remains nonetheless that in the end, there is you across from me, our eyes cast aside.
*
Tomorrow I will read in Chicago for the last time. I will empty my voice out.
*
I am disgusted by the man who avoids his dying friend only to attend the funeral, claiming his time. Me, I.
*
, la douleur se propose comme une solution à la douleur, comme un deuxième amour. (Duras)[2]
*
There is nothing aleatory about Chicago, it is a city that shows itself. But it will mark me as it has marked me, violently and in the unconditional time of smothered avowals. Simply we find that we suddenly have nothing left to say to one another. And so we say this nothing and it is by this nothing that we take our leave.
*
I will speak these words, or will force them out of me and no one will receive them. There is the door by which I enter and the door by which I leave. I have a hard time imagining it, all of it, even at the moment at which it is taking place, has already taken place.
*
It’s hard to believe that all of this could happen, that all of this did happen. You see, I have as much difficulty composing my time. But I don’t care, because pain is of the present, and it is the very present of removal.
*
The literal body on the verge of detaching itself from its substance, agonizing, it knows itself, and knowing itself, undoes.
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I don’t know what discourse will spare us from the pain that drives us into concrete, nor whether pain ought to be spared, but I know what it is to not want or be able to pull oneself from it.
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Pleasure taken in language is already a betrayal of suffering.
*
It is your voice that reads the text to me and stitched into it is J.’s agony, and it is this which wants not to be worded, in the bend, the hitch, the burn, the kill. Because I have come to think of death as murder, and our complicity. // You are right that this is no beginning, but an end upended,
*
Clearly everything is disproportionately signified at present.
*
If there had been a phone, I would have called to tell you, called you in the night, say, it seemed the sort of thing one could wake a friend for, imagine waking someone in the night with news like this instead of all the midnight calls to my sister, to M., over the past three years, the middles of the nights of horror, the gashing of days (and gash, in French, gâcher, is to spoil), lieber B., just writing you awakens parts of me, and I don’t intend this to elicit an urgency to respond, simply, imagine this as my mid-night call to you, this, this is you, and how extraordinary, that you do this.
*
I place the stone upon the ground, I make the ground into a cemetery. I pour the pebbles into the lake, I make the lake into a fountain.
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, as though some vital thing and familiar and strange still subsisted, on the verge of arriving.
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Now I give myself over to the vertiginous pitching of the continents.
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The hideous deformity of the self.
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I watch the door. First the entrance then the exit. Someone berates me for not speaking. But everything has been said. The place anticipates the instance of a body in a place. Speaking is mere consolidation. It is much worse than the name, the call.
*
How stupid to think oneself moveable, we don’t move, we are nailed to the mouths of others.
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I realize, walking in this city, that I am waiting for someone to pick me up, like a piece of garbage.
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To live one’s difference to excess.
*
I open the box and I am overcome with disappointment. The same books as before. The books that taught me desire. That gave me what is taken away. I take The Thirtieth Year and lock myself in a room. I set fire to the rest.
*
But tell me, is not every gesture accomplished in the very error of the gesture?
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Yes, the art books, me, a murderer. Une meurtrière. Which is also a tiny slit cut into a wall to see, no doubt obliquely. To see would then mean to kill.
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I realize too late that the sum is not what remains but that which is removed. This book before me is the sum of all the abandoned books. In sum is one way to disgorge oneself.
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I bid you farewell. It was I who shouted out. (Bachmann)
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I am not able to arrive; there is a shame in the place of my having come here.
*
Non ça n’est pas fini. Il faut entendre encore, entendre la voix, les questions, s’encourager, se protéger, aussi se débattre pour aller jusqu’au bout, avec cette immense lâcheté de préférer les mots, leur édifice, au petit geste, inconcevable, que je n’arrive pas encore à faire. (Collobert)[3]
*
The painter loved this blue he said cobalt, night falling, a fallen blue?
*
To be in the voice before, the voice before the body, the voice of the body that does not lean against speaking but endeavors to live in the present with its sorrows and lurches.
*
Chicago had become a sort of wild forest.
*
A hideous howl pulls me from sleep. A dune, a house, birds decorated with martial feathers, animals—horses?—decorated as well, it is a dune and also a plain, neighbors whose wall touches mine. A deep wall that descends beneath the earth where the arrangement of space recalls other places, a library, a forbidden place. There is A., then S., the parents, a rag, a map of Chicago pinned to the wall, laughter, strained, laughter that is even more quiet, gently, we speak in quiet, your traces on this bit of fabric, I want to go up, out, up, but the way goes lower, bamboo, hardwood, A. sits down, there is the stranger who meets me, we meet in the dunes, we cross over, the other side with the decorated birds, the horses, a grave silence, we entwine, first in the bamboo of a kitchen installed beneath the earth, then on that dune, let’s go, I say, we go, walk in the astonishment of walking, our bodies touch, I turn, the wave rises, throws me onto the side with the birds, the horses, the stranger, swallowed by the wave risen from the depth of every ocean, cry, I cry out, a howl that runs after the body, plunges into my stomach, open my eyes, gutted,
*
Nor the present.
*
Si je veux on me prend pour un enfant de quarante ans de philosophie. (Duras)[4]
*
I understand that I don’t exist, here or anywhere. I understand the degree to which the road is vacant even when it is crowded. I understand that I am killing myself as much as everyone around me.
*
Forgive me for this letter so filled with pain. I miss you. I read you, there is a sharp pain in my chest, like the time last week when we spoke, and so I think that I must be a murderer of sorts, a murderer of people and of cities.
*
I could go back. I tell myself this. Then I tell myself that I’d be better off drowning in the ocean.
*
He says that there is hope. I say no, there is no hope. That hope always rests on a future that doesn’t arrive; a future with no concordance in the present. That hope must be of the present otherewise it is not hope, it is life forever postponed in favor of derailing hopefulness. He says okay hope in the present, a present tied to a vow, a belief. As you like, I say to him, except that there is no present either.
*
Among all the books, there is a great thirst.
*
What will be said of me, that I was intolerant, maladapted, and frankly indefensible, she took herself to be a boy, she never did extract herself from her story, she closed everything, even her name in the end she remained caught in it.
*
No I will sleep against the continent that doesn’t dream says nothing wanders off among the acacias like the giraffes in the very tall book from a time before the wretched time that was presaged in the forty years to come.
*
That blood may be the carrier of a culture, as of a malady. Please.
*
The space of address is indicated by a blank. Un blanc, which is a space, the color white, and a blank, in an arsenal of false attempts at murder. Still, they have been known to kill.
*
Two weeks or so since my transport here. I don’t quite know what word to attach to it, I am ever more distrustful than usual, of words that encircle a place, tender a distance, put an end.
*
Thus do I no longer invent your story.
*
[…]
[1] One cannot like the theater if one does not like boredom.
[2] , pain offers itself as a solution to pain, like a second love.
[3] No it isn’t over. It is still necessary to hear, hear the voice, the questions, to encourage, protect oneself, and also struggle to get to the very end, with that immense cowardice of preferring words, their edifice, to the small, inconceivable gesture I am yet incapable of making.
[4] If I wanted, I could pass for a child of forty years of philosophy.