Monthly Archives: September 2009

‘I sleep and wake up in another sleep. I used to call it the Hole, do you remember? A deep kitschy hole in the earth. The things I made desert me, turn ugly, they were ugly to begin with. There’s no escape except through you, when somehow your babble comes through me. Are you listening? It was when the words came that you arrived, in the beginning, and it’s when the words come that you arrive now, and leave, and arrive again in new forms, trailing absence all around you.

‘”The cause of its being is that it shall cease to be”, said Augustine of the present. I come to life through death, and you come to me through absence, like laughter. I’m unanchored like the present, like laughter that laughs at itself. — I enter Barthes’ darkness of desire, I live between blows, I’m hungry, I hate you. But sometimes there’s another night, says Barthes: the night of non-meaning and non-profit, when I expect nothing and accept your absence. I wait for you and my waiting becomes its own arrival, your arrival.

‘You’re my grief and my escape, hence the laughter. You’re my inability to shut up, you keep me from silence and keep me watching myself. Yet your silence would be the death of me, hence the laughter. I feed myself on other things while I endure your absence or forget your presence, and your absence becomes “an active practice”. I obey my training, shun kitsch and forget you. Says Barthes: “You have gone (which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you). Whereupon I know what the present, that difficult tense, is: a pure portion of anxiety.” I manipulate your absence, turn it into whatever comes to mind. I make you responsible for all manner of things, all the while pleading with you to return.’

‘It’s when the words come that you’re speaking to me. The rest of the time I think I’m alone. I imagine all kinds of things: that you’ve gone forever, that you’ve finally abandoned me to my disgrace. Then the words come again, in torrents, and I long for you to go away, for distance. Leave me alone, don’t go too far.’

‘We watched ourselves and found ourselves wanting. So we made a virtue of watching and wanting. We knew this was suspect so we made a virtue of suspicion.’

‘We were lost but never abandoned. Who was there to abandon us? You were absent with us. You turned the wrong corners with us, and sometimes the right ones, which also turned out to be wrong. You led us into an ever deeper night and an ever more luminous absence. We almost liked turning wrong corners, though we never got used to it and still haven’t. We have to laugh at ourselves, and at you. Sometimes you even laugh back, and it’s like a wounded laughter welling up from creation.’

‘This is the lost time, or rather timelessness lost, we’re not from here. We think back, now how was it? When was it we felt real, wasn’t it before the mist descended and we started seeing things in glimpses of time? When did it descend in the first place, was it our fault? It doesn’t matter, what matters is what it was like before, and where the path is that will take us back to the whole present. But that doesn’t matter either. Don’t you remember how the future loomed then? Before you got into trouble, before you picked up your story. You were in trouble before then, you just didn’t know it. You were blind the minute you stepped out of the womb. There may not have been a load of memories, there may not have been the tedium of return, but there was fear, there’s always fear, and time that was never truly inhabited. Don’t you remember the discomfort and the hugeness of things, of the future? And there’s something to be said for being lost and hoping against hope for a return to presence. Perhaps there are even wrong and right ways to lose yourself in absence, and wrong and right ways to think about presence. Perhaps you can only return, wrong word, or regain, wrong again, by getting more lost.’

‘I dreamed my speech merged with yours, that I addressed myself to you as a familiar. No, not a familiar, a shared absence. I dreamed we were both outside our own dreams. That day I felt free. There was nothing to prove, no end and nothing but ending. Death was here, for us both, as an uncertainty, a lightness. I listened to your murmur and was shown how to live without living, die without dying. I’d mastered nothing and neither had you. I was freed from my contradictions, which were endless.’

‘I used to beg you for a word, afraid that a word from you would be the death of me, as if you lived in silence. But you never stopped talking, did you? Your silence would have been the death of us both, wouldn’t it? You show up solitude, you show up death. So perhaps the Word was there all along, and the Word is that nothing is ever finished. Voice and babble. I fall asleep and awake to a laughable ending, a laughable beginning.’