Monthly Archives: October 2009

‘I fell right back in the hole. I started talking and waited for you to lift me up, but I got sick of the sound of my voice before I could hear yours.’

‘Where were we before we started talking to you, or listening for you? Were we happy then? That was before the mist rose from the ground, up around our legs, before we got weak.’

‘You’re what we can’t command and can’t escape. We asked you for pity, then we asked you to take us in any way at all: to shake us out of our stupor, wash over us and drown us. Did we stop asking, did we stop believing? You were our loss of direction, what could we embrace besides our failure and longing to embrace you? And you, didn’t you long for us? Wasn’t our longing, our very speech your migration through us?’

‘You cast me out of myself, conjure away the world. You’re world and veil, noise and echo. You enclose me outside myself, in a circle from which I’m absent. This is a failed attempt to silence you. Could I renounce? Let me be, return me to the light of day. Wash over me, drown me. My strength and my weakness, refuge and fear.’

‘We had to get drunk or be in some state of grace to pass over. Into what, we asked. What we wanted was a living death, a dying life. You were our enemy and, maddeningly, our friend: almost ourselves.’

‘We already belonged to another time. We didn’t go from the world to you, nor from you back to the world. You were our world, a world where time was lost. We didn’t make anything of ourselves. We began by approaching you, and we began in you. We spoke a language nobody speaks, we were digressing. We didn’t address each other, perhaps not even you. Yet we still affirmed each other, and you, with every word we spoke. How we did this was a mystery to us.’

‘You suspend my life, make a dream of it, then tell me, “Be”. What’s left to be? Only this word, your word. I live on, visit a friend while my life is held in reserve until I gather the strength to live it. Meanwhile your command takes its place and turns into this.’

‘Neither my hands nor my face were mine now. Nor perhaps the other parts. Nor perhaps my belongings. I tell a lie, they were mine but they were leaving me. Or rather I wanted them to leave me. Or should I say I wanted to leave them. That doesn’t seem to make sense. In a sense they were no longer mine and never had been, but I still wanted them. I was at the end of something, my tether, or rather your tether, but also at the beginning of something. At the end and beginning of your tether, that’s one way of putting it. If they perished in a fire, my belongings I mean, would I grieve? And me, if I perished, would you grieve?’