Spurious

The Black Page

Perhaps there is a kind of speech different to that which adds noise to the world. That subtracts silence from that noise, as you would draw with your finger on a condensated window.

To speak by subtraction - to let silence sound and speak thereby ... is there a kind of writing that unwrites the written? A white writing, a writing blanched; or is it the other way round: a black page slipped beneath black ink?

The Last Word

I do not keep the last word, but writing keeps it for me. The last word? No: the one which erodes all words from within - which attenuates, by stretching each beyond its limits and beyond all limits, the possibility of preserving anything by writing.

Oblivion

Plato was wrong: it is not immortality that is sought in the creation of a book, but the sweetness of obscurity. Not immortality - not the fame of a name that spreads from generation to generation, but the oblivion of a name, the St. Andrew's cross that is placed across it.

Brahma to Vishnu: 'Without a sacrifice, nothing can received. To create a new world, what shall I sacrifice?' Vishnu: 'sacrifice me'. - 'What shall I use as the sacrificial knife, the sacrificial altar and the sacrificial post?' - 'Use me'. - 'Where do I find the sacred fire and the sacred chants?' - 'In me'. - 'Who shall be the presiding deity?' - 'It will be me. I will also be the offering and the reward'.

Sweetness

A kind of tranquility is said to come to those afflicted with total paralysis; they who can only move their eyes are claimed to lack the input from their paralysed body that would disturb them. If they weep, this is not because of their mute isolation (they can only move their eyelids), but because of the sweetness of their solitude.

Virginia Woolf: 'I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past'.

Balthus: 'I wanted to paint a dreaming young girl and what passes through her, not the dream itself. The passing therefore, not the dream'.

Augury

A kind of dream (a waking dream): that writing was a scapel along the skin, opening it, and opening a body like a book. It was to be my own entrails that I read, but I was hollow; and the pages were like pieces of the night turning.

Stammering

Moses spoke with a too-thick tongue; he stammered, which meant his speech was doubled by the impossibility of speaking. And wasn't that, too, his prophecy: not of liberation, but of the impossibility of liberation; not of the promised land, but of what fails to promise itself in every land?

How to stammer in writing? How let it double itself, such that it fails and succeeds each time in failure? It is language itself that must thicken itself in your mouth. Language itself - and that doubles what is said with the impossibility of saying it.

The Decision

The only story - how the telling of the story was possible. The only one: that tells of the strength that it drew on to begin, the 'merciful surplus' of which Kafka writes. There are those in whom words fall like rain; they think with words, ordinary, innocent words, and do not know their interruption. But when the words, for the most part, do not come? Or when they bring with them a trail of silence, a kind of residue of the interruption that allowed them to arrive?

The Persians, according to Herodotus, made every important decision twice: once drunk and once sober. Is there a kind of decision that belongs to silence, to that murmuring prior to speech and from which speech cannot awaken? It must be followed by a second decision that breaks from that murmuring, and wakes up. The second cannot decide against the first, but rides it. And that is the story you might decide to tell: how the strength to begin was given to you, a decision flowering within a decision.

The strength to tell is borrowed. And the strength to decide? A fold of telling within non-telling, of writing within its impossibility. It is writing that is drunk, not you. But it is also writing that is sober, and not you.