Spurious

A Greater Age

I always thought of you under the sign of neglect. Who watched out for you? Who appreciated you? No one at all; and what could I do from a distance? I was always too far away. Still, I always wonder about distance. Is there a kind of attention which can only reach you from afar - that is necessarily distant?

I was always in the North, and you in the South. But wasn't that same distance carried in the letters that used to criss-cross the country? Just as our friendship was never really a friendship, and our relationship never a relationship, I imagine the distance rising into a kind of plateau, a way that can only be crossed when you could lift yourself to that height. As, perhaps, we lifted one another.

Distance: we barely saw one another - did that matter? We barely spoke - did it matter? Perhaps there is a kind of speech that can reach you only by way of distance, by a kind of neglect.

I am with you, I am not with you. Or: I am with you, but also far away, living my own life. Or: with you, but something else is happening here, many things are happening, of which you will not know; with you - and despite what happens here, despite what happens from day to day, and isn't this the testimony to my love? A neglectful love - but is it love? - that would reach you only because of distance, for the reason of distance.

There must be a threshold, a space. No instantaneous communication, no telephone - except very occasionally, and unexpectedly (the rule: keep each other's numbers). None of the temptations that would allow a kind of camaradarie to our friendship. For isn't the danger, despite the many joys sharing a day to day life might bring, that that distance would disappear which was always the third term in our friendship?

Distance - and in relation to which each of us could meditate upon the whole of our lives. The whole - wasn't that at issue each time we wrote? Wasn't it a question, each time, of meditating upon our lives and before the threshold, before distance? When we met - rarely then, and now almost never - it was always by way of what separated each of us from our daily lives.

It was a rare event, an exception. Did I want to see you sometimes, more than you me? And were you sometimes frustrated by a distance that always kept us apart? But over the years, it was the distance that kept us; we reached each other by way of its strangeness. Letters - emails - in which we would each report musingly on the whole of our lives.

Such relationships as these - where you meet very rarely, and writing only occasionally - amidst some crisis or another, perhaps, or simply because there gathers in you the need for distance, and to write, to speak, by way of that distance - are too rare. How often I think of friends with whom I am no longer in contact! Women, exclusively. Women - and I have no idea what has happened to them, nor how I can get in contact, nor, if I do, whether it will be welcome.

What does it matter now? I suppose I want to learn of the shape of a life, and to speak to others of the shape of mine. To write, to speak, by way of separation. I suppose I have a good memory, or that I spend too much time alone. The past is alive for me; I remember, I like to remember, not to press myself against the details of a vanished world, but to experience it by way of the temporal distance that separates me from it, diffusing event from event, insinuating itself into what happened then, even as it seems to suspend the order of completion.

Nothing will complete itself; we are still walking through the woods in the dark, as we used to do. Still meeting on occasion in the town centre on Sunday afternoon, you speaking of a new boyfriend. Do not keep memories - neglect them. Do not impose continuity on what has gone before, but neglect them, let events be incomplete, let sentences trail off into nothing.

Isn't this the wonder of Tarkovsky's Mirror? Neglected memories, events freed from themselves and rising into the air. 'I can speak now' says the cured stutterer at the beginning of the film. But isn't it better to say, 'I cannot speak'? I cannot speak; speech has neglected itself in me. Speech lies down. Writing lies out beneath the stars. 'I cannot speak': what neglects itself in me? What neglects itself as the past, in me?

This is the joy of being alone: never having to recount, for another, the order of the day, of a passage of weeks, of a life. And then letting the day return, and those weeks, and that life as if from afar. Letting them come, by neglecting them, as they neglect you. Freud said we had to kill His-Majesty-The-Baby in each of us: the imperious child who is the centre of the world. Kill him by neglect. A kind murder.

Neglect that lets the world turn away from you, and welcome you in its turning. That allows you to relate to others without seeking attention from them - to be one among many, a walker among walkers, conversation lightening itself of anything in particular. Happy neglect! Life without contour! What do you want? Nothing in particular. What do you require? No more than anyone else.  The tyranny of the question, How are you? The lightness of the answer, Not too bad.

I suppose this is how I understand my relationship to other bloggers, by way of their blogs. How is it I've come to know something of the lives of those whom I have barely met, if I've met them at all? And isn't it the more beautiful when a blogger writes under a pseudonym that is rigorously enforced (as mine is not, alas): then anyone at all could have written the blog you read. And couldn't you speak to anyone as though they were that writer (it could be him, or her - or him - or her -)?

Do I want to know who you are? Or do I prefer the gentle neglect of your anonymity, the way it falls peacefully around me like snow? Foolishly, stupidly, I wonder if the world of blogs isn't that world Handke is said to open in a book forthcoming in translation next year (via This Space)?

... 'a greater age' in which contemplation, love, goodness, beauty and peace are not only construed as utopian possibilities, but can be generated and made viable propositions  by telling stories.

And isn't that a reason  not to have comments on the blog? To neglect my readers (are there any?), and to ask for neglect in turn, which is to say, start your own blog (if you haven't started one), or carry your comment to your own blog, and let it bloom there in solitude. A gorgeous, generous solitude that can give of itself only because of this solitude; that will reach me by way of its separation. I am close to you; I am not close to you. I can hear you breathing; I can hear nothing.

The Open Door

Do you know as it happens that a particular event is the last of its kind, that henceforward it will harden itself into a kind of icon of a relationship? Everything is there, if you think about it. Everything is concentrated there, and in the future that's how it will sum itself up, in the event that becomes the last, even if it is not the last.

So the last day with X., even if it was not the last: the Bacon exhibition in a white roomed studio, then to the London Review of Books bookstore for how long? Did I persuade her not to buy the three volume Marothy? But she bought more Bernhard, I remember that. 'I remember': and isn't it difficult to become a kind of archive, to contain more, in memory, than lives in the present?

It's very early. I woke three times in the night. It's the beer, I thought to myself. The bottle of Leffe from Londis. 'A man who drinks becomes interplanetary', writes Duras. Several times, she took the cure. Her liver was ruined. If she drank anymore, she'd -. But she still drank, she and Yann Andrea - her lover, her non-lover, then in the 1980s, after giving up filmmaking and retreating to write a series of books.

He met her at a book signing or somesuch; he wrote a few letters - and eventually, she replied. And then he visited her, a young gay man. They were lovers for a time - she was in her 70s now - but he would still go out to the hotels to find men. They drank together all night, all day. He soon caught up with her. They were both alcoholics, both wrecking their livers.

I think of them often, not, no doubt as they were, but as I imagine them to have been. Duras writing her journal of the year 1980; The Atlantic Man; The Slut of the Normany Coast; The Malady of Death: should I call them absolute books? And they drank, and walked on the beach, and she wrote, and he went out to pick up men.

They rowed - screamed at each other. Then, reconciliation. Departures and returns. She had to take the cure; she took it more than once. And she wrote, she continued to write, discovering a kind of absolute idiom, an absolute book. Only she could write it.

We have to write what only we can write, I tell W. sometimes. What can we do that no one else can? But who is this 'we' - he and I? Each of us, separately? Or more of us - more like us? 'Develop your legitimate madness': who wrote that? Nin? I took her books, along with Henry Miller's, to Oxfam a long time ago.

Your legitimate madness: Sebald, to the last, considered himself a scholar first, a writer second. Austerlitz, of course, is a terrible book - self-consciously grand, inflated, grotesquely exaggerating the tropes that made his earlier books so wonderful: the narrator who wanders, who comes close to madness, the presence of ghosts, of great events ... And the book is incessant, immodest; it rambles without cease.

Remember, instead, the story of Ambros in The Emigrants - remember as his journal writings release themselves from the narrator's account of his life and mental collapse. The writings from his journal, that he wrote when still young, accompanying his master through the Middle East. Ah, lightness itself, and full of youth.

Lightness like Duras's account of the year 1980, her published diary, that lifted itself into the air of Neauphle like a seabird. Will there have been one time in my life that lifted itself thus? A stream of diary entries, or letters, or posts?

Sometimes I think nothing has been left to chance in my life - there's no drifting. When was the last time a friend, passing, knocked on my door? Not once over five years; and barely before then. Besides, I wouldn't welcome it. I like to move undisturbed from one room to another.

Staying at Blah-feme's during the renovations, I once woke and went out to the toilet, past a sleeping Norn, and found the front door open. It was late - or was it early? The front door was open. I thought: this is like a dream. And then: Blah-feme's flat has entered my unconscious, and this is how I will remember it, and these days, when, rising early, we would sit at the table and drink capuccinos, before forming our little peloton to head to work.

It's been a long time since I lived with others. Five years - and wasn't it unbearable, then? Didn't R. and I go out to the garage and stare back at our big house, thinking, why are we here?, why do we live here? R. still phones, always drunk. I bought a caller ID phone so I know not to answer him.

Drunk, he has great plans for us. We're very funny, he says, we should write comedy together, he says. He might join the Foreign Legion, he tells me. This is his last year - you have to be under 40 to join. But it would sort him out, he says, and besides, he would learn French. They'd give you a new identity, too. R. could leave his debts behind. When he gets drunker still, R. tells me I haven't lived, that he's lived and I have not. I should write about his experiences, not mine, says R.

I moved into his room after he'd left in a hurry, being kicked out, and not for the first or last time, for drinking. I found a play he'd been writing. He admired the Beats; he left Kerouac's books, too, in that room. We used to quote favourite lines from Burroughs at one another. Drinking, taking drugs - it was his Beat adventure. R. was an adventurer, he told me; he was truly alive. He addicted himself to crack so he could descend into the underworld. 'It's what Burroughs would have done', he told me.

Meanwhile, Duras and Yann Andrea are drinking. She calls him Yann Andrea Steiner now - another Steiner, another character in her fiction. She writes - what is she writing? She collected some old photographs and decided to write a commentary. So The Lover was born. That's how it came together - as a kind of commentary.

Once, in a student house, on a visit to the careers service of my old university, a friend of a friend quoted the whole first page of The Lover from memory. I remember two phrases: 'one day, when I was already old', and 'ravaged'. That's what he quoted, drinking tea in his dark room.

It's not so early anymore. I should be writing my review. Should be doing anything else but writing here. But I need to wake up - to wake myself up, and there is a kind of writing that does that. Tilt your head back, says my brother-in-law. It's good for you to look up at the sky. Tilt it up then; look up: is the dawn coming? Not yet; soon.

Sometimes I imagine my unconscious is full of rooms, like Doom, or like Quake. Pass from one to the other. That room opens onto that one, unexpectedly. Doesn't the artist's room in The Trial open unexpectedly on the court? And I remember Wolfe's Peace, too - the ghost awoken in a vast house whose doors open into rooms of his past: the orange juice factory, the party at which he plays at Indians with his mother, the room beyond which he knows the Christmas tree is, burning by itself. Open the door, I tell myself. But it is already open, like Blah-feme's front door, letting in the orange light from the streetlights.

Duras died in her Paris flat, I think. At least that's where she used to receive her biographer. Monique Antelme is the last of them, the writers who used to gather at the rue Saint-Benoit. Blanchot had returned from the South; Mascolo and Antelme were already at work on le 14 Julliet, then came the drafting of the Manifesto of the 121 ...

This morning I tell myself I stand at the end of a whole history, that the door has opened onto a final room. Everything's been written; that world, the literary one, is finished. Pick over the remains, the memoirs. That there are some who can link you to the past: this is marvellous. That there are others, like you, who remember - this, too, is important, but in the end, your knowledge is for nothing, and you will die like one who is the last speaker of a language, with no one to understand you.

It was over, the literary dream drained away, when Duras moved back to her apartment to Paris and then - as I learnt from the only edition of Le Monde I ever bought - died. Back to the rue Saint-Benoit, no. 5, where Merleau-Ponty used to visit, and Lacan; where she would prepare 'steak a la Blanchot' for him to eat very slowly (he was always ill - that photograph of him as a young man, sitting with Levinas on the back of a car already has him with a cane). Duras, who would drink with the others every night.

Didn't I see, in Paris, the last time I visited (many years ago), a Duras cookbook? How funny! Her son published it, I think - the one they nicknamed Outa, the mite., and whom she spoke about in the interview attached to the English edition of Destroy, She Said, as belonging to a new, blank generation who cared nothing for the future. She placed all her hopes in them, the new generation, but what happened?

Picture it: Duras, between Blanchot and Leiris, their arms joined, during the Events of May 1968. Later, Leiris would condemn Blanchot for playing revolution in his journals. How indiscreet! How disrespectful! But I have always admired Leiris for the pictures of himself he allowed to circulate. An uncalm man, a man disturbed: yes, I like him very much, this rich man, this Sunday writer (he only had one day a week, he said, on which he had time to write.)

I think the dawn is coming. Open the curtains: is that the dawn? Outside, the big box that contains a dishwasher delivered to me in error. Should I sell it on, or let it rot there, outside. I'd asked B and Q to pick it up, they'd send delivery men, they said, but I waited a whole Wednesday in vain, and in the end crossly pushed it outside, scratching my wooden floor as I did so. But staying in, didn't I discovered the new joy of my flat, which I used to leave as early as I could in the morning, even at weekends, even on Sunday, to work, instead, in the office?

A whole life with X. finished in the summer. John Sandoe books, the London Review of Books bookshop - and World's End bookshop at the bottom of the King's Road. I think we saw Anthony and Cleopatra at the Globe the last time I was down - too much of a pantomime, played for laughs, X. and I standing stiff-legged among the groundlings.

Isn't that where Corin Redgrave stood when he came to the Globe? Where else? Where else would he stand? Was it a year before that we went to the last night of his King Lear by chance? And I remember cycling across London Bridge in the rain to see Kevin Spacey as Richard III. But that life is over; the door is closed, althoughI think it stands slightly ajar in my dreams, like the door at Blah-feme's house.

R. rang twice last night. Neither time did I answer. How loudly the phone rang! But it was his number that showed up on the caller ID. Doesn't he understand that while he drinks, he belongs to the past. The door is closed; I'm pushing it against him.

'In Paris': and that, too, was another life. I remember looking for the bookshop, Des Femmes, to see Cixous books all lined up. It was closed, though we took a long time to find it. The bookshop by the Sorbonne, that was the best. But I didn't belong in Paris, just as I didn't belong in London.

Another life. Did I know it then? Did I know it was an episode? Your affairs are like novellas, David used to tell me. And I thought, no, like recits - events that never quite seemed to happen, to complete themselves. That turned around a moment that could never come into the present.

Affairs - that could never be lived in the present, leaving memories oddly stranded, without context. The Rodin museum. The Picasso museum; his glorious ceramics. The day out at Versailles; it was my birthday that day; I had turned 30, and I couldn't accommodate the size of the gardens - were those dots people? How far, then, did the water stretch?

Later, we walked through the woods, and I thought of the House Absolute in Wolfe's Book of the New Sun: a House whose rooms opened to the outside, a House so vast, so ancient, that huntsmen pursued their prey through its corridors. But did I know it was only an episode - that that day, like so many others, would set itself back in my memory, as though it were behind glass? But an episode that did not complete itself, and set out to look for writing, like a hunter searching for its prey.

Letters

Sometimes, apart for months, years, we corresponded. I wrote too much; you wrote very little, and what you said seemed to say nothing. Pure froth - but was it that? There was a letter; something was written - and wasn't that enough, that you'd addressed me?

Occasionally, a more serious letter would come, and you would speak with great brevity. I have been very unhappy. I've decided to leave my job. Absolute letters. Decisive ones, in which a new turn was announced. Why did you need to tell me? Why that need, to join what was said to what could not be said, the written to the unwriteable? For it was also in order for speech to rest in silence that you wrote, and that I wrote to you. To rest, to be addressed - speech was lightened by that crossing, by the letters that were sent over the body of England.

Sometimes, alone, I imagine my words are addressed to you. My words - not mine, and you as the guardian of my speech, just as I am the guardian of yours. Peace: I wanted them to rest in your silence, to find peace there. And then it is as though we are still young, that this day joins itself to another, half our lives ago.

Fidelity to the Non-Event

(I have often wondered what I have tried to name with the phrase 'lightened speech'. Strange path of research that lets a phenomenon crystallise around such a name, without knowing yet its significance or what it means, but only that it works as an attractor, that it seems to push itself forward as something that will one day have to be thought as such: doesn't it work according to the logic of the future anterior as Sinthome discusses it? - 'It's clear only now what I meant all along.' - 'Is it clear?')

Lightened speech: 'but we never said anything', that's what you said later. Yes: nothing was said, or rather, nothing was decided. A feature, perhaps, of adolescent romance, which does not yet know in what direction it reaches, or even that it reaches at all. Looking back, I can say: 'I know what was happening.' Or: 'if only we'd spoken of what we felt!' But a retrospective glance can unify what happened on the basis of what had not yet happened; what did not happen accompanied its happening, and by way of speech.

And that was the point: like Bergson's sugar melting in the water, its duration was given in its unfolding, or rather, its unfolding could not be detached from it; to know what has happened today is to know nothing; the experience was made of our unknowing, that's how it was lived and that was its delight. But I suppose there's always a moment like this before any romantic relationship begins: to not-know, to speak without knowing what is said.

'It was then I realised ...'; 'suddenly it came to me ...'; not love at first sight, then, but love as it gathers itself from disparate, inchoate beginnings. That comes to harden itself into a decision, and then to that kind of contract that is made in a relationship. That remains, yet, part of indeterminate speech. (I always think of Donnie Darko: Donnie walking up the road with the new girl in school ...)

There are relationships that never begin, or that teeter on the edge of the beginning, still drawing with them what does not begin, like that drowsiness that can seem to draw waking back into sleep. I'm half-asleep - nothing has quite begun, or the non-beginning is still returning in what seems to begin. This is what is lost once they have made a pact that allows each to rest in the awareness of the other's regard.

Nothing is certain, even now, but there is at least a beginning place; a relationship has formed. And before the beginning? The relationship is not yet itself, or it is not sure of its terms. The other has not been engaged, not fully - or rather, that engagement has not been redoubled in the commitment that is the beginning of a relationship.

The suspense of not-quite-loving before it is commitment. The engagement, the call, that is only half-avowed. What, then, of a relationship that remains in suspense, or that retains, in its happening, what did not happen and could not happen? I think at once of Duras's The Malady of Death: is it the male character's homosexuality that keeps the lovers apart? Is it his masculinity (read Duras on men in Practicalities ...)? And then I ask, not really sure what I'm asking, what would fidelity to the non-event might mean? Or a fidelity to what did not reveal itself according to the logic of the future anterior?

'It did not happen.' - 'It keeps not happening.' Non-happening happens, opening out the instant to what does not pass in time. Bergson's sugar never melts - or is it that melting never melts, never completes itself?

Seriousness

I am the oldest of two, but you are the youngest of three. By that I account for the way you spoke as though citing, that words didn't quite belong to you. Sometimes, it is true, you spoke with great seriousness; to claim words as your own was an enormous task, but for the most part, you repeated satirically the expressions I would use, or mimicked my speech, or the speech of others.

Speech, for you, was lightness, a kind of laughter. I imagined you laughing at your sisters in your mimickry. They were serious, and you were - an imp; it was visible in the photograph your parents hung in their lounge: there was the imp, between the two others.

For my part, speech was deliberate, it did what it was told. Was that why I liked to lose that certainty by speaking to you? Yes, I loved for speech to lighten, to lose its orientation, and to rise from the scraps of countryside across which we walked. But sometimes that lightness changed its polarity - speech fell out of phase with itself, as though it spoke by way of what it could not say; as though communication could not communicate.

Something serious was to be said, and by way of lightness. Seriousness - it is true you distrusted abstract conversation. You'd heard too much of that; you felt excluded. But there was another seriousness, one which bore our speech and, I would say, placed it at stake.

You could say we did not speak deeply. Afterwards, when I left you, I would think, we said nothing at all - and isn't that what you said, much later: we didn't say anything. True, nothing was said. But still there was seriousness - still it was the condition of speech into which what we said seemed to set itself back. The surprise of speech, and that we could speak by way of the space it opened between us.

Sometimes, apart for months, years, we corresponded. I wrote too much; you wrote very little, and what you said seemed to say nothing. Pure froth - but was it that? There was a letter; something was written - and wasn't that enough, that you'd addressed me?

Occasionally, a more decisive letter would come, and you would speak with great brevity. I have been very unhappy. I've decided to leave my job. Absolute letters. Decisive ones, in which a new turn was announced. Why did you need to tell me? For the same reason, I think, as you sent the others. What mattered was the address; what mattered was speech, and the distance of speech.

You joined what was said to what could not be said, the written to the unwriteable. With you, communication went by way of what could not communicate, speech by way of silence, and writing by what erased every word. Was it was also in order for speech to rest in silence that you wrote, and that I wrote to you? To rest, to be addressed - speech was lightened by that crossing, by the letters that were sent over the body of England.

Today, writing alone, I imagine my words are addressed to you. My words - not mine, because you are the guardian of my speech, just as I am the guardian of yours. Peace: I wanted them to rest in the unwriteable, to find peace there. And then it is as though we are still young, that this day joins itself to another, half our lives ago.

Desire

Recurring dream as a child: the girl infinitely wise, and who could speak of everything. The girl who spoke with absolute certainty, though I sensed she did not know what she said. Spoke without knowing, and whose certainty had been sent on an infinite detour. And my listening wandered with her; I followed her. Was it by chance I usually saw her as blind, as though her sight was wandering somewhere behind her eyes?

Later, a letter from a friend written with the same sybilline certainty. I smoothed down the page with my hand. What had I touched? Absolute writing. Blind writing, behind which she wandered. How could I follow her?; I could not, though I waited for her letters every day.

I think I have always sought that measure of blindness in another. Desire within desire - for a kind of pause, a waiting place, that opening beneath a starless sky. It's always still when we go out for our walks, you said. As though everything were suspended, you said. Out of town, by the path only I knew; you'd looked for it, you said, but you couldn't find it. I knew the path across the park and over the railway bridge. I knew the way into the interval, although it was only you who could summon me there.

Desire within desire, desire unlimiting itself in desire - I wanted to hear you speak, and to speak in turn. Wanted to hear the errancy of speech, to let speech wander, scattering itself across the plain. Later, when I'd come home, I would try to write from that silence, from that speech. It's true you had beauty, that I was attracted to you, but that is banal. It was that desire undid itself within desire, explicating itself, opening into a kind of waiting.

To wait - but what for? Desire suspended, desire lost in wandering: your beauty belonged to that suspense. It was nonchalant, unowned, like the speech we sent up into the air. I always thought you were careless of your beauty, that it was taken for granted. But in truth, it was nothing you asked for and nothing you wanted. You would like your face to be totally round, you told me, the face of anyone. You would like to be like anyone at all.

And then you laughed at the way I spoke. Mimicked me. And then laughed at us both: who do we think we are?

A Breath

My name - you always liked to say it. To breathe it, because it is easy to breathe. One syllable.

'Always liked': what tense is that? Completed action in the past. That past completed, and broken from the present. That whole past drifting into the archive, to return in dreams, passing across the threshold of the morning and the threshold of the evening. Unguarded hours, when the past is stronger than the present.

But now that past is completed, rounded off. It will not change; it is all there. At the threshold, returning: the promise of my name, the past broken from my present.

Erasure

Chance must be allowed to play because no one wants to force the issue; neither of us is to act or be acted upon. Chance: we may meet again; we may not; it will happen or will not. From what strange coincidences is our relationship made and unmade.

The field of chance is the day, the everyday. Will we meet there? Will we fail to meet? I know I cannot phone you; that would be too active, and too demanding. Do not force events. But it's been eighteen months. How old am I? Twenty, twenty-one? It's been too much of my life.

Then - one day - we met by chance. There you were, with your mother. And if we hadn't met then? I wouldn't know you now. And if I hadn't ran into you in the stationers? For a long time, I would sit in town on a step by the street, waiting, or cycle through the park where we had once walked.

No appointment had been made. Was it that I believed you would appear because it was what I wanted? Rather, I think I liked that belief, that it grew around me like an arbour. Somewhere, in those eighteen months, I was being looked for. Somewhere, as from a far corner of the universe, chance had set out to find me.

How else to pass my summer, except by watching for your return? But you did not appear; and the whole world shaped itself around your absence. I think it was that when I knew the thickness of the everyday, its blindess, its indifference. Fate had no place here. The great rivers of history ran out here; everything was neutralised, and if this was the end, it was the endless end, when nothing was to happen.

But, I met you, didn't I? Chance came to find me, and when I wasn't expecting it. I had waited until I'd forgotten I was waiting. When I saw you I knew what my life had been. But it would have been more perfect still if you had failed to see me - failed to remember who I was, as the Abbess had forgotten Honda in the last book of The Sea of Fertility, or the grandmother her own grandson in Tarkovsky's Mirror?

I would have been found, but by whom? You had forgotten me, and my life had become lighter by that forgetting.

I'm growing older, I know it, as day lies down upon day. Older, and the days that turn will one day do so without me. The earth turns into the sun as it will turn into darkness; this, the long afternoon of my life, will fan out to its evening, like a river that fans into a delta as it reaches the sea.

Sometimes I dream life is already over, and I am living backwards, not forwards, opening doors into rooms in which I've been before. Is there a way of watching your own traces disappear from the world, like footprints in snow? One day I will arrive at the point where I am not yet born. Perfection: the work of erasure done, it will be time to pass from my life.

The Open Palm

No, there was no 'teenage angst', I do not remember that. The escape from the party, the walk to the lake at dawn in the frizzying rain: the world that had been closed opened to us like an opening hand. And we went across the open palm of the world, in the morning, that may as well have been the first morning of the world.

Of what did we speak? Of the others left behind, and, as all those do who are half infatuated, the chance of your meeting, its strangeness, and the kind of imperative it carries. With, not alone: we were always meant to pass here; the world was always meant to open. Now we are alone with the fact of our attraction; it is a fate held in common, and this first of all was the topic of our conversation.

But even this is wrong, for what conversation was there? Intervallic speech, speech that lightened itself in the opening between what is said: how was it that nothing seemed to say itself, or what we said was already undone, and there was the delight of letting those words float into the air and disappear?

What was said did not matter; that it said itself was everything, that, speaking, we were able to exchange the lightness of speech, able to lighten it: we were both smiling, I remember that. Smiling, and because we'd lent speech a kind of assistance. We had left the party; we made our way to the lake: you said you would always remember that.

So did I. But it stands, in my memory, as part a series of days, of nights we shared. A series marked by lightness, by the saying of nothing in particular, where what mattered was the lightness of speech, before what it was that speech bore. True, infatuation fell away, but wasn't there retained a memory of that first infatuation, a sense of youth, of the morning, and the promise held in the open palm of the world?

Yes, that's what lightness has always meant: it is youth, it is play of speech that lightens the world. Absolute youth. 'We never said anything', you said. Nothing was said, that's true. But by that nothing was spoken the between of speaking, its its demand, which asked, over the years, to be maintained.

And that's what held us together. Together? But who were we, speakers, in the exchange of the lightness of speech. No one in particular; no one, everyone, who gave up what they said to the sacrifice speech demands. A gentle sacrifice, a light burning, a flame in the drizzle of that first morning.

What joy there is to give, to be given! Joy of anonymity, of the open palm from which everything must rebegin. That's what it means to be young, to be very young, and finally for youth to name what cannot be lived, but that streams all around us.

You will not step into the same morning twice. And not even once, for the step is a gift, a giving, that will plunge you into the streaming of youth. To speak is also to come apart.

And after you have spoken? After the morning passed? That morning became the brightness behind everything, a sky behind the sky, the backdrop of our lives, obscured sometimes, sometimes lost, but that burned like the flame in the rain, in the sacrifice to which we were given.

Thunder and Silence

'Write our story.' - 'There was no story.' - 'Write it.'

But it did not begin; it never stepped over the threshold. How can you speak of what does not belong to the continuity of time?' The story: the attempt to reach a story. Or a story of the failure of stories - not, now, of the limit against which stories are wrecked, but of a detour so vast, you can never come to a place from which to begin. How to speak of what has no contour?

'Speak. Tell me what happened.' What happened? Do you think I could tell you? Is that what you want - to be told, to round off the event? But it did not end and it will not end. Who can speak of it? 'But it speaks.' It speaks, saying nothing, saying itself, thunder and silence. And who are we except the speakers it elected, the relays it called for, that speaking that speaks only by withholding itself in what is said? But what was it apart from us, this speech? What was it, apart from its speakers?

But I know that when it used us, when it spoke in our speech, it was only to lighten itself, to disperse itself, to make it that it did not weigh upon anyone. It was to be kept afloat - alive, and by passing from the one to the other: yes that's what it wanted.

'Tell me what happened.' With what kind of telling? How to narrate a story that never reached a beginning? How, when that beginning will never be reached? It is deferral itself. It is detour. Why do you suppose that there's anything to be reached, or that we would have the means to reach it?

'We lacked the means.' Yes, that's true. But wasn't that why we were selected? Wasn't it our weakness that selected us? It was by our weakness that we found one another. And weakness that made us sink down, each beside the other.

To sink down - to rest: that's when we heard it, the thunder, the silence. That's when it was heard, in the background, withdrawing, and sounding in its withdrawal. 'That's what we exchanged, that speech.' No: we were what allowed it to lighten itself, to be heard, to be lightened. It was what spoke by what was said. 'What we said.' What spoke itself between us.