above
all, do not mistake me for someone else
—Nietzsche
eyes lips
dreams & then night goes first night & then day & she must
open her eyes & confront that other that intractable real of light
& solid objects but eyes need not be open for this to be real eyes
could be shut one could still be able to sense to listen to recall impressions
this body this bed this room the words speak themselves from somewhere
further on some external voice insisting upon the unquestionable existence
of things a voice by itself spilling out of nowhere but who is speaking
she thought shaking off the sleep haze of unconsciousness who or what
& she felt her body lying tense & silent hopeless & beside
her an other body she was listening to its breathing there in the distance
like wind coursing through the street broken into an echo of an echo only
which hung now suspended in silence & now called back aloud to something
forgotten during the night a voice drawing her into the present time of
its own cadence but what was it saying with its heavy consonants drifting
one into another like waves against a shoreline something meaningless
the same thing repeated over & over terminating in a restless &
frustrated monotony obscuring her thoughts confusing them she opened her
mouth & tried to speak a dull empty sound a knot in her throat in
her lungs she shuddered slightly & stiffened against the ceiling a
pale light flickered on & off casting a broken shadow across the side
of her face her mouth was in darkness a dark cavity beneath the black
rings of her eyes outside the sound of footsteps passing below the window
the ticking of a clock obstinate murmur of language strangely entangled
like hair after sleep on a passive face as someone watches but what could
have happened for every-thing to be & remain incomprehensible forever
be-ginning with a line & then the line faltering panic arc of a seabird
the futile beating of imaginary wings there where the eye breaks off suddenly
& falls to-wards the water the smell of leaves & wet earth mingling
with the sharp smell of salt & she felt her-self listening far off
to an echo of an echo listening for the first disconnected syllables of
day just before dawn actually breaks & strained to recall what it
looked like when the sun rose on the blue lines of rooftops to imagine
what type of sound it would make dragging itself over the dark cut of
earth the ringing of granite in the desert the sudden intonations of the
callers to prayer or whether or not the blind could believe in such a
difference night & day day she murmured night as if either could mean
something after all something real the way she tried to believe in a body
her body this body she felt a narrow band of perspiration about her wrist
when one of these hands touches the other is it true that the things in
question are my own these hands touch the same things because they are
the hands of the one same body the things themselves the lived presence
hearing oneself understanding speaking the sound of a typewriter entering
from a different room the dissonance of keys struck at irregular intervals
& each sound in fluid symphony persisting obscurely like a palimpsest
of notes vibrating in air like a sheet of paper deeply indented &
in places cut through the barely legible traces of other texts whose characters
seem to branch off in unex-pected directions spreading & overflowing
punc-tuating her thoughts confusing them one instant opening to another
suddenly & with no apparent connection or else she had already gone
on ahead turning pages like somebody who has forgotten about the words
& has begun to move uncon-sciously among their meanings a lucidity
hidden in the void a specter & you want to call out to ad-dress her
there where she has already begun to disappear like a ghost passing through
a locked door but like the doors in dreams it has no handle as if to say
there was an imminence which took shape in her & which held you at
bay indecision keeping everything open as the ultimate rationale each
of those fragments notes treacherous insights on the way to some occasion
everything you sought to make her represent as if i have followed one
by one all the steps of the route chosen going back to the start every
time a doubt or suspicion directed me there in other words i have not
been allowed i have not allowed myself to arrive at a single conclusion
without having retraced all the thoughts that precede it but is that even
possible chance when i seek it is beyond my reach i could have said it
escapes me but it is not from me that it escapes since i have never had
it in my grasp & in fact can barely conceive it & at the same
time something resembling a memory breakdown sets in i begin to be afraid
of forgetting as though unless i made a note of everything i would be
unable to hold onto any part of it all of these extraneous elements which
are perhaps nothing more than an elaborate arrangement of planes &
facets & simul-taneous aspects of so many generalized items if only
to project a sense of volume in space some-thing tangible enough to frame
a presence independent of impressions but such deep complicity cant
be expressed in words or else it is all that can be expressed in words
& our intentions are merely a way of saying that these things do not
belong to us & even thought must pass away then afterwards driving
through m in the back seat of a taxi it was a late summer he thought wiping
the sweat from his forehead he hadnt slept outside everything flashed
past unresolved this day he mur-mured at last to be delivered staring
out at the white glare of heat a fume of hemorrhaged faces the phrase
pity never helped the dead mouthed it-self over & over changing momentum
with the harsh whir of car tires meaning is eclipsed he thought like the
face beneath its death-mask & the self becomes the anti-self becomes
an echo only a conjurers cheap trick as if to say open sesame &
there she was that pale wax figure lying in a box or gazing from a window
of a hospital in m as though she had seen a ghost the way she might have
expected someone her savior like cortez to appear suddenly on the gravel
driveway wearing flowers in his hair she might have run outside one day
as if to greet him like a moth flying blindly into light & that was
death had he not seen her in fact lying there still alive trying to touch
his hand to speak to him promise me shed said but he did-nt
know what to promise he could promise nothing he promised nothing but
when did it end the hours of waiting outside the ward until finally they
let him in & felt as though he were being pushed downwards his head
his whole body submerged as though their voices were coming to him underwater
further & further down an illusion was it just an illusion on a platform
of the gare saint-lazare a woman had stepped in front of him & instead
of moving to the side he allowed his body to come into contact with hers
upsetting her balance & when she touches him he resents her because
her touch reminds him of his betrayals because even compassion belongs
to cruelty the falsity of it the lies & contrivances that is what
it will have been a vacant life turning & turning between the walls
of a cell the incessant measuring of time an unresolved sentence that
runs up continuously against the edges of the page strophe antistrophe
filling the empty spaces of that mise en scène like an actor on
stage rehearsing other sentiments than his own always saying what he is
made to say & tormented by the words of others entering his body taking
possession of it so that he can neither see nor think how many nights
have passed like this not sleeping repeating the senseless tableau i cant
go on you say & at the last minute he stretches out his hands to stop
her from falling a reflex or an afterthought but never soon enough the
faces of people crowding on the platform & trains rushing past out
of obscure darkness shuddering stripping back the air & the down-wards
motion of the body caught frame by frame as though it could make a difference
reaching the turn-ing point one day after another with your note writ-ten
out & folded in your pocket taking one last look in the mirror before
going outside but you dont you take the key out of the lock instead
& take off your clothes again & lie down beside that other &
close your eyes again did you allow yourself to be over-come by so little
pain im shaking she stammered lifting her hand to her face with
the gesture of a marionette i cant stop shaking she pressed her
eyes with her knuckles & rocked the weight of her body back &
forth on the edge of the chair & there were moments hours perhaps
sometimes days when she would stand by the window compulsively shifting
the curtain back & forth looking down onto the street although she
knew there was no-one there looking down onto that street where she could
imagine her-self as another returning her own gaze perhaps nothing more
than a glance an instant of recognition that would cancel the oppressive
weight of entrapment the night sometimes i dont know if i want to
live or die sometimes its painful not to die at last to have been
done with words to have been able to resolve everything into a single
continuous nothing car il y a tant de choses que je nose te dire
tant de chose que tu ne me laisserais pas dire the flowerless stems hung
in the glass bowl on the window sill now shadows rose & fell &
lay flat where the sun touched on the leaf-colored water now a figure
stirred in the bed & the room separated into light & solid planes
& things unhinged from nowhere in an infinitesimal fraction of a moment
morning replaces dawn night into dawn into morning suspended in that single
moment all moments interceding in one another & over the city the
sky becomes a fire a burst ventricle bells & trucks & voices pealing
in chorus she felt the light beat against her eyelids little by little
a red disk filling the black screen & faint blue vertical or horizontal
lines weaving a vague gridlike pattern that suggested the movements of
concealed forms somewhere in the background a spectral acrostic in which
geometrical designs spelt out entire sequences of words algebraic notations
molecular structures of time & space merging in this intricate hieroglyph
written between the membrane & the eye though it seemed impossible
to distinguish what they were saying carried off on the endless stream
of noise that flowed circulated & throbbed in the citys veins
feeding the vast entropic spiral at its heart the ceaseless tending towards
an end a gray-brown opacity that seemed to pervade everything & to
consume everything in its own time the struggle was writing itself out
transcribing itself the words & phrases half-seen half-heard &
fail-ing as she herself was failing & she thought of all the people
whose eyes would never meet across an empty intersection & all the
disregarded phrases from foreign languages their fugitive exis-tence how
it both lured & repelled her like the music she had heard long ago
in the bois de boulogne things unseen & unspoken that haunted through
each moment the intermezzo that her own life seemed to represent suspended
as though between two indistinguish-able points of negation when everything
& its op-posite narrow to a single fragmentation an arch-way a door
a windowpane & there was some-thing awkward about the expectations
of a room the way she felt its walls required something from her &
always there was the sensation of a verbal thread created by their silence
as though she were trying to hold onto something to stitch time to reweave
the inevitable lacunae of departure & ab-sence as though trying to
hold onto something by denying it by denying the loss of it & silence
like a knot gathering each fragment of her conscious-ness into a point
of dark interiority an impossible silence closed off from the senses it
was the same night that she always experienced over & over a recurrent
dream though fleeting enough never to be remembered in the same way it
was as though each time she glimpsed only one aspect of the re-ality in
which she was suspended but which she couldnt seem to grasp hold
of adrift on a sea with only the vague suggestion of landfall far in the
distance she thought of all the false sight-ings the flocks of seabirds
that might have suggested a shoreline luring her on hopelessly towards
a bank of clouds arching over the horizon like a mountain range each night
the pale flicker of zodiacs rising low in the east like campfires hidden
deep in the mangroves of some dark estuary she moved inexorably towards
them swimming through the air upwards & in all directions circling
like an insect caught in a lunar trance a sense of inevitability surrounded
each of her actions & yet not of their own accord i harbor no illusions
she said i cant reach that point in my memory from which time seems
to diverge something resembling a fold a warp in the layering of hours
a suspended alien moment the opposite of a beginning as though it stood
on the verge of an irrevocable erasure like a word or a name of which
all that remains is the initial letter a barely audible consonant alone
in a sea of noise indistinctly murmuring & beyond it the silence that
it masks & which envelops it in the same precarious instant she felt
herself drawn towards it & repulsed lured by chance outlines &
pushed back & in that strangely present tense of her movement she
appeared to herself as a pair of eyes drifting in their own space punctuating
it but through which space also flows out & she was staring down at
the streetlights aware that a tide was welling up inside her & no
longer a surface to reassure only her reflection in the glass pierced
by the streetlights beyond the punctured form swelling to incredible proportions
of its own accord into a neb-ula of flesh & corrupted matter an idea
began to form of her body as a hive of wounds that somehow pre-existed
an implement a secret mutilation from within as though i am always going
back over something that i cannot recall & the fear that there is
no end to this pantomime by retreating from the mirror one goes deeper
into it by retracing ones steps one continually advances & at
moments when her mind was quite clear she would complain of the most pro-found
darkness in her head of not being able to think of becoming blind &
deaf of having two selves a real one & a false one which forced her
to behave badly she felt that she was always struggling towards some haven
of finality the secret unseen light in which the end would be revealed
lumen luminis deciphered at last from the sidereal or hieratic writings
of the lost chambers of night the places where the souls the divine entities
the shadows & the spirits the transfigured dwell sym-bols words phrases
like talismans magic charms written over the bodies of the dead flectero
si nequeo superos acheronta movebo but to experi-ence oneself as cut off
from others is also to hold open the possibility of transcending this
isolation entering into all of those lives experiencing them like a mirror
in which no division of time or space prevails only the fluid contour
of an irrational gaze tracing a path between each of her gestures now
opaque now transparent revealing a series of half-formed images like cinema
stills in which the subject is constantly moving beyond the edge of the
frame & whose fea-tures remain indistinct blurred unfocussed as if
i were haunted by every-thing i am forbidden to remember & somewhere
he was sitting on a bench by a river that resembled the seine & he
was smoking a cigarette watching the barges slip by on the lethe-waters
below the stone parapets there are elements of the scene which remain
indiscernible by going back over details perhaps it would be possible
to recon-struct events & he was looking across at the people on the
other side of the river there was something disturbing about their movements
at a distance their mouths which seemed to open & close silently like
fish a chorus of the damned nothing is real her voice said as if i were
on stage faking my own pain a leering pierrot the idea of a murderer who
waits in a room for the victim who will never arrive she crum-pled onto
the floor there were cigarette burns on the carpet & dust & human
hair night goes the thought repeated itself in an in-finitesimal fraction
of a moment night becomes dawn & then becomes morning she dragged
up-right let fall her feet from the bed without opening her eyes she felt
her way mechanically across the floor walked to the window by the washbasin
& unlatched a shutter let it sag open a crack of light streaming at
an angle across her breasts a mere outline the summarized form of a body
in vertical sections whose details have become obscured in the too immediate
contrast of white & black un-able to isolate or focus the image between
conflict-ing exposures shutter speed & width of aperture although
for the pretence of meaning there must at least be a relic some sort of
vestige a scar of rock jutting out over the water the uneven ledges of
seaweed exposed at low tide the suns dying rays dragging across
the sea like the strings of mari-onettes she placed her fingers hesitantly
against the wall it was the tide she felt it running out of her gradually
she knew that the last marker had slipped into darkness now she was counting
back working back through the absences memory presented to her the pulsions
of her body the waves the tide reversing mounting up against its limit
on the breach of a sys-tem of meaning the elision of its totalizing movement
& at the same time inaugurating its acts the act mediated translated
by what lies between in the silent aspiration the neither spoken nor unspoken
where the harbor lies flat & heavy on the seas lip & the
headland like a sentence half-articulated faltering syllables of stone
shivered falling to a still & cold weight of water that stretched
then further off into a tongue of silence the crossing over into a beyond
space into a beyond time the failure of the episteme knowledge & memory
to draw things together to re-solve mirrored in the act of entering a
room empty & pregnant with significance but what do we seek through
so many pages only to arrive in the midst of another reading or perhaps
there are other worlds & these are simply means of transporting ourselves
une tantative i recognize that here is a wall & that beyond it there
are other walls but the essence of my confinement is neither in the wall
nor outside it but in my dwelling upon it which means also that it is
not possible to think the opposite of the wall though in my dream i have
made it into a symbol & once again it remains there for as long as
i seek to explain its significance the anguish of dispossession the experience
of having lost life of separation from thought of the body exiled from
the mind i cant think she said the words are not my own less than
before im always failing to compose myself & then falling into
others falling outside my-self into the nothing which opens my history
but how is it possible to begin saying all of these things with-out inventing
narratives or describing events i imagine the objects around me &
determine their re-lation as though they exist all by themselves &
are not in fact projected outwards from a body an organ of perception
of perceptibility like the body & eye of god i write these things
but i do not un-derstand them if only everything could be made to stand
still & not speak to communicate directly in the senses outside the
sound of traffic moving in the opposite direction reminded him of the
sea the sound echoed in stasis lines of flight that were closed off from
him it all seemed blurred unreal like a picture in a newspaper other peoples
faces & yet there he was barely an hour ago standing beside a grave
& saying her name over & over thinking how dry the lips must have
been under the embalmers heavy make-up they seemed to represent
first one thing & then another the illu-sion that something stirs
in the dusty corner of the eye in the room gray light filtering through
the window mixes with the yellow light of the reading lamp but how do
we know it is we who are speaking the voices in a crowd guarding their
anonymity were they real or did you invent them no does it matter nam
& ego vobis illa non probo sed narro it goes on like this no longer
conscious of what has been said if anything you wait for the mind to go
blank for the pantomime to end staring into space the same space &
these voices this voice these words from elsewhere without naming you
words that are not my own but whose lives i inhabit as actors inhabit
the theatre the performance the rôle the seam which draws them to-gether
words passing from mouth to mouth one mouth to another like an eternal
eucharist flesh of my flesh blood of my blood there are cries in the distance
the sea birds reel & lunge at the ebbing tide between the piled-up
masses of broken rock & dense vegetation arching over the water it
seemed to grow not in a vertical but in a horizontal direction & something
else what was it a faint stirring the snapping of a twig & then silence
as if someone were listening watching among the trees & later along
a path you find a piece of broken glass like millefiori it burns white
in the sun it turns green you close your hand upon it & it changes
to black you are not afraid of cutting yourself in a café beside
the hotel she let her fin-gers play inside a pitcher of ice water the
geomet-rical patterns on the tablecloth that reminded her of the mosaic
of blue turquoise framing the entrance of the koutoubia mosque & dissolving
at its edges into exposed masonry where the tesseræ had bro-ken
off & her own image coming back to her hunched between the rocks above
the ochreous red cliffs that fell into the sea with sullen eyes shifting
from ledge to ledge searching she supposed for some promise of destruction
some massive catastrophe echoing from the past the water thickening dark
green becoming black she turned her head dropped her hands & then
lifted them again aimlessly i suppose its all so logi-cal isnt
it to believe that the past has actually taken place afraid of being alone
afraid in the end she said it seemed impossible to believe in uncaused
things i cant see it it mustnt exist she held her face in
both hands sinking wearily into the chair i have a recollection of perfect
stillness she sighed letting her hands slip down between her legs oh hell
thats a lie i cant recall anything i feel that nothing can
be gath-ered made whole like waiting for a room to become silent &
then the silence begins to bash at your skull she stood up abruptly wrapped
herself with her arms as if you could be enormous & infinitesimally
small at the same time she said i fear that more than death she dug her
nails into the sleeves of her coat & moved towards the window a faint
exterior light casting a blue shadow across the floor i dont know
who i am any more im going to make gashes all over my body i want
to become infinitely hideous she repeated herself & then fell silent
the minutes passed it will never come to its own end she whispered staring
out through a cracked pane of glass i cant retrieve the fear of
death nothing interests me any more nothing less than that even without
words no desire the wheels of the taxi turned dismally beneath him promise
me shed said promise the sound of gravel beneath the car tires a
feeling of disgust gagged in his throat you cant pretend youre
actually sorry for her he hissed catching sight of his reflection in the
window he closed his eyes felt the sunlight beat across his face red light
& then darkness again did he really remember her that way but there
was nothing he could have done that day or any other day nothing he could
have ever done at the gare saint-lazare he thought he had seen her on
the crowded platform appear-ing & disappearing in a sea of faces watching
im-passively as he struggled towards her like a swimmer fighting against
the tide but there was no sign of recognition in her eyes
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