writing vii

language wants to escape itself, even as we want to escape ourselves. language’s means is silence, ours technology. but silence and technology are bound similarly to language and the human.

even as i cannot consider the human an expert commentator on itself – but only one voice among many, hardly privileged because it tends to be perceived to be located on some inside and the inside perceived to possess in some sense superior perception – so i cannot consider myself an expert commentator on myself. yet we – and i – cannot help comment. the gap between this cannot consider and cannot help is a charter of writing. yet most writing comes from the cannot help.

when we say the external world doesn’t exist – or that it exists solely or primarily as a function of imagination – we point to maps of spaces of writing. for writing re-enters voids not to create worlds about which it is debated whether they are illusory or real but to create spaces that might point to maps, so making any discussion of existence and non-existence, their locus or non-locus, moot.

we don’t have to create another world, through politics or technology. that other world is here, already, in language – all we have to do is enter it, although the policies and procedures for immigration are never explicit and always morphing.

do i write in privacy and loneliness? i enter privacy and loneliness – or at least the porches of the cottages of their names. then writing happens. writing is the odd breath of souls loosened in the unsegmented world.

writing! a dialogue with mirrors’ mute flat infinity.

to trek through writing’s dense empty forests, the only respites deserts and carnivals, is to become so used to nomadic minimalism and survivalist ingenuities that i confuse life and those techniques required to navigate writing’s environment.

writing is violence, but a violence so processed by violence violence destroys itself and only writing remains.

nothing here, he says, after having purchased an excursion package to writing. but writing is a selective mute.

writing? an empty boat on a river, unmoored, drifting, unseen, in which time may have ridden once, its traces smelly, like a deep navel never cleaned?

writing subverts itself. so that in the end – though there is no end – it gives up itself. what is left? a useless acquiescent subversion? questions of the methodologies of giving up? atonal memories? convalescence? palliation? a wellness that refuses its name? these are questions of death, of the root of the religious quest, where neither spirit’s presence nor absence can claim ascendancy and its mutability presents itself in objectifications, its mockery in reifications, its incommunicability in subjectifications. am i not seduced by writing as its voids are passable simulations of death and so hold the eternally lost key to life?