Writing does not dwell in life. It lives elsewhere. On the edge. in the delusional.
Writing dwells behind the door. Knocking but the door isn't opened for her. Maybe because no one is inside. Maybe because the inside is empty. Maybe because there's no inside.
Where are life, space and time? If life is outside, why, when we're outside, don't we see it? And if it's inside, why doesn't the door open?
I, the writer, confess: I searched for a long time in writing about life and did not find it. I did not find life, time, space, or freedom. Freedom?
Obviously, there is no freedom. Freedom? How can it be called freedom as long as there is no life? We invent it, they said. Right, and here we are inventing it. But from imaginary materials that are also incapable of life.
Why do I write then? Since I know, since I discovered this illusion, this lie, why am I writing?
I will probably have to re-install myself. I take my self apart piece by piece, throw the damn thing out and put it back together. If the soul were a machine I wish I could see its pieces.
Lost in the storm and looking for a machine! Lost and plundered. The wind robbed me and I want my possessions back.
I want the trinket my mother gave me. I want the bird my father brought me. I want the feather of the soul, the stare of space in front of the door, the milk of the stone that was flowing from my gaze.
And if all these things were plundered, did I not at least have myself in the past?
Now I want it.
And if it's not mine, I want a flower, for its corpse.
I want my possessions back: the first trail, its dust that hung on my feet and became mine, the star of promises when sunset comes while I sleep under an almond. My possessions: my looks, which I tenderly sent and still await their return, my hand, which passers-by thought of as a fiddle, my panting, which was mixed with a light breeze, then turned into a wind that now returns to me and plunders me.
What time is it now?
I know patients at sunset hallucinate like this. The holes left by the predators of looks will remain empty. The bullet of madness and the bullet of wisdom both hit the same death.
In the past, I did not know all this. The earth was round, I did not see it turning. Now the land is rectangular, a vast desert, and long caravans of people, trees, and mules, the dead are above it.
A flimsy line in the distance, a hanged thread, I want to cross. And whenever an offspring came out of the thread, I thought it was my children.
Sometimes memory talks to me about the earth, I am naked, so I reach out to her coat thrown on an old chair, and try to wrap myself in it.
I'm trying to convince myself that I'm going to make a sweater for my kids out of these worn threads.
Where are the denizens of the cold? Let them gather now in one line, and those residing in heat in another: people and their temperatures must be sorted, and a balance must be created between the frost and heat of humanity.
The balance between the refined coat and sweater. Otherwise, the earth will fall.
Word for word. Just a few words for a lot of pointlessness. Words to the wind, to the look, to the shadow, to the snake. The released thread has its offspring, for the gallows that keep the shirt. A speech for those who do not hear.
Give me the coffin in the morning, give me the cloud to the pillow. Climb through the window and cut off the lily's head. Hold the traitorous garment in space. Chase the lunatic leaning on the spring.
Cut off the language's tongue. Terrifying words, fragmenting and displacing them. Smother the method and style. Horrible principles and logic and their enemies. Take the sound to the park, take it for a walk, with the camel, and throw them in the river.
No no. Let the belly of the language become pregnant with words after. Words whose fathers and mothers think they will caress her like children, wash her face, comb her hair, and bring her toys... Let the fathers and mothers of the language dream of children, this is their happiness, do not ruin it. The belly of the language is pregnant with words that are born dead, let them know slowly. Let illusion make their hearts happy, and let the language do its thing: the fertilization of silence and impossibility, of absence and coma, of death and death.
Darkness alone may be life, the privacy that is not seen, not said, not done.
Did I have to lock the doors and draw the curtains and turn off the lights in order to have a life and a language? When they crossed the threshold and mingled with many outsiders, I lost them... But, really, I could not find them inside. I thought they were outside, in a tavern or under a tree or on a sidewalk. They were neither outside nor inside. Where are life and language then?
The clock is ticking and I am standing under it, I hear the tones running in space and disappearing.
Standing under the clock. I don't run with the ringing, I just hear it and spread it. Fixed in place and fixed in time. Fast continuous ringing, I can't distinguish between them. The first is like the second, like a thousand, like a million. And I am under the first ring, similar to me under all the ringing. Standing in the Square of Voices in the wave of solid echoes.
A bird lands on my head as it lands on a statue and flies off. A fish touches me and goes on.
There is no place for feelings to go. No room for emotions. No space between the walls.
There is no place for words and no time for them to move or live.
Are space and time also illusions in which we are trying to build a refuge? But there is not enough reed to pitch this tent. So we sit back and play music of death to air.
The wind passes, leaving the dead at our door. Desperate from within we call out: who will bury our dead? Our early ancestors were hammering rocks day and night to dig a basin in which to plant their dead. They provide them with gold and money to pay for the journey to eternity. Our dead are at the gates, who will bury them? And who buries our dead in this room, who have been lying for hundreds of years on top of cement, layer by layer, until this whole building has become from the material of death, and we, ourselves, have become the product of the dead.
I'm trying to stick my head out of the rubble. Sending a shrill sound piercing bones and worn-out flesh, hoping I would glimpse what lies beyond. Just an inch, one lit inch, beyond this death, is enough.
But, let me sleep. The shroud of heaven descends upon the room and covers me. To sleep with the same comfort as the flocks, as the inanimate, as ashes. I sleep for a wound that cannot move. For crippled dreaming and for oblivion. Let me sleep and wrap myself in whatever remains on the tables and chairs of the dead. For I sleep humbly and do not go away, so I would think I am alive.
There are words emerging from under the soil, I hear them emerging from among the scattered skeletal jaws of the dead, buried a thousand years ago. Jaws floating above the soil to say a word. And jaws to offer a kiss that they could not, while alive, offer.
Bones come out to laugh, and bones come out to play, and bones to inspect their first places, and bones to turn their gaze in the hope that they see the land that they lived on yet never saw. Bones come out from under the soil in order to do what their owners did not do above the soil.
From this porthole, from the bone, I try to look out on the world. I must do today what I will emerge from under the soil to do in a thousand years. I have to laugh now and play and see the earth, and say the word I want to say, and print my kiss on the mouth of life.
Many kisses imprinted on my death. But I want one kiss for life.